Ultimate Freelancing Guide for Designers & Developers

1. What will this Freelancing course cover?: Hello and welcome to my course about freelancing for designers and developers. Now, I have been freelancing from past eight years and I have faced a lot of problems in my career dealing with clients from a lot of different countries. A lot of students were asking me about how to freelance, so here is my course. Let me introduce to you how this course has been laid out. The first section will be covering the qualities of a great freelancer. In the second section of this course, I'm going to cover up all the mistakes of a newbie freelancers and all the freelancers when they start their career, what mistakes they can avoid. How they are going to price themselves higher even in the start of their career, and how to avoid their portfolio, and profile mistakes, and a lot of other things. In the third section of this course, I am going to cover skills related to job hunting. How to write effective and job applications, how to write effective proposals, and what about selecting effective clients, and the right clients and the right jobs. There is a whole section on freelancing apps in my course, I am going to cover collaboration apps, time tracking apps, invoicing apps, videoconferencing apps, and Pomodoro and productivity apps for freelancers. Don't miss out that section. Now, coming towards the biggest question, I have been asked many times how to find freelance jobs. I'm going to cover almost eight different categories of job finding websites and I'm going to share with you more than 60 freelance websites to find freelance jobs. What are you waiting for? Let's get started and get into some good freelancing stuff and build your freelance career. 2. Level of your Skills: Skills are the gems of your freelance career. If you don't have very good or solid-skill or very real skill, you cannot earn at all. Let's discuss what does that mean level of skill. This is the first factor that is going to set you apart from other freelancers or the freelancing crowd. Now the first advice I always give to newbie freelancers and new freelancers is that skill is the main important part of your freelancing career. First thing is that they don't know which skill they need to pursue. Sometimes they go, "Okay, I am going to learn 3Ds Max. I saw my friend his earning a lot on 3Ds Max. I should learn 3Ds Max." After some time, they are going to say, "Okay, I have seen a lot of jobs on mobile app development. I should learn Android development and something like this." This is really strange, you should not do something like this. Try to choose your skill or the hill you are trying to climb, first decide which path you are going to go. Then you need to learn the latest tools, techniques, and methods you need to climb that hill. This is going to really set you apart from the crowd. Go to the top of that hill, go to the top of that skill, then try to expand that skill into different skill sets. A lot of things which newbie freelancers they miss is that they don't get much grip on the basics. If you have learned HTML and CSS, they might have learned from different tutorials, piece by piece, from different sources on internet, or maybe watching different YouTube videos. The problem here is that you should always learn CSS in-depth and learn all the basics of it. I used to learn like that, and then I saw very good CSS video series on Treehouse. Team Treehouse is a very good online learning resource, and when I saw their CSS videos, I thought that I don't know most of the basics of that CSS. Cascading style sheets, it's related to front-end development and HTML. This is the basic, always try to grip on your basics first, don't skip them. Now the key takeaways are, find the field of your interest where you want to go, then get good grip on your basics, and third thing is don't try to become a jack of all trades, and third thing is that you should not become a jack of all trades. The second advice I'm going to give you on skills is keep on improving your skills. The world is moving very fast. Technology is moving very fast. A lot of new tools, new methods, new technologies, they are emerging with a lot of speed. You should always keep improving yourself. Never stop learning. Allocate daily time for learning. Second thing is that if there is a very new technology, don't try to switch too fast. Try to first learn it, with some good extent, then switch towards it, like Photoshop and Sketch. A lot of UI designers, they know that Sketch is a new UI design tool. But I have seen a lot of senior designers that haven't switched tail yet because they are still learning Sketch. So first try to learn that tool, new tool and then go to the switch. Now also mind the learning curve. If you are learning a new thing, it will take time, learning curve will be difficult in the end, it will be very slow, so don't switch too early. Now the key takeaways here are, keep improving yourself. Never stop learning and keep in mind that if you are going to learn a new thing or you are going to leave the old tool, then it will take some time to get used to it. The other thing I tell a lot of newbies or freelancers is that try to combine your skills to create a relevant skillset. Don't try to mix skills that are not relevant, like you are mixing 3Ds Max and HTML. They have no correlation with each other. Learn skills that are related to your major-skill, so it is like just growing a tree. If you have a tree, try to see whether you can plant more leaves on it, or maybe you can have a red fruit on it. So this is the variety, green leaves, your trunk is brown or maybe blackish-brown, and your fruit is orange or something like that. If you are mainly in a branding, you used to design logos or brochures. You can also get into web design because you are already familiar with those tools like Photoshop, Illustrator. You can easily get into web design field, and you can also learn app designs and application designs or mobile app designs. Now the second example is that if you have learned HTML and CSS, you can mix JavaScript or maybe Ajax. These are all front-end technologies, and maybe you can go ahead and learn AngularJS and few more other advanced techniques or languages. One other combination could be that you have a web design skills, and then you can have HTML, CSS, and WordPress. These are all front end, you can mix front-end with front-end design, front-end coding and design, but don't go too broad. I can design websites, I can code them, and I can also do coding in PHP, and I can also code at the backend, or I can also do server-side languages, C++, C. If you try to become jack of all trades, then you will not be a master in any of these skills. Now the key takeaways are that you need a new skill added to your skillset after one year or maybe two years. Don't stick to one skill; try to broaden your skillset. The second tip is that don't go too broad. Limit your skillset into one portion or maybe one or two fields, don't go too broad. It will be difficult for you to commercial everything. Here are some tips on how to remain up-to-date and how to get in touch with the latest technologies. Try to subscribe to blogs like Codrops or Web Designer News. They are really good at keeping you up to date or try to watch on some of the repositories is on GiTHub, if you like, some plugin or extension or JavaScript or jQuery plugin, you should try to watch it. Second thing is that try to learn new courses on Udemy, Team Treehouse, or Skillshare, whatever site you like. Try to learn courses in your own field or skillset. Don't try to learn everything. Third thing is that find a mentor. If someone is good at mentoring you or he's a good mentor, you can get attached to it. You know that he lives around my area or maybe in my city, try to go with him. If he's doing a project, get attached with him, help him around that. I will not get any payment. Just keep me with yourself. So I just want to see while you are designing or while you're coding, or if you have any tips for me or for my career, let me know. The experienced person, they can really guide you in a lot of things or mistakes you make early in your career. The key takeaways are always try to read news and articles. Get some experience working with your mentor, or maybe working with a team of NGOs or maybe non-profit organizations. Let me show you some of the blogs I showed you over here, Codrops, or Web Designer News. Here are the few blogs I follow, and I think they are the best of them. Codrops and they show something like this collective number 17, or they have different HTML or CSS or JavaScript plugins and also a lot of new articles about design, web design, and front end development. You can see using SVG clip-path, editing table responsive everything. Sometimes I like few things a lot, and I read one or two articles from these. Second is this web designer news. You can find it over here, and you can see over here they have this category, most shared, most wanted, most clicked. You can subscribe your e-mail, and they will send you email weekly or daily, and they have a lot of different categories. You can see Web design, Web development, Typography, Tech, UX/Usability, Infographics, Funny, Design, Business Apps. I think for designers and developers, this is the best site, and these are the best articles over here. I will also share few more links in the resources files. Make sure you try to read them. This is all about getting updated on your skills and how to remain update. Let's move on to the next lesson. 3. Communication Skills for Freelancers: Communication skills are the most basic and most needed skills in any job. Even if you are a freelancer or you are doing a permanent job, if you don't communicate your ideas well to your fellow team members or your CEO, you are doomed. Let's discuss how we are going to get good communication skills, because a lot of people from Asia, India, Pakistan, or other countries that are not native English, they get a lot of problems talking to clients or communicating with them. They have poor English. Even though they have a lot of good skills like designing or they are very good designers or very good developers but they cannot communicate well. So this keeps them away from getting good clients. Let's see what we can do about communication skills. Now, the question is, how well can you communicate? Now, why is it important? Because if you can't communicate, you cannot sell yourself. Selling yourself is a very basic skill in freelancing, it is the most needed skill. Also, if you are going for a job, hiring managers think that this skill is the key skill, even for designers or even for developers. Now, what about design briefs? If you are given a design brief or a development specification document or requirement document for any website or web design. How are you going to communicate that or how are you going to turn that into a beautiful code or a beautiful web design. So if you can't understand the language or can't understand what the design brief is saying, you are not going to do well in your end result. Also, when your client is telling you about their requirements via e-mail or maybe via direct phone call, and you cannot understand what it is he's saying, then I think this can create a lot of big problems. Now, the key takeaways is that communication is the key to all job success, even permanent jobs or freelance jobs and it helps getting your idea across. If you can't get your idea across to your CEO, your management or marketing team, I think you cannot work very well. Now, why is communication the most necessary skill? Because in job interviews, even in topped-all, when they interview freelancers, they are going to go with this very necessary question and it will be, for developers, can you explain why you have used this method or this JavaScript code? For designers, can you tell us about your process or idea behind this project, how you came up with this idea? What is your daily design process? So you're going to explain your work in all these job interviews so be prepared for this. Communication skills are the key over here. Now, to the point where a lot of us lack, how to improve your communication. A lot of people will tell you that communication is very necessary, but how to improve it. So how to communicate well with your clients. Now, the first thing is that if you have any online courses on Udemy or any other platform, try to learn those courses. Now, the second part is that try to watch cartoons, movies with subtitles. So if you don't get any word or any line, try to rewind it and listen again and again. This is the first technique I tell a lot of newbies or the people who struggle communicating in English. First thing is that you need to develop your listening skills. So if you can't listen to the English accent and you cannot interpret what he is saying, then this is a very big problem. This is the first step. Then you need to come towards the spoken English. First, you need to listen and then you need to communicate back. So this is how it is going to work. Now the secret tip I'm going to give you is that you need to watch cartoons like Peppa Pig. They speak English very slowly and they are for kids and you can easily get what they are talking about and you can improve your listening skills a lot. Now, the second tip is that don't look on grammar while you are speaking. A lot of us in these countries, we learn grammar first off English. We are using these tenses, continuous tense, past tense or present tense. So don't try to listen to this, just try to get started in communicating in English. Just start uttering words. Whether your tenses are right or wrong, don't care about it. It will improve after some time. The first tip is that try to watch very basic children cartoon where they have spoken English very slowly and very clearly. Second thing is that watch movies with subtitles, English movies, Hollywood movies, famous movies. Then first develop your listening skills, then come to the spoken English skills. This is how you are going to improve your skills. Now, the next step is that you have learned the communication skills or you have learned your English or you know, that I have got some idea of how they are talking or what they are saying, then you should test your English. Try to take English language tests on upwork.com. This is a freelance site. Also a lot of other freelance sites like freelancer.com or maybe others they provide basic English tests where you use your grammar or maybe sentence creation tests. Try to sit those tests. Now, the second test is that you need to start reading a job description. Try to read some job description on upwork.com. So go to upwork.com. Let me show you. Now you can see over here I am browsing some jobs on Upwork. If I click any of the jobs like you can see over here, you can see these are the details they are looking for. Cybersecurity interview, question and answers, top interview questions and model answers for cybersecurity interviews team. These are the links. Guidelines, use English only, style guides. So if you don't understand all this, you are going to be in a problem. Let's go to this mobile development, develop iOS and Android app. You can see over here in the details he says, in the first part of the job I want to have an app to be developed. Main purpose of the app is to create a Modbus-TCP Client. I developed a Modbus library for.NET. These are the key things he needed. So you need to understand all this part fully and you should know that I can understand and I can reply to him. So this is how you try to read your job description. You can also try 99designs.com. There are design briefs that are very, very descriptive and very long. The key takeaways here is that learn and test your English level and try to repeat this cycle till the time you get a lot better. This is all about communication skills. How to improve your English, how to improve your communication with your client, and how to sell yourself. Let's move on to the next lesson. 4. Speed of Response might get your quick Jobs: One more factor which can separate you from other freelancers or freelance herd is that your feedback speed is very awesome. If you have a very slow speed of feedback and you reply to your clients after two days or three days, then this is really going to hurt your freelance career. Let's see what we can do about feedback speed and what are the tips I have for you. Feedback speed is really necessary even in user experience. Even in website loading. If your website loads slowly, you are likely to close it up if it takes five minutes, five seconds, or ten seconds, or more than one minute, you are really going to close it. The same effect happens when you are a freelancer and some client asks you about something and you are going to reply him after two days. This also works with client communication. If you are very slow with your client communication, then it is really going to get you in trouble and you will start losing jobs. My recommendation is always reply within the first 24 hours. If you can reply within few hours, then this is the best thing. Keep checking your emails after two hours or three hours on your mobile phone and try to reply in just two or three words or maybe two or three lines so the client is satisfied that I got my reply and he's working on the project or he's trying to solve my problem. Now the key takeaway is that your response speed really matters. When you apply online on freelance job sites you should be very responsive. Even it's affected most of the freelance sites, they consider it and try to measure it. So be careful. On upwork.com they check your response by speed and reply to your clients when you apply on any job. Second thing is that your unresponsiveness is going to make your client angry. So avoid that. Even if your client is unresponsive, this can make you angry a lot. Sometimes clients are like that. The third thing is that when you are replying very fast, you might have a chance to get hired first. These are the things you need to keep in mind if you have applied on a job where there are 50 freelancers and the client replied to you that I need to interview you right now or within two hours or three hours, then I think there are chances that he is going to hire you first if you reply first. Now the question is how to be more responsive. Now this is the solution. First thing is that you need to check your emails every hour or maybe every two hours. Use your email notification sounds. If you have an email app on your mobile phone, then try to check it. Always be present on Skype. Show yourself online. Smartphones can help. You can install Skype app on your iOS device, iPhone, or an Android, Samsung phone, or whatever you use and see if someone messages you. Reply them after a few minutes. If you are sleeping or you are very busy, just let them know that "I will talk to you later. Right now I'm sleeping, or maybe I'm working, or I'm busy." Just to satisfy them. Also the apps like Viber or WhatsApp, these can also help. You can get a call from your client on these apps. Now the key takeaways are calling your client is better than long emails. If you want to clear up something or you want to ask some questions, and if you ask them on one-to-one call, then this is really going to impress your client. Second thing is that always be present, always reply your emails quickly, always reply your Skype or other messaging services quickly. If they have any problem, tell them that, "Okay. Call me right now." So if something is urgent or something like that, your client is really going to trust you in all these urgent matters if you reply very fast. Now, which one is better, email, chat or direct call? Now, the direct call has the most priority. If you can call directly your client, this is really going to boost their trust with you. Second thing is via emails are better. Emails are better when you need to write some proposal, or some specifications of a project, or cost estimates of a project, or you need to give them some options to choose from. These are good on emails because you need some time to think about it. Now, chats are good when you need something urgently like your client says, "My website is down. Someone hacked my website. Try to fix it." This is an urgent job. He might just message you or something like that. If he's not able to reach you, he will message you. Try to reply them as early as possible. Like, "I will fix it in the morning right now I'm sleeping. " or something like that. Now, the key takeaways are that if you can't write very long email, just write them few words or two words, three lines that, "I am working on it right now. ", just to satisfy them. It's human psychology if someone replies you early, then you know that "Okay, something is happening. I should be relaxed." Second take-away is that don't discuss cost and specifications on call. Sometimes when you do something like this, you might miss something. If your client says that I want logo design, web design, and a contact form working or maybe e-commerce website, that's a very broad area. So try to be more specific. Try to tell the client that I will do these, these, these, and these things in this cost. This is better. Emails are better for specifications. Even if I remember, I had a very big project from a crypto rate company, that's a Bitcoin company, the only thing that we've worked with was email. I used to get very long emails with attached word documents with a list of specifications. That guy was you can say he was some data scrapping, or data mining engineer, or whatever he was. He used to write me very long specification for each step, even each portion of design. We ended that project successfully because he was too specific in his emails and he was very best at what he does. So e-mails are better for specifications. They really can work miracles when used properly. Keep all these points in mind. Now here are some fast response dirty tricks. Now, dirty means sometimes your clients are non-paying or they don't reply you back after years or maybe six months, they don't pay you. Now, the best thing about fast response is that if you get some urgent job, you are going to get paid two or three times higher than your normal hourly rate or normal fixed rate. Second thing is that a good thing about fast response is that if you have a very bad client, and he don't pay you on time in an urgent job, he's going to really pay you everything. Email them back, "Please make the payment so I can fix your hacked website." If it's very urgent, he's going to pay you the last year's bill and also all the costs of the current project. So just hit them hard. When you are going to ask for payment, ask good payment. This is really going to help you when your response time is good. These kind of things happen a lot when you are freelancing. The key takeaways are that when you are doing something dirty with your clients, dirty means that you are using some cheap tricks with your non-paying clients, then urgent situations and fast response is really going to help you. Second thing is that in urgent jobs, when you are responsive very fast, you can easily get upfront payment. You can even get the whole payment up front. So be responsive. Keep in mind that this client can pay me very well or he is in a very bad situation and take advantage of that bad situation. So keep all these points in your mind. If you have any questions ask me. Let's move on to the next lesson. 5. Presenting your work to clients: One other thing that can set you apart from other freelancers is how you present your work. So presentation really counts. Even you have designed a very simple logo, if it is presented well, it can really get a good impact on your client. So here I'm going to share with you some of the tips for designers and developers, how to present your work. So let's get started. Now, some of the tips for designers on how to present their work. Now the first thing is always present your work using awesome mock-ups. So mock-ups are available on a lot of free websites, freebies. So try to download a good mock-up for your branding design or your mobile app or your website. Now, what it is going to do is it is going to really give a boost to your work, your design, and it is really going to show them your work in real context. So if you are a guard, and you have designed business card, it is going to look really nice if you can show them two cards on a table or something like that. So what mock-ups do is they allow clients to see your design in context and in real word. So it can really impact their thinking and their imagination. So it is really going to give your work boast. Now, if you need, you should purchase premium mock-ups. So if you really want to get a good impact, try to purchase really nice premium mock-ups that can be available on theme forest or even to website or fewer that websites try to buy premium mock-ups. Let me show you some of my examples of my design work that how I show my clients the work I do like I have designed this business card and you can see over here, I'm showing Ocean Gates this Custom Tech web design, card design, and you can see how well they are looking. The background is dark and these cards are looking really great. One other example is, let me show you this card. So I'm also showing this card, this is Maxwell Unified Network and you can see this logo is designed by me and this name. So they are looking really cool on different backgrounds like black and white. So it is on the client that what he is going to decide about it. Then let me show you this one. This is a Facebook cover I designed and you can see over here how it really looks great on that Facebook template. So show the client their design in their own context or environment. So if the design is going to be used on a card, it should look like a card. You can see over here, this is another design and it's a mobile app mock-up. And also you can see over here, they are looking really great in this iOS app mock-up. You can see over here, these are for basically mock-ups. These can really improve your impression on your client, So they are really going to love these. So make sure you show them your finished work or some finished version of your work in a mock-up. So these are few examples you need to keep in mind. Now, for developers, now, what developers are going to do, how they are going to show their work. First tip is that never show or send unfinished or buggy project to a client to test. It should be working. It should not have too many bugs or too many problems that it can break down. It is really going to give a very bad impression on your client. Second thing is that if you are developing a website, your WordPress website or HTML landing page or something like that, you need to upload a demo on a real FTP server. Now, if you have a working demo of your files, try to upload it to any FTP servers so client can see them live. So show them the live website view your work. Now, the first thing you can do is the key takeaways are buy your own domain with your name or some testing website server or something like that. Always show your demos using that domain. Now, working demos can really capture your aha's moments of your client. So they are really going to see your work and your page animations or transitions or your form working perfectly and they're going to say, "Yeah, that is what I wanted." This can really impress your client about your work and they are really going to love it and like it. Also, if there are few bugs, you might know that client is using Chrome on macOS then you will know that I need to test in Chrome more. Or if he is using Firefox and he says that I had some problems with filling your form then you can know and you can test using Firefox. So make sure that your work is shown online as a demo files and they can really see the live website. It can really improve your impression on your client. Never try to show unfinished work, whether you are a designer or a developer to your client. Show them the finished version, or at least the working demo of your website or your work. So this is all about presenting your work to your clients. Let's move on to the next lesson. 6. Professional Behavior: Today I'm going to talk about Professional Behavior. Professional behavior can set you apart from other freelancers. What does that mean? A lot of freelancers, they are lazy, they do not respond in time or maybe they don't show a lot of respect to the clients or maybe professionalism. I have seen in my experience that this happens a lot. Let's see what we can improve in our professional behavior to get good clients and good client attention. The first thing is you are responding to a client's email or phone call or something like that, you should always be in a professional manner. Don't get too rigid or don't get too funny, just a balance out both these sides. The second thing is that if you get into some conflicts with your client, or you got into a fight or your client got angry, you should resolve this conflict with patience and calmness. Don't get angry or don't try to fight with your clients. They are really going to give you bad ratings. Try to avoid those bad ratings. The third point is that if you can't do any project or you can't meet the deadline, try to avoid those project, even if you have started a contract with a client, let them know in time that I cannot do this project. Don't waste their time. The first takeaway is that if you get into a conflict, if you can call that client or you can talk to them face-to-face on Skype, you should try that. It can ease out their pain and also it can relax them. The second thing is that don't use jargon words or verbs like you're, ur, or do it yourself, DIY in your responses. Sometimes clients from different countries, they don't know what that means. Make sure you are using professional verbs and full words in your response. Here is a story from my own experience, professional behavior story I'm going to tell you. I was basically the client and I was hiring a freelancer on Upwork and what happened is I am going to tell you in just a moment. How I started the interview, I said can you work on 960 grids in HTML and also with STS. The freelancer has listed hundreds of skills that he is master of 960 grid, his master of Bootrap, everything but in fact he was just a beginner in CSS. He never had worked on any grid system or any Bootrap. His answer was yes, I am credit with CSS please give me the project. He signed the contract, I gave him the project but after three days, he didn't communicate anything and after three days I saw a message that he ended the contract without saying anything. What did you get from this story? It was really unprofessional behavior. He should have told me early in the project that he cannot do it. The reason he wrote was that I cannot handle this project or I cannot do it. This is really unprofessional, try to avoid such kind of mistakes they can really ruin your carrier. I gave him one star out of five stars. That is my really bad experience. The key takeaways are that never try to take a project you can not do or you are not sure about that you can do it easily. Tell the client early on in time that you can't complete this project. Here is a tip about how to solve your behavior problems. If you are a lazy like me, then you can add few days as a buffer in the deadline. What does buffer mean that if you have a deadline of like seven days, add two or three days more and give them that I can do this in 10 days. When you are going to deliver them early on, like you said that in 10 days and you are going to deliver them in seventh day, they will be surprised, they will be amazed. They will say, this freelancer is the best man. He can deliver very fast, his delivery is very fast. He can solve your problem in no time. This is the same technique Walmart is doing. I have ordered a lot of things from Walmart and Amazon. The differences is although Walmart is not good as Amazon, but in their delivery what they do is they add one or two days as a buffer time. When I get my things two early, I'm going to say, this site's delivery is awesome. They can deliver very fast. I was amazed by their service. Keep in mind that add few days or maybe one week in your deadline. You can deliver early and you don't have problem with meeting your deadline. Here are a few key takeaways from this section, which is deliver early and some buffer time to your deadline. Divide your bigger projects into small tasks. A lot of freelancers like me, when we think of a project, a big project we get lazy. I will start it after some time, maybe tomorrow. What you are going to do is divide that big project into very small chunks. Everyday keep one or two chunks, try to complete them and you can easily complete that project in time. This is all about professional behavior and meeting your deadlines and how to add deadline buffer time, and how to deliver fast. If you have any questions, let me know. I'm going to move to the next lesson. Let's meet in the next lesson. 7. Proper Deliverables: One other characteristic which makes you different and sets you apart from other normal freelancers is proper deliverables. Now, what does proper deliverables means that when you are delivering your project files, your zip files, your designs, they must be managed and organized into different folders and files that your client can easily scan them or understand what the contents are. Let's get started and see how we can improve and deliver proper deliverables to our clients. In this section, we are going to talk about how designers are going to deliver their projects to their clients. There are few tips I'm going to give you. Number 1, is that always create proper folder organization. If you design RPSDs, or any source files, keep them in separate folder. If you have used any fonts or any other images from websites or royalty-free images, keep them into separate folder. When your client opens up your zip file, he knows that these files are for this purpose. Also, it is best if you can include a README file or how to use the zip file, explain the different contents of different folders. Then your naming should be very professional, don't use underscore, final underscore, final underscore, final. Name everything properly, that is a header PST or it's a footer.PST, or it's a main page design, and it's a sign-up design. Every file should be named properly. If you can create a video guide or a PDF guide for a client so he can easily use them or if he needs to alter some design portions, then how he's going to do that, that would be really beneficial. All the assets you have used in your design, like fonts and other files, like if you have placed any royalty-free image or anything, you need to provide it into different Assets folder or Fonts folder. If your client tries to open up your design into their own Photoshop or any other application, they don't get error messages like three fonts are missing. This is really going to get them a problem or a headache, so avoid that. Now, the key takeaways from this section is that properly name, organize, and zip your project files. Also try to append date and time, or at least date to those zip files at the end, and use Dropbox to share them. One more thing. In the end, I'm going to give you one more tip, which is always keep a copy of that zip file you sent to your client in organized folder with years. If you're working with a client from several years, create a folder with the client's name and use different year folders in them, and then the project name, and then the project files. Whenever you send those files, create a separate folders like Deliverables, September 10th, 2016, or something like that, so you know that at this time, I sent those files. Sometimes my clients even after six months, they say, "Okay, Hassan, can you send me the files you sent me six moths ago? I have lost that e-mail, I cannot find the source files." It is really a headache if you haven't organized your files into different folders with years and dates. Let me show you an example of my folder organization. Now, this is my main folder called Working folder. I have main four categories, like you can see over the App icons, logo designs, mobile apps, web projects. If you open up web projects, you can see over here clients. There are other few things for my helping resources. These are basically resources, so the main folder is Clients. When I open Clients, you can see 99Designs, Awais UK, Brady PRMS, Charlie Work, Corsello Work, Lisa Mckeogh, Luciana, these are all my clients. QME, Sunray, Tom, William Dipoalo, these are all my clients. If you open up any one of the clients, you can see over here, there are different projects over here. Like backtaxhelper or Cleanslatetax. If you open up one of them, you can see I have appended dates with them, February, 2015. Also I can see over here the dates modified over here. If you look at these, you can see over here, backtaxhelper have two versions, 2014 and 2015. If my clients asked me that I need the last version you sent, I will check in this folder the last date or the latest version. You can see over here, Final version. This is the folder I sent to my client along with invoice, optimization report, final version, PSD elements, HTML sources. This is the folder I sent to the client. You can see over here, I have appended the date, 18th October, 2015. This can really help you that you know that this is backtaxhelper website. The final version I sent on 18th October was this zip file. This is how you are going to organize your folders with projects. I have four main categories, then I have clients in different categories, then their projects. Keep your folders organized and always remember that the zip file you finally sent was this. Name it deliverables or final sent, or something like that, so you remember this is the file you sent last time. Let's move on to the next section for developers. Now, for coders and developers, the same goes for folder organization and file organization. Their files and folders should be properly named and they should be properly organized, so each file can be easily found by your client and they don't get headache when they try to open up your file. Now, the second major thing I have seen in a lot of newbie coders and developers, what they do is they don't comment or organize their code. If they're doing HTML or CSS or whatever, they don't create different code sections. Always try to create different code sections with proper commenting, so even the novice developer knows that this section is doing this. Always comment your code, and keep it into sections. If you have a very long CSS file, separate it into different sections like header CSS, footer CSS, or body CSS, or Section 1 CSS, Section 2 CSS. Always try to separate it into comments. This can really impact your professionalism in your developer career or even your freelance career. Third thing is whenever you deliver something to your client, always give them an online working demo. Along with your zip file, always send them working demo link, so they can see that how these files are showing up. Sometimes it happens with me, I have sent a landing page HTML, and they try to double-click and try to run it. What happens is that they are not connected with Internet or something, and my jQuery files or my JavaScript files, they don't load. When they have working online demo, they know that it will be accessible via Internet and they will try to see it on their PC or Macs. One other thing is that you need to include a README file, or if you are using GitHub, that is great because it saves all the versioning and everything. GitHub, if you are working with your client on a GitHub, then that's one of the best thing. Now, the main takeaways are properly name, organize, and zip your project files. Never name them in a sense that the main file, main.HTML, or something like that. Name them on the basis of what page it is. The second biggest take-away is always properly comment your code into different blocks and sections and segments. I'm going to give you few links to Photoshop etiquette's website and also a link to a proper commenting, and how you are going to comment your code and proper code organization. There are few guides the coders and professional designers, they have already created. I'm going to share you the next article, so make sure you see those links in the resources, are in the next article, I'm going to share them with you. This is all about properly delivering your project, whether you're a coder or designer, to your clients. If you have any questions, ask me. If you don't know about GitHub or any term I have used, Google about it and try to learn it. Let's move on to the next lesson. 8. Awards & Certifications play their role: There is one more thing that can set apart your freelancing profile from other freelance designers or developers, or the freelancers, which is Awards and Certifications. If you have worked for some awesome company like maybe Panasonic, Samsung, or Apple, or some other company or you have won some awards, gold medal or won some competitions, or you have completed a few courses online and you have certificates, you can list them here and it can really set your portfolio and your freelance profiles apart from other designers and developers. Let's see what are the points we are going to cover. Now there are two things I'm going to cover here. One is that if you have won any award in one situation is then that you haven't won any reward. Now, the first thing is that if you have taken part in some design competition on design websites like 99design.com, or you have won any coding competition locally or in your college, then it's good, you can list them in your profile. If you have written some famous articles or they are vital articles, they have a lot of views or shares, you can share them. Second thing is that if you haven't won any award then what you are going to do, you are going to build some, or redesign, or record some new idea, try to redesign like Skype interface. If you have any more idea in your head, then you can use that. What you are going to do is build an awesome side project like redesigning of ARBNB, or some controls or a sign up form that uses STM animations or something like that, or some API or something that can really set you apart from other freelancers. If you have written some WordPress plugins towards it that can show your client that you are good at PHP or you really know a lot about WordPress, so these are the things that can set you apart. Now, the key takeaways are that list your awards or you have worked with FORTUNE500 companies, list them on your portfolio. Second thing is that if you have a very good side project, you can show it in your profile and show it that it's really awesome, its details and how you build up that project. Now the second thing, how you can build your authority and show your client. 9. How to develop Freelance Skillset: Today I'm going to talk about the most important thing in your freelanced carrier, which is your skill set. A lot of people who try to start your day freelanced carrier, they make this very mistake again and again. So I'm going to discuss how you are going to build your skills such that set you apart from other freelancers or designers or quarters or whatever you are competing with. So let's get started. Now, why do we need a skill set? Most of the clients, when they come to they say, I need a website. Now, what does that mean? They actually need logo, the web design, mock-ups, wire frames, and actual coded website live on an FTP server. So this is basically what they want. They also need domain and hosting and everything. So nobody wants half the solution. They need a full solution for that to work. You need to have some designing skills along with some coding skills. Now the problem is that, if you can't code, then you need to pair up with an awesome coder. You can pair up with the back end coder or you can create a team of your own. In another city, like I have made, I have a team of coders in another city remote in my country, and I call them on phone and give them tasks. They use GitHub and other coding techniques that data coding, modern coding techniques, to let me know or update me about projects. We use Trello and a base camp project management tools to do our remote projects like that. This is how you are going to expand. You need to expand within your skill set. So if you have more jobs off a website, then you need logo designer, maybe a logo designer, a coder. If you design the website yourself, then you need two more people. So this is how it works. So if you can design logo and you can also design a website that then you just need one more coder. Now here are few skill set combinations for designers. If you are already a branding designer, then you can add up app icon design. If you know that I already have a course on that, app icon design. So if you already know Illustrator or you can design logos and business cards than you can learn app icon design live because most of the time when client comes to design his logo, he will also ask that I want an app icon for my logo also. Second option could be logo design, web design plus HTML. Third option could be web design plus WordPress team. This is a whole solution. This also means that you know PHP and basics of taming. Then you can add app icon design plus mobile app design. So if someone comes to you that I need my mobile app designs, can you also design the app icon, logo? I haven't had time to design that app icon. So most of the clients, when they will come for app icon design, you might ask them that do you need mobile app design? Do you want me to design the screens of your mobile app or you want me to wire frame them. So this is how you combine your skill sets. Don't go too broad. Keep your focus within one skill set. Don't go too broad. Same in the case if you are a 3-D designer, then you can go with After Effects, to add some effects and create a video of your 3-D design. Now, the key takeaways are that you are going to add skills that are related to your primary or major scale that you are master at. So if you are master at branding, you need to go around that. So don't expand too much, if you can't code, don't try to learn it. Try to team up with someone else. Don't try to be jack of all trades. Expand your skills wisely. Now there are few skill sets for developers, if you don't know any term, don't worry, you can such online, Google about it. If you are already a designer or you can code your web websites or web design than HTML, CSS you already know, then you can combine JavaScript and j-query. So this can really help you to create some animations or something like that. Then you can go ahead more. You can use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. So this is also a combination. This is basically combining front-end and back-end development. Then you can also be adjusted front-end with some expert technologies like NBA ab.js or AngularJS. You can also be a front end developer, or you can combine WordPress with HTML and CSS. So these are all the combinations I have. You can just be a back-end developer too. So you can just learn PHP and MySQL and maybe some frameworks or some new technologies and methodologies that work just with PHP. So you can move around your base scale, like if you have a PHP command, you can move around the PHP language. If you have a command on purpose, then you move around WordPress, you can start developing its plugins or something like that. So this is how I always give advice to new freelancers that how to build their skill sets. Now, the key takeaways are that decide between front-end and back-end development. You can't be master of both technologies, the front end is getting more complex day-by-day. So you can't be expert at HTML, CSS, JavaScript, query, PHP, MySQL, C plus plus. So don't try to learn everything. Try to expand while remaining inside the scope of your major scale or field of skills. So don't go too broad. Keep your focus in some area. This can make you an expert. There are few more carrier path data really getting noticed these days, which are full-stack designers and full-stack developers. So first I'm going to talk about full-stack designers. What are they basically? Full-stack means that they design everything. They are going to design your user experience. So user investigation, user research, word framing. So everything they are going to do it themselves, then. They are also going to design, convert that user experience of wire frames into more copper actual designs. Then they are also going to convert that design into HTML and CSS code. Now why they are in demand these days, because a lot of new start-ups, they require less force. They basically need less employers with a lot of experience and a lot of fields they can cover. So if they need one guy that can design everything and one coder that can code everything, than they are in luck. So the alleles startups, they are going to really give you good jobs, if you are a full-stack designer. I also expand to like full-stack designers. I am learning still running user experience, but I am good at GUI and HTML and CSS. So you can say I am a full-stack designers, but my major scale is user interface design or visual design. Okay, now how you can become a full-stack designers, you need to start with one skill and then tried to expand it. So if you have mastered already UI design, then you can move to UX. If you already have mastered HTML, CSS, you try to learn UI. So don't try to expand too much. So try to keep your focus. If you can't, become everything. If you can't code or don't like coding, then you can limit yourself to user experience design and UI design. So don't try to force yourself to learn something, if you don't like it. Second thing is that you can read books and blogs on those topics you are learning, allocate time to learn that new scale. Even if you are in an organization and you'll see that there is an opportunity that if I learn user experience, then I can go a bit above in my pay scale or my rank or something like that. Then you can also try to learn new things and grab that job. Now, what are full-stack developers? They are basically front end plus back end developers, know front end means that they only do HTML and CSS. Maybe JavaScript. Back-end developers are that the languages they know our PHP database buses, and everything in between AngularJS or whatever technologies they use these days. A full-stack developer will be our developer in a full package. He can go from HTML to the end product. So this is what full stack developers are and they are mostly needed in startups there, as I already told about full stack the designers. Now again, I'm going to give you the same advice again that start with one skill nor try to learn multiple skills at one time. Try to read blogs and books about the scale or maybe watch video courses about that. Allocate time to practice code. So this is really important. Now, I'm going to give you a final word of advice about your carrier or building skill sets. Which is that at the end, the expert in one field is really going to Vin over a full-stack designer or a developer. Experts are real. They are like diamonds. They are really going to get ahead of everyone. So if you are going to learn something like that, then lend maximum two fields in your carrier. If you are a UX designer, you can add user interface design. If you are a front end coder or a user interface designer, then you can go along with front-end coding. So don't try to make a very long bridge. Tried to make a short bridge between two closer fields and two closer areas of study. So this is how you are going to get a good freelance carrier. So let's move on to the next lesson. 10. Why Specialists always win?: This is going to be the last advice for freelance career, which is to become a specialist. Now, why do we need to become a specialist? The main reason is that if you are a specialist, you are like a rare diamond and your rate will be higher than any of the normal freelancer or full-stack designer, full-stack developer. So what kind of clients are going to look for you? Clients like project managers, design directors. They always look for special skills. Because they already have hired a lot of people they know what they are looking for. The second benefit of being a specialist is that you can really charge higher hourly rates. If you are a normal web designers, you might charge maybe 30 or $40 per hour or $20 per hour. But if you are a specialist, you can easily charge $80 per hour or maybe $150 per hour. I have seen people charging $80, even in India or Pakistan. So in countries like us $80 is too much even I think the managerial level jobs, they can not earn that much. Also a specialist can become a consultant later in their career because they know a lot about their subject or they know a lot about their scale. So people will come around and say, okay I need a website or I need an e-commerce website. What is your suggestion? Should I purchase this plug-in or this plug-in or what is the root I should take. So you can easily become a consultant and you can give them advice that in this way, if you have like a 100 products you can easily open up e-commerce website on WordPress backend. If you need a very big e-commerce website where you have more than 1,000 products, then I don't recommend WordPress. It is going to be slow. So this is really going to give you an education you can easily become a consultant. Now, the key takeaways are that specialists are going to earn a lot more than Jack of all trades. So keep that every time in your mind. Now the second thing is that specialists have a great demand in software agencies or software app development companies. So keep that in mind. So if you are a specialist, like if you do my specialist on Unix or Linux servers or something like that, then there will always be a need for you. Now the final word of advice from me is that at the end, experts are really going to win they can really charge higher than average freelancer, and don't try to be jack of all trades. Don't try to list a 100 of skills on your portfolio or a freelance profile, but only few you are best at. So keep all these things in your mind if you have any questions, ask me. So let's move on to the next lesson. 11. Don't accept all Freelance Projects: Today I'm going to share with you some of the don'ts while selecting projects for a freelance job. If you are trying to select a project you want to do, what are the things you should look for and you should never do. I have seen a lot of newbie freelancers, new freelancers who have just come in the field making these mistakes again and again. Here are a few tips to avoid them. The first thing is that which project to take. A lot of newbies, what they do is they say yes to every project thrown towards them. If someone says, "I want a website with a Google Map and I want multiple markers on it or, I want a logo design with figure or maybe a mascot design, a cartoonic design type of logo," and they don't know how to design that logo, they will say, "Yes, give me the project. I will ask my friend to make this for me and I will get the money that's it. I should get the job first." This is the wrong technique. Never try to go with this method. Second thing is that when you are selecting your projects, think about whether this project is going to add some value to your portfolio. If you are a UI designer, you should be looking for better UI design projects rather than coding, fixing someone's websites code. That fixing job will not be added to your portfolio. Think whether this job have some value in my portfolio. If I add this to my portfolio, whether it will be upgraded, it will look good, it will look cool in my portfolio. Select projects wisely. The third criteria is that try to do projects you really love to do and also, if they are paying good, then this is, you can say, better. If they are paying you good and you love that job, you should always accept that project. The second option is that even if they are not paying you good and it adds more value to your portfolio and you really love doing it, you should also take this project. It will build up your carrier, even if they are not paying you good in monetary terms, they are paying you good in value terms. Your project portfolio value is going to get higher. Now the takeaways are, checked up portfolio weight of every project. Weigh them on value added to your portfolio. Second thing is that if you can't say no to some of your clients, because sometimes they are clients that are very valuable to your business or freelance business, then try to refer them to someone else. Get someone else you know and tell them that he is better at 3D Max or he can design 3D designs for you, I am not a 3D guy. Now the second major point about taking projects is that always take projects you are really sure about, that you can easily complete it or 95 percent or 98 percent sure that you can make it. Before taking any project, if you see that in the requirements there is something you have never done, but you can do it search online. Google it and see if that is possible or there are solutions or samples available which you can copy, then that's great. In programming and coding it happens a lot, even with me. When I'm coding someone's website or learning page, I know that there are things I have never done. First thing I do is I search or Google it. Then I copy those simple codes and create a folder and keep those links and those codes along with the project files I receive from the client. Don't apply for any job where you are not 95 or 98 percent sure about its job description or details. Second thing is that never try to take risky projects. Risky means sometimes you say, "Okay, when the client is paying me top $, he's been very good. I should take it man, that $1000. I'm missing out for small job. Somehow I will figure out how to do it." This is very risky. Don't try to address your client trust or your reputation with that client for these risky projects. Just tell them that this is not possible for me. I'm going to recommend another one for another person which is good at this skill. You should talk to them. I will send you the email or Skype ID or something like that. Second thing is don't take experimental projects when you are at short deadlines. Experimental means when you are in the start of your career, most of the time, you will see some projects then that you think that I can somehow, maybe I will be able to do it. You have some doubt about that project. If you have a doubt and you know that the deadline is very short, you should not take it. Some of the projects I did a very in the beginning of my freelance carrier, I developed a website, even I don't know any jQuery at that time. I had to use our image slider at the top and it took me like seven or eight days like just to figure it out that how it's CSS is working and How its code is working. The fact is that at that time my client didn't had any deadline. If you have no deadline, you are taking a local Brookline from around you or he's your friend or maybe family person or he knows you personally and he is not in a hurry. You can experiment, take your dig experimental projects where you know that you can maybe somehow managed to do it. [inaudible] take a way is that don't try to ask your friend to complete your own project. You should know that you can do it easily, first thing. Second is that if you are not sure about any project deadline or is the risk factor, try to ask that client more questions about it. Before starting any project. This is all about taking projects. Let's move on to the next slide. This is really going to hurt you because it hurt me a lot. Why? Because you are doing projects for free. [inaudible] men, that's really desperate. I have seen a lot of freelancers, what they do is they are doing the projects in the start for free. This is really bad, it will really ruin your reputation. Three also means that you are doing projects on a very G braid like $5. I am going to develop a website in just $5. That's hilarious men. It is going to really damage your reputation and your portfolio. Next time that client will never pay you even for the next project. They will always pay you $5. This is a mistake. I have seen a lot of new freelancers they make. They offer a very big gig for $5 and does suffer a lot in the end because it is wastage of their time. That is all about all the tips about selecting and accepting projects, which kind of projects you need to ignore, and which kind of projects you need to select. If you have any questions, ask me. Let's move on to the next lesson. 12. How not to price yourself: One of the biggest problems I have seen with newbie freelancers is that the price themselves very low or they have a lot of pricing issues. In this lesson, I am going to show you what are the mistakes they make and how to fix them. Now, first we are going to look at the factors that define your hourly rate or your pricing. Okay. Number one is your market. Do you have a real skill, you are a shining diamond, you are rare to find, then your rate will be higher. Maybe like $80 or a $100 per hour or maybe $50. It depends on your market. If you are in USA, your rate will be different. If you have similar skills and you're in Asia, India or Pakistan or Egypt, your dollar hourly rate will be different. Now, first thing is that try to figure out your rate. Try to search different websites online and try to see what is that hourly rate that suits you according to your market. Don't try to be too high or too low in the start. Second thing is level of experience. Now, if you have like 10 years experience or more than five years experience, your rate will be higher. Third thing is what value you are offering. Even if you have cheap hourly rate or low hourly rate but if you are offering a very good opportunity to your client, the value of your service is very high. For example, my clients need mail chimp e-mail integrated with their WordPress website again. They want the subscription to go automatically. Now, they don't know what are the steps involved in this job, but I know and I am going to charge them good for this because it is really needed feature for their website. This is basically the value you are providing them. You are providing them automatic subscription via mail chimp. The fourth factor is that your previous work record. Clients what they are going to do is on any freelance website, I'm going to show you in few seconds the example of my upload profile, what they do is they are going to look at your previous jobs you have completed and they are going to compare that hourly rate with their own. If you have applied on a job with a $100 per hourly rate and the previous job you did was for $20 per hour, I think this will make your client upset. The takeaways are never start to low or too cheap hourly rate in the start of your career. This is going to fix your anchor. If your first anchor or first hourly rate is a bit higher than in the future, you will aim more higher. In the beginning of your career, second thing is that let your client test for first two to three hours and then start billing them. Why? Because if your hourly rate is a bit higher, maybe even in the start you are charging $20, your client will be reluctant to give you the task because you have no previous record or no experience. What you need to do is you need to tell your client that, "Please test me for two to three hours, if you don't like my work, I will refund you everything." This is a way of starting your career. The biggest problem I have seen in the freelance career is that pricing your self too low in the start of your carrier. What it is going to do is, it is going to put a anchor in your clients' head. Client will always judge you with your starting rate. If your first job was like $10, per hour he is not going to pay you above $10. It will be very difficult for you to go above. Now how to fix that is that try to take fixed rate jobs in the start. Small fix rate jobs rather than hourly. When you are comfortable that the client is giving me good hourly rate, then switch to hourly rate. Second thing is that try to learn some skills. Upgrade your skills, upgrade your level of experience, upgrade your portfolio to get more high hourly rates. Here is a very cool and secret tip, how to use anchoring to psychologically dealing with your client. What we're going to do is that we are going to set our hourly rate 10 to 15 or maybe $20 higher in our profile. In your freelance profile or any profile on your freelancing website, set your hourly rate $20 or $10 or $15 higher. This is the first step in using this psychological technique. The second step is that when you apply on any job, you are going to give your client a discount of like 10 or $15 in your hourly rate and he will be happy to get it. Even this happens with me a lot when I go shopping. Few of the shopkeepers they have this technique applied and I am always amazed by it because it improves my satisfaction level. If he says that this thing is a $100 and he says for you, I am going to make it just $60. Then the next step is, I never bargain. I say,"Yes, that is it. Give me this bag or purse in something like that in just $60." I'm saving $40 over here. This is anchoring effect. Add some 10 or $15 to your profile hourly rate and then reduce them while you are applying for a job. This is all about pricing user flow and using anchoring technique to psychologically deal with your client and get good rates. That's it. If you have any questions, ask me. Let's move on to the next lesson. 13. Time management for Freelancers: As a freelancer, one of the biggest problems I face is time management. What does that means is most of the freelancers, they are lazy by nature because there are no office hours. Sometimes the deadlines are too far and I say, "Okay, I will do it in two or three days, just first relax for two or three days." In this lesson, I'm going to tell you how to manage your time, how to divide it for learning new skills, and how to effectively use your time for freelancing. The first thing I have seen in a lot of freelance designers is that they waste time on competition websites like 99designs.com and few similar websites. What they do is, they take competition in a lot of websites and they waste hours and hours on designing, and what they get is they lose that competition and waste like 20 or 30 hours of their weekly capacity. What is the calculation? What are you going to lose is that if you're designing on one website for 10 hours and your hourly rate is $20, you are going to lose $200. So why not take a small $100 project instead of wasting time on these websites? It makes some logic. Even if you take four or five design competition then you just win one of them to get $300, still if you take projects in the half of the price or even less than half of the price, you are going to win more money in doing fixed project jobs rather than wasting time on competition websites. Try to avoid these competition websites like 99designs.com. If you want to really use your time and you have a lot of time in the start of your career, you are experimenting with your designs, audio skills, try to build a side project. These are the takeaways I'm telling right now. Build a side project like try to redesign Skype or a Skype interface, or try to design some sign-up page of Amazon, and share it on Behas or Dribbble or any other website to others and see what are the reviews or comments. Now I'm going to show you why I showed you this wasting time on competition websites. Let me show you an example. I have the same experience. Here I have the winning website with me and the website I designed for that client. It's a very high class, Blow Dry Bar, you can see over here. This is my design, Posh Blowdry Bar. What happened is that I designed it maybe and improved it many times, taking 10 hours. What happened is that I went to the finals. I was selected in the top 5 or 6 designers which went to the final but I lost in the end. I lost with a very, you can say, ugly design. I'm going to show you that one also. First let's see my design over here. You can see over here. It is a very classy design, even I saw their picture and their inner atmosphere of their bar to me, it matched up my team. This team was actually aligned with their own blow dry bar or their own styling saloon or whatever it is. Now I'm going to show you the design which won this competition. This is their design. As can see it is very ugly, even the bar and everything. Orange color, what is the meaning of this orange color? I don't even get it. Orange is not their brand color at all. What I did is my design was elegant, it was in all black and white and just purple. Purple was their main logo color and everything. It is all biased in the end. The person who is looking at the final design is the one going to choose their design, it is not going to be the best design. Second example I'm going to show you is this app. This is the app I designed for but this is the winning app. Let me show you my design after some time. You can see over here. I don't understand what these arrows mean, whether they go up, down. Does this mean cancel or go back? A lot of usability issues in this app. Now let me show you my design. This is my design. You can see over here, this is my design. My design was better. Total score was showed, total points was showed at anytime. The words you have played with. Also the tick mark means that this is good and you can go ahead, and cross means that you need to go back. If you click on tick, you will see this window over here. You can see even my navigation and these are the text over here, they are more elegant and more design wise, it was better than the design one. So I wasted a lot of my time over here. After these two losses, even this edit to my portfolio, but still I don't like it that I wasted 20 hours on these two designs. This is the basic thing behind this wasting your time on 99designs. Don't waste your time like mine and try to build some side project. How you are going to manage your time is try to divide your day into three equal parts. The first part of the day, you will be feeling very energetic and you will be fresh. What you are going to do is maybe you need to read some book for 30 minutes or 15 minutes and then try to do your freelance work. Keep your daily task in front of you. I'm going to accomplish these three small tasks. Divide your bigger projects into smaller tasks. In the second part of the day, you are going to do your household work or your personal tasks: Go to the market, shopping, drink milk or bread or whatever you want. In the third part of the day when you are going to sleep, you can read some articles or you can reply to your clients, reply their emails, and try to write some proposals to your clients. So third part of the day at the night, you are going to basically communicate with your clients. This is how I recommend that you divide your work day. Also, you should aim for six hours work time. Don't go above eight hours or 10 hours or 12 hours. Now the third most important part is learning. You should always give time, allocate time to your learning. Why learning is important? If you really want to get ahead of other freelancers or really want to shine in your profile or a portfolio, you should always go for continuous learning. It is a must-have. Always try to allocate 2-4 hours a week, maybe at the end of the week on Sundays when you are not working, try to learn for two hours, watch some online courses or try to read some books. Also try to include learning in your daily routine, maybe 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes, add in your daily schedule to read an article or watch a few videos. Don't waste your time on Facebook or Twitter. This is a must-have. Now this is all about allocating your time to different sections and how to control your freelance time. If you have any questions, ask me. Let's move on to the next lesson. 14. What should be in your Freelance Portfolio: Today I'm going to show you the portfolio mistakes of a lot of freelancers, how to avoid them and how to improve your online presence and portfolio. Also, I'm going to show you some of the example websites where you can create your portfolio free for developers and designers alike. Now the first question is what to include in your portfolio? First thing is that you are going to only include the best and the best of your work. If you have done like a 100 projects, don't include all 100 projects in your portfolio. Just maybe the best 10 or 20 or 15 will do much more impression on your client rather than showing them a 100 of portfolio items and what if by mistake, he opens your very early project or very funny project, so what impression will it leave on your client? Don't show every project in your portfolio. Second thing is that always give proper title and description of each portfolio item. I am also going to show you some of the best item portfolios and the images which I have taken from some of the best portfolios. So always include title and description of each portfolio item. Also, it's best if you can show the whole process of your coding or solving that problem. Clients are mostly inclined to learn the process and the results. What are the results when you designed this, did it increase the conversion rate? So these are the things you need to include in your portfolio. Now the takeaways are that clients need to see how you solve their problem. Your methodology is really important, even applying for a job they are going to see your design process or your development process. The second thing is clients are looking for results of their projects, return on Investment increment or bounce rate changes or conversion changes. They are not interested in your very creative design, they are most interested in their results. The relevancy, freshness and authority we're going to talk about all these factors regarding your portfolio. First thing is always and only show relevant portfolio items to your client. So if you have declared your title as a developer, always include only development related portfolio items in your portfolio. Also never give your client the link to other portfolio items if he wants to get a project done with you for web development or WordPress only provide him with a WordPress links. Second thing is always try to include your latest projects first in your portfolio because they will reflect your current state of development or coding or design skills. Another thing is that you can also include the books you have read at the end of your portfolio to improve your authority. So they know that you are expert in that subject matter. Also to improve your authority on the subject matter, if you are a designer or developer, you should show your stack overflow profile if you can. Let me show you what is the stack overflow profile at the end of this lecture. The takeaways are, clients need to know that you are expert in the skill they are looking for. This should reflect in your portfolio. Relevance is the key. If you have like multiple skills, try to filter them, try to get some way of filtering them. If the client is looking for just the branding design, there should be a filter button or drop-down that he can select branding and every branding project will be shown only. There are a lot of portfolios I have seen online that have filtering options like designs, wire frames, mockups. You explore or something like that. They have separated every skill into different tabs or something like that. So make sure that you use that in your portfolio. One of the biggest mistake I see on freelancing websites that a lot of newbie freelancers, they try to list every skill they have. I am expert at MS Office and I am expert at communication. These are really funny things. I think almost 90 percent of the people who use computers or PCs or Macs on daily basis, they know how to use these softwares or communicate well. So the main thing is that only try to focus on 3-5 skills. I recommend that you list 3-5 best skills you have. The second option is that if you have a specific skill set like branding, you can list all the skills related to branding only. Now here is an example of a portfolio item from a guy. You can see he has a title Concern Worldwide, one line description and then the brief. What was the brief of that project. Then image overhead. So what he did for the project, he has these reviewed user research conducted by IQ content and undertook a content inventory of the existing website, working in an agile way. So he is showing his ideas and workflow what he did. Then the tools he used, you can see over here, this is very cool effect. I really like it that he's a master of these tools. He used exhort PR for prototype, workshop, stakeholder interviews, he did content inventory, competitive analysis. All these things then the results. These are the main things that are really going to boost your clients trust in you. They know that you are really expert on this. This is a great example from Ian and you can see what Ian Fren UX design portfolio. Let me show you some more examples. Here we have Borahm Cho and you can see how he has featured some of his projects and you can see designing for a market place. This is the title and some of the description at the bottom. This is how they should be listed over here. This is another example from a UX designer, Janice and you can see how she has the some two lines project detail over here and you can read more or click over here to get more details about this project. Now you can see one of the example of how it can be done. You can see over here, Adrienne Hunter, she has some very good feedback over here. This is also UX portfolio and you can see demo feedback. She has written some of the key points over here, then she has sad things about her problem solver and I do through user experience design. Then she is saying that is what I do. You can see over here there are only few limited things in her portfolio contact work and Hello. I think you should not increase more than that. Maybe you can add your blog over here, but this is all that should be on your portfolio website. These are all examples of portfolio websites. Let's move on to the portfolio websites that are present online and you can use them to build your portfolio. There are basically two ways you can use these free websites to build your portfolio or your own website with your own name. Now the first two websites I'm going to show you stack exchange and stack UX user experience. They are basically a question answers, portfolio websites where your portfolio is like this. You can see over here activity, this is my reputation. These are the questions I have asked or answered. So these profiles really matter. They provide authority and surety to your clients that you are really expert in the subject matter. Even I got few of the jobs from this stack overflow website. You can see also this user experience. I include this link when I am applying on a user experience related jobs. I include my link over here, profile link, portfolio link for these websites. Then for designers, this website is basically to create your profile Behance and there are a lot of millions of designers over here, you can see this is my portfolio. Then we have this crop. These have jobs and it is very good for designers. Build your portfolio over here. Then this is dribbled as well is like a premium invite only portfolio for designers. You can share dribble charts over here. It is in white only, so only best of the designers make their appearance over here. Now for coders, mostly I think if they have GitHub repositories or projects on GitHub that can really help in their portfolio. This is all about different portfolio websites and how you can improve your authority in your portfolio, so let's move on to the next lesson. 15. Work Life balance for Freelancers: I have seen a lot of new freelancers or even experienced one that cannot balance their work life and their family and their work. This lecture is all about how to balance your life and your work. The problem is that your work is mostly at your home, it is very difficult for you to make them both separate or sometimes give more time to your work and leave out your family matters and everything. Let's see how we can manage all this. The first question is that how much time we should allocate to work. The first thing I tell every freelancer is that don't try to overwork yourself. Don't try to use your muscles and your fingers for more than eight hours. If you ever get into any RSI injury, you will regret your whole life. I have been through multiple RSI injuries it's my own life story. Every time I see a youngsters getting some pain back in the shoulders or maybe the upper back or neck. I always advise them. You need to manage your time. You need to take gaps. If you ever get RSI injury, you will regret your whole life. My whole career was shattered when I got RSI injuries for whole one year, I was not able to hold my computer mouse, take care about this. This is not very light issue. You should take it very serious. I normally recommend that you should not go over six hours work per day and try to take 15 minute gaps after each hour. To effectively manage your time, you can use Pomodoro apps. It's a technique where we have each task in a, divided in 25 minutes gaps. There are a lot of Pomodoro apps. You might find a lot of links of these in my resources do try to use them. The main takeaway is that you should not go above eight hours. Try to sleep at least eight hours and don't try to run after a lot of jobs or money, you need to balance all these things. The second question is that always first, setup your workstation for good posture and try to make your workstation setup more ergonomic. First of all invest in these things, even if they cost you a little much. First try to buy an ergonomic chair and level your chair and desk according to your best posture. Use mouse pads, and mouse, and keyboards that really relaxes your arms or your fingers. Don't try to get a very big mouse or don't try to buy a very small mouse, they are going to put strain on your hands. Second thing is that you need to level your eyes and monitor. It is really going to put a lot of strain on your neck. Try to balance it that your head should not be tilted forward or moved upward. Even while you are working, it is human nature or you can say muscle memory that we tend to move into a position which is not very good for our body or health. Try to tell your wife, or your friends, or parents, or whoever is around that after 30 minutes, please check on me and see whether I am sitting straight, or I am leaning forward on my computer desk or whatever. Make sure others are watching you after maybe 30 minutes or one hour. Try to take a five-minute gap after every 30 minutes of work. Don't try to overuse your muscles, even if you are somewhat in a bad posture, this will protect you. If you are in a little bit of bad posture and your head, neck started hurting, start taking gaps in between your work, this can improve your productivity and even in the long run, it can save your careers. Let me share a story of another designer I signed up for his weekly newsletter and then received his newsletter with this picture and his message. Let me share with you, you can see what here he got carpal tunnel syndrome and that is basically around his wrist. For I think one-two months he was unable to work at all. He is also a freelancer and he's our designer. You can see now he is working like this. His whole hand is bashed up and I don't recommend that you should work like this or you should ruin your career like this guy or like me. I used to work more than ten hours, maybe 12 hours. Sometimes I slept on my desk. During my work hours even at night and in some time I used to play games with my work. It is like 16 hours sitting on a PC. Make sure you don't waste your time playing games. If you have some habit like that, try to minimize it may be one hour or 30 minutes. That is to say don't play, overuse your fingers or your wrists. Your health is your first priority. It should always be keep in mind that your health is your first priority, and then work is your second priority and family. You should balance those work, family and health. Take care of all these issue. Move around, do some exercises off your shoulders and neck. You can find them a lot on online and maybe on you tube. Now, something about freelance family time. The best part of freelancing is that you are always at your home with your kids, with your family or with your friends. The best part is that when you are at home, you should always enjoy every moment of it. When you are not working, you should always try to give a lot of time to your family. At least three to four hours, you should dedicate to your family, go out with kids, have some fun, go to supermarket with them, go to their school with them. You can always have a flexible time schedule. As you are a freelancer, you can always move your time slot up or down or you don't have to worry about it. Work less hours, give proper time to your family and don't try to get into any RSI injuries. If you want to know more about RSI injuries, you can e-mail me or you can ask me questions, I can recommend you what setup I'm using. I still have got some RSI problems, in my upper back, in my shoulder blades. I got some trigger points. I searched a lot on this topic, RSI injuries. If you are facing some, you can ask me questions on that. This is all about working too much. I have seen a lot of freelancers who are ruining their health by running after money or jobs. I have got a 100 jobs in this month. No, the second part is that you are the second side or flip side of that is that you are ruining your health. You are losing the next one whole year income and also your health expenses. You are losing a lot, balance your work and life and your health and keep doing some good freelancing. I'm going end this overhead and let's move on to the next lesson. 16. Surviving no job season for Freelancers: This is one of the worst season in your freelance career or freelance life, which is surviving no job season. Okay, there are times in your freelance careers that where you will get no job at all even for months. Now, I'm going to tell you a lot of ways and how you are going to survive these no job seasons and how you are going to get more jobs in such kind of season. Even if you don't get any jobs, what you are going to do in this no job season. The no job season can be experienced by very experienced and experts freelancers to work. I have seen few freelancers that are working for like ten years and they have faced these. Where no job seasons for more than three months, okay? So this jobless season can last up to three months. Don't worry about it. I'm going to show you ways how to survive it. Now, the first step is when you are thinking about monthly income, okay? If you are thinking that my aim for this month is $1000 or maybe $5000, always aim higher, okay? Try to price each project thinking in mind that you need to make this income equal to the three months expense of the next three months, okay? Your monthly income should be equal to the expenses, total expenses of next three months. Charge higher, try to get jobs that are in high monetary terms, okay? High value in dollars, and match this statement, okay? This is the formula. Each month income should be equal to three months expenses, okay? Plan ahead of time, these are the takeaways. Plan ahead of time if you have a family to support because most of the freelancers have families to support. Spending three months or maybe one or two months, it will be really hard for them to survive this time period. Second thing is that, always aim to achieve three times of your monthly expenses, okay? This is the key formula and this is the way you are going to survive your job season. Now, when you are going through the no job season, how you are going to survive is, first step is start marketing yourself. Team up with few other team members, maybe developers to get continuous flow of projects, okay? You can also team up with similar freelancers, like if you are a designer and you met two or three designers, they might have a load of work and they give you one or two tasks that, okay, I have a lot of work, can you handle these two projects, okay? This is a one way. Second way is, try to introduce yourself to new clients and markets. Maybe visiting local areas, shops, where you can leave your card or something like that, that I do web designing or I can produce your social media marketing or something like that, okay? Third step is that keep in touch with your old clients, okay? Try to send an hello e-mail to all your clients and ask them if they have any project, okay? This is not a bad thing. You can always send e-mails. It happened with me I sent an e-mail and one of the clients replied that they have some work coming up in the future, maybe next month. This is a good sign, okay? Now, the key takeaway is team up with someone else. If you are a designer, you can team up with a coder or developer because developers might need a designer for some of their jobs, okay? Also, if you are a designer, you might need a coder to get a job or maybe produce a whole website. Now, the second main takeaway from this section is that your old clients might refer you to some other person, okay? Keep in contact with them. Try to e-mail them, okay? Say hello or hey, long time no see, okay? I was wondering if you have any work for me. These are the tips. You can try to market yourself and grow your team or you can contact your old clients. Now, what if the disappointment and no job season keeps on going, okay? What if you can't find any work for more than three months? Now, don't get disappointed. If you have time, invest your time in learning and improving your skills, try to learn something from others, maybe attend some workshop, seminars or something like that. Grow your network, okay? Invest your time in learning, it can really improve your skills. Now, the second tip is that if no jobs season last more than three months, okay? Then you should be worried and you should start finding a permanent job. One of my friend, he's very experienced freelancer but he faced no job season for more than three months then he switched to a permanent job, okay? He found a permanent job which was very good in another country and he moved there. Then after stabilizing for like one year or two years, he came back to his freelance life and opened up a new agency with some of his friends. These are the ways you can improve your network. These are the ways to invest your free time. Also, you can get a permanent job if your no job season lasts more than three months. If you have any questions, ask me. Let's move on to the next lesson. 17. Writing Job Application: Today I am going to discuss about Anatomy of Job Application. While you are applying on a job, the most difficult part is writing that job application and how you should format that job application. In this lesson, I am going to show you some examples and some of the tips on how to format your job application. Now in the next lesson or in the resources of this lesson, you should see all the links to all the best job applications, and also I'm going to share with you a template for job application. You can use that in your job application. Now, what are the key points in a good job application? Number 1 is that, it is direct and relevant. If you are using a template and copying pasting one job application to a 100 jobs, then you are ruining your chance of getting hired. Keep it direct, keep it relevant, customize it according to the job description, don't use a single template and copy paste for every job you apply on. When you try to attach some work samples or your work links, they should be relevant. One more tip is that you should try to give your Skype ID while applying in your job application that you can communicate with me, you should tell the client that you can openly communicate with me, discuss your project with me, something like that. Second thing is that when you are attaching your relevant work samples, give them proper titles. Like web design, lending page design for crypto rate agency, or something like that. So the client knows what they are trying to open. They don't just copy paste three or four links and the client don't know what they are going to open, whether it's spam link or whatever it is. Now the key takeaways from this section is, only attach three best relevant work samples to your job application. Don't overwhelm your client. If they require more than three, then attach more than three, otherwise just limit your work samples to the best three work samples. Read the whole job description carefully with detail before applying on any job. I have seen this mistake by a lot of newbie freelancers, they don't read the full description and they just keep on applying on different jobs. Try to avoid it. The second most important part is that you should show them that they need you. How are you going to show them that? Show interest and curiosity in their job. Show them that you are eager to do their job, you'll take and trust this work, and this is a very interesting project. Also, try to show them similar projects you have done in the past. Similar projects means that similar to the project you are applying on. In one or two lines, tell them that you are expert in designing website, coding WordPress via websites, basically what they want. Tell them that you are the expert on the topics or the solutions your client need. The key takeaways from this section are that, show them you have command in your skill. You are really skilled in those areas, let them trust you and your skills. It can build their trust that you are really competent in those areas. Also showing interest and curiosity in their job is a key factor to get hired easily. While writing your job application, you should focus on the pain of your client. After introducing yourself, just hit the pain point of your client. Tell them about the problem they are having and a hint of your solution. Like you can see if they have a link of their website and they need it to be improved, you can tell them in two or three lines that, "I have seen your website and it seems that its loading speed or images are very heavy, it takes like 10 seconds to load. I can easily improve this loading speed of your website and I can decrease the bounce rate and increase conversions of your current users and new users coming to your website." This is basically, you are giving them a solution of the pain of your client. There are few things you need to mention while applying in your job application. When you are applying on any job, never ever apply it without your availability and estimated cost. Most of the clients then need to know what are the estimated costs before they are going to hire you. Give them some estimated cost, maybe some range cost. It can be number of hours to complete that task or a flexible cost, it will be like $300-$500 to create a WordPress website. Also tell them that I am available from Monday, 28 September and it will take me five days to complete this job. You are also estimating your timeline. Don't give them false timeline, give them availability and timeline and estimated cost that you can easily meet. These are all the tips you need for a job application. Let's move on to the next lesson, and the resources of this lecture, make sure you download the templates and the links to the best job applications I have collected for you. Now let's move on to the next lesson. 18. Selecting the perfect job for your skillset: In this lesson I'm going to discuss about job selection and how you are going to select the best job for you. There are 100s and 1000s of freelance jobs online. There is a lot of methods and techniques involving best job selection. In this lesson we are going to discuss how you are going to select the best job and what are the things you will look in a job while selecting a job. In the end of the lesson I'm going to show you a live example on how I'm going to search a job with a keyword on Upwork.com which is the biggest freelance job websites. Let's get started, which jobs to apply for? Now, the first thing is that you need a keyword or major scale you are looking for. If you're looking for a UI design job or a developer job at HTML to PSD to HTML job or PHP job or WordPress job, you should type in and search for that keyword. The main problem here is a lot of new freelancers, newbies, they tried to apply on a lot of jobs even they are not sure about it. Only apply on jobs that really, really match your skill set 100 percent or 99 percent. Read the job description in detail before applying, read it one or two times at least thoroughly, don't just read one paragraph or two paragraphs. See all the skills or all the things asked by the client, answer those questions or you need to have all those skills in your skill set. Now the take-away from this section is that apply only on jobs that you are sure about. Don't waste the client's time and don't ruin your rapport with your clients on that freelancing website. Also don't apply on more than five jobs per day, don't rush into applying the jobs. Select your jobs carefully, only apply few jobs like 3-5 jobs per day because most of these freelance website they have a limit on bidding. You cannot apply on more than 10 jobs in a week. Use that wisely. Now, what are the things you are going to look for while applying for a freelance job? Number one is experience level of your client. I have discussed it in another lecture. You can see over here, you can see the next lecture which is about right clients selection, then you can also see the clients budget and deadline of project. If you cannot meet the deadline, you are out of your way, you should not apply on that job. Also you need to look for the competition. How many applicants have already applied on that job? Keep that in mind. This can increase or decrease your likeliness of hiring. Also you are going to look for feedback about client. If the client has a very poor feedback, you should not apply on that job, otherwise you will end up having a very bad rating and ruining your freelance profile with that client. Now the takeaways are, make sure you are applying on the right job and you know what you are doing. Make sure everything, deadline, budget, everything meets you accordingly and you can easily do that in that budget and that timeline. Also check for freelance competition. You need to check for the competition because it is going to be like 70. A freelancers have applied on that job, there are less chances that you are going to be hired. Now which jobs you are going to abide on freelance sites, there are few tips I'm going to give you. Jobs with a very poor client feedback. If the client have a very poor feedback from previous freelancers then you should not take that job. Jobs that don't fit your skill set. If the clients have asked few tools of skill sets that they really need, and you don't know how to use them you should not apply on that. If the deadline is very tight or it's impossible, you cannot do it on Monday or two days, you should not waste the time of your client. Also there are jobs that are very cheap rates like create a website for me in just $5. Never try to apply on those jobs. These jobs are really going to ruin your freelance profile and your freelance career. Also there are jobs that have very vague description, like one or two lines that says, I open up a job description and it says, "I need a website," and there is nothing else about it. Now, I need a website means many things. Whether you need a logo for the website, you need the design for that website, you need coding for that website, whether it is going to be a WordPress website or E-commerce website, what do you need basically? The client is missing every description. If you face something like that, you need to see the takeaways right now, if the client have poor feedback or poor ratings or reviews or deadline is very tight you should not apply on their job. Also, if you are worried about the job description, you don't know what the clients need, you should ask questions before applying to that job or you should try to ask questions about that job so to make sure that you know what you are going to do for that client. This is all about job selection and what you are going to look for jobs on a freelance site. Let's see live example. Now, here is an example of a job with very less description. You can see over here, writing specs for software website. I need someone to create good specs. I understand that and I'll start working on it. Now, he need a writer with a lot of good specs. You need to see the client reviews over here. There are a lot of skills he has listed over here. You need to see whether you fit for them. It is a one time project. There are few more filtering questions he has asked over here. You should answer those accordingly. Also you can see he has applied for at least 90 percent. This doesn't matter much you need to apply on it. These skills match you and the details are good to go, you should apply on it. You can see over here, this is the response other freelancers have given about this client. You can see very bad experiences not responsive. Sometimes bad clients that don't respond for weeks, which can really slow down your work and it can really hurt you in the long run. You can see over here also he's a bit shaky. I can say that this client's image is a bit shady, you should not try to apply on this job. Now you can see over here, this is a new client and I think he's already interviewing one person over here. Already 5-10 people have already applied on this job. He have a very good work history over here like you can see over here. You should try to submit a proposal for this job. Start date, you can see over here 12 October, if you are busy before that date make sure that you can start from this time. Read this description. You can see over here there are bullet points see it fully. See the requirements over here, JavaScript web design, web development. If you are good at all these things, you should apply on this job. These are the things you need to keep in mind. Also, you can see over here what job it is, hourly, expert level. He needs expert level person over here and you should try. You can also save this job if you want to apply it after some time or maybe later at night or tomorrow, but try to apply it as early as possible. You can see 5-10 applicants are very low. You can easily compete with them. Let's see how many have applied over here. Also you can see over here there are upgrade membership to see how much connects and other perks you can get a lot of perks and also you can see whether this job have a high rate, average rate, or low rate of application and what hourly rate has been applied on this job so that you can shape your job proposal according to that. These are all the tips you can use to apply on any job, so let's move on to the next lesson. 19. Creating Job Application Templates: Today, I'm going to give you some more job application productivity tips so your job application time and applying for jobs reduces, and you are more efficient in applying for multiple jobs in less time. Now, when you are writing your job application, you should be very concise and direct. Don't write long paragraphs saying and showing your whole story, how you become a developer or designer. Just write concise, very brief introduction, maybe one or two lines and just then go get to the point. Clients don't have to hold it, read your job application. Now, the takeaways is that don't write more than 500 words job application. It is not article, just write very concise, maybe two or three paragraphs, or maybe 9-10 lines in your whole job application. Keep your intro very short. I just recommend that you should not go above two lines of your introduction. Now, the second productivity tip is the job application templates. You need to create some job application templates for multiple jobs. You don't need just one or two. Maybe you are a designer and you apply on logo designs, and website designs or maybe wireframe, so create two or three different job application templates based on your each skill, but also zip your different samples or your portfolio items into different zips containing each your skill. I have different folders for my wireframes. I have zipped up my learning page designs into a separate folder. Upload them to Dropbox and you can short on their links with bit.ly, goo.gl, there are lot of URL shortening services online. You can use any of them and keep those URLs in another text file. Now, the takeaway is that even if you have created a template, it doesn't mean that you are going to just copy and paste it in the job application. When you are writing a job proposal, you need to customize that job application or your already saved template and customize it according to each job description. Also, if you have online links of your samples and works, that work better than zip files, because sometimes I have seen that clients are reluctant to download zip files and then extract them. This is human nature. We always lean towards the easy jobs. These are all the few more tips and tricks of applying to your jobs and creating templates for your job applications. Now, let me share with you my portfolio, how I have arranged it. You can see over here blog design, dashboard design. I have arranged everything in different folders. Learning page designs are in different folder, Old portfolio, Print letter designs. Everything I have done for PRINT. You can see over here different card designs. If I have to send to a client, I just select a few of them from here and send it to the attachment or email, or whatever. If I get a e-commerce website, I just send these designs. If I have a dashboard design, I send this kind of designs. This is how you are going to be very selective. These are different folders. If you have, you can zip them, that is good. You can see over here flat designs, it's a zip folder. I have zipped them into a folder, all my flat designs. Then you can see wireframes over here. Now, if you click over here, "New portfolio UI", you can see over here this is how I have written my job application. These are all the links. They are like seven or eight links. I have divided them into different sections. You can see over here with these lines because most of the time, only you can write the text in those job applications. One or two lines introduction, then I have won these contests, so I've worked with these companies, Panasonic and McAfee (Intel), and these are my Dribbble profiles. Basically, if you have a profile on Dribbble or Behance, if you are a designer, then they are going to really get a good impression. You can see over here. Here are some of the links from a Behance gallery and that is good impression. Also, I think it's a bit old. Let's see which I have a few more, you can see over here, and this is written in different methodology. I have shown usability and UI guidelines, skills over here, CSS knowledge, grid system. Also, I have different categories of work over here, so if I need to remove some section, I just remove it. If the job is for mobile work, I just delete all this and customize it according to that job description. You can have multiple portfolios, like you can see over here. These are my other links over here, mobile portfolio, latest 2015 portfolio. You can see over here. These are few different job applications I have written. This is how you create your folders, manage your portfolio images, and portfolio items into different folders and create different templates for your job applications. 20. How to select the right client?: When you are applying for freelance job, you should also look for the client. How is the client? Whether he is experienced or what ratings are the freelancers has given to that client? The problem is how to select the right client while applying on your online jobs. Now why care about clients? Now the main thing is that clients are the lifeline of your freelance business and freelance carrier. Even if they are in a bad mood and they give you a bad rating, they can ruin your online portfolio or profile with bad ratings, you will be jobless in no time. The third is that you can form very long-term relationships with your clients. Even two or three great clients can give you more than enough jobs and you don't need to search for jobs anytime soon. Now the takeaways are that you need to form relationships with good clients. If they are very good paying clients, send them gifts twice a year or maybe once a year on a Christmas or any eve-days or something like that. Then you can also email them, keep them in contact, email them on every special occasion, Eve day, Christmas Day. Create a card for them, and send them over. Coming to the point which clients you need to a avoid while applying for freelance jobs. Now, Number 1 is the category of clients which are non-technical clients, mostly from sales and marketing backgrounds. You need to avoid them. Second category is the client who is basically creating a fairy project. I call it fairly projects or fairy clients. They don't know what they are doing. They have very high imagination. I want a website that can animate this and that can play a video like this. There is something like this, then they want features that are almost maybe non-realistic. They have requirements of a project that non-realistic. Now, the third type of clients, do you need to avoid are the clients with a very bad reputation or which get very angry or they have anger issues that they have very harsh comments from other freelancers, bad reviews about them. Now the main takeaways from this section is that salespeople or marketing people have a tendency to negotiate and they are going to give you a very good negotiation. If your freelance rate is like $40. They are going to get you and negotiate you as long as it is going to be half of that rate. Keep in mind that they are going to really push you down towards the last limit of your hourly rate. Now, the second thing is that you need to sign our proposal or document containing all the things you are going to accomplish for that client. Try to sign them with your fairy project clients or the bad clients on non-technical clients. They know that what you are going to accomplish for them, there are times when you have clients from heaven, they are really great clients. They are good paying, they give you like funded a half times or sometime double the rate of other clients. These clients miss basically fall in the category of project managers, design directors, people who really value your skills or they have some taste of your skill. They know what the design field is and what software's and how it is designed. Now, what you are going to do is you're going to keep good relations with those clients. They are really rare gems and you are not going to lose them at any cost. Now the second type of clients from heaven are the clients who have a very good hiring experienced. If they have hired like a 100 designers, they know you are the best one or you fall in that category or you fall in expert category. They will pay you according to your experience and your skill set. Now, few types of clients, i'm going to give you few more types of clients you should be aware of. Number 1 is that the client who pays too late. You ask them, you need a payment and they are going to forget it and they are not going to even reply your email. They are really stubborn. They are really late payers. Sometimes they don't even remember that they had appending payment towards you. Second, our clients who are very serious, who just talk about work and nothing else, no smile, no extra words, no extra emails, nothing else. Then the third type of clients are very stubborn clients and they want everything according to their will and their likeness. They want you to design a website and they are going to pinpoint every inch, every small pixel that they want it like that. They don't care about performance or anything. They just need their product as they want. There are another type of clients that are basically going to promise you that we have a lower load of works. If you work this project in $5, I am sure that you will get a like a 100 jobs in a month from us. They are all fake promises. Don't try to get into that. If the value your work that much, they should pay you good in the first job. Now that take away from this section is charge high rates to your stubborn and serious clients. If you have very serious clients or stubborn clients, you need to charge them very good rates because you know that in the end they are going to be a lot of problem and they're going to bother you a lot. Know the solution to late paying clients is that sometimes when they have some emergency task or very urgent tasks to do and they give you that we want this website urgently, my website is down. Please fix something. I'm losing clients, i'm losing money. Now at that moment or time, this is your prime time. This is your time to attack that client and get the payback, now what you are going to do is you are going to build them really high and you need a 100 percent payment before doing that task, email them that I want a $100 right now because I need to give it to the hosting company to put your website back on and they will pay you instantly. Why I am emphasizing it is that it happens with me a few times and high head to few clients that I like that they really don't pay me for like one or two years. When they had a very urgent task and their website went down. I got all the payments from the previous year and the next one. This is how you tackle all these types of clients and be aware of the nature and their type and select your clients wisely. Let me show you some examples of clients from upwork.com. When you open a job application, like I have opened up this job application. Now on the right side you can see here's the information about the client. You can see he is verified client, verified payment and he has 34 reviews and his review is 4.22 almost okay. He's from the United States. This is his local time right now. He might be sleeping, and he has hired this much, how much he has spent over here, and this is how much average rate he has paid up to now. He normally hires very low rate freelancers, and this is how i'm going to judge him from here. Let me show you a few other examples. You can see this is the client. He's verified he's a new client. He has no reviews, zero review, he is from the United Arab Emirates Dubai, this is time he has posted these much jobs, and this is how much his hiring rate is. Here's a new one, and he needs an expert level professional over here. Now, let's see another one. This is a very good client. He has 36 ratings. He has Platinum Tier, he has one of the top clients on Upwork. He's from United States Angels Camp and job posted. He has a very good experience. You can see from his description over here, he has very detailed job description that shows that he is very experienced. Also he's hiring is around $10 per hour average. You can see other jobs posted by him over here, you can see what here. Jobs and progress, clients work has a history. These are the rates he has paid. You can see 10 hours at 25 per hour. Looking at these figures, you can decide or guess that this client can easily pay me $25 per hour or he likes to pay like $10 or maybe I should hit him like 15 or 12 or 13 in the middle ground. Still get hired on this job. This is how you assess your clients. You can see over here this client has not verified his payment method. I am going to avoid it till the time he has some payment method verified overhead. Also, he has not hired anyone over here. He has six open jobs and he is asking for entry-level freelancers. This is all about different type of clients and how you are going to look for their information on Freelance website. Always look for what the client is and why they are hiring you and how experienced he is or she is. This is all about clients and types of clients. If you have any questions ask me, let's move on to the next lesson. 21. Building Trust with Clients: Whenever you start talking socially with any person, any client, or anyone around you, the first thing in their mind will be trust. Whether they trust you or not, this is very important, so whenever you apply on a job or talk to a client, there are a few tips that help you build trust with them. I'm going to discuss those building trust tips with you in this lesson. Now the question is how to build trust with clients? Number 1 is that you are going to talk to or communicate with that client directly. If you can go with the face to face or on the phone that is created, tried to ask questions about their projects so they know that you are interested in their project. Tell them the results of a similar project that I have done, a similar project to you, and the results were marvelous, we increase the web page speed to a 100 percent from 80 percent. Also you can offer them small trial jobs, if you are new in your career, clients are not willing to give you jobs. In that case, you are going to offer them small trial jobs first. Let them test you for a few hours, give them three first five hours or something like that. Now the takeaway from these tips are that talking on phone can clear your misconceptions with your client. Sometimes in my communication with my clients, I had a lot of misconceptions and client got angry with me. Then I just called them and everything was poof, so everything disappeared like that. Communicating on phone is better than texting or emailing because your mode of communication or how you are sounding cannot be seen or felt via text. Now, if you really run into a client that is very picky and he doesn't trust you at all and you have started some trust issues, never try to take that project lead that project. Sometimes it is human nature. Some clients have some problems and they cannot control their anger or sometime you can call them very difficult client, so you should leave that project. Don't charge a new client upfront a lot of money. This is a good tape in making trust. The new client, he doesn't trust you much and if you are going to charge a lot, like 50 percent upfront or maybe the whole value upfront, they are going to get scared of you. Let them taste a candy first. Give them a preview of your solution and your services, Also show empathy towards their problem. Tell them that you know how your problem is right now, it's urgent and I'm going to fix it in just two days, don't worry about it. This can really relax the client that the person I'm dealing with is really into my project, he is really interested in solving my problem. Now about phone call, it is better to meet in person. If you can go to your client and meet him in person, or you can have a video conference with him, it is better than calling on a phone. That major takeaways from this section is that, try to meet your client in person. If they had a very big client, a very big firm, meeting in person is the best option. The second thing is e-mail and phone or text, better is that you meet them in person or you have a video conference with them. This is better than just on a phone or e-mail. Now the last tip I'm going to give you to win your client trust is, that showing them solutions rather than services. They need solutions to their problems, so problems, solutions and then tell them the price. First, listen to their problem and tell them, you understand that problem. Show them few sketches or your action plan that you are going to solve this problem like that. This shows the client that you know what you are doing and they know that you have their solution. This is the main thing. Don't tell stories about yourself. You need to listen to them and show your action plan or the solution to their problems. They have hired you or they're going to hire you for the solution, not your shining portfolio or something like that. This sums up the client trust, solutions and tips. Let's move on to the next lesson. 22. How to write Winning Proposals: Hello, freelancers. Today we are going to talk about proposals. If you have a very good client and good paying clients big company, I think rather than Just sending them cost in just one or two lines that it will cost you $1500 or something like that, is a joke. If you really want to win their project, you should prepare a proper proposal. There are different portions of every proposal. One is introduction. Second is scope of work, what you are going to do for them. You need to define the scope so in the end there is no fight between you and the client that this has not been completed. Third portion is fees, or you can say the schedule. Fees always separated into different sections like this. You can see over here, like mockups, wireframes, UX, WordPress setup, theme installation WordPress training, etc. Then we have terms and condition that I will be receiving 50 percent upfront or 50 percent after project completion. This is very simple. The template I'm using that I'm showing you is from pandadoc.com. It is not basically a free solution, but they have a lot of templates, you can see over here from marketing, web and IT, construction, invoices, proposals. I really like some of their proposals, they are very well built and well written. You just need to change some of the variables over here, like you can see over here. You just need to change, and it will be changed all over in the whole document. I have clicked on this pricing. So it is $19 a month. I think it's a pretty neat templates. They have very nice templates. Other two templates I am going to share the links with you are free, and one of them is from this guy, Ryan Robinson. He is basically offering the whole course. You can say subject matter specialists for freelance proposals. I'm going to show his proposal link in some minutes. The second one is this Nusii guy and he's also a freelancer. He also have an online app like you can see over here. It has different plans, and I will also show and share with you one template from the sky. Pandadoc and this one and this one. These are three option Ryan Robinson and Nusii and Pandadoc.com. Also, I really like this one, proposify.biz. It has also a lot of great templates for proposals. I really like this one too, it is also paid. I think you cannot get everything from here free. These are few options that are automated, like this proposify.biz. It's very difficult for me to read the name, and these pandadoc.com. These are two paid options. Then we have this guy Ryan Robinson and I'm going to share his template with you in a few minutes. Let's see what he has. You can see Ryan Robinson. I think his proposal is really great. You can see over here, your logo. The first thing is very interesting, meeting your needs. It is very different from the other proposals I have shown you. I think this is really great. I'm going to develop something from you for this company, and with this authority and different things. It has pointed out a lot of great options. Recommendation for a company name, the company you are going to send the proposal. Deliverable one. This is basically what you will be delivering to their company. Then we have measured results, which is very good section to convince your client that you are delivering some results to them rather than just a web site. So you are giving them some valuable services, providing them valuable services. Then we have this feed summary. This is basically break up off your total cost. Then you have project timeline. This is a really nice setup. This is very good template of proposal, and then we have next steps. Then we have the submitted initial payment of past month. These are basically terms and conditions, and here he has shown them as next steps. The last part which is very interesting for me, why choose me? Is that why I am proposing and I am the best one to be hired for this work. Then we have terms and conditions. This is very good option, and the next one I'm going to show you is this from this nusii website? It is also a professional and the thing I like about it is, it is a bit formal but the best thing about it is, let me show you project goals option. The best thing I love about it is, it shows you the value you are going to provide to your customer. Like decrease cart abandonment rate by this percent and increase average time onsite by this percent, and in return visitors will be increased. This is just the pitch that you are going to deliver some results to that company. Always make sure that you highlight this portion. Then it has three options. Basically three packages. You are going to propose different packages to your client. In the option one, we are going to design this and this. In the option two, everything from option one will be included, and we are going to Measure of Success. We are going to aim to increase sign up or something. Notice that this is written in terms of layman, and it also gives some results at the end. Even the manager or a CEO of the company who has not developed any website, he can get impressed from this proposal. You can also see the third one option and the next steps. The only thing he has different from that Ryan Robinson is that it is giving three options to the client to choose from. If you merge both these templates together Ryan Robinson and also this new nusii website, I think you can get the best proposal and you are really going to win that. The main things in your proposal should be overview, what you are going to basically deliver to their client. It is basically a rephrase of what your client needs. Just to give your brief introduction, very short introduction and come to the point that we are going to deliver you this, and we are going to solve your problem. Then make sure you always define the scope of work. Because in the end it will be very difficult if something goes wrong. These are terms and conditions. This is very short version, and you can also download if you just use this panda doc for 15 trial days, you can just download it and you can use it. It is going to download it in PDF format. Make sure you download it like I am going to do right now. I'm going to download it. Also this proposify is a very good option. I have heard very good words from other freelancers about this website. For paid options, you can go for this panda doc, this proposify. Then the guy Ryan Robinson is expert on this. You can subscribe and join his newsletter and you will get free course from this guy. Also I think this one. These are the few things I wanted to discuss with you about the proposals. I personally have written maybe two or three or maybe five times. I don't normally post this proposals may be in the start when the client is new, but when the client has more trust on me and they know what I am doing or what I can do, they just give me a project and just give them in four or five lines the value I'm going to give them, and the cost of that. That is basically the start of that project. That is all about proposals, and getting the trust of your client and winning proposals. Stay tuned, and let's move on to the next lesson. 23. Freelance Pricing Strategies: Today I'm going to talk about pricing strategies for freelancers. Now, a lot of freelancers that are in the beginning of their carrier, they are really interested in how they are going to charge the project to the client, whether they should use fixed pricing or they should use hourly rates. So we are going to see all these strategies in this lecture. Let's get on with it. Now the first question, fixed versus hourly rate? Okay, hourly rates are good when you don't know how long the project will take or how many divisions there will be. So if you have a very long history of the client, you know that this client is going to revise my design like 20 times or 50 times, then don't ever try to get a fixed rate with them. Also in the start of your career, I don't think that you should take an hourly rate or charge hourly rate projects. Try to get very small fixed price projects. Now fixed price projects are good when you know the nature of the project, or you have done that task 100 or a million times. In the jobs posted on Fiverr gigs, you can see that they are small tasks that the person who is offering them or the freelancer has done them many times. They are really experts at them, so in maybe one hour they can take two or three or maybe five jobs at the time. So this is how this works. Also in the fixed price, if I have done it many times, and for example, I am maintaining a WordPress website, if I charge $100 for maintaining a website, and I just complete it every time in one hour, go for a fixed price. Otherwise, if I charge like $20 per hour, and I'm going to go with hourly rate, I'm going to lose a lot of money because I will complete it in just one hour, and I will lose $75. Takeaway from this section is always used fixed price for small jobs. Try to take fixed small jobs where we have fixed price. For larger projects, you can divide your fixed payments into milestones. This is also good for your surety that your client is not going to run at the end of the project. So if you have a very big project, like $2000, $3000, or maybe $10000, try to divide it into different milestones. Like after a design phase, I will take $300 or $500, after the development phase, you are going to pay me $500, and at the end of the project, when everything will be finalized, I am going to get the rest of the money. Let's see some of the examples of fixed-priced projects. Now fixed priced jobs hold what kind of jobs you're going to offer as a fixed price. For example, if I have a WordPress developer, and I know how much time it takes to increase our security of a WordPress website, or maintenance of a WordPress website, or maybe a responsive lending page development. I know that it takes like 15 hours to design, and code. Then I am going to offer them a fixed priced project. Also, there is one more tip that if you have a design, and you are going to revise it, and it is going to be revised, limit the revisions. The number of revisions mentioned in your proposal for this design job, I am comfortable with only two revisions. So these prices are up to two revisions. Then for each revision, I'm going to charge you $50. So always try to limit your scope of work. Tell the client that this is the scope of the work, and these things I'm going to do in this price. So the basic takeaway from this section is the job boundaries are well defined or job scope. So define the scope first. It should be well-defined. Otherwise, you will get into different problems at the end. The second thing is that these kinds of fixed price jobs, or fixed price projects, they are very well known to you. You know 100 percent all the steps involved in each job. Like we have a WordPress maintenance job or security job. I know that I'm going to get that plugin, and I have all the settings exported into another file. I'm just going to import that setting, and that will be fixed. So I should know all these steps. This is a repetitive job, and this is good for fixed-priced projects. Even it can be applied to large projects where we have different milestones. Okay, let's see some of the examples of hourly rate projects. If I am going to fix some CSS issues, I am a web designer or a web developer, and I'm going to fix some of the coding of a website. I don't know how much time it is going to be. Maybe it takes one hour, two hours, or maybe 10 hours. It is unidentifiable, so, I'm going to charge on hourly rates. Also, if the client says that I need a logo design with unlimited revisions that I will revise it as much as I like, you should go with hourly rate projects. Also there are some clients that are really stubborn, really itchy, they will not let you complete your work unless they are really satisfied. You are going to charge them hourly. So they know that time is money, they are going to be charged more if they are going to let you revise your design for like 1000 times. Also, the hourly rate can work for the clients that are project managers, or previously programmers, or designers, or design directors, or creative directors. They know how valuable your skill is. So you can give them a good hourly rate or a high hourly rate, they will be willing to pay that. Now the basic takeaway from this slide is that hourly rates are reflected in your Freelance profile. So choose them wisely. If you are taking an hourly rate project job, you should take it wisely. Don't lower your rate too much. Otherwise, you will suffer in the future. Don't start too low with your hourly rates. Even if you have started your freelance career, don't list your rate like $1. You are going to design a whole website in five hours. So $5, is really cheap. This is going to disturb the whole design community, and also it is going to hurt your future in your freelance career. Now there is another pricing strategy which is flexible fixed pricing. Here what we are going to do is every human being, they love bargaining. So you are going to give your client three pricing options to select from. The first option will be a very bare minimum of what they need. The second one will be, what the client needs, and the third one will be some extra options or added value. There is another technique, if you don't know the estimate, and the client wants a rough estimate, you never give them one exact value. Always give them a price range. Always try to give your client a price range like $500 to $700, something like that. The takeaways from this section is that most humans try to bargain, and we don't like rigid things. We don't like rigid pricing strategies. We don't like answers like yes, no. So try to provide your clients with at least two options to select from. Don't give them four or five options, just two or three maximum. Let me show you some of the examples of flexible fixed pricing. You can see I have three packages over here. Logo design with two options, $100. It is very minimum viable product. This is my bare minimum product, which the client really needs, and there is no option without him to survive. Now the second option is that he might be developing an app for his company, and I am going to give him plus an app icon for 150. Now for just $50, he is going to jump to this. So this is what we want the client to select. The third one is with few more options, like business cards or maybe with four options, something like this. We are going to give the client a bit more upgrade over here, $200. He might try to get this one. Also there is another trick. On the maximum deal, you are giving three deals. So this one, the priciest deal, you are going to give a discount. If you pay me now, I'm going to give this deal in just $170. So $30 saving, or maybe $190, or $180, or 10 percent. You can ask them just 10 percent. So this is a great way of flexible fixed pricing. It is going to work a lot in your design proposals or your development proposals. So this is all about pricing strategies. I have discussed a lot of pricing strategies, fixed versus hourly, fixed with milestones, and fixed with flexible fixed pricing. So this is all about these pricing strategies. Let's move on to the next lesson. 24. What should be in a Freelance Profile/portfolio?: Today we are going to talk about what should be present in a freelancer profile. From different sources, I have found the top freelancers on upwork.com and some on the freelancer.com. I'm going to show you their profiles, what are the key things I like in their profile and it should be present in yours too. First off, this we have Rafal Rzepecki person and I think he is a programmer from Poland. The main thing is that he has mostly programming languages listed over here. His focus is basically programming C, C++, Ruby, SQL, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails. I think he's a Ruby on Rails expert and you can see over here, even in his review, he said that he is highly skilled in programming. These are the things he listed over here. He also knows these three things or four things. You can see over here, most of his jobs are also programming related. You can see over here his tests, they are all programming test, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, programming with C++, he is really expert in all these languages. This is how it makes up his great portfolio. Next up is this Igor Kimono and he has written a lot of texts over here, which I don't recommend that nobody's going to read all that, but the main thing is this title over here subtitle and all the skills he have listed over here. You can see they match a lot Linux sysadmin, you can see he's basically a system administrator and Linux and Unix systems, I guess, he's experiment on these two or one skills. Very narrow focus. You can see over here, good reviews and portfolio don't have much, but a lot of tests and he's also top scorers in his tests. These are all Linux based or UNIX-based tests that are his main skills. This designer he, is also very focused and he doesn't have too many skills. That is why he job success rate is a 100 percent. He's just a photographer and photo editor. This is what you need to be. Keep your focus over here. Don't list too many things over here. He has just two skills and he is good at them. I have seen his video, he has edited his video and his skills on photo editing are superb, they are out class. You can see over here, here are some samples of his work, then he has two tests that are related to his photograph. These other things doesn't matter much, but these are the things that matter. Very short overview and I think he wrote about his education over here and photography video production for the retouching. Very short, very concise, this is good. Let's move on to this one. This is also a programmer with JavaScript Node, MySQL, Nginx, Mango DB, and few more skills. I think he's more of a PHP developer with some JavaScript skills. You can see in the first line, this is very good, he shows his experience that I am a very experienced in this programming field. Then in the next line, he listed all the languages, all the main thing he is good at. Also in the end you can see over here how he ends up some buzzword that will help you to find me are all these skills again. Listing out your skills really help in your overview. Always try to list your expertise or languages or things you do over here. Also, this title and these skills should match a lot. Here we have a graphic designer, expert in developing brand images. You can see here her focuses on brand imaging. Everything related to it is illiterate to branding. Here you can see she has different headings on different sections. You can see over here application design, packaging design. We have a lot of great focus on branding only. This is how we can filter out and come out as a top rated freelancer. Let's move on to the another designer, web graphic designer, Inesa Navasardyan. From my point of view, she has written a lot of different skills like web design, HTML, Adobe Illustrator, Font Development. The basic thing I like about her is that she have included a line over here, that she really enjoyed her work and she feels great pleasure in doing it. This is the main thing over here. She told that she is fluent in English languages and Russian languages. This is basically two tips from over here that you love your work and what languages speak, or you can be communicated easily. Your communication skills are good. Next moving on to this. This is another website designer and basically his focuses on HTML, PHP, Zend Framework. Basically he is running an organization. If you play the video, he will show that he has a firm who creates all sizes of websites. He's basically all in one solution. He produces all all sizes of websites, even PPC, SMM, basically social media marketing. This is one person. There are basically two kinds of freelancers I have seen over here, all in one solutions and very specific and very narrow focused where like you can see over here this freelancers, she just have a focus on branding. Let's see some of the other profiles over here. On the freelancer. You can see over here, his title is scored. He's a senior graphic designer and illustrator. The main thing I really like about it is that every time I like this presentation a lot. Always try to list down because lists are easier to scan by eyes and they can grab attention easily than reading this text, nobody is going to read this full text. Maybe they just keep a glance of first line and then they will focus on this area. In your profile, make sure that you have listed are your skills. If you can divide them into skills and your tools you use, that would be very good because most of the clients, they might not know your tools like Buzz and Mockups or sublime text or whatever, but if they have expertise or they're project managers, they are going to look for the tools you're using. You can see over here he has listed his tools over here, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe In Design, Photoshop, 3D max, Maya and others relevant tools. Make sure you have listed your tools and services, both of them. Basically reviewing all these profiles, I'm going to give you just two things. Number 1, there are two kinds of freelancers or here. One that are very focused on one or two skills. They have very high rates. Let me show you the one. You can see your head $35 but are just for photo editing. The second type of freelancers, they have multiple skills and they are touching, I think two grounds. One is design and second is front-end coding and coding, so design plus code, or you can say whole solution. The second thing I'm going to show you is always specify your skills and the tools you use in a listed format. Don't include very long lines for your introduction, nobody's going to read your preview text over here. The second thing is that your designs should be very, very relevant to your description over here. If you have written wireframes and front end design or maybe mockup design. They should be displayed over here. You can see what this guy is very specialized in brochure design and all his portfolio items are brochure design. He will be hired for design job. You can see over here redesigned fact-sheet designer cannot be artwork design and higher graphic designer, logo designer. He's basically branding designer most of the time. You can see over here he focuses on Logo packaging design, T-shirt design, tag design, vector, visiting guard. Basically brochure, cover page. His focus is on branding design. These are all the things I have seen in most of the profiles of freelancers. Make sure that you list only your best work and relevant works over here. Don't upload your scrap work or old design over here, just the latest ones, even they are few. Even if you have three or four design, just list them our here. Don't try to fill up all your profile with scratch or junk designs. One thing I forgot about it is that in your image, use a very good smiling image of your face looking towards the client. Do not look over here or over there. You can see this one. You can see this image is good and this image is almost good. Don't use images like this one. The clients mostly need to contact a human being, you can see this image is good and this image is good. Use your face over here and try to get a good picture over here. Nice picture of you sitting on your PC and video laptop. These are few of the tips. I'm sure that these will really improve your freelance portfolio and profiles. Let's get ahead and let's move on to the next lesson. 25. Categories of Freelance Job Websites: Today we are going to talk about freelancing job website. To find freelance jobs, you need some freelancing website. I'm going to tell you in this lesson that what are different categories of freelancing job websites and also which one you are going to hit in the start of your career and the middle of your career. Let's get started. There are a lot of famous websites, freelancing websites where we have a thousands or maybe more than thousands of freelance jobs at a time. These are basically high competition freelance websites. There are also new comers in the market which are basically low competition websites. When you are in the start of your career, you should avoid the high competition websites. Start making your profile simultaneously on two or three freelancing websites, one popular and two non popular websites and see what are the response from all these websites. It is just like putting your eggs into different baskets, it is just like investment. Now, websites like Upwork might have more than 50 or maybe hundreds of applicants applied on just one job, so your chances are very thin like maybe out of 50, you might have just one chance to get that job. Takeaways from here is, when you are applying on a job, try to apply as early as you can on the job like if you open a job and there is only one applicant or two applicants then this is the job. There is very low competition. Just get ahead and apply it as soon as possible. Also, try to check the competition on different websites like guru.com, freelancer.com, upwork.com, PeoplePerHour. There are there are multiple websites. I'm going to share the links in next lesson, a lot of links from different websites, high competition websites and low competition on new websites, and you are going to love it. Try to compare different websites and see which suits you better. Now, most of the freelancers, they get a lot of problem when they are starting out in their career. The first step I'm going to give you is that when you are going to start your career as a freelancer, try to start with Fiverr or Upwork. Fiverr is basically for small gigs like $5. So try to post multiple small gigs on Fiverr. Don't offer a very big service like if you are offering something which takes you three hours or maybe five hours to do and you're doing it for $5, then you're wasting your time. Try to create small MVP, Minimum Viable Product. Minimum Viable Product means that it is the smallest viable product, so you have a very small gig which is complete and add some extra add-ons to it that are really useful. Just design a logo with a PNG file for $5. Then you can add, you want Illustrator file or source files for that logo, then you are going to charge $50 more. This is how you can create your gigs on Fiverr. The second thing which a lot of new freelancers do very badly is that they start applying on each job without thinking. Try to apply only on jobs that suite you and you can easily do that and you are confident about it. Don't barge in and start posting jobs. I need a job. I need a job. This is wrong. On Upwork, we have a limited number of jobs. You can apply to 20 total jobs in limited time. Don't waste all your application limit in one day. On Upwork, Upwork is a very big website. Elance and Upwork basically merged together. So there is a lot of cheap jobs and small fix rate jobs. In the start of your career, try to apply for fix rate small jobs and if you are applying for an hourly rate, then make sure that your hourly rate is good because it will be reflected in your profile. Also if your client is reluctant, try to give him two hours, three. Let him test you for a few hours to build his confidence or her confidence. Now coming to the high paying freelance web sites which are very top websites and I don't recommend beginner freelancers to even try to get an account on those websites. These are very high paying top freelancer websites like Toptal or gun.io, which is good for developers. If you are in the middle of your career or you very expert in any topic like maybe designing or user experience or maybe a development. Then you should try to get attention on these websites. If you are registered on Toptal, I think your minimum hourly rates starts from I think $40. Now these are really great websites and their screening and tests are really difficult. First, they have like two or three interviews for each applicant and fastest title screen you on Skype, and then they ask you a lot of interview questions face-to-face. They are going to get your programming or design methodologies. Before applying to these websites, prepare good for the interview questions. I am going to share a lot of resources regarding these interview questions. I'm going to share a lot of interview questions Toptal asks to all the applicants for different positions. Make sure you check those links. This is all about different freelancing job websites. There are high paying websites, there are low competition and high competition websites. A wide, high competition in the start and also in the start of your career, you cannot go with Toptal or very high-paying freelance websites. Stick with small jobs. You can do them very quickly, like in half an hour. In this way, your time is not going to be wasted. So this is all. If I have more tips or more websites I'm going to share with you. Keep on checking the links. I'm going to create a very big file for all the websites I'm finding and they are really good. Keep checking all the links, all the interview question links and stay tuned, and if you have any questions, ask me. Let's move on to the next lesson. 26. Most popular Freelance Websites: Today I am going to review the most popular Freelance websites. The websites I'm going to review, I'm going to show you they're different membership plans. So how to onboard them, how to search jobs on these platforms. They are almost similar but each have their own benefits. The sites I'm going to review our peopleperhour.com, freelance.com, guru.com, and upwork.com. First I'm going to start with this upwork.com. Upwork.com Have a lot of jobs because recently elast.com and odesk they merged up to create this upwork. Previously it was odesk. First you are going to create a profile on it and they are going to verify a few things and also there is upwork readiness test. They are going to ask you things about the interface and where you are going to find your jobs, and a few other things. You can find the answers to those tests online. Try to such online upwork readiness test results or maybe answers, question answers, and you will find those. So you can easily pass the test. Once you have passed they test and you have created your profile, you can see here my profile is, let me show you my profile. Here's my profile. You can see over here, you can even place a video. This my overview, these are my skills listed over here also, here's my work history, availability, languages then we have phone verified and then here's the feedback from different previous work history. In the start you will not have any work history. This is my portfolio. The designs I have done, this is my certifications, Microsoft Certified Professional and we have these tests. These tests are free if you are very good in anything like WordPress, designing or maybe coding, try to give some tests. If you have good scores, these are really going to shine on your profile. You can see over here I have taken this test two times above average than I have dreamweaver CS the test dropped 30 percent. These tests of 20 percent, 30 percent they are really going to get your profile a boost. If you want to cheat the system, then I have found some websites where you can find all the answers to these questions. If you want to cheat the system, you can go ahead but I don't recommend because in this way, these are your own assessments that I am, that could in these areas. These tests are not ultimate assessment, but they have a lot of an even questions, but still it is a good major. These are other experiences. Create your profile, work on it, try to use a photo with a smiling face and few other things. This is how you are going to get on this website, all the other website, they have similar view you can see over here. It also has similarities like changing my, this is my overview title name. These are my locations and other things, payment verified and phone verified. These are my work samples these are very old, but I haven't worked on this side from last five or six years, I guess. These are all other certifications like you can see over here and these are my skills. The profiles on different websites are similar, so don't try to create your profile on 10 or 20 websites at the same time, I think you should try first two or three websites. One very crowded and few others which are not very crowded. Here we have jobs, If you want to go to find work, you can see as interface like that. You can search for jobs. You can type your keywords like UI design. You can view all the jobs that are related to this UI design. You can see this is expert UI/UX mobile designer and payment verified. This is experienced client, It has spent a lot from United States and these are the ratings. These on the left side there are filters and we can separate them like if I want only jobs, I can remove this check. Also, if we are entry level, I'm going to remove those experienced expert and intermediate levels and I am going to go just get the entry level jobs. Also, I can see my search, you can see over here they've saved you such as a job field. This guru.com, such jobs is also the same, you can see over here. It has budget, posted time, expire time. These are different skill categories , it is almost the same. You can find your jobs, filter down and see if suits you best. One thing I want to mention, over here few websites, even the Upwork, they have membership, freelance memberships, and there are different benefits for each membership. If you want to go ahead, you can upgrade to this plus plan, basic plan or starter plan. They have different features over here, You can list they have some limitations and some revolves applied to each of them. Be aware in the start of the career, I don't think you are going to get this membership, but maybe after doing 10 or 15 jobs, you can get done by this freelance membership. Coming to this website peopleperhour. It is also a very good website I think it's from United Kingdom, UK. It has also similar structure, experienced level, all jobs remote, design categories, filters, urgent, this is a good one, urgent. You can find a urgent jobs over here. It is a bit different from the other ones. You can see over here, you can send proposal to each of these jobs. I think you can post your hourlie. It is just like fiber kicks, but our best bit costly than that. Fiber kicks not more than $5, this is a good website. These are the big website. These are very crowded, you can find a lot of jobs over here, you can see like 302 jobs found for this one. If I click all the levels over here, let's see how many jobs I have. So I have almost more than 1,000 jobs on UI design. So this is a review for all the big websites, create your account, your profile, work on your profile, list your skills. If you have, clear some tests over here, this freelance have some tests you can see over here certifications although they charge for this certification, it is not free. As we are freelancers, we love free things a lot and we hate doing free work, so keep in mind. This is all my review for all these websites and if you have any questions, ask me and these are, tests. This time I just reviewed the most crowded and most popular freelance websites. Let's move on to the next lesson. 27. Gigs websites for Freelance Jobs: Today I'm going to review gigs website for freelancers. Gig websites means that you can post your gigs for very many small amount like $5, $3, and you can get jobs. It is easier to get jobs for small amount, it's human psychology that being in small amounts or small sections, we don't get much pay. It is easier for us to pay in small transactions like $5, $10. First website is this Fiverr, it is very popular. You can create your account. You can have multiple gigs over here, so make sure that you have multiple gigs in multiple categories. Get most of your exposure. Expose yourself as much as you can. Then we have this website, Croogster, it is similar to Fiverr. It also have a lot of gigs, you can see over here, and it also shows you gigs which are more than $5, you can see over here. This is how this website works. Then we have a similar website Gig Bucks, and it has a lot of categories, and it has a list view. I haven't tried it, but these are different options you can try. Then another one is this Task Army. I really like this one. I haven't tried it, but from the appearance, I think it have a lot of good options like you can see $10 per hour, you can also give your hourly rate over here. This is good because is not of fixed gig. This is one of them. Then we have this Fiver Up, it is also similar to Fiverr. I don't like its interface very much, but if you can get jobs from here, I think it's good for you. Then we have this zeerk.com. They have micro jobs from $5-$1,000. This is good in a sense that you can post your gigs which are more than $5, like you can see with a $50, $75, $100, $313, it is good. Then if you are in the SEO business, then you can go ahead and jab this site, seoclerks.com, and post jobs over here, they have a lot of jobs. You can see you can filter by price. This is seoclerks.com, then I have another website for a SEO work, this is Source Market. They provide backlinks, social signal, content creation, PBNs, I don't know much of these terms, key word research, YouTube SEO, site creation, a lot of different packages you can see over here in different prices. This is all for the gigs websites. Try to create your account on most popular two or three gigs website and see what is the response. It is good if you are in the beginning of your career, you should try these websites. Let's move on to the next lesson. 28. Design Competition Websites: Today I'm going to show you another way which I really don't recommend most of the time, but it is another way to get freelance jobs, which is sign up for different design competitions. These are the four websites I'm going to show you. One of them is this designhill another one is designcontest.com, third one is this crowdspring.com, designcrowd.com, and we have 99designs.com, this one, okay? This is the top one from my point. I have won like 7 8, I think competitions on this website, and the price is really high. If you win a single web-page design, you can win up to like $700, or sometimes 800 or $1000 for a single page. But your winning ratio is very slow. You cannot win, there are less chances, because of two or three factors. One is that a lot of designers are competing here, maybe if you are competing with like 70 or 72 designers, your chances are very low that you are going to succeed. Okay? The second thing is that if you are really awesome and you want to waste your time designing for these websites, or you want some competitions or award winning title in your profile. So if you want to add your profile, add in your profile that I've won ten competitions from 99designs.com or web design competitions or mobile app design competitions, you can go ahead. Personally, I think it is better to build site project rather than, competing on these websites. Okay? There are different categories; Art illustration, clothing merchandise, business advertisement, a lot of different competitions. So you can go ahead and try these competition websites, I'm going to share the link, so don't worry all the links to all those freelancing and job hunting websites I'm going to share with you. This is all about these websites, don't waste too much time, build a site project if you have, but if you are really for fun and you have a lot of time, you can go ahead and try out these websites. Okay? This is all about these competition website and getting jobs on these competition websites. Let's move on to the next lesson. 29. Finding Freelance Jobs on Craiglist: I have seen a lot of freelancers that are using Craigslist as a job hunting website. There are a lot of jobs posted on this. If in your country Craigslist is available, you can go ahead and search your jobs over here. Right now, I have opened this font, Phoenix, a city I guess. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to search for my tag, UI Designer, and press 'Enter'. You can see over here, this page pops up. I can go from here and choose the jobs. You can see how it is going to search all the jobs in this area. You can see UI/UX Designer, on-site, Graphic Designer Interactive, WordPress Web Designer. Also, there is a guy who is expert in doing jobs on Craigslist, so you can check out this article. I'm going to share the link for this article. There are a lot of tips on what you are going to search and how you are going to search like 'telecommute', it means that you are remote and you are going to do some remote job over here. 'internship', 'non-profits', so there are different filters over here. Also, he said that you should not apply on jobs with a lot of dollar signs. So it is a bit spammy, so a wide spammy titles. This is how you select your area. Let's search some jobs in New York City. Craigslist.org and I'm going to search some jobs, UI Designer. Let's search some jobs over here. Go for Jobs, and it's going to list a lot of jobs over here. We have like 10 maybe 15 jobs over here. This is how you find, you can click over here, 'telecommute', and you can see I have one job where I can remotely work over here. So if you are based in New York City, then I think it's not a very big problem, you can go ahead and go to that website or, sorry, that company site or that job location and do that job over there. This is how you are going to find jobs; freelance jobs, or permanent jobs, or contract based jobs, or internship on Craigslist. This is all about Craigslist, so let's move on to the next lesson. 30. Job Boards for Freelance Jobs: Now I'm going to talk about few job boards. So job boards are basically in job listing services on different websites, and there are multiple design websites where designers works are posted like Dribbble and Behance and this Krop designer portfolio profile website. You can find a lot of jobs over here. I'm going to also share a lot of other websites, so they are like seven eight websites. So first off, this Krop, this is basically designers portfolio website. You can start your free trial over here. You can see at the bottom you can see a lot of jobs, production artist (temporary), freelance art director, six to eight weeks, they're going to pay you this much. You work such a UX/UI designer. A lot of designer jobs, freelance. You can see over here freelance jobs also, you might find a very good client over here. They are good paying also. These are the benefits of these job boards. Then I'm going to show you this another one job of design week.co.uk. They also have a lot of design jobs posted over here in different categories. You can see over here there are a lot of jobs from different companies. These are a few more options and lets move on to the next one. This is called We Work Remotely.com and I think they have a lot of different jobs, mostly technical support, customer support jobs. They also have programming jobs, you can see over here. Design jobs, product designer team up. Then we have very popular design websites like Behance and Dribbble and there are a lot of jobs posted over here. You can see at the top jobs, all remote, hiring, team hiring. If you are a very good designer and you have a portfolio on Dribbble, you can go ahead and go from here. Also, you can get some jobs over on this Behance. I think they will be looking for very high-end designers, but still, you can apply, you can try your luck over here. Then this website WiredSussex, I think it's mostly UK jobs. I don't know, but you can see over here projects boards, digital and media jobs, events and training. These are all the jobs over here. You can click view all jobs and go to all the jobs and you can see they have a lot of categories and different jobs in all these categories. Now this one is Aquent and this is also a job board. You can see over here they have a lot of jobs in different areas, in different countries. So assistant technical designer, client manager. The benefit of these job boards is that you can apply on a good jobs. You will get good money, you will get paid on time, and you can get a lot of good relations with your clients. Another one is this collegerecruiter.com, I think they normally recruit college students or the students who want some internship, maybe. I'm not sure, but you can go ahead and browse this site, try it out. If you find any more job related boards, keep me posted and if you have any questions, ask me. Let's move on to the next lesson. 31. Jobs at startup: Today, I am going to discuss one other way of getting good freelance jobs. These can be permanent jobs or you can get signed up as a team member of that company or organization. This is basically jobs with a lot of new start-ups coming up. The first website I'm going to show you is this angel.co. AngelList it is called basically. You can see over here you can browse a lot of jobs like I have tagged over here, UI/UX designer and remote. I want a remote job. You can see I am seeing a lot of companies like Quiver, mobile UI/UX designer they need. What they're going to pay me in this one equity share, I guess. I'm not aware of much of these terms, but this is how you can find a very good job while networking with different other companies. Sometimes they just make you a team member and they don't pay you anything. If you are building a side project, you can also do that over here. Find the jobs you like over here, filter down. There is a very good filter. You can see compensation, company, size, keywords. Job type, full-time, contract, internship. There are 566 start-ups that are looking for UI/UX designer. This is really good. You can get ahead and sign-up over here and try to find jobs that are closer to you. You can also enter location over here, if I add Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or United States over here, it is going to show me the jobs for that location. This is one of them, then another one I'm going to show you this F6S. It is also a very good website for start ups and searching your jobs. Let's add this and see what it is going to get us. I have got a lot of jobs over here like User Experience Design Lead in New York and a lot of other jobs on different scales. This is one other you can apply for jobs. Create your account over here F6S. I have my account on AngelList, I haven't tried all these. But you can go ahead and try these. They have a lot of jobs, you can see over here, this one have even more jobs. Now, the third one I'm going to show you is hasjob.co. Normally it is good for programmers. They have a lot of jobs for programmers. I just see one of them for a designer over here. The main thing about this website is that it is mostly, most jobs are from India. You can see over here, Bangalore, Bangalore, anywhere, Pune, Mumbai. If you're Indian or you want to do some job for these companies, Indian companies, you can go ahead and select your location over here. You can see they're are different Indian nations and there are few jobs from London, and Sydney, and Taipei. Also from Tokyo. Mostly they are Indian jobs than there are a few other cities. Then we have the Start-up Jobs. This is, as the name suggests, it is for the startup jobs. You can get jobs from different startups, product design, visual design. The company logo and the jobs they are looking for. If I just click on this visual design. Strategic design background and they are looking for three plus years of experience, an online portfolio, bachelor degree. You can apply over here for this job. It's in Bangkok Thailand and it's full-time. The company name is or Agoda. If you want to go to this profile, you can go what this company is about before interviewing and getting to these jobs. I always search for these companies, learn what their environment is, what they are doing. Who is the founder? How many employees? Always prepare yourself before going to any, applying to any job. These are four websites I'm going to share with you guys and I think this is all about searching jobs in the new startups. Now, let's move on to the next lesson. 32. Small Tasks Freelance Websites: Now, I'm going to talk about few of the micro job work sites where you can find very small jobs and for a very small price, like maybe in cents or maybe in $0.5 or something like that. Okay? These are three websites I found. You might find other ones, but I really like this Amazon Mechanical Turk. You can see you have a lot of options, you can work from home, choose your hours or whatever. They have very small jobs. I don't know, I haven't used it. So if you are really desperate and don't have any big skill, you can go ahead and try these websites. Okay? But, I never recommend that you waste your time clicking on different surveys and filling out forms. I personally think that you should go for a good freelance career, try to build some good skill-set where your interest lies. Okay? So if you have an interest in designing or developing, or just managing something, if you are good at managing something or you are a very good virtual assistant, you can go ahead and train yourself, get skills. Okay? You can check out my other courses on UI design. I basically teach UI Design on Udemy. So, if you don't have any skills, you can go and take those courses, or any other courses you like. Okay? Try to build your career by getting good skills. The next is this [inaudible]. You are going to play games, bingo, and surveys, fill out surveys to get the money. Okay? This one I really like microWorkers. I went to microworkers.com, and I signed up just to see what they're offering, and you can see they're offering a lot of jobs like testing, surveys, signing up their mobile apps, okay? Write a review, write an Article, Download-Install, Forums , Yahoo Answers, so a lot of things. They are offering different rates. You can see over here $0.53 iOS app testing. Then they have all these different jobs. Mostly, I am seeing app testing jobs these are very small jobs, if you are a student or don't have much skill, you can go to these websites and start doing some work over here. Okay? This is all about small tasks and microwork or microtasks websites. There's one more website, taskrabbit.com. It is not opening in my country right now but I think it's open in USA. It's a US website, I guess, or maybe some other countries are included in that website. You can see over here this is taskrabbit.com, and you can see, login, become a Tasker, how to work, how it works. It is also a good one. Okay, so this is all about small task websites for freelancers. Let's get ahead and see some more websites. Let's move on to the next lesson. 33. Cheating the Freelance System: In every freelancer life, there is a time when you need to cheat the freelance system. No why do we need that? Let me just explain this with an example. It happened with me. So I'm going to show you my own example. Okay, now, here is my Upwork Freelance profile. Everything looks great. My hourly rate, my skills, my overview, availability, work history, everything looks great. Even you can see most of the clients. I think 98 percent of the clients have given me five-star rating. So five-star over here, five-star, then five-star. So in almost, I think 98 percent of the job I have achieved five-stars. So previously, Upwork have a rating with stars rating okay. So whatever the client rates over here is reflected on this side of the profile. Now recently they have changed this weird rating and added something new, which is called this, 'Job Success score.' Now this job success score rating is very weird. I don't know how they have calculated me. I had some clients who hired me, kept me hired for like one year without any work because they wanted to avoid re hiring again and again are finding me again and again. They just kept the contract running. Okay, so that gave me some negative rating. Now my job success score is 68 percent, although I have all my jobs with five-star rating. So this is really weird. So it should not have something like two or three ratings or things to be calculated over here. So most of the jobs now I see they have something checked like this. So this is really weird. It happened with a lot of old Upwork freelancers. Like me and I have seen a few others who had the 4.9 rating and now their job success score is 82 or 83 percent. So they don't qualify this job success score. Now, the solution, if you are entangled with such a problem and you cannot solve it, and then you can do one thing. Which is that we are going to have multiple freelance profiles with different names. You can use your brother's name, your mother's name, your father's name, and use that profile to get the things done. So if your one profile is messed up, you can go ahead and start creating more profiles. So this happens a lot of time when some angry client or some bad mouth client, he just stabs you in the back and give you a very bad rating. I don't know, sometime it's transparent. Sometime it's at the back end of that freelance system. To avoid that in the first place, I'm going to give you two tips. Number one, is that never get angry with your clients. Keep cool and always try to refund to your client to avoid bad ratings. If they threaten you like, "I don't like your work or you have wasted my 10 hours." Then give them like 90 percent of the refund, okay? So they will be happy that they got the money. So it happens a lot of time. So this is two or three tricks I have given you. Use multiple freelance profile. This is the best cheat. I have seen few freelancers using it. I haven't used it much because I have clients outside of these freelance websites. So they are my loyal clients, so I always work with them. Now coming to the cheat number two. Cheat number two is that sometimes these multiple profiles can help you get out of the competition. So what I have seen few freelancers, my friends, they are doing, they basically trick the system by applying with multiple profiles to a single job application. So I have a single job application. Let me show you. For example, I have this single job application, top skilled web designer with UX UI. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to apply over here with this profile then I'm going to log out and log in. Or maybe use my other browser where I have logged in with another profile and I am going to apply the same job with some other rate. Maybe I apply $50 on this website and with this profile, using this profile and on the next one I'm going to use maybe $20. So just to check the client's mind. So this can really improve your chances of getting that job. So higher chances of getting that job. Now, I don't recommend that you use these cheap tricks unless you are really hopeless. One more thing is that on Upwork or maybe other freelance websites, you can create two accounts. One is a freelance account and other is an agency account. So you can create your design agency or coding agency. You can apply from those profiles. So you can already have two profiles but still if you have to get dirty and get some cheating applied to this freelance system, you can have multiple profiles. So this is all about solving freelance problems. So keep me updated if you like my trick or this cheap, dirty tricks and ask questions. I would love to hear them and answer them. Okay, so let's move on to the next lesson. 34. Invoicing Apps for Freelancers: Today I am going to discuss about invoicing and the apps a lot of freelancers use in their daily work regarding sending their invoices to their clients. This is very important, after every project you are going to complete you need to send invoices to your clients. There are a lot of different free apps and some paid one I'm going to review today. The first one is PayPal. Now via PayPal is mandate because a lot of clients already have their accounts in PayPal and they really trust this, so it is very popular. Create account, in your country if there is no PayPal I'm going to show. In the PayPal when you've logged in you can see here we have a button, "Pay or send money", you can click on it. Or you can go to this "Send & Request" money and you can create invoice from within the PayPal. So "Create invoice" I have already sent hundreds of times, invoices from this invoice management system of PayPal. You can also copy already sent invoice. If I have an invoice I have sent I can just copy it and start from here. This is really easy to create invoice. You can add a lot of things like descriptions, your items, and you can see over here, invoice numbers, e-mail of your business, client, client's e-mail. Then you can see over here, I have this Landing page design, Charge over here. Here I have Stock image purchased. If you want to send some note to the client you can send it over here. This is one way. The second app I really like is this one hellobonsai.com, and I think it is one of the best, very straightforward and it is built by freelance community, and I think it is free for everyone. I can even create different contracts, I can create projects and it can create very professional you can see over here I have created one dummy contract with Google over here, and you can see it has created very great content and contract. I think everything is really legal about it, so very easy. You can see over here my signatures, and the other party I can send this contract so they can sign over here. As soon as I create a contract it is going to create two invoices. You can see over here I have one payment $300 that is going to be paid before work begins so it is going to create one for this $300 and the rest for $600. This is very easy. Also, it's integration with different, let me show you it's "Settings". You can see over here, "Payments" integrations are great. You can see it can integrate it with your PayPal, with Stripe and Coinbase for sending bitcoins I guess. I don't understand this "Integrations." But I think you can integrate it with Zapier which is very popular among developers. This is all about this hellobonsai.com and I really love it. The second one is this Invoicely.com and right now I'm in the dashboard. Now the thing I love about this Invoicely app is that it can create two types of invoices. For example I am creating or maintaining my clients WordPress website on a monthly charge. I want a recurring invoice sent to him every month, after every 30 days of $50 or $100, so I can create a "Recurring Invoice" over here. Also you can create simple "Invoice." The fields and automatic filling of this I really love this how it is laid out. You can see over here "From", and here you can insert your logo, and a lot of things. I think these are very easy. Every field is really unique and laid out easily so I know that I'm typing over here. It is really nice. Also it can create "Bills." I don't know what they are for but I think they mean urgent payment in terms of finance. "Estimates" and "Track" are basically for paid members so you need to purchase it for $10 per month to get this feature on. Also you can add some clients over here if you want to. This is all about this Invoicely I think it is good for invoices and recurring invoices and it's free. I really love the apps where we have free accounts. Then I am going to discuss this waveapps.com and I have heard very good things from few freelancers about this, so a lot of people are using it. The features it has are almost similar to this Invoicely, and I think also this Invoicing window or lets say interface is good. They are also similar between apps. I think it's almost similar to that one. "Bills" are also the same. I don't know what are the "Receipts" for, "Accounting", "Reports" and "Payroll". I think it's a bit bigger if you are managing a team. You can issue their payroll and other things, so it is good for freelancers or freelance agencies I guess. But I think this bonsai is very straightforward and this Invoicely is very straightforward. It is a bit bigger app, Wave, it is slowing down my browser I don't know why. Next up is invoice.to. It is very simple, very free, it is already a template you just need to click and fill, different items over here. I really love it very simple, very straight forward it has no other options, so you just need to connect with Stripe. You can create a Stripe account with your bank, you need a bank account. In the USA you can easily do it as Stripe is good and reliable. The best thing is, that this invoicing is free. Now next up is FreshBooks. Freshbooks is free for 30 days and it has also very good dashboard items like "Invoices", "Clients", 'Expenses', "Projects", "Time Tracking". I really love their options. These options are very close to the freelancer's needs and I really like this navigation. Also it's invoices and other things they are good. You can create a new invoice over here. You can see over here how this is laid out, very nice, and very easy to grab different portions. You can see over here "Add a Client." It's very easy to use it and it's a paid options, so I am going to keep it at the end. Other options is that you just need a template. You can download templates from squareup.com/invoices/invoice-templates. I'm going to give you all the links at the end of this lecture, in the next lecture you can see all the links. You can download any.doc or xls format invoices and go from there. Now the next up is invoicing templates from Microsoft Office. You can see over here they are 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, you can use any of them. Now I'm going to show you my invoicing template I created myself. This one and it is very simple very easy I am going to include this in the links too so you can download and use it. Invoice for this number, date and Invoice for what I've done description. Then there is a description for each item I'm using or charging for, then there is Total charges. When you write at the end of the Total charges you should tell the client that these are going to be excluding your money transfer charges or taxes or everything. The client is going to bear all the charges. Then we have over here which I always write because we are freelancers we are remote, we might be in another country, so you can use two options, which I'm going to show you at the end this one payoneer.com. I also use this PayPal logo so the client instantly know that this is my PayPal e-mail. I add 0.3 percent or 3 percent PayPal deductions on every transaction. These are my signatures at the end. I think we don't need it but still I use them over here so client knows that it is from me. This is one other you can see over here I have more items. Where I have free item I have made it bold so client knows that he got this for free. It makes some good impression on the client, so it's a secret. Keep in mind this step and this is all. Now I'm going to discuss a website or paying service which is called Payoneer. It is for the people who don't have a PayPal account and can't create a PayPal account. You can get payment from here. You can create "Global Payment Services" where you can have different US bank accounts you can see over here. You can transfer with ACH US bank transfers. They can transfer here and you will get it in your card. This Payoneer sends you a Visa or debit card and you can use that in your own country, and it will be linked to this virtual account. These are virtual bank accounts not, real bank accounts. Sometimes if your client is having a problem just give them your international bank account number, I-BAN number and they can set up a wire transfer. This is another option. Rather than giving them PayPal or some other option, just give them your international account and they can transfer there. Make sure you have good payment maybe $1000 or more than $1000 because, setting up a wire transfer is going to cost at least $30-$40 to your client. These are all the options I have showed you for invoicing and sending invoices to your clients. Keep me updated about it if you like something or don't like something. Ask questions and this is all about invoicing and invoicing templates. Let's move on. 35. Time Tracking Apps for Freelancer: Hello freelancers, today I am going to talk about the best time tracking apps for freelancers. I have tested a lot of them, more than 10 apps and I have finalized two of them, which are very great in terms of their packages. Some of them are free pricing and some of them can be installed on all the platforms like Windows, OSX or Linux. The third feature I look for is the integration. If your clients are working with some Trello board or base camp project, you can integrate those in your freelancing time tracking app. The first one I'm going to review is this stopped all app. I think it is one of the best top tracker. Let me show you a tracker. Here it is, it is a desktop app. You can create project or you can select a project over here. You can see it is already over here. It is the project I created. Then you can also add the offline hours if you haven't worked. If you forgot to add some time, you can add it over here, then you can like one hour. This is the description. Let me add some description and submit and it can show that it has already added. It has some preferences you can set, you can login and logout. You can start your tracker at some description. It is really great, very simple, very elegant and just does the thing which it is supposed to be doing. Here it is. Let me show you the dashboard. If you log on, you can see you have different timeline over here, your projects, your time, your description of those projects. Let me refresh so that I can see my time over here. I have added some time over here. You can create new projects, and there are reports, time reports. You can see over here how I have worked. You can export it to PDF thus you can send it to your clients. It has a good interface; very nice, very simple, very straightforward. The second one is the time tracker from Upwork desktop app. You can see over here if you have created a profile on Upwork.com, you should go to this My jobs and you can see your contracts over here. If you have already a contract right now, I don't, I'm not working on Upwork, so I don't have any contracts. Download your Upwork desktop app and install it. Once you log in, you will see basically two windows, one is this time tracker, and second is the message. You can directly message or clients. You can see over here, I have different conversations with my clients over here, even I can attach files. Here is basically the time tracker. You need to select a contact from here and you should start tracking your time over here. Right now I don't have any contracts, so it is not giving me any option. If you close this window, you can open it up from here. It is really nice. These two are, I think the top ones. I haven't worked on Freelancer.com or Google.com. I don't know whether they have good trackers or not, but you can try them out if you have. The third one is timelyapp.com. I tried using it and I think from a user experience point of view it is just okay, not too great. We can add time over here. This is our description. I can start the timer from here, I can add the timer from here, or I can stop it, update it, drag it like that. It is really a nice feature to add my hours like one or two hours. I have set my rate in the settings for my hourly rate. One more feature I forgot about it is that it can be integrated with a lot of apps. It will track your apps and time you are using it like Gmail, Google Calendar, Moves app, Rescue Time, GIT Hub, wake time, Trello and others. These are two project management tools, Trello and Asana. It can also track your time with the Google Calendar, your whole schedule or something. It can grab it. I think it's good, but just for the freelancers. Let's see. It is giving me some introduction to the screen. This is how its time sheet is appearing. Go to reports to generate the time reports, and you can export them. It has two options in Excel and PDF format. I think it's good because it has the Mac app and iPhone app, I think for windows, it doesn't have any app. You can use it on the web and it has good integrations. Apply it or integrate it with other apps, like I have showed you before. You can add projects, you can add users. I think their navigation is straightforward, good app. The second best from my point of view. Then we have this toggle and I am using it from some time as trial. You can see over here I have added few tasks over here and you can see here we have the summary reports. Very nice presentation. You can export it in PDF and CSV. This is for the premium accounts. It just record your time, I think it doesn't show me the billable time for my free account, so if you are looking for free, this is not an option for you. It also have a desktop app. You can see over here. This is toggled desktop. I can add a time. I can add description, select my project from here, like this one is my project, and I can also add manual time, or I can add some description and play it and it is going to record my time 3, 2, 1. It is going to record my time. It is not showing me any update over here and it keep on adding this. It has some problems. I don't like its desktop app much, but it has some issues. You can also use this manual mode, I think I should stop it. So start it and you can use it like this timer. I think I will give it just maybe 70-80 percent marks, good app but not recommended. Then this one is primaERP time tracking and from my point of view, it is really cumbersome. It's UX had a lot of items on it and for the first time I was just caught confused where how many things it presents me at a time. So very complex for me. I don't know, maybe it works for a very large teams, but for me I think it is really strange, don't have nice presentation. Try it out if you want but I don't recommend it using it. Then this one, it is very popular Harvest app. It has a lot of things like invoices and I really like it's invoicing feature. It is really great. Here, I have added some time. You can see over here is my client name and few other things. Harvest app is really great if you are trying to create a new account. Their user onboarding is great and I think their top navigation is good. You can add projects and you can see the reports. You can create invoices like that. I have one draft invoice, you can see if I try to click it, you can see over here, I added my photo on the logo. But you can add logo customization and a lot of things like texts, values and you can attach a file to the invoice. Also, you can give discounts. Let me edit this invoice. The invoicing feature is great. The next lecture will be about invoicing apps and I will discuss this in that portion. For now on their time management is okay. I think from my point of view, I don't know much about their integration, I think it can connect to QuickBooks, also to zero. These are two, I think, accounting softwares. These are the two integration it can have and if we go to manage, let's see what we have. We can add new people over here, like employees or I don't know maybe some other roles. So department, regular user, project manager, administrator. I think it is good for Big Teams and if you are really going after creating invoices for your clients, I think this one is good, but it is, again limited trial. It is not free. Another one I have tried is the tickspot.com. Their onboarding and everything is good. Their timesheets and project management is also very good. You can see here I have two tasks which I have started and this is my project, and this is my company. If I go to projects, you can see very nice, it is just good for timesheets. Also I think it can be integrated to different apps. If you install their Chrome Web Store app. So you can also use it on iOS and Android, Apple Watch, and Mac App. Also, I think they can be connected to Zapier and QuickBooks and FreshBooks, Basecamp. It have a lot of good options. I'm not sure, I don't remember right now and I'm going to check out. It also have 30 day free trial, it is not going to be free for freelancers. Let me go back. This is my Toggl timer and let's shut it out. Tick is good and it has good integrations. If your company or the manager you are working with have QuickBooks or FreshBooks, or they're working with Basecamp, you can use this one. The other one I tried is the Hubstaff and I think for me it was for Big Teams and not good for freelancers. If you want to try it, you can try it. Here it is their desktop app. It really sucks, it cannot log any manual time over here, just our stop and start timer, that's it. I really don't like this Hubstaff. They have good options over here, very big web app, but for me I think it is not very good. For bigger organization or bigger Teams, I think it might be an option, but I don't recommend using it, a bit complex for my taste. Then this one TMetric. This is a new app I came across and I think it really works very nice. The only thing, the problem I see over here is onboarding and a few things I don't really understand why these clients and projects is hiding under the settings. If I need to add a new client or project, I need to go to the settings. This is really bad UX. When I tried to use it for some time, I was very confused, where are my clients or where I need to put the new project or where to start the new project. When I logged in, I just saw this timesheet. This is really bad user experience from my point of view. Only thing best about it, is that it's free. Also, it can be integrated with Trello. You can see over here Asana, Assembla, GitLab and GitHub Time Tracking, JIRA Time Tracking, Pivotal Tracker, Visual Studio Online Time Tracker, YouTrack Time Tracker. Also I think it has some browser extensions like I have installed over here, which you need for these integrations to work. It is really nice, really good. They have also have desktop App. I'm using it right now, let me show you where it is. You can start timer from here, like this. It doesn't have many functions, but it's just can start timer from your desktop. That's it and it shows this number of tasks you are doing. The last app I am going to introduce is this free app, Grindstone. I used it for some time with some clients. It just have a desktop app like this one, let me show you. Now, it has a lot of good options. Like in the options, you can set your hourly rate and few other things. Also you can see it can show create reports and let me see where, what are the fields. You can go to this rates and add different rates for different projects, or may be fixed rates for different tasks. Then you can create tasks from here and you can name them, estimate the time when they are due, completed or not. You can select a rate from here like this and it will be applied automatically like lending. I just need to start the timer and I can hide this one, and this one will be at the top of my screen. I can stop it and it can also detect idle time, if I move out from my chair, it will stop the timer after five or ten minutes, I guess. It is really great, I have used it many times. The thing I like about these reports, you can generate different reports, you can save them as a PNG, JPEG. Also, you can generate this summary, like that time sheets summary, and you can save it with CSV file, XLSX Excel workbook. It has good options. I'm not sure whether it is available for Mac or not, but it can generate time and timesheets and everything. I think this lesson is already very long. Actually, it took a lot of time for me to test out all these apps. Stay tuned and let me know if you like any app or you used any app. Let's move on to the next lesson. 36. Time Tracking Apps → MAC only: Hello guys, today I'm going to review some of the best Mac-only apps for freelancers and what these apps do, they are basically time tracking apps. I have tried a lot, like four or five different apps on reading different articles and searching online and recommended by other freelancers. But I think only two of them really worked for me. All of them are just okay so I will start with this app T-Y-M-E, TYME. It is really easy to use and it can export in different formats your timesheets. Now, the second one I really like is this one, Chrono plus time tracker and timesheet with billing, invoicing, and reporting. The cool thing about this app is that it also exports your timesheet and it also creates invoicing, which is really cool. It creates invoice in basically Microsoft Excel format. Let me show you both these apps, the other one I tried is this one billing pro. Billing pro, you can see over here by market circle and I really don't like it. It had a lot of controls and lot of options. If you really want to go with the bigger app or a lot of controls. Basically, I don't like too many controls to deal with, the main thing I really like about apps is that it can create some projects, some task in those projects, they can track time for all those tasks and create time sheet or an invoice according to that time spent on each task or project. I think these two billing pro and one under this one clock, it really failed mean they had a lot of options to toggle with. I don't like wasting too much time with all these options. Now if you don't have Microsoft Office, the other alternative for opening your invoices is this liberty office, it's a free software and you can download it from here. Now, let me show you one by one, both apps, now the first one is this time, and I really loved its presentation. This colored one purple, this blue one, and this yellow one. These are basically my projects and the next line you can see over here, PSD to HTML is that task in that project. I have three categories, this top one is basically category, then project, then task so you can right-click and add category, add project and once the project is added, you can add a task over here like that. Let's name it, landing page revision, you can set your hourly rate and plan time, time rounding, bilevel and you can see over here, we have two tasks. Now you can play this task and record this task and start working on that task, and you can then pause it when you like to. Now, let me pause this one, it has other views like you can see over here, this timesheet. You can see billed and other, I really like its presentation. Then we have a working draft view on how much, how many hours I have worked on the task. Small design, small graphic has seven hours, nine hours, 48 I think it is showing me it is closer to 952. I don't understand whether these are number of hours or the time being shown. Now the cool thing about is that you can export it in different formats, like PDF, CSV, CSV for Windows, HTML, JSON database backup. I'd really like the HTML view also you can export it in PDF and send it to your client. Now, what is the benefit for sending these timesheets? Actually, it gives the impression of professionalism to your client. If you are doing very small task like a small graphic added, you don't need to record your time. Just send them that. It costs you $20 or $25, but if you are doing a very large project, maybe it takes you one month to do it, then I think you should use some app like that. Also, it will help to estimate in the future that how much time did that WordPress team took? Now you can select all these projects over here, I'm pressing Shift and Click and you can export it in different formats. Like now I'm exporting it in HTML, replaced and I'm going to go to my documents and you can see over here, it has generated a very nice timesheet with all the reads and total cost. This is very nice, the second app I really like is this Chrono Plus and you can see over here, the only thing I don't like is these icons. I don't really understand what is this? This is basically a project and this is basically a task. If you click on it, it will create a new project and if you click on it, it will create a new task. Then you can click on it and start this button and it will keep on recording your task time. I think it can also set your our hourly rate. You can see over here five minutes Idle timeout. If you leave this app for five minutes and leave your computer idle for five minutes, it will stop recording. If you want to show settings are not. This is all about this Chrono app. Chrono plus and I really like it. The cool thing about it is, it exports and creates a very nice invoice but it is. I just accidentally closed it now I can create an invoice if I go to this ,and this is how it shows me the graph and if you click on this Create invoice, it is going to create an invoice in Excel format. You can see over here and you can press save, and this invoice will be saved. Right now I don't have office or anything installed on it, so I cannot show you the invoice, but I really like it. It's limited functionality and I think a normal freelancer don't need too many functions. I think that these functions are more than enough for a basic freelancer if you are working in a very large team or very large organization, which outsource and highest multiple and the freelancers then they might suggest to you their own software. That's it about it, let's move on to the next lesson. 37. Video Conferencing Tools for Freelancers: Now, listen closely. Sometimes you need to meet your client face-to-face. So video conferencing, build your trust with your client, and maybe if they have a team of three or four people, managers, or they're other development team, or the other product managers, and you want to convey your message and you need to get your message across, you should be using video conferencing tools. So I'm going to discuss few of them. The first tool I'm going to review is this zoom.us and I will be using it. It is free for first 50 members. So up to 50 participants, you can share your screens, and even your cameras, and you can talk to each other. This is very good conference room and up to 50. It is the best. I have used it. You can go to its plans and you can see over here up to 50 participants. Its personal meeting free and 40-minute limit on group meeting. So 40 minutes are more than enough. So this is one of the best options. Then, I have used WebEx. Once I was doing a project with a team from USA, their whole team, five or six people or even from my country in another city. Totally, we were like nine or 10 people talking at the same time on this Cisco WebEx. It's a bit pricey, but a lot of companies use it. Maybe the bigger ones or maybe big software houses, they use it. Third option is this Google Hangout. If you want to call, you can use this free. You can use Google Hangout to get in touch with them and show your face and call them face-to-face. So top option is Zoom, then Google Hangouts. Then, you can try this WebEx and this Bitrix. So Bitrix is a very big tool. It is for companies. It is not good for very small or maybe start-up companies. You can see tasks and projects shared, video, documents, drive. A lot of options. So I personally don't like all-in-one solutions because they have a lot of extra options to bother you. You cannot use the main feature you are looking for. So if you want to try it, you can try it. The best one is this Zoom, then Google Hangouts. If you want to try this one, you can this one. I also found this one. I don't know how it is. So I would not recommend it, so let's stick with these four. So best options are these two. If you see another one, let me know. But, I have searched a lot online for this and most of the time I found this Zoom the best. Their audio and video quality is great and it is seamless, so this also counts a lot. That's all about video meeting with your clients, so this can build trust and it can also show that you are a real person. Clients and people, they are in problem and they need solutions, and they need solutions from real human beings, not chatbots. So mostly if you try to click this "Help" or these icons on most of the sites, I don't really trust them because I know that this might be an automated program and it's not a human being. So let's move on to the next lesson. 38. Collaboration Apps for Freelancers: Today we are going to talk about collaboration tools for freelancers and how you are going to show your project's progress with your client, how to share your ideas with your clients. I'm going to show you a lot of great tools online available and I'm also going to show you some methods I normally use. Now, the first tool I really love about it is Asana and it is a task-based project management tool and you can have 15 team members on a free account and I think it's premium account is also very cheap. Now, the great thing about it is, the onboarding is very easy, the navigation is very easy, dashboard, inbox, my tasks, list, calendar, and files view. You can see over here, I have used it today for the first time and I didn't get any problem using it. I think their interface and their user experience is great. I really recommend if you are doing a project that is going to take like one month, I think it is good that you keep your client updated. Add them, invite them over here, create a free account on Asana, and you can also manage your daily tasks with it. You can have team conversations, team calendar, you can add project from [inaudible] , you can see at the bottom I've added the project over here. You can invite people from here, once you have created your project, you can go to the project and you can see here is my view. You can add tasks and sections containing different tasks. Then you can change the view with conversation, calendar, you can see over here, I have signed the task to myself and it is giving me that on 13th, I have to deliver the design hierarchy and color scheme. On 20th I am going to add basically out and form into place. This is how it is going to be viewed by my client and if I take them that I have done this step and this one here will be updated that I have completed all these things. This is how it is going to be showing my progress. Also, you can see all the files, if I am designing or [inaudible] on our design, you can see all the files or attachments I have. I really like its view. If you click on any of the tasks, you can see that in the last lecture, I showed you some timers and time tracking apps and one of them was this team metric and you can see it is right now showing me over here. Also, I can tag it and you can see over here I can comment on it, write comments. You can see over here, Charlie is selected over here. Also, I can attach files. I can love this or something like that. I can assign dates over here and I can delete this task. Others are hidden over here, so very intuitive and very easy to use interface and I really give it a go. It is the best app, you should try using it. Now what these apps give you, they give you an edge that your client thinks that you are really professional freelancer and not just a freelancer. This is the tape. You need to make your client feel professional that he is using or dealing with a great guy and awesome freelancer and really stealthy ninja freelancer. Now the second tool I'm going to share with you is this one. This is really great, I just discovered it a few years ago and it is called RealtimeBoard.com, and I think it is great for a lot of tasks. It has a lot of templates. You can see I have loaded one of them, it is called basically RealtimeBoard. You can share and your ideas, your images, you can see over here, I can insert a lot of things via URL. I can capture images, I can upload images, I can share my Google Drive Dropbox. So this is really great. I can even upload or show my views over here. You can create wireframes, you can create a visual design, you can create your storyboards, you can create your customer journey maps or whatever, you can iterate your ideas, show and get your thoughts, thoughts of your client and really get going with this ideation and prototyping tool. I really love it, it is one of the best for ideation and getting thoughts of your client's mind and see what is going on in your client's head. Now the third one I'm going to discuss, again, one of the best basecamp.com, it is also a project management or a collaboration tool and I think I should give it again 100 percent. It is one of the best, its user experience, even onboarding experience was created. You can talk to your clients and talk to a team, you can have both, you can see both over here. Now this is my dummy project. If I change to another project, it will be something else, so I haven't added anyone other than me. It is [inaudible] from here. Now Camp Fire is basically each ad over here than they have message boards, discussion on topics, To-dos are activities. Automatic check-ins what we have done today or whatever is going on. This is my schedule. Documents and files I have uploaded with all my to-dos and tasks are going to be over here. If I click over here, you can see it is showing me that create a new list. This is very nice. My project name is over here, and this is, for a client's name. This one and this one are better than this Trello. Basecamp and Asana are really great, also RealtimeBoard is great for ideation and sharing your ideas and getting ideas from your clients and all this automization. Now, Trello is also very popular, but the main problem I see in it is that it shows you different boards. You can create different boards for each project, like you can see over here, I have created one project and I have added three cards over here. You can see there are tasks in each card. For me, I have used is two times still. Sometimes I feel it very difficult task to upload my files over here. You can see in this area there is no signifier or affordance. That it can upload your attach or file. If I click over here, then I can see that you can add commands and you can attach your file. There are other things like add members, labels, checklist, due date, attachment, start timer. All these things are hidden from me. But you can see over here, things are not hidden from me. If I click any task, you can see attachment that everything is clearly seen even the due date. This is also one of the options, if you want to go with it, you can go with it. You can see over here, I've used it with one of my projects, WordPress projects. You can see my client. She used to see the designs over here and she never commented on any of these. She always sends me comments via e-mail. I think she didn't figure out how to use this. I will give it 80 percent marks, it is not 100 percent good, but not good enough. It is not easier, maybe for my clients to use it. One more new app that is coming is Dropbox Paper. It is also collaboration tool. I have not used it. It is in beta right now. You can see they can post videos, to-dos, even coding codes, tasks. You can see you can embed and a lot of new features, but I haven't checked it out. You can check it out if you want. Right now, I don't think it is better than this Asana and this Basecamp or this one RealtimeBoard. One other, which I have seen online a lot of time, ProofHub.com. For me I have used it. I have created my dummy account. You can see over here. For me, there is no visual cue or heading that this thing, whatever this thing is doing or what are these 001s? I don't understand most of the things. Although it is similar, looking like this Base Camp. But for me I think it's a bit difficult maybe for a very large teams this is good, it have Gantt charts, calendars, notes, files, time, discussions, overview. So a lot of options over here. It might be good for very large team, but not for freelancers or small teams. Now the best tool I use a lot, even I use it daily in my work is this Jing. A lot of people don't know about it. What I do, first step in my project, that I let my client install Jing on their PC or Mac. It's free. It is going to be like this and you can capture anything like that. If I take a screenshot over here and I can add arrows like "Change this heading" or maybe some boxes around few things like that. Something like this. I can also change few colors. This is really great. You can pinpoint a lot of areas. It is one of the best tool I use for my design reviews. When my clients have to change something or change the position of something, they will just keep on adding or dragging things. You can see it has also has highlighter. This is one of the best tools. Tell your client to install it. It can also capture video you can see over here. If I want to take the video of this area, you can see it can capture video for five minutes and you can see over here that the microphone is also coming iRig Mic SD. It is really nice. It can create five minutes short videos. If you want to send a video to your client, you can send video with it. That's it. Let me just turn it off. Moving on. The other tool I use on a daily basis is Dropbox. I think you people might be using it. So what I do is I share larger files with clients on Dropbox. I name the files with the date at the end, append the date. Let me show you. I have created different folders of my clients. Let me show you. Public, you can see over here clients, different client names and then there are different videos, or sometimes they are different zip files containing all the HTML or WordPress themes. This is how I normally work. The other thing you can use in similar way is Google Drive. It has more space, 15 GB free. Over here I think I had 3GB, maybe max. This is one other. It can have a lot of other things like Google Docs, Sheets, slides, a lot of other things. Now the new tool that is coming in market and very popular is the Slack. It is also a collaboration tool or you can say team management tool and a lot of people are using it. I still don't use it. But it's very popular, you can check this out also. Now for designers, there is one more tool which is good for prototyping, basic prototyping. You can see over here this is my prototype. If I click over here, let me show you full view. If I click over here, you can see it changes. Then if I need to open my navigation, it shows me the navigation. So if I click "Okay", and then it works like that. In this view, my client, can give me commands over here and this section is going to be like that. So this is basically command mode. So I can comment over here on this area "Remove this" or "Add this" and something like that. So this is one other. You can live share it. It is basically in Vision app. I think I forgot to tell you it's in Vision app. I'm going to get out of this full view in Visionapp.com. It is very popular, very basic, very nice. It's free account, I'm using its free account. This one I used it for some time. It is also very good, just like this one. But it is more towards the just static images. There you can say they're collaboration and commenting and feedback. I tried it for sometime. But now it's not free, maybe just for trial days. It doesn't have any free account. It is basically called Redpen.io. So in Vision app, Redpen, Slack, Google Drive, or Dropbox, you can use any of these for larger file sharing. This is create, I think it is TechSmith Jing is better than this Redpen. So I think ditch this Redpen and use instead this Jing. Also this ProofHub, if you have a very large team or very large organization, you can use this one. Otherwise, I think I don't recommend using this one. Trello is good but not the best. Basecamp and RealtimeBoard, Asana, these are the top awesome apps I have seen. So this is all about this lecture. I don't want it to be lengthier than 20 minutes. I think I have already explored a lot of apps for you guys. If you have any app in your mind or you need help with any of this, let me know. So the must have apps, should be these: Jing, Dropbox and Asana. Maybe I think these are best apps among all these and this one too, Basecamp. So let's meet in another lecture of mine and let's move on to the next lesson. 39. Productivity Apps for Freelancers: Hello freelancers. Today I'm going to give you the best tip of my life because I suffered through this and let me share my story. I used to sit on my PC for long hours, like maybe eight or maybe sometime twelve hours. I got a lot of RSA injuries, repetitive strain injuries. The first thing which I still am working on is taking break from your PC. Okay, so we designers or developers or freelancers, e are addicted to our PCs and internet. You need to take off your time. Tell your wife or your other significant or your children or your friends that please after some time maybe after one hour see me and get me out of my chair, do some other activity. There are few apps I'm going to share with you today which help in productivity and reducing this RSA injuries and your repetitive strain injuries due to continuous use of computer and Internet. The first thing I'm going to first show you some apps I really like, and they are free for the Mac. Then I'm going to show you some I use on my PC. Okay? This is the one I'm using right now. It has two bricks, normal and micro, and this is really nice. This is what I need in each RSA injury preventing software on app, it is called Time Out Break Reminder. It is available on Mac store and it's free. This is the best one, I am using it right now you can see over here, you can set up the timing, okay? Color label and the timing that every 40 minutes it is going to give me ten minutes break. It's up to you. I am already suffering from RSA injuries. Ten minutes of at least break works for me. If you are not suffering from any, I think do not exceed for more than one hour. Okay. Every one hour you should take at least ten to fifteen minute break, even if you are on job or at your home or anywhere else do not use your mobile phone or PC for more than one hour. Okay? Now this is the one app. There are few more apps, like we have this tomatoes, okay. It is basically called Pomodoro Technique and it gives you sessions of twenty five minutes. If you start this one, it will keep on ticking for 25 minutes and then it will give you a break. This is also a productivity technique and it really helps you, even if you are a designer developer and you are stuck somewhere, get out of your chair and move around and drink some tea or coffee, and relax and come back after some time. It is really important to get out of your chair. This is the main thing I am giving a lot of weight on this. This is really important. Don't waste your career because after I got multiple RSA injuries, I had a lot of clients maybe more than 15 or 20, now I am limited with one client, okay, one or two clients. This can really ruin your career. Keep on using such productivity apps. I'm going to show you a few more. This app is for iPhone and iPad. This is another option. If you want to install it on a separate iPad or iPhone. This is good, but I really recommend this one okay. Time out. Time out is the best one because it is going to blur your screen. Let me show you how it is going to do it. It is going to disable your screen like that. It is going to show you a clock and a timer. As soon as you see this, you should get out of your chair. If you want to skip break, this is just a preview. I think in the actual break it is not going to let you skip it. One app is this one. This is iPhone and iPad app. You can search a lot of iPhone apps like tomato and Pomodoro techniques. Then the best one I like is this RSA guard. This is the top. You can say the top of the line product and it shows you videos of different people doing exercises, sitting on their chair and standing up during each break. It can really help productivity. I think this software should be present in all software houses, development houses, design agencies. It can really improve your productivity and it can reduce your risk of RSA injuries. One other free app I'm using on Windows, this one, this is for Linux and Windows, it is not going to work on a Mac. This is really nice. I use it on my Windows. Let me show you after some time, I'm going to switch to my Windows. Now, you can see at the right side of my this PC, and you can see this is the basically my window for work wave. It has three more modes; normal, quiet and suspended. If I'm watching a movie, I switch to suspended and the normal mode, it is going to give me a rest break after you can see nine minutes. The big break will be after twenty five minutes. Total limit of my working hours for one day is going to be six hours. I have set three parameters over here. It is really helpful and it also shows you some exercises, but they are not very helpful, in my opinion. They are just, you can say very low-quality. Okay. If you are looking for very high quality, you should go for RSA guard. You can find more apps like that, but I really recommend on PCs this work wave. It is free, and it works really well. It locks your screen after some time. The other one I like on Mac is, I really love this one. Time-out. This is really cool, okay, so two apps I'm really recommending you guys if you are a freelancer, designer, developer, or even if you are working in an office, recommend these in your offices. Tell your managers, CEOs, that this is really going to work really well and it is going to reduce their health and maintenance costs on their employees. That's all for this session. Let's move on to the next lesson. 40. Win clients with Perfect Cover Letter: Today I'm going to share with you the perfect example of a cover letter. Now, cover letter is the most important part when you're applying for any freelance job, because it is going to create trust with your client and it is going to start a conversation between you and your client. You need to make good first impression on your client. I am going to share with you a perfect example. This is from Danny. He is a great freelancer and a copywriter basically. Although this is not directly linked to designers and developers, but you can apply these techniques to get jobs you really need and to get great and good paying clients. Let's get started. Now you can see here's the cover letter I was talking about. You can see he started with, "Hi there," rather than, I have seen a lot of freelancers starting with "Hi, marketing manager or hiring manager." This is really strange or maybe if I'm hiring someone, this looks very boring. Use something like this. Hi there. How are you? Congrats on the launch of your company and app. This is a very unique way to start your conversation rather than asking that I really need this job, please give me these job, sir. You are going to give them congratulation on their company or if they are building some app, or building a new website, something like that. Then you can see over here in the first two lines, he started a conversation by saying that I don't look for new clients. I think he has a lot of good reputation on that platform, I think Upwork, so he can start like that. But you can maybe change it, alter it to your own situation. Now, you can see in the first two lines, these two lines, he told the client about the don't. I wanted to tell you about the biggest mistake I see app developers make when they put out a press release. He is a copywriter and he writes press releases and articles for different companies, apps, and something like that. In the first two lines, he is going to give his client some tips that you should not do something like this, or this is the biggest mistake when you hire someone or when you try to create copy for your website or app. In the next two lines, he's more elaborating his problem. The problem he sees with a lot of press releases is this one. Then he's going to give his suggestion or view, as he says that come up with a hook. So this is very different approach. Most of the other freelancers who might have applied on this job. They might not think that they should give some solution or hint of that solution. I think I have discussed this in previous lessons, but here it is, so he gave the hint of his solution, that his solution is different, and his solution is better than what others are offering. Then in the next four lines, he is giving the example of a previous job he did for someone else, which went viral and which gave his client tons of money or something like that. You can see over here, he says, "Once I wrote a press release for a real estate app, but instead of talking about the cool things," you can read all these things. He used a hook. What he says is that rather than using a press release or writing the features of your app, you should use some hook or one hook that your clients or your users are willing to know about. You can see over here it says all about what he did for that app or the article he wrote. It is showing his own experience that I did something previously similar like this one and my client responded with this, it went viral, and it was a success. Now, in the last two lines, he is asking for more discussion. You can see over here he says, "Can you tell me more about your app and what it does?" It shows the client and tells the client that you are interested in their mobile app or their work or their website or their e-commerce store. You can see over here, this is a great way to end. My English is not that good. He's a copywriter, so I think he is a lot better than me. "Love to know more if you would like to chat about it. Danny." This is how he has ended his cover letter. You can see that he got the job, you can see over here, and he wrote just a press release, a small article for just $300. He is offering a full course on copy writing. So if you were a copywriter, I think you can check that out. I'm not his salesman or I don't get any commission. This is the perfect example I found for cover letters and I hope you have enjoyed this lesson. If you have any questions, do ask me, and if I come up with anything new, I will share it with you guys. I hope you get your jobs well and you get good paying clients with these techniques. Let's move on to the next lesson.