How to become a freelancer

Formation of a virtual personality

Network life is no different from real life. To lie or not to lie is your own business. But a few simple rules that negatively affect your earnings should be remembered:

• you are not 18. The stereotype of irresponsible shkoloty is nothing to destroy
• VKontakte you name is Vasya, on the stock exchange Peter, and webmoney will betray that you are Masha. Few people think about their virtual profile at the very beginning, but in vain, then nothing will change. Think not only about the reliability of the input data, but also about their "purity". If the user under your nickname is on the phpclub forum to ask to teach him how to program, then be prepared for suddenly lost clients.
• give the future customer a maximum of information about yourself: phone, skype, ICQ, numbers of wallets and accounts.
• pay attention to social networks. Nothing compromises a performer like a VKontakte page containing a checkmate, Padone expressions, etc.
• put yourself in the customer's place and check all this information through search engines for purity and consistency
• Try to write without errors and typos. I don’t even think about talking about the mother in communication with the customer.

Get used to live in a new era ...

First order

So, we coped with the registration. Next you need to try to get an order. Frankly, for the first 2 years, the cost of an hour of my work was striving for 0. There are plenty of options for a programmer to earn on the exchange. It is important to make the right choice. You obviously cannot see big orders, you need experience and feedback. Therefore, the choice is approximately as follows:

• Small hacks and modules to popular cms systems . This work is very good, you can quickly gather around you loyal customers who need to support sites. But the disadvantage is the lack of growth. CMS for housewives do not differ in the quality of coding, which means that you expect constant communication with the cattle-code and the generation of it. This will slow down your professional growth. In any work mistakes are made, even in small ones. The second drawback is the accumulation and difficulty of identifying errors in your work. You can choke on this. After all, you do not disappear after receiving the money, but honestly and free of charge correct the mistakes made in the code. Yes, and apologize to the client for each of them. The third drawback of fine coding is the contingent in need of it. You will have to get used to, that you will be overcome with stupid questions and requests. The fourth drawback is the high rotation of customers. In other words - a lot of talk, but little money.
  
  
• Parsing Almost perfect job, despite the moral motivation. She is a lot, she dominates among orders. At the moment, it is easy to find up to 20 offers per day on the Russian exchanges. Huge opportunities for work automation. It all depends on you. Learn curl, sockets, parsing libraries for html, and of course regular expressions. It is advisable not to dwell on php. Before my eyes, there are many examples of freelancers who in fine parsing earn no less than Moscow office programmers who like to talk about patterns at interviews.
• Small scripts . Forms, small databases and other routine for the price less than $ 100. The worst possible direction. The risk of running into an inadequate customer in this category is very high. And all because most of the orders are generated by "housewives", the very ones who stamp everything from business cards to the store on WordPress and Joomla. Having crammed their creation with everything that one can get in open access, they run to the stock exchange to order the missing functionality. The trouble is that their work is not much appreciated, so for a couple of dollars they will be ready for you to endure all the brains. Also, the disadvantages include the inability to accumulate and improve ready-made solutions, your professional growth will initially strive upwards by leaps and bounds, knowledge will be required from a variety of areas, but this knowledge is an entry level and therefore you will eventually stop somewhere in the middle. This slag from shit-code concocted for $ 10 in haste.

This choice of beginners ends. Further, you will be required to experience programming and reviews on the exchange.

Start earning

• Turnkey websites or the development of modules on open-source engines . In this segment there are designers who need a programmer to implement projects. Also, poor web studios to the detriment of their reputation are asked to create saytik using Joomla, pulling the design and finishing it a bit. I am absolutely not familiar with this direction, so
  how I avoided it like a fire. Therefore, I will express my opinion based on logic, not experience. Learn the popular engines: see how to work with which of them gives you pleasure and dare.
  If you are professional in your responsibilities, customers will gather around you.
  
• Writing small engines. If you are not looking for easy ways, then this is your choice. You have to get used to the idea that you will not be able to get quick returns. As you grow your career, your views on the architecture and implementation of web applications will change. And for each change of opinion you will have to pay your time or money, which, incidentally, is a synonym for freelancing. It is best to work with intermediaries - small web companies that will merge your orders from $ 200 with non-standard functionality. The mediator takes on communication with the client, the preparation of TK and is often a more obligatory and stable partner.
  It is better to avoid private customers, otherwise you will become an investigator, and your work will turn into continuous conversations and making TK. For all the time of my work, I met a meager share of customers who knew what they wanted, the rest flew in the clouds. A new client is always a risk of running into an inadequate person or a fraudster. Recognize them will only help your own communication experience.
  
• Frameworks In recent years, this area is constantly growing. After studying one or more popular frameworks, you will not only get professional growth, but also the opportunity to work as a team on a large project. However, you should never forget that you are programming in a language, not in a framework. Another danger of frameworks - you solve problems that will become irrelevant with the retirement of this framework. Do not repeat the mistakes of jquery programmers who have not seen clean code in their life and connect the library to write something like
  $('.btn').css('display','none');
  

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Communication with the client

So. You have created a virtual working image for yourself and decided on the front of future work, what next?

• Evaluation of work. Freelancers are surprisingly fond of round numbers. You give him a task, and he gives you $ 1000 with an intelligent look in an hour. The likelihood that a freelancer is a lazy person and the price he called from the ceiling is extremely high and personally I have such amounts that are immediately suspicious. Therefore, an important point of freelancing is job evaluation. Mostly evaluate the hours of operation. The cost of an hour usually ranges from $ 3 to $ 35, depending on experience and greed. The number of hours is calculated on the basis of TK. Only your own experience can help you here. I break the project into pages and blocks. For each block, I put the estimated execution time in minutes (this is where we see the real need for any time managers to apply). To the amount received, I add a certain number of hours to talk with the client and debug the project. The resulting amount is multiplied by the cost of one hour of work and the result is given to the client. To complete the picture, you can still reset his estimate. Even if the price is more than the client expected, he will hardly argue. At best, it will offer to trim some of the functionality.
• Prepay. Without prepayment can not work. The more experience you have, the more you ask for prepayment. Ideally, you need to immediately demand all the money for the project. already. This will save you from unnecessary communication with the customer on the topic of finance. You are a creative person and you don’t need to bother with financial routine. At the beginning of my work, I worked without prepayment, proudly announced this to customers, and this certainly helped me to find orders. The project was divided into parts and after the implementation of each of them, the client was supposed to transfer part of the money. But the trouble is, you did the first part of the project, sat for a week at the monitor from 8 am to 10 pm, shipped the result to the client for testing and ... and that's it. Day of silence, another. The customer is your man busy and greedy. One quality of his character does not allow him to pay for work without verification, and the other to allocate time for this very test. And like any cynic, he wanted to spit on you from the high bell tower and he does not care about the delay. Will you start the next part of the project? No ... Realizing that a hole is starting to form in the budget, you will take on another project. And this, in turn, is fraught with the waste of a huge amount of extra time. After all, your greedy client is not a cheater and in a week he will check the project anyway and maybe even pay it, but he will surely cut the amount, noticing errors. And you have to do the project further, and all thoughts for a week of inactivity have disappeared from my head, and you have to spend time to restore memory. Worse, you don’t have time, at the other end of the country another client is waiting for the results of your work. Such customers are quite common. Therefore, at any convenient opportunity, demand prepayment and as much as possible.
• Estimate of time. I notice that many people, and programmers in particular, suffer from a reassessment of their strength. You look at the TK, and in your head “What is there to do, a trifle” turns around and you call it without thinking about the time or worse, you take one job, another, a third and you don’t understand that the collapse of time is close. It seems that everything is about to ruin. And then, at best, you have to apologize to the customer. To avoid this, you need to keep a clear log of work. You should be aware of: how much you are able to spend hours a day, a week. What is your potential at force majeure? It is very important to be able to correctly estimate the amount of work, this also comes with experience. Record how much was spent on this or that work, then analyze and draw conclusions.
• Timing. Freelancers often forget to specify a deadline for the project. It's a paradox, but 50% of my clients take projects longer than I do them. There are no problems until you break the project into parts with payment for each of the executed parts. A freelancer is not considered as a person, because it is not protected by the COAPOM, therefore, as practice shows, it is useless to appeal to human conscience. People do not want to understand that they are delaying your salary. Although I think many people understand everything and just enjoy it.
• Choosing a customer. Know how to program? This is not enough. Learn more to communicate with people. I studied for a long time, more than 4 years. And after abandoned this ungrateful business. As I wrote above, it is more convenient and safer to work with intermediaries. A freelancer can be saved from cheating only by his experience. Do not be careless and naive. Do not work on the client server. Do not work without prepayment. I am now writing this phrase, but I myself know that at first I will have to work without prepayment.
• TK. Here it is often argued whether TK is necessary or not. It's pretty simple - TK is an extra expense. But this rule is valid only with old, proven, adequate customers who are confident in you, and you are confident in them. If we talk about new employers, the lack of TK is a failed project. You hand it over to chance. If you think that TK is the answer to all questions, then you are mistaken. TK simply allows you to save time by getting rid of heaps of erroneous steps. But from an inadequate customer who changes his desires every day it will not save you. Sticking his nose in the TZ, you get arrogance and blackmail. It’s unprofitable for you to argue about small things, so you have to swallow the offense and continue to work to your own detriment or waste unpaid time on disputes. Also, you can easily be faced with a choice: to continue working to the customer’s tune or go through the forest. In this case, the time spent by you, no one will pay. Even worse, they will write a complaint to you. A negative review in a freelancer portfolio is like death. Few customers understand how much time and effort is invested in this profile. Rating earned over the years, and spoils in a jiffy. I sense that you write a negative review, if you are written out of the principle of nastiness in response and it does not matter if they write the truth or lie. Therefore, enter into a contract. Every freelance site allows it. Let the site act as an intermediary in your contract.
• Learn to refuse. If something does not suit you in the client, then it is better to refuse. This is not so easy to do. Refuse clearly and politely. Finally give some banal advice. Often, the client is not morally ready to refuse and starts dumping the dialogue to the level of sracha. You should not get involved in the dialogue, anyway, you won’t get an understanding, but your mood and working mood will deteriorate. It doesn't matter to you that the last word is not yours, you should be above it. Do not try to explain to the client the reasons. An adequate person will simply say goodbye and leave, in the worst case in English.

All the above stage covered?
So I am no longer an adviser to you. Do not forget to share your experience with the world, which will help to grow an army of competitors)