Top 5 skills to learn as a freelancer in 2021

Being a godlike designer isn't enough

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Have you ever wondered why only top 10% of freelancers on Upwork make over $10k. That means that only about 10% of freelancers that start on the most popular freelancing site MIGHT be able to make a living out of their freelance venture.

It seems very discouraging but the good news is this - If you master the auxiliary skills to your design skills, you will not only do good as a Freelancer, you will excel.

No matter how good you are once you are starting out as a solo freelancer though, you will probably feel very frustrated and unsure why you're not getting clients even though you know you could do the job at a high level. You might get the idea that it's too late to be a freelancer because nobody is responding to your proposals and you see clients being swamped with different proposals on sites like Upwork.

It really isn't fair after all, why would they hire someone who is brand new for a job when they can hire someone who has a bunch of reviews from other clients that have tested the waters before them.

It is the same as if you were working in a company, your work output does not necessarily corelate with whether or not you'll get a promotion, but your connection to your boss or the quality of your communication with the people who will be your superiors could be a deciding factor. So let's look at all the different skills that you need to learn along with design to find amazing clients who are happy to work with you along with how to learn them.

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What does it take?

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All of the skills we are going to discuss, just like design, are bottomless pits that you can get lost in if you decide to dig deep enough. You don't have to be an expert at every one of them, but the better you are the more you can leverage them for reputation and money.

Here are the skills we will be discussing: 

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• Language mastery
• Sales and marketing
• Business knowledge
• Self-confidence
• IT skills

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These at a first glance are very broad topics, but depending on your niche and what sort of clients you're looking to attract you might not need to go as deep into these topics as it seems right away.

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Language Mastery

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Considering how hard it is to get started making a decent living in the US as a freelancer at first, a majority of freelancers come from non English speaking countries. The cost of living tends to be lower so people from Eastern Europe, South Asia, Africa etc. can get by with much less success at first and are more motivated to pursue freelancing as a career path.

The first issue that a freelancer might run into is leaving a bad impression due to bad English. When you reach out to a potential client they will not even be looking at your design if you reach out to them with a proposal that isn't written in perfect English with proper grammar. And that is only the first step. Lots of clients nowadays also want to jump onto a voice call or a video chat to talk to freelancers before they start a work relationship, so it is crucial for you as a freelancer to be able to express yourself without hesitation and be able to convey complex ideas simply to the client.

Clients will always gravitate towards people they perceive as experts, and there is no faster way to show that you are not one than not to be able to communicate what you need to. It is not about what you know, it is about how you can communicate the idea of what needs to be done to someone who is seeking your expertise.

A very easy example would be typing up a proposal and trying to convey the importance of a good call to action at the bottom of a page. An average client doesn't know what the appropriate structure for an ecommerce website is, but if you are able to simply explain it and why it works, they will see that you know what you're talking about.

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Mastering Language

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That is where it becomes tricky because it can take quite a while if you're not good at English. Good things you can do to improve are: 
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• Take English classes

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This is probably the fastest way to actually improve, specially if you niche down into business English once you have good fundamentals. However if you already have a good understanding of how English works you don't have to go through this.

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• Watch content related to your profession, made by Americans

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Youtube channels like The Futur, like Flux (Ran is from Isreal but he sounds very professional in English), Graham Stephan (personal finance channel, will be useful for other skills on this list), Payton Clark Smith etc. are great because they not only give you invaluable advice regarding useful skills for owning a business, freelancing and managing your finances, but they also tend to explain business/marketing terms that you might run into like CPC, ROI, SEO etc. very clearly for beginners.

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• Talk to Americans

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This is an incredibly important step. I have learned English through video games and since I am from Eastern Europe I very rarely talked to Americans directly. While I had a firm grasp on the basics of the language, going to boards like Reddit and eventually being in contact with American technicians on my software job made me get much more comfortable talking to natives and pick up their mannerisms and accents.

Mastering any language is a tall order, but there's no better way to stand out than making a personalized proposal.

If you want to learn more about writing amazing proposals, here's a guide!

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• Learn COPYWRITING

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While you don't have to sell Copywriting, even though you should, you need to be able to make punchy proposals and come up with good copy ideas very fast in order to seem like you are on top of your game.

Let's say your clients headline is "X company lets you work more collaboratively and get more done". If in your proposal you can explain why "Work collaboratively. Get more done." is a better tagline and the psychology behind less is more you will already stand above most of the proposals they've gotten.

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Sales and Marketing

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Another deep topic and another fundamental that you need to have in order to truly stand out. Luckily for you, learning these two things will separate you from about 95% of freelancers out there. You don't need to go incredibly deep, but if you are applying to make a website for a medical equipment supplier you need to know how to quickly research how a medical equipment supplier would best market, and how you can tailor a conversation towards their needs and wants. As I've covered in the proposal guide linked above, it is definitely the best to tailor every proposal and contact to every customer, so knowing right off the bat how you can help them grow their business with little information that they provide should be your top priority.

There is no easier way to get someone's attention than to give them ideas on how to make money and to show them that your thought process comes down to exactly that.

Starting an interview call with questions about how your potential client gets leads, who his target audience is, how he plans to market and then instantly understanding and expanding on what you've been given will set you up as an expert in no time. And this is just basic knowledge of marketing. It can be as simple as understanding that they are a local business and understanding that for a local business the most important factors are local SEO, real world marketing, TV time, pamphlets and social media, and then figuring out which one is a right fit for them.

A great resource to learn all about marketing is this blog post from Apollo Digital.

Learn as much as you can from there. If you offer SEO, if you offer SMM your services suddenly become something much more valuable than just website design.

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What about sales? 

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This is where all your other skills come together. Sales is not about selling your product, sales is not about selling your customers' product. Sales as freelancer is selling yourself. In order to make this step the easiest for you as possible you will need to learn and internalize at least one sales technique for best results. I personally love using advice from the book called "SPIN Selling". It's one of the most valuable books I've ever read and I would recommend it to everyone. If you prefer YouTube Fox Web School has a great amount of videos explaining the process of selling websites using specifically the SPIN sales method. It's not the only successful way to sell websites of course but it gets you into a mindset to sell and not undervalue your work.

Another thing that I personally mix in with the SPIN method are the things I've learned on my sales job that come from the Straight Line Persuasion seminar. I highly recommend you look at this as well. It's something most salespeople go through and it teaches you about a lot of important concepts when it comes to sales. Lots of it more traditional and learning how to handle cold leads, and even if you mostly talk to warm leads the advice you learn in the course is invaluable. But if you take anything from it it's this mindset -

Be sharp as a tack. Be enthusiastic as hell. Be an expert in your field.

None of the advice you learn in any book or course is universal and 'must use', but knowing more about sales will let you identify what works with your personality and your confidence level and let you show the customer your expertise and making them want to give you money to make their problems go away.

And not to forget - "Never Split The Difference" by Chris Voss is a must read. A negotiation book made by an FBI hostage negotiator and reframed for business. If that doesn't make you want to read it nothing else I say will.

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Business Knowledge

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Business knowledge heavily ties in with knowledge of marketing. By understanding how a business gets customers, how they operate, what legislation the business owner needs to watch out for and what their financial situation looks like and what impacts it the most makes you more valuable to them than any great designer could be, unless they are a huge corporation.

Imagine as a freelancer you are trying to hire someone to do your Facebook ads and in a proposal they not only show you case studies but also record a video where they show that they not only understand what you want from them, but they also tell you 3 other ways that you can improve your freelance business and uncover some marketing concepts that you didn't even know about because you are busy focusing on other areas of your business. They suddenly go from a "ad guy for Facebook" to a valuable asset that can help you grow your business.

You want to learn as much as you can about business so that you become that guy, and not the "FB ad guy" or the "Website guy". You will earn more and your clients will be more than happy to recommend you to everyone they know that might need your services and you will make their lives much easier.

Good books to read to understand how to think like a businessman and what they might be facing with every day are -

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• The Lean Startup
• Zero to One
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• E-Myth revisited
• 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

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These books will not only help you understand your freelance career as more of a business and not as you working for clients, but deeply understanding and internalizing their concepts will let you see how their businesses can grow as well. Of course experience is still king, but in order to have the confidence to start and offer these services you need good business fundamentals.

Besides books I also love hopping onto YouTube and looking for great content that way. The Futur that I recommended earlier has a lot of business related topics for web designers in videos. It is mostly beginner level stuff but an amazing jumping off point. Just don't lock yourself into one source of information, learn as much as you can and don't forget to read! 

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Self-Confidence

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If you are not sure that you can do a great job and that you know how to help, how can someone talking to you be sure?

You must've experienced a situation where someone has tried to sell you something but they seemed like they were reading off a script or even worse that they didn't know what they were gonna say next.

When you talk to your clients you are looking to come across as sharp, enthusiastic and an expert as we've covered earlier, and if you aren't sure of yourself while in a call, you will not come across as any of these things, let alone be able to negotiate a price that you are happy with and would like to work for. Confidence is not about pretending to be something you are not, it is not about feeling superior or anything toxic, it is just about understanding your worth, being able to lead a conversation and a meeting and not letting people push you around.

I was personally lucky to have a great deal of confidence since I was a kid, I have never struggled with this, so I will not be the best guide for you but I can tell you that the book that has impacted my life the most in regards to social skills and that helped me make people around me feel amazing about themselves is How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you read one book from this blog post, let it be this one, since it's an amazing groundwork for everything else in your life, from personal to professional relationships.

Even Warren Buffett says that the biggest investment you can make is to read that book and internalize it's concepts. It is that impactful.

Also, watch Fuck you, Pay me.

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IT Skills

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This one is a bit more technical than a lot of other things in this list, but it is also incredibly crucial for you to keep that expert status that we have been talking about being really important.

You don't need to know how to code or how to fix computers, but you need to know all the technical things that a possible client of yours could need.

Let's say that then want an email with their domain and not a Gmail account, do you know how to set it up for them? I will write down a list of technical topics that have come up when I was working with clients and you can use it as a guideline on what skills might come up in your everyday work. Keep in mind, you can monetize these skills and use them to make yourself an even more valuable asset to a business that is hiring you.

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• Setting up a domain email address on different hosting providers
• Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of different hosting platforms and offers
• Knowing how to set up hosting and broadly explain stuff like DNS and domain names.
• Understanding the tech behind on-page SEO (what does robots.txt do? What is First Contentful Paint (FCP)? ) 
• What is a CMS? How to set up a CMS for the client and what do they need to know about it?
• HTML/CSS/JS basics even if you use Webflow or Wordpress to be able to make changes that they don't let you to
• Managing a web server
• Photo editing with photoshop or similar
• Working with files of any type you might get provided with

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In conclusion

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This list is surely overwhelming, and goes much more in depth than most things you'd find in a simple google search, but you don't need to do all of these things at once, you don't even need to have all of those skills at a high level. You need to understand them and consciously try to improve at all times, and the rest will come to you. Realistically it is years of hard work, and to start out you don't need them, but make a roadmap for yourself and see what you want to cover first on your way to go from "a website guy" to an exceptional freelancer.

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Until next time,

Stefan