In the corporate world, it’s easy to track positive mobility in your career. You could get a promotion (a move upward to a position of higher rank or pay), or laterally to a position of similar rank, but with different tasks or projects. Advancement in a freelancing career is not so easy to track, possibly because we each have different definitions of what a freelance “promotion” consists of.

Here are some ways you can climb the freelance career ladder:

Rates. The most obvious way to climb your career ladder is to raise your rates as you gain more experience and skills. The quality of your work, client support, and even your online presence should reflect these changes. If you want some tips on how to raise your rates, check out the following resources:

• “How to Raise Your Rates Without Losing Clients” at Freelance Switch
• “How to Increase Your Rates for the New Year” from Men With Pens

Of course, just relying on increasing your rates has its limits. Just because you’re increasing your hourly rate by $5, it doesn’t mean that you’ll eventually get away with charging $1,000 per hour. The good news is that there are other ways to give yourself a “promotion.”

Projects and clients. One of the signs that you’re doing well as a freelancer is that you occasionally turn down projects. Still, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you should only take on projects with a bigger scope or work only with high-profile clients. What’s important is to look out for new projects that we’re passionate about. This could mean the following:

• Taking on projects that will allow you to learn and explore additional skills you’ve always wanted.
• Working with people in an industry or field that you’ve always wanted to get involved with.
• Choosing challenging projects that excite you and allow you to push your work quality a notch higher.
• Having the time and resources to work on passion projects that may not be financially rewarding, but are personally fulfilling.

Tasks. If you take a look at your daily tasks, which ones do you like the least? Out of these, which ones can you automate with an app, delegate to an assistant or subcontract to others? Sometimes, advancement in your career means focusing your time and energy on your preferred tasks.

Leisure. It seems like many freelancers work during the weekends or fail to take some time off. While we may be passionate about our work, it doesn’t mean we can’t professionally benefit from leisure time. In one of his TED talks, Stefan Sagmeister discussed the power of taking time off. The benefits include the following:

• We can pursue creative experiments that we don’t have the time or energy for during the regular work week.
• We get fresh ideas and innovate. This prevents repetition and keeps our work from becoming stagnant.

Learning opportunities. Career mobility should also involve learning new skills and becoming acquainted with developments in your field. You can do this via seminars, workshops, reading materials, and even attending conferences. On a smaller scale, you can subscribe to relevant blogs and sign up for online courses. By pushing ourselves to learn more, we improve the quality of our work, hear new ideas, and interact with other professionals.

Business building. For some people, being a lone freelancer isn’t enough. Sometimes we want our jobs to evolve into a business. This doesn’t necessarily mean renting an office or owning a building, but it can mean setting up our own teams, having dedicated staff for client support, or simply getting the right paperwork.

Getting a promotion as a freelancer may not be simple, but as I’ve illustrated with the points above, the freedom and options we have more than make up for that.

How are you climbing the freelance career ladder? Do you do this deliberately or do you find that your career path forges naturally with very little planning?

Image by svilen001 from sxc.hu

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Learn how to collaborate with people who are less tech savvy than we are. As online collaboration becomes more commonplace, we’ll be working with some people who aren’t up to speed with the most practical Web 2.0 tools for their needs.  Knowing how to communicate with them effectively while bridging the tech gap will be a priceless skill.
Offline marketing efforts. I’m willing to bet that most web freelancers – including myself – usually overlook offline marketing.  While the yellow pages might not be a good idea, there are many effective offline marketing tactics that can help us attract new clients.

Differentiation. More and more people are looking for part-time or full-time work online, especially with many layoffs going on.  This means that existing web workers might face more competition in the incoming year.  You need to differentiate yourself from the thousands of other freelancers out there.  Strengthen your personal brand and make sure that you’re delivering a consistent message about the work you provide and the products you create.

Win the loyalty of existing clients. I’ve already mentioned the increase in competitors.  They won’t just be competing with you for new contracts, some of them might even attract your current clients.  Evaluate each of your clients, ask them what their expected needs will be in the incoming year, and see whether you’re still a perfect fit for them.  If there’s a mismatch, you’ll either have to adapt, hire a helping hand, or recommend another web worker to your client.

Redundancy systems. Today’s hottest web app might be tomorrow’s online fossil, something you can only find through Wikipedia or The Wayback Machine.  This can be a nightmare if this happened to the most important app you use for business.  While free tools are abundant, make sure that it won’t kill your business if these tools are suddenly unavailable. To be safe, you either need to regularly backup your data or switch to a more reliable, mainstream tool.

The art of rigorous filtering. From unwanted emails to difficult clients, from distractions at home to hundreds of unread blog posts, we need to be more discriminating of the things that we devote our time and attention to.  With a new year comes more websites and blogs, leading to more content we have to digest.  There will also be new clients, some of them will be regular, and this means you’ll be adding extra hours of your workday doing client support.  Is all the content important?  Are all your clients worth the hours you put in?

Don’t get me wrong – information, projects, clients, hobbies, and random activities are all great.  Just make sure that the things that grab your time are the things that you really want to do.  Otherwise, you’ll feel unnecessarily fatigued and full all the time.

A high financial IQ and the ability to make use of it. Being practical with money has always been important, even more so during times when the economy is slow (eg. now).  Web workers who have an above-average grasp of finances will be much better off than those who don’t.  Her are some ways you can put yourself at a safer financial standing:

• Multiple income streams. There are several ways for freelancers to make money online, other than providing the usual services.
• Cutting down expenses. Equipment, apps, and other tools can be expensive when you add them up.
• Saving for a rainy day. I’m a big fan of emergency funds, that stash of money you’re keeping in the bank in case of large, unexpected expenses, or in case you’re having a low-income month.  Right now I have 5 months’ worth of living expenses saved up, but I want to crank it up a little and save up for a year’s worth.

How about you, what do you think web workers need to do to prepare for the incoming year?  How much different will it be from the preparations you made for 2008?

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But it’s one thing to survive as a web worker. To thrive, on the other hand, happens on a completely different level.

Surviving versus thriving

Survival means staying alive, continuing your existence as a web worker. This isn’t necessarily an easy feat. Web working isn’t an easy decision to make, especially if you’re coming from a traditional office environment. With all the obstacles in the way of successful web working, it’s almost puzzling why it’s a growing trend. But if you can regularly pay your bills with the work that you do, and you can do it remotely, then you know you’ve got what it takes to survive.

Unlike survival, thriving is a mindset that allows you to fulfill more than just your basic needs. Thriving is about setting career goals , meeting them, and feeling a deep sense of personal fulfillment when it’s comes to your work.

So how does a web worker thrive?

Be active in planning your career.

If you’re freelancing, observe how you get new work. What percentage of your current clients came to you, and what percentage did you seek out? Do you wait for offers to drop in your inbox or do you actively offer your services to the clients you want? It’s good to have a healthy mix of both, but waiting for offers to happen puts your career in the hands of your future clients rather than your own.

Think about your top ideal clients. What would you have to do to get them? Or, if clients are irrelevant to you, what is your dream project? Knowing what you really want and taking the steps to attain it is the difference between working with passion and working just to pay the bills.

Focus on getting better.

Merlin Mann recently gave an inspiring talk entitled “How to Blog”. In that talk, he had one particular slide that contained everything he new about blogging. The last line of that slide read: Get better.

This is something we should all make an effort to do, whether we blog or not. If we are unmindful of the work we do, we’re prone to repeat the same mistakes multiple times, stay stagnant, and be left behind by other people who work more deliberately than we do. Thriving doesn’t mean meeting the minimum standards, it’s about exceeding the standards you’ve set for yourself and constantly raising them. Doing this shows that you have pride in your work, and that the time you devote to it isn’t just about the paycheck – it’s about the work itself.

Look for jobs that excite you.

What is your criteria for accepting job offers or answering online ads? Is it just the pay, the prestige, or the scope of the project itself?

It’s important to occasionally create work that excites you and encourages you to get up early because you can’t wait to start doing it. While these types of projects tend to be more of the exception than the rule, it’s still important to get them when the opportunity arises. They can serve as a refreshing reminder of why you got into web working in the first place.

Do you think you’re a thriving web worker? What types of projects do you feel the most passionate about?

Image by: Abdulaziz Almansour from sxc.hu

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