How to Transit from Freelancing to Serious Entrepreneurship

Freelancing has become a very popular career path in recent times – and for good reason. No manager coming into your office every 15 minutes to check in on you, you can work whenever you feel like working, and best of all, you can change clients whenever you see fit. That said, there also seems to be a tendency of freelancers turning into entrepreneurs. First, let’s see what benefits does freelancing bring, and then how to take your career from freelancing to full-on entrepreneurship.

There’s plenty of free time

A well-known fact is that freelancers don’t work full-time. They can, but they usually don’t, since they are often getting new projects. Some researchers said that freelancers usually work 10 to 20 hours per week. This leaves them a lot of time for side projects, self-improvement, and for some “me” time. Make those extra hours count!

Experience is all around you

First of all, not everyone immediately gets a feeling of what their passion is. They need to try out different things. Aside from that, no matter what you do, you’ll probably get in touch with various niches, and that’s one of the most valuable experiences you can get. Doing what you love while keeping up with trends? Yes please!

Next-level organization

You have a deadline and enough experience to estimate the time you need to finish the task. Nobody is telling you to be creative and innovative at 11:30am, because you can be that whenever you want. The best thing is that, over the course of time, you actually get the hang of what hours you’re most effective at, and you just stick with that. You are your own boss, and that works perfectly.

Access to potential customers

Whether you’re a copywriter, graphic designer or a software developer, you’ll be in touch with many potential customers. “Designers have to sense opportunities and develop them into new arrangements to create value with users,” underlines this contemporary master in service design. Everything you do comes down to gaining people who could, one day, buy one of your products.

Don’t turn down business offers

While freelancing, you may feel like nothing could ever go better and that many offers are bad ones, but you could be horribly wrong. If you get offered to co-run a blog, and if there are no expenses or just small ones, feel free to jump right into it. There are many benefits of freelancing, and we’ve just went through most important ones, but it’s time to turn the heat up a little bit. Any business offer could be the right one for you, if you carefully approach and analyze it.

Turn your knowledge and experience into products

Throughout years of selling your services, you’ve gained plenty of knowledge and experience. Now it’s time to use all of that in order to create and sell your own products. You’ve had the opportunity to realize what the market needs, how do people react on different things, and you might even have some potential customers on your list. Let’s see if you have what it takes to turn possibilities into something real!

Affiliate marketing

A very popular way of earning money is the affiliate marketing. This is ideal if you’re not feeling comfortable selling your own products. All you have to do is to be good at promoting others’ products, and that’s it. With the market trends going up and the development of affiliate marketing, it’s now become very easy to be a part of it. Still, this also means that the competition is bigger than ever.

Share your knowledge

Even though this one might not seem like true entrepreneurship, it differs from freelancing because you’re doing it for yourself, by yourself. Start an online class, write an ebook or consult others. Not only that it is a generous thing to do, as an experienced freelancer, but it’s also a fine income and you’re on a good way to become an entrepreneur.

Freelancing isn’t the final stop

It’s awesome, but only because people ignore the downsides. What happens after you’ve just finished a one-time-only project for a certain client? It’s time to find a new client, get to know the new team, familiarize with the new target audience, and adapt to the new requirements. This requires a lot of time that you could’ve spent working on yourself, or doing something concrete. That’s why you should take a step forward and not let freelancing be your final stop. Go for new challenges and new ways of making money, create something by yourself!

Once you quit your day job and become a freelancer, it seems like you’ve reached the best point at your life. No matter how good it feels at the moment, you’ll get tired of certain things and you’ll wish to do something bigger. You’ll start thinking of how you could become a serious entrepreneur. With the advice mentioned above, you’re almost guaranteed to have a good start at new career path. Good luck!

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