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Skillshare

The Freelance Masterclass: The Ultimate Guide to Freelancing

via Skillshare

Overview

Are you ready to go freelance? Or are you wanting to learn everything about how to become a successful freelancer? Interested in going from part-time to full-time or wanting to explore this is a viable career option?

This course has a special focus on creative freelancers or anyone who uses their creative skillsets in their craft. This includes:

  • Graphic Designers
  • Illustrators
  • Photographers
  • Website Designers
  • UX/UI Designers and more!

Although everyone can get a ton out of this class, even if you do not use creative talents in your line of work.

This extensive course reviews all aspects of the freelancing process including: 

  • Setting Our Goals
  • Writing our Story, Bios, Profiles, Mission Statements
  • Finding Our Target Market
  • Going through the Personal Freelance Branding Process
  • Brainstorming Logo Ideas and Talking About Color
  • Creating Our Business Cards and Letterheads
  • Building our Portfolios both Online and PDF portfolios
  • Finding Clients Online
  • Finding Clients Offline
  • Building an Upwork Profile Together
  • Walking through Hourly and Fixed Rate Pricing
  • Finding our Perfect Hourly Rate
  • Working through Practice Quotes
  • Creating a Contract and talking about Contract Basics
  • Finding out when to go Full-time
  • Working with Money and our Cash Flow
  • Reviewing many different Client Situations, we can be in and how to handle them

We will craft our freelancing story together to write effective bios, marketing copy and write a compelling mission statement. We will learn what goes into powerful personal freelance branding. We will work through the brainstorming of a logo design, the creation of a letterhead and business card and learn how to create and use branded assets to make yourself look incredibly professional and consistent.  

We will learn the power of stellar portfolios and how to best present your work in several different formats including a pdf portfolio and a website-based portfolio. We even review how to post your work to third party websites like behance.com.

Finding clients is the hardest part of freelancing. We will spend plenty of time reviewing the many different ways to secure clients online, offline and on social media.  We will learn to write fantastic bios and profile descriptions to present ourselves in the best way possible to potential clients. We even spend time creating an UpWork profile and lean how to use freelancer websites to find work.

Pricing your work is essential to maximizing your earnings as a freelancer. We will learn several different ways to price your work. We will go over the benefits and downsides to both hourly and fixed rate pricing. We find ways to help us create accurate and profitable quotes and even work through several practice quotes to get comfortable pricing our work.

After finding clients, sometimes working with clients can be just as challenging. We will learn how to create contracts that properly protect us and talk about upfront deposits, project scope and more. We even work through a contract together and I provide a basic contract as a downloadable resource.

We will work through several negative client’s situations and talk about best ways to navigate those common client issues. Finally, we work through copyright issues as we review best practices for using fonts, photos and graphic resources for client work and projects.

Managing your income and cashflow is vital to your success. We will discuss when might be the right time for you to move from part-time to full-time freelance and maybe even quit your job! We also review cash flow basics and how to properly manage your income from month to month.

This course is dynamic and there will be additional content added to the course.

And speaking of downloadable resources, this course has more than all my prior classes combined with over 100 pages of written content downloadable in nice bite sized resources that go along with each section so you can work through the class with videos and with resources to adding another level of engagement to the class.

Are you ready to start adding value to the world you never thought was possible? Are you ready to be your own boss or make your current freelancing side gig a bigger deal? I am more than excited and proud to present this freelance masterclass to you today.

The best thing we can as freelancers is stay in community with each other, that is why all students of this course will have access to an exclusive student Facebook group where we can support each other, ask questions and thrive together!

So, are you ready to open up your world to freelancing? See you in the first lesson!

Syllabus

  • Course Preview
  • The Course Guide
  • Setting Your Goals And Expectations
  • Creating Your Services List
  • Finding Your Target Market
  • Personal Branding - Branding Theory
  • Personal Branding - Crafting Our Story
  • Personal Branding - Creating Our Inspiration Boards
  • Personal Branding - Creating Our Logo
  • Personal Branding - Logo Construction
  • Personal Branding - Brand Assets
  • Personal Branding - Creating A Business Card
  • Personal Branding - Letterhead
  • (Optional) Student Design Challenge - Create Your Personal Brand
  • Portfolio Building - Building Strong Portfolios
  • Portfolio Building - PDF Portfolios Gathering Resources
  • Portfolio Building - Pdf Portfolio - Project Page Layouts
  • Portfolio Building - Project Pages
  • Portfolio Building - Pdf Portfolio The Cover Page
  • Portfolio Building - PDF portfolio BIO page
  • Portfolio Building - Online Website
  • Portfolio Building - Adobe Portfolio
  • Portfolio Building - Adobe Portfolio Part 2
  • Portfolio Building - Behance
  • Portfolio Building - Wordpress
  • Student Challenge
  • BONUS- Adobe InDesign Portfolio Building Template
  • Finding Clients - Introduction
  • Finding Clients ONLINE
  • Finding Clients - Paid Ads
  • FInding Clients - Offline
  • Finding Clients - Creating An Upwork Profile
  • Finding Clients - Creating an Upwork Profile Part 2
  • Finding Clients - Creating an Upwork Profile Part 3
  • Pricing Your Work - Introduction To Pricing
  • Pricing Your Work - Finding Your Hourly Rate
  • Pricing Your Work - Fixed Pricing
  • Pricing Your Work - Client Size
  • Pricing Your Work - Project Exposure
  • Pricing Your Work - Practice Quotes
  • Pricing Your Work - Practice Quote 2
  • Working With Clients - Contract Overview
  • Working With Clients - Client Contracts
  • Working With Clients Client Contracts Part2
  • Working With Clients - Negative Clients Situations
  • Licensing Basics - Fonts
  • Licensing Basics - Photos
  • Licensing Basics - Resources
  • Dealing With Money - When To Go Full-time Freelance
  • Dealing With Money - Cash Flow

Taught by

Lindsay Marsh

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