Freelancing

Freelancing Content writing Freelancing Content writing is one of the most rewarding areas for the writers and also challenging. Almost everything on the internet is related to content. Organizations are investing a huge amount to get a good, relevant, fresh, and unique content idea. And why they shouldn’t? I mean, it is the content that decides your online brand presence, customer experience and which ultimately leads to revenue. With time being one of the factors, it is important that content writing evolve. For the evolution of this field, the writers too need to evolve. Unfortunately content is king but content writers are poor (read underpaid). Most of the writers fail to get a promising career in this field. They fail to do so because they start seeing that too much of effort is needed as compared to the payout. Every day I get many calls from agencies asking for exceptional content writers at the price of peanuts. If you think you can do wonder with your words, you can write the article and sell them, believe me, you can make fortune for yourself which you cannot do just by doing a 9-5 job. Definitely, a job has its own advantages. There is a way to make a handsome living successfully out of freelance writing and eventually, you can start your own agency. For inspiration and idea, you can read the story of Julia McCoy To start with, you need the basic marketing skills. But even after that, you need some substantial skills that can gain you profit in the long run. Below is a list of 10 tips to get freelance work in content writing. These tips are designed according to preferences of multiple content writers with the dedicated establishment in the industry. 1. Exploration: If you want good gigs, you must know how to explore. Exploring the authentic sites is good but keeping an active track is also important. Most of the people start off good but when it comes to the continuation, they give up. It is the gigs that make a real difference. If you can successfully crack down big gigs, half of your work is already done. 2. Register with multiple agencies/portal rather than one: A limited approach means that you are limited by options. When it comes to other contributing factors, approach plays a big role. One website with one target is good but trying luck on multiple websites are better. Never put all your eggs in a single basket. Freelancer is largest and the most promising service provider for content writers. Trying your luck for sites like Upwork, Fish Talent etc with your writing is good as well. 3. Leveraging the power of Social media: I think social media is one of the most promising approaches for an easier communication. You can join different groups, communities and you can even create your own fan page/group which can help you in many ways in the long run. If these platforms are used prudently it can help you in many ways from reputation building to get a lead. Consider LinkedIn, FaceBook, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest etc. You can join our groups to see how we leverage the strength of the social platform. The rates are not that high there but if you are looking for something in bulk, that is actually the place that you should look for. Remember, you should always set your price bars legit. Once you lower them down, it is not easy to get it up.Read this blog to Gain expertise in time and cost estimation. 4. Delivery and Commitment: Let us be honest here. when you are working with freelancer you know almost nothing about the person you are working with neither his whereabouts. The issue with these industry freelancers (imposters)  is that they are in a self-destructing mode just because of the concept of everybody can write. These kinds of imposters fail deadlines, fail to deliver, they set their bar low and when they fail to deliver, they quit bringing a bad name to others also. Here is the opportunity for you. In one word if you can maintain professionalism and deliver quality content on schedule with high quality the competition is next to zero. So the secret sauce is maintaining the quality delivery on time, Commit less deliver more and kingdom is yours. 5. Chose your work wisely: Delivery and commitment are alike but not the same. Someone with the understanding of commitment can never lose his job. Content writing is a vast field and you may get an opportunity to work on different topics and domain but it is not wise to jump on the wagon about which you do not have any idea. Learn to say No. Don’t opt for something that you don’t know or you are not comfortable. Doing this may sometime backfire you. Instead, try doing something that you already have a grip on even if the level is that of a novice. Instead of making false commitments, it is better to make things that you already know how to excel.   6. Quality matters: Newbie or trained, blogger or SEO expert, there is one thing that this industry never accepts. That’s plagiarism. This can kill your freelancing journey. If you let your work succumbed to plagiarism, it will actually be a matter of time before you hit the road. Don’t take more than you can handle. Instead, try to things that you can already maintain. Taking inspiration is always a good idea but the end of the day we are paid for original work. Curate original content ask for the price you deserve. Only plagiarism is not the issue poor grammar, spelling mistakes use of weak phrase can be the killer. Learn the list of weak phrase you must avoid. 7. Focus: Don’t jump from one genre to another without prior planning and preparations. Understand what you are good at. Around 70% of the clients from your client base will be referred or returning client. So, in one word, reputation matters. Abruptly changing your genre may dilute your content depth and ultimately quality. So, slowly and steadily learn

Technical writer resume A CV can be the best tool to explain your expertise to a would-be client. Not all freelancers use a CV/resume to market their services or to convey their experience to their clients. It’s a great way to convey complex things to the potential clients. A freelance CV is very different from the one used to apply for a job, and it’s a good idea to learn how to approach CV development for freelance work even if you decide it’s an approach that isn’t right for your business. If you’re starting a new design agency with only you or a partner, you should also consider including a resume on your “about page”. According to many freelancers, the easiest way to convey their expertise and experience to a client is in a CV/Curriculum Vitae/resume format. Many freelancers use a very different style of CV once they have a few projects under their belts though, it can be produced in the conventional format occasionally. Short and Crisp like your Doc The best CVs are short and to the point. There are some exceptions to this rule (for example, IT contractors who may change projects every few months) but, in general—the shorter the better. If you’re going to be competing against a bunch of other freelancers for a project, keeping things short will make you unique and make it easier for a client to push you further into the selection process. An ideal freelance CV covers a single page and no more than two pages. “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs This is one of the best rule for everything in life—not just freelance CVs—Keep It Simple Stupid. The less wordy you are, the easier it will be for a client to get involved with what you do. But you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple, as simple is often harder than complex. What goes into a Freelance CV?  Depending on their profession, their industry vertical, and their target audience a freelance CV inputs will vary from freelancer to freelancer. However, most freelance CVs will include: 1. Your Personal Profile This is a brief statement of who you are and what you do. It’s where you make it clear what you offer to the client. If you are dealing with a specific client, you will want to tailor this profile to their needs. You will be more general if you make this available for download on your website or from a freelance job board. In general, you should not focus on describing yourself but describing what you can do for your client. Please remember—the client is not interested in you but in how you can help them. 2. Your List of Skills Break this down into a manageable list (again—if a client is looking for certain skills—make sure they’re on this list). Ideally, unless you’re looking at a ridiculously complex project, you will want to keep this to a list of no more than 5–10 skill sets. Pick only those skills that are saleable to clients (pretty much everyone can use MS Word today, for example – so unless you’re an administrator with seriously advanced skills, there’s probably no need to mention it). 3. A List of Projects Completed and Your Achievements This is really important. Clients aren’t as much interested in what you’ve done as what you can do for them. “Developed a logo for XYZ Company” is fine as far as it goes but… so what? How did that add value to XYZ Company? However, “Developed a logo for XYZ Company as part of a major rebranding exercise that resulted in a 35% increase in sales.” tells a much clearer story. This is the difference between selling logos for INR 5–INR 50 and selling them from INR 500–INR 50,000. Your work should add value to your clients’ bottom line in some way or another. Don’t be afraid to ask clients what they’re doing with your work and what they expect to achieve with it. And don’t be afraid to go back and ask whether they got those results, too. Whatever field of freelancing you are in, it’s important to understand the value you create. This section can change. If you’re targeting a specific job, including projects and achievements relevant to that job. If you’re using the CV for general marketing, pick your biggest wins. You can, in this section, refer to projects that you completed as an employee (as long as you don’t infringe any contracts with a previous employer regarding confidentiality) until such a time as you have sufficient freelance work under your belt. Don’t be afraid to use graphics to highlight what you’ve done and what you can do. This can make it much easier for a client to understand your strengths. 4. A Potted Career History You’ve already told clients what you do and what the benefits are of your work; you don’t need to deliver a ten-page history of every job you’ve done and every achievement you’ve ever scored. You should, however, show any relevant experience gained. In most cases, a job title, a company name, and dates will be enough to show this. You can always provide a link to your LinkedIn profile if the client needs more information. 5. Your Contact Details Do yourself a favour—keep these minimal and at the end of the page, not at the top. Clients are buying services, not your home address. It’s vital you offer a client a way to contact you, but it’s not vital that they see this first. If your CV gets shortlisted, they’ll make it through to the contact details; don’t worry about that. In many cases, an e-mail address and a phone number will be enough for this and if you have a website. Consider including the office address if

Information Developers Meetups Snaps of Information Developers Foundation meetup on 22 August 2015. It was attended by top-notch technical writers of NCR and the presentations were truly amazing.The best part was it was interactive. Interactive technical writing session in progress Bipul presented a very interesting talk on the importance of UX in developers guide. Bipul from GlobalLogic talking on UX in documentation Ankur Srivastav guru of DITA talk about the information mapping through DITA. DITA man Ankur   Rinni talk about one of the latest concept of documentation DocOps. Rinni still try to find out why tech writing? Puja Gandhi from Agilent and Ankur Srivastava from Freescale   Rinni Mahajan From Inteera System and Manisha Khurana from Comviva   Dipti sharing pain point of technical writers   Dr.Anu from Fiserv and Dipti Sehgal from Pitney Bose   Participant of the Information Developers Consortium- August 2015   Rahul Karn- Co-Founder of ApraDocs Information Developers  

Most of us directly get to the Google search engine and look for solutions whenever we encounter problems related to Google’s services including Gmail, Maps, Chrome, and YouTube. We visit various websites and keep hunting them until we get the best solution to our problems. But to facilitate your experience with its products and services, Google has come up with a website – Google Tips – that includes tips related to its wide range of services. Users can search for tips on a service/product. Tips are presented in the form of cards. Find a card based on your needs and flip it over to learn more. For instance, one of the tips under the Android sections is “Never lose contact with your contacts.” The moment you click on any card, it turns over and comes up with a detailed tutorial describing how to use a particular tip. Tips are presented in the form of cards. Find a card based on your needs and flip it over to learn more. Users can share tips with their friends and can also suggest tips to Google if they have any. You can simply click on “Suggest a card” button suggest a tip.

How To Estimate  Time For Technical Writing Projects? Estimating time for a technical writing project is an art or craft that I do not know but surely it is one of the significant and core skill, yet most of the technical communicator find it one of the most daunting tasks because it relies on many conflicting, delicate and external factors. Why estimate time? Either you are a freelance or permanent employee if you can effectively estimate the time commitment required to complete a project, you can safely meet your clients’ needs while maintaining balance in your schedule. If you can’t do this, you won’t know how much to charge for your work or how to best schedule your time and wind up costing you time and money. Unfortunately, it is difficult but essential. With the spirit of sharing, I thought to post a few tips on what to consider while estimating time for the technical writing project. Nothing revolutionary. There are many sites and resources available, but it is difficult to say what is the exact method, probably that’s why it is an estimation. End of the day, it will be your experience which will make you the guru of this gyan.   Pre Kick-off meeting preparation time is important for freelancers to take into consideration. You can also consider the time required in preparing of the quote, MOU, negotiation time, preparation of the agreement. Know what you have to estimate before estimating you should be familiar with what you are giving estimation because sometimes documenting one menu may take one hour and sometimes it may run in many hours. Knowing the scope is the most vital part of the estimation. So do not forget to allocate time for meetings to evaluate project details. To conduct information-gathering meeting is essential for estimating, raise questions until you are sure you understand the application. It should be a red flag if a client or developer is not willing to define the project for you. Try to understand the difficulty of the project during your research. Have you worked in this domain earlier? Is it a simple topic or complicated? Do you know and have the knowledge of the tools which are required to complete the project. Give yourself permission to have a greater learning curve than for projects similar to your past work. Check the availability of the finished project, specification requirement docs, and other information availability? Also, find any existing document you have to update, or you have to do it from scratch, Are templates ready or you have to create? These are the small things you should consider before estimating actual writing time. Guestimate time for actual work-After understanding the complexity of the project and knowing the real number of windows and menu option make a high-level view of topics now you can guesstimate the actual time you will take to write. Keep in mind apart from the actual flow you have to write an index, appendices, and many definition and introduction. Also keep time for graphics, formatting, editing, and self-proofreading and generating output. Revision-Make it clear in advance with the client about the number of revisions the client keeps changing his or her mind or code allot time for each round. This avoids the endless cycle of minute detail changes that end up adding hours and hours to your total time commitment Buffer-This time cushion you when the unknown problem suddenly emerges like delay in getting feedback, hardware or software problem or your guesstimate deviate from the path, Extraneous Hours-This time is important when you have a very demanding client who needs you to revolve around them answering call writing emails remember all these takes time To learn more concepts of Freelancing visit www.informationdevelopers.in

How to estimate the rate for freelancing writing projects? Undoubtedly freelancing gives you priceless freedom of working and choosing your type of work, boss-free life, work from anywhere but it brings a lot of responsibilities and should be done with the discipline to be your own boss. My first triage with cost estimation as a consultant: 🤔 The year 2008, my client asked me how much you will charge? Hmm, I can complete this work in 1.5 days and I m earning 30k/mo so 1k will be the correct figure. If I ask for more he may not give this project to me and finally, after deep thinking  I quote INR999. Do you think it was the correct approach? NO-It was a disaster even he sign 5 more projects with me. To estimate the per hour rate for a freelancing project is one of the trickiest questions that come to our mind before taking any consultancy project? Continue reading otherwise your situation will be something like mine 🙂 🔥Not only in technical documentation, but you also face similar trouble in any freelancing work. In this blog post, I have written 💯 about the significant challenges and solutions for freelancing cost estimations. Share your experiences about cost estimates in the comment section. How to estimate the per hour rate for freelancing technical writing project is one of the tricky questions that come to the mind before taking any technical documentation project. Not only in technical documentation, but you also face similar trouble in any freelancing writing assignments like content writing, medical writing, and blogging. In one of my blog posts, I have written about the significant challenges of freelancing. Read the post before you foray into technical writing. I do not oversell freelancing for technical writers because freelancing work is limited in technical writing. You will get plenty of work in content writing, resume writing, Generally you will get contract technical writing work n which client will ask to write from client premise. There are many calculators available to calculate per hour rate for a freelancing project, but I firmly believe that you are the best person to judge “What should be your value”. In our content charcha (webinar) we recently invited Scheely to talk about her journey of freelancing. You can enjoy the recording of the webinar. Yes, there are many parameters which you should take into consideration before you fix your freelancing price. Pricing is one of the crucial aspects of any right business price that can win or lose you a project. Read “Pros and Cons of Contract Technical Writer Work” consider the points mentioned in it before doing any math for your rate. Math for calculating the hourly price for content freelancing work Simple maths you can do is take your monthly gross salary before deductions, round it up to an even number, and divide by 176 (the average hours per month,22×8). Suppose you want to earn INR 100000/month. In this case divide 100000/176=568.18. So, you should never ask anything less than INR 750 after negotiation you can quote a minimum INR 600. I will suggest quoting INR 1000 because you cannot work for 8 hours and many unseen issues can do your math wrong. Keep reading to know those unseen issues. By now your freelancing resume is ready and shortlisted by the client. If you want to learn about freelancer resume consider reading. Hope you get a rough estimate but before finalizing the rate consider the few points also. Points to consider for estimating the freelancing price of writing work- How many of your daily working hours are billable? How many days off do you need for holiday.s, sick days, and personal days each year? How much vacation time do you want each year? The number of visits and duration of meetings with the client. Make sure who is going to pay for this. Travel cost, phone bills, and courier charges if any. Investment in hardware, software, electricity, Internet bill even on coffee or water. Insurance cover, EPF, marketing, promotions, taxes, etc. Be ready for the negotiation, so always have Negotiation buffer. The duration of the project also matters. You can reduce the hourly rate for larger assignments. What kinds of documents will you be writing? Online help, Print docs, Web articles, Newsletters, Website content etc…? What kind of skill set is required? General or Rare? How desperately you want this project. Is it going to be an entry for you in a new line of business? If yes, quote less. Your existing or future relationship with the client. What is your expertise and experience level and how clients value that? Marketing expense. Like chasing the client, writing emails etc. You can get good freelancing work from the website like Upwork, e-lance,freelancer.com, etc. You can also contact agencies like Technowrites, Commit, ibruk etc. I got my first work through my friend Jeno Joy who was working with Dots consultancy in Mumbai (W). His company was in need of a freelance content writer and my journey started. It was the year 2008. Conclusion In freelancing it is also very important to estimate the time. If you have a correct estimation of time, you very quickly calculate the cost. Do not forget to fix the payment terms and conditions like advance and full payment duration. The client may ask for GST and invoice. So be ready with all these. Acceptance criteria and definition of done should be clear. How the quality of content will be measured and how many times you will rewrite the content should be clear during price and time fixation. Read how to estimate the time for a freelancing writing project. Always keep adjusting your fee, after all, you deserve increment:-). I’m eager to listen to your freelancing story please share in the comment.

 Challenges of doing Freelance Content Writing  Freelancing is the best way to be your own boss and manage your life the way you want it to be. The sky is the limit in freelancing and every opportunity has its own challenges. In this post, I’m discussing the pros and cons of freelancing as a content professional based on my personal experience. I believe pros and cons are the respective words, what are pros for me can be cons for you and vice verse. It is up to you decide what is going to be pros for you and cons. Most of us believe that staying home and working is the best job in the world.  When you decide to work from your home there will be good and bad things about it, but there are good and bad things when working in a brick and mortar office too. Things will not always be smooth and problem free, that is just part of life. List of pros and cons  I can remember doing contract/freelancing You will have to do sales and marketing job as well i.e to keep getting a contract to keep you fully occupied. This may include writing and replying emails, some cold calls, reply to the calls etc. Keep in mind of these hours when you are determining your per hour rate. The big challenge for contracting is the uncertainty of getting the next contract. But in some situations, having a so-called “full-time job” really isn’t much more secure than contracting. Who the heck have secure jobs these days? You will have to be a Doc manager also to negotiate important factors like cost and time. The client will always love to get work done at the minimum cost in minimum time with the best quality. So, you should have great negotiating skill. You will have to manage your taxes or hire a good consultant for calculating your business-related expenses and taxes. You will have to be your legal manager. Read carefully consulting contract and before signing MOU and NDA be sure to contract build is not one-sided. Many time requirements for product change and so the product. Sometimes you may have to do lots of re-work without pay if your contract is not in place. Try to get a freeze version and any charge for anything diverting from it. In nutshell, your contract should have all. Sometime client may ask you to use your hardware and software for authoring, so have a licensed version of hardware and software what normally used for authoring and bill for it, if it is not a basic tool. You will be moving from one company to another frequently it is interesting but has its challenges. New people, new industries, new technologies. So, be ready for context hoping and do not let it reflect it in your writing.You may get a chance to work on varieties of projects the same day, you may end up working for the different company on a different tool for different kind of write-ups. So you can gain more knowledge. Some time payment may be delayed so have a sufficient backup.I must say have at least six-month backup. You need to maintain good PR, be courteous and professional, have a good sense of humour, be flexible, and always give more than is expected. Higher pressure as you are paid by the hour. You don’t work, you don’t get paid. So, always take the lean time into consideration when estimating your cost. For every client that pays you a reasonable hourly fee, there will be ten who expect you to work for pennies (or worse, for free). Be careful in choosing your client. Sometimes contract terminate in between there can be many reasons for that, so better be prepared for this kind of situation as well. Always add notice period clause in your contract. Your work can imbalance your work and personal life if you allow. As a freelancer due to uncertainty unknowingly we commit more than we can do in working hours. This lead to extra work hour and danger of this is that you will soon exhaust. To avoid communication problem get very specific and detailed instruction from the client. You can schedule the demo for review between development process. There is no one who tells you to start working when you do not feel like to. So you need a lot of self-discipline. For technical writing /content writing service and training contact Information Developers Foundation, New Delhi.Call 7840741999