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?

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There are many symptoms of a stagnant freelancing career. They include boredom, complacency, apathy and the inability to picture what your work should be like a year from now. If you can relate to these symptoms, then it’s time to face facts: you’re stuck. Additionally, you need to do something to get unstuck.

So how can you get a stagnant career moving again?

Know where you want to be. Sometimes, the reason behind a stagnant career is that you don’t know what you want. This doesn’t mean that you’re indecisive, but maybe you didn’t give ourselves the chance to plan. Without the existence of a traditional corporate ladder, freelancers can have a hard time knowing what the next step is and how to get there. Here are two articles from our archives which might help you figure it out:

• “Plan Your Web Working Career Path“
• “Plotting Your Career When You’ve Jumped Off the Corporate Ladder”

Write a book. Many freelancers have improved their reputation by self-publishing books about their field. As Darrell noted in a previous post, doing so can be seen as a proof of competency. Through your book, potential clients can verify your expertise. Print-on-demand services such as Lulu and Blurb make it easy to self-publish your book.

But this doesn’t mean that you should aim to print a costly paperback or hardbound version of your book. In most cases, an e-book will do, even if you’ll just give it away for free. If a full-length book sounds too labor-intensive, start with a 10 to 20 page guide or manifesto. Review this list if you need inspiration.

Submit guest posts to authority blogs in your niche. Guest posting, when done right, can help spread the word about your work. You’ll be sharing your ideas with your target market while promoting yourself at the same time. To learn more about guest posting, visit the following:

• Ramit Sethi wrote some guidelines on how to write guest posts for his blog, but the advice is applicable to guest posting in general.
• “How to Maximize the Benefits of Guest Posting” from Problogger.net.
• Men with Pens has a seven part series on guest posting, starting with this piece.

Make one to three valuable new contacts. Think about the top three people you’d love to show your work to. They could be potential clients, professionals you respect, or even people working in a completely different field altogether. It’s easy to forget about networking when you’re spending several months talking to the same clients and colleagues. There’s an entire world of web workers out there. Many of them could be a source of inspiration, advice and referrals.

Help others. As a side effect of blogging, I end up answering emails and queries from new teleworkers looking for advice. Look for opportunities to help those who are new in your field, whether it’s through your blog, online messageboards or social networks. It’s a good way to remind yourself of the basics and establish your reputation as an expert.

While teaching can feel rewarding at first, it can also be exhausting in the long run if you’re doing it pro bono. Just remember to set your boundaries. If you can teach a paid class, that’s even better.

Get a mentor. Apart from teaching others, we also need to be taught. Is there a colleague or a leading expert who can serve as your mentor? It could be someone you’re already in contact with, or someone whose work you’ve followed over the years.

Of course, if you pick someone who already knows you, you’ll benefit from having two-way communication. Your mentor can give you advice on your career options, as well as help you spot professional weaknesses.

Acquire new skills and apply them. Whether you attend formal classes or become self-taught, continuous learning can help you get to the next level of your career. If you don’t know where to start, ask yourself which skills will improve the quality of your work.

It’s worth remembering that signing up for a class or seminar doesn’t automatically enhance your career. Make sure that you also build working experience with the skills you’ve learned.

As online freelancing becomes increasingly competitive, we need to make sure that our careers are moving forward. How do you prevent stagnation in your own freelancing practice?

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Basically, your competitors are the other freelancers whose target clients are similar to your own.  Their clients come from the same age group, niche, industry, and budget range as your own clients do.  In other words, they are the other option that potential clients and employers will be looking to hire if they won’t be hiring you.

Of course, you shouldn’t just spend your time defining your competitors.  You need to define yourself too.  Knowing the competition’s strengths and weaknesses is almost useless if you don’t know your own.

Find out what works (and what doesn’t work) for them. Go through their website, online promotional materials, and even the final output of their services, if you can.  When you do this, it helps to put yourself in a potential client’s shoes.  This allows you to be in a more receptive frame of mind.  As you look at these materials, it helps to ask yourself the following questions:

• What strategies are they using that gains your trust?
• What would make a client choose them over you?
• Is the value of their service evident in their online presence?
• What are they charging?  Can they justify this?

After you’ve done this, it helps to go over your own promotional materials to compare notes.  See if you can apply any of their techniques to your practice.

Know how they interact with clients. Doing this requires a bit more research.  You’ll need to learn how the competition engages your client.  Is their communication style friendly or matter-of-fact?  Do they contact the client regularly in the long run or do they stop communication after the project is complete?  Do they interact well with clients across a wide range of Web 2.0 literacy?

Here are some ways you can find the answers to these questions:

• Subscribe to your competitor’s blog entries.
• Subscribe to their online newsletter, if applicable.
• Look for client reviews, whether on the client’s website or the freelancer’s.
• If you need to outsource some work or get a helping hand, it might even help to hire your competitor’s services, if only to get a more accurate insider’s perspective on how they deal with clients.

Remember what makes you different. There is no way that you and your competitors provide the exact same thing in the exact same way.  There’s bound to be an area of differentiation.  For example, while Nizoral and Head and Shoulders are both anti-dandruff shampoo brands, the former is marketed as a more medicinal type of cure, while the latter is marketed as a shampoo for everyday use.

What value do you bring your client that your competitors do not?  Is it your years of experience?  The many languages you speak?  The diversity of your skills?  More often than not, your client uses this as the deciding factor, and not your price.

See if you can cut a deal. In many cases, I’ve had to refer some clients to other freelancers who are a better fit for them when I don’t have enough skills for a specific job, or when I’m simply overbooked when they need me.  An article over at Freelance Folder suggests the same thing as well, but with a great catch – you should get a deal with your competitors where you get a percentage of their profits from your referrals.

Learning more about your competition isn’t necessarily about competition itself, it’s just another way of staying ahead of your own game.  If you think about your competitors with this attitude, you’ll become a better service provider, and both your new and existing clients will just be reminded of why they chose you over your competitor.

Do you take competition seriously in the online freelancing world?  How do you use competitors to your advantage?

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I, on the other hand, looked forward to these workshops.  I believe that this was the activity that gave me the best preparation for web working.  Like those workshops, online freelance work tends to be a public affair.  Your blog posts, design work, marketing efforts, and most of your business output is done where the public can see them.  In a way, you’re putting your work in front of a firing squad.

Believe it or not, this is a great thing.

Criticism is the best way to see the flaws you’ve overlooked in your work, especially when you’re not expecting it (through an email from a random site visitor, for example).  It’s very easy to overlook your own mistakes since your mind is so familiar with what you’re doing.  But, as web workers, the platform we use for our work isn’t just in our minds – it’s on the computer screen.  Sometimes, there’s a discrepancy between what we’re trying to do and what we actually did.

This is why many people – writers, programmers, and designers – sometimes step away from their computer after working for several hours.  It’s easier to spot errors when you distance yourself from the work you’re doing and you return later with a fresh perspective.  And what could be fresher than someone else’s opinion?  Especially the opinion of someone who is unfamiliar with the details of your work.

This is where your personal firing squad comes in.  They’re the ones who can tell you what you actually did and what you failed to do.  It’s better to get their opinion and correct your flaws before the client or the general public sees your work.

Another important thing you’d learn from critics and naysayers is the difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism.  If you listen to every single troll out there who yells “FAIL!” at you, then you’re accepting the impossible task of trying to please everybody.  When people trash you enough, in time you’ll know who’s giving helpful advice and who just loves kicking you when you’re down.

If you’re looking for your own constructive firing squad, here are some people you can approach: mentors, respected leaders in your field, and your colleagues.  If it doesn’t violate any contracts or policies, show them your work before you put the final version out there.  It’s like having a personal group of beta testers.

You can also request for a critique from your clients through a client satisfaction survey when you’ve sent in your final work.  But by the time they receive it, hopefully your beta testers have helped you weed out the problems.

I’ve also noticed that the more workshops I participated in, and the more negative comments I received from my work, I gradually became immune to the pain of rejection.  You think this blog post sucks?  Okay.  Please let me know why.

One of the editors I worked with told me that other writers he’s handled would have fits if he changed something as simple as a comma.  He was surprised that I was open to hearing him out.  What was it that made me open?  I found out that the more criticism I received, the more I knew I could handle it.  Sure, I don’t have to listen to everything he says, but most of the time, his points are valid and essential.

By regularly exposing yourself to critics, you start taking criticism as a chance to improve yourself rather than something to hide from.  What was once a painful experience becomes a useful one.  The ability to do this is one significant step to making your work better.

How do you hear about criticism of your work?  How do you react to your critics?

Note: This post is the first part in a 3-part series on better web working.  Please stay tuned this week for parts 2 and 3.

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In cases like those, it’s important to take calculated steps in fixing what went wrong.

Don’t panic. Your client is probably emotional the first time they contact you about a problem.  Since that’s the case, it’s your job to be calm and logical.  No good can come from having a shouting match about who’s right and who’s wrong.

Of course, this is easier to say than it is to do – especially if the client calls you on the phone.  It’s easier to be calm and collected (or at least to seem that way) when you’re communicating via chat or email.  On the phone, it takes more willpower.

Read (or listen) between the lines. Oftentimes, when your client is saying something, that’s not what they really mean.  “This isn’t what we talked about” could mean “I understood your proposal differently”. A phrase like “I could easily replace you with a high school student” usually means “Fix this as soon as possible” with a dash of “I have no idea how difficult your work is”.

In other words, take the time to truly listen and interpret what went wrong.

Be accountable. At least a small fraction of the blame, if not all of it, should rest on you.  This is why you need to take control of the situation and start channeling both your energies into finding a solution.  You need to ask yourselves what went wrong and what could be done to repair the damage.  Speak in terms of situations and events, rather than people.  Otherwise, it will look like finger-pointing.

Remember that even if you’re at least partially accountable, this doesn’t mean you have to accept verbal abuse and enslave yourself to unreasonable requests just because you’re feeling guilty.

Provide options. Giving clients several options to choose from makes them feel empowered.  You’re not forcing solutions on them or telling them what to do.  This makes it easier for your client to accept your proposed solutions, since they know that the final decision is in their hands.

Give insurance. Your client needs to know that you’re also taking steps to avoid this particular problem in the future.  Even after you’ve resolved their problem, it’s important to send them an update about any steps you’ve made towards prevention.

Ask for a testimonial. I know this part sounds unusual, but if you actually resolve the problem and your client is appreciative and pleasantly surprised, it makes sense to request a testimonial.  Most people take perfect testimonials with a grain of salt, so nothing stands out like a testimonial that says “I encountered this problem with her service, but she was there 100% to fix it with me.  Didn’t have another problem since then.”  This tells potential clients three things: that you’re honest, you’re a reliable problem solver, and that you take their feedback seriously enough to improve yourself.

Taking care of angry clients can be an emotionally exhausting task.  Although our instinctive response is to feel some anger as well, it’s important to remember that these disappointed clients are the ones who will teach us the most about what we need to do to be better web workers.

Have you ever had an angry client?  How did you handle the situation?

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Here are some things we should consider when tweaking our portfolios:

Quality of Work

By now, your standards might be different from what they were when you last put your portfolio together.  What was a masterpiece yesterday might seem like your worst project today.  It might hurt you to take down projects that you had fond memories of, but if it’s not your best work, it’s also going to hurt your chances of getting new clients.

Relevance

Looking at your portfolio, how closely does it resemble the type of work you’ve been doing lately?  A couple of years ago, I actually linked to some dull articles about loans, which had outdated information and had nothing to do with the kind of work I was pursuing at that time (which was tourist city guides).  Imagine what would’ve happened if I showed that kind of work when I applied to Web Worker Daily.  My application would’ve been met with a big “Huh?”

Apart from being closer to your current work thematically, having more recent items in your portfolio shows that you’ve been busy and in demand.  It’s rare that anyone wants to work with a freelancer whose last good output was over two years old.  You wouldn’t want the embarrassment of having a website in your portfolio that was already redesigned by your client since you last worked on it.  It gives the impression that your work didn’t give them the results they needed.

Uniqueness

It takes a long time before a writer finds her voice, or a designer discovers her own visual style.  If you’ve accomplished this for yourself, this should show on your portfolio.  After all, this is an important part of your branding.

Direction

There’s nothing wrong with accepting every job that comes your way when you’re just starting out.  But if your displayed work represents too many industries, niches, and price ranges, this could be detrimental.  While there must always be diversity in your work, there’s such a thing as having so much diversity that your ideal clients can’t identify with you.  By looking at your portfolio, your leads should be able to say “This freelancer works with people like us.  He gets our kind.”

Taking direction into account is especially important if you want to change niches.  For example, if you want to move away from writing gadget reviews and get into writing press releases for tech startups, your portfolio should have press releases in it.

Multiple portfolios

It’s also possible that you want to work on two different niches, and therefore serve two different kinds of clients.  If this is the case, you should have two different portfolios ready.  The bigger the difference between the niches you’re working on, the more you need separate portfolios for each.

This approach is similar to leaving out some items in your resume that seem unnecessary or irrelevant to the job you’re applying for.  Just present each client with what she needs to see.

How often do you update your portfolio?  How selective are you when it comes to building it?

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