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Thursday, February 12, 2004
Toral: Working from home: tips for the freelancer
By Janette Toral
Digital Filipino
INCOME. One of the challenges of a freelancer or self-employed is to manage time and earn the desired income.
A free-lancer who has family and peers employed in an eight-to-five shift can’t help but get nagged into going back to the rat race and working eight hours a day. This is especially the case when you work late hours and don’t meet your financial commitments on time.
Very few who have experienced working within their own schedule, at home, and earned reasonable income would want to go back to such a day-to-day work system. Those who do usually don’t last that long. Working as a freelancer has benefits and challenges.
On the benefits side, you can undertake almost anything you like. Who you know and what you know are the only things that will limit you. If one venture is not profitable, you can explore new sources of revenue.
But the main challenge is sustainability. Once you finish a project or sale today, where are you going to get your next one?
Building quality relationships is an important factor for sustainability. Should opportunities come up that are in your area, will you be the firm or person to be recommended? How can you develop advocates?
Instead of spending 80 percent of your time looking for new clients, it is best to allocate this to existing ones. Leads generated through clients are often much higher in quality compared to cold calls.
If you did not do well with a past client and were unable to tap him for referral resources, then you will have to go back to your drawing board, reflect, improve yourself, and repair broken relationships.
In building sustai-nability, you will have to find a way for your source of income not to depend solely on you. This is easier said than done, and it takes a lot of trial, error, and time to find the right business model. But you have to start mapping it.
For website owners, creating an affiliate network is like having a traditional network marketing set-up for your organization.
Ikobo.com is a payment gateway system I found lately through discussion group peers. I’m currently using it as a means to accept payment in my website, Digital-Filipino.com. I benefit financially from those who buy from my site and later on use the Ikobo service for their own Internet ventures.
This is the same case with Google.com, which came up with an AdSense program. I signed up with their service and put their banner ads below my site. Google gives me revenue every time a site visitor clicks on it. My website traffic is not that high, but to my surprise, I was able to earn up to $10 a day.
Filipino Internet entrepreneurs are encouraged to come up with Internet-based network marketing programs that can motivate others to not only use their service but even advocate it for others to use.
(email: janette@digitalfilipino.com.)
(February 12, 2004 issue)
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