Survive a Freelance Programmer's Life
A freelance programmer is a self-employed person who is not bound to an organization or individual under contract or permanent employment. In a nutshell, being self-employed means you are your own boss .
Anyone can live a happy and prosperous life as a freelance developer, if he is hardworking, creative and has the ability to make some positive and bold decisions. But it is not any one specific quality that will assure him of a successful free agent life. In order to earn something, you have to learn the things that are associated with success, and those that can cause failures.
Using the following steps can help freelance programmers to earn a very good living.
Steps
- Make an impact by mentioning your degrees, certificates, researches, consultancy, and/or work experience on your resume.
- Be a complex problem-solving person who can work under tight timelines.
- Interact with the companies or the individuals when gathering their requirements by listening to them.
- If they seem receptive, suggest different alternatives.
- Offering the cheapest services to outclass your competition is not a good practice.
- This can cause a negative impact on the client. It can make the client think that perhaps you are an immature developer in the community, or that you have no previous experience of developing a project in real-time. After all, professional and quality work should have some worth. It is a skill within itself to ask for the amount which you deserve.
- Be a cost-effective solution provider who doesn't waste time or energy.
- Be in between the category of those who are asking for more and those who are desperate to work with the clients at any cost.
- Get some extra points to engage attention. Point systems are an excellent method to highlight your profile amongst accomplished programmers.
- Achieve points by investing funds at the beginning to pass their tests, or by referring your friends (or some serious workaholics) to join the communities through effective campaigns in the websites, blogs, social communities or through advertising.
- Define clear target achieving dead-line estimates for the completion of the project and proper cost evaluation skills of the whole project.
- Develop a self-evolving personality, with the ability to learn from your mistakes.
- If none of the above mentioned things work, the free-market is also another option.
- Make something creative and attractive and sell it in the market.
- Take the help of the marketing professionals such as merchandisers willing to work with you .Merchandisers are commonly misunderstood in the information technology domain. These are the people and resources that get to the right audiences and can do all the heavy lifting of marketing for your product.
- Use automated installers that are available in the market. These are the newest merchandising software that pay you after every successful installation of your product to the computers of those who download them.
- Keep in mind that the targeted audiences may not want to install anything that auto-installs the browser redirectors. Take an opportunity and the responsibility to describe that they are not redirection malware.
- Have sound knowledge of web page designing, especially WordPress themes designing and selling on sites like www.codecanyon.net
- If you know the client side scripts such as JavaScript, JQuery or other markups like HTML5 or styles designing such as CSS3 , you will definitely survive by developing and selling the blogs plugins, some great interactive games for the Android phones or even by blogging tutorials about programming, scripting, etc.
References
- [freelance.com]
- [odesk.com]
- [getacoder.com]
- [scriptlance.com]
- [codecanyon.net]
