Our cash flow as freelancers is crazy at times. During one month we won’t see a single penny reach our hands, whilst the next the whole world’s wealth seems to shower us. This is a problem within itself for freelancers, and there isn’t much you can do to stop this from happening. In current times, clients are finding it ever-harder to pay up for anything – and this includes your services.
I’m sure current freelancers reading this have all experienced what I’m talking about here. Now, you may not be able to stop non-paying clients, but you can definitely do a few things to help your cash flow during such times by optimizing your earnings and sources.
If you maximize your earnings per client, and diversify the amount of clients paying you, you can “hedge” against the problem.
1. Offer Hosting
One way you can try to stabilize your income with is to offer additional products and services that are complementary to your freelance services. For example, if you’re a freelance web designer, then you could easily offer hosting additionally to your package for a monthly fee. This way, you could potentially build up a very nice residual income for yourself.
2. Offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Once a client has their website created, their next agenda would be to drive traffic to the website. It makes sense to offer a service to help them do exactly that, as the chances of going with an additional SEO service from you is high as they’ve already dealt with you (and you were presumably good to work with). Again, a potentially high additional monthly income to work towards stabilizing your overall income.
3. Offer Article Promotion
The two previous points I’ve mentioned are really aimed at web designers/developers, so here’s one for freelance writers. Once you’ve created content for your client, let’s say an article for their blog, you could also offer to promote that article in a plethora of ways. For example, you could submit the article to popular niche blogs who may link to it, or article directories and the likes.
You could also offer to submit the article to all those crazy social media sites which would definitely give the blog a bit more traffic and I’m sure would please your client even more.
So keep in mind that you’re definitely not limited to offering a single service, and that usually stringing complementary services together brings about drastically increased income.
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September 6th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
nice post, thanks for write..
September 6th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
And maybe you can start a blog on the side, but it will not skyrocket your income quickly… :)
September 6th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Brilliant post! I couldn’t agree more.
I think freelancers should become some sort of “renaissance freelancers” and be capable of offering a number of complementary services that will not only make clients happy but also keep a tight relationship with them for a long time.
Thanks for posting
September 7th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Nice post for freelancers! If you offer web content writing services, consistently put your best into it. More quality deserves more pay, don’t you agree?
September 7th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I don’t think it will skyrocket but it will definitely help get additional passive income.
September 7th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Writing articles is definitely another way to make good money, content is king and if you write well you can get paid well for it.
Nice tips, it’s always interesting to see different ways to increase your income and personally, I feel obtaining some sort of stability in your income should be the target. The last thing you want to do is guess how much you’ll make, but at first that’s how it is. Offering additional services can at least offset some other costs so that’s a good way to look at it. Would like to offer writing services in the future…since I do like writing.
September 8th, 2009 at 1:47 am
I like your ideas for expanding, and doing so is typically a good idea. However, in addition to just giving readers these ideas, could you go an extra step and suggest HOW people might incorporate these strategies?
I’ve been looking at working hosting into my web development services, and I’ve been up in the air as to whether I should simply grab affiliate sales for a host or actually purchase a reseller package and roll my own hosting service. I’m sure there are a lot of other people in a similar position who already had that idea but would love to hear your personal/professional opinion on the details! =D
September 8th, 2009 at 8:54 am
I gonna give it a try allthough I thing that offering a hosting package also means a lot of work, because your clients will always call you when something went wrong, even if the blame is on them for compromising the security of the server…
September 8th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
I also do not think it will sky rocket your career because every developer offers seo. Might give you a chance at a job.
September 11th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Excellent work. I will try to implement in my work
September 16th, 2009 at 10:05 am
The ideas presented in the post are all valid, but (you saw this one coming, didn’t you) offering something as intangible as SEO requires pretty solid ground rules what should / could be achieved. The goal here is to be very realistic concerning the results.
Besides that, SEO is much more than submitting posts to directories and the like. Real SEO usually involves either a lot of research and knowledge or access to “someone in the know” willing to share said knowledge.
Everyone offering SEO services should be aware of the fact that many clients hear SEO and think about the top ten spots on page one of the search-results in about two days. So make sure to keep the expectations on a realistic level.
Just my 2 cents
September 18th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Something else that I’ve found helpful for creating residual income is creating wordpress themes. They don’t take too much time and once you’ve created them they take no work to deploy to clients (using an online theme marketplace)
November 19th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Hosting is an additional service I offer amongst other things, and its proving quite a nice income stream! I also offer on-site email installation, and additional SEO Services for my clients.
I am always on the look out for additional services I can offer customers etc.
Nice post :-)
January 28th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Aside from these offerings that you can add to generate more income, another thing you can do is learn how to budget your income. Although that won’t help it skyrocket but if you do it correctly, you can even create an emergency fund that will be especially useful later on during months where there is no income or even very little income.