If you’re thinking of becoming a freelancer or have already made that transition, you probably want to learn about the freelance life. Today, it’s time to look at the boring things that often get overlooked, or at least, not talked about very often. Many of these things are important, though. And forcing yourself to spend time on the boring stuff could be the difference between success and failure as a freelancer.

Invoicing and Chasing

Of course, you’re going to want to get paid when you’re doing freelance work. No one wants their hard work to be for nothing. However, invoicing if pretty boring, and what’s even more tedious is the inevitable need to chase non-paying clients.

Anyone who has worked as a freelancer will have experienced late payments at some time or other. In some instance, those payments never arrive at all. It’s boring to do all that chasing, and it can get frustrating too.

Following Up

When you’re producing important work for people, it pays to follow it up. You need to be sure that the work you’ve completed was received in the right way. If that’s not the case, it can really throw a spanner in the works and destroy your reputation going forward.

By following up, you could get a chance to put things right if they went wrong. Doing all that following up is pretty boring, and it often leads nowhere. However, it’s not worth taking the risk of not doing it.

Building Your Online Skill Set

You need to have the right online skills to succeed as a freelancer in the modern landscape. It’s all done online, and if you don’t have a strong online profile, then you won’t go far in most cases.

However, learning these skills can be frustrating and dull if they don’t really appeal to you. Not all freelancers are technically savvy, and they often just want to focus on the creative side of things. Tools like embedded BI at Izenda, among many others, can make life easier. And it’s often good to hire people and delegate tasks when you can afford to do that.

Handling Emails

Handling emails is something you do a lot of as a freelancer. On the one hand, you have people contacting you about all kinds of work, and you have to filter out the stuff you’re not interested in while responding to the stuff you are. You also need to communicate with other industry figures to boost your profile and move on up in your career. Pitching work to important people might also be an aspect of freelancing that you do, and it can get very repetitive and disheartening.

Just be sure to keep track of those that you're waiting for a reply from and to keep notes on people you want to contact. A simple spreadsheet can help keep that organized. 

Freelancing is not all fun and games. However, freelancing means taking the rough with the smooth, and this stuff matters.

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