Freelance Web Developer Roadmap

hey guys welcome to another in-depth practical guide and this time we're talking about freelancing as a web developer and this is a topic that I've dealt with a lot when I first started learning web development I wasn't really in a great place in life I had gotten into drugs and uh it drove me down the wrong path and led me into legal troubles so I had a record and I was having trouble finding a job once I learned how to code so my solution was to kind of go around everything and and start my own business and start Freel in and finding my own clients and then from there creating my own small agency and I eventually did find a job as a software developer but in the end I still went back to to freelancing to my agency and then ultimately to teaching and content creation because I just love working for myself and and being My Own Boss um not everyone wants to that learns to code wants to work for someone else and that's really who this guide is for so we're going to explore a path to becoming a successful freelance developer now this is not the only path but it's one that I have experience with and I know it can work if you work it so let's get [Music] started okay so as I said this one this is one path of many and you don't have to follow it to a te you can if it makes sense for you but my goal is to give you kind of a template to start with and then you can adjust it to fit your needs so if you're freelancing there's a lot more to think about than just learning to code right you you in the Technologies you have to learn about how to set up your business because that's essentially what freelancing is is creating your own business so you need to come up with proposals set pricing contracts and so on you need to think about Marketing sales customer service and a lot more so we're going to cover all that in this road map also if you're serious about becoming a freelancer I have a full course at freelance mastery. deev that I did with Kyle Prinsloo who's a very successful freelance developer and entrepreneur and content creator and I'll have a link to that in the description with a discount if you guys are interested all right so Step One is gaining the skill set and be even before you do that you should know what skills you need to learn by figuring out what type of freelancer you want to be so I would suggest having a highlevel plan and just know what you're getting into and what you're working towards you know there's Freelancers of all types and the type of freelancer that you're going to be will determine what you need to learn so in my experience these are what I consider the main types of Freelancers when it comes to web development and you may pick one of these now and and stay with it or you might progress through them as you learn more and and get more experience so first is just like a basic web developer SL web designer and this is someone that has a good understanding of HTML CSS JavaScript all the fundamentals and if that's all you know you will be limited in the projects that you can take on especially these days but there are still a lot of small businesses out there that just want some kind of web presence and like a basic brochure type website you know it's important to mention that uh unless you plan on Outsourcing all your design work you will need to have a decent eye when it comes to design when it comes to things like contrast white space color scale and I mean you don't need to be a full out graphic designer but you should know what looks good and what doesn't and you can make a a a decent living doing this type of work you can charge anywhere from $500 to $55,000 for a website depending on uh depending on a lot of things the complexity the client you and your experience uh I'd say this is the lowest paying type of freelancer but it's also the easiest to get started with and the projects you can ually do pretty quickly so next is a CMS or content management system based developer uh CMS is a graphical interface that you can install and use on your on your server and create custom Dynamic websites and WordPress is one of the big ones that's been around for for a long time and you might hear some people talk smack about WordPress but those aren't people that are in business for themselves those are developers that plan to to work at large companies that's a completely different world I think sometimes people don't understand that now WordPress isn't your only option we now have tools like headless content Management systems and static website generators things like that and I'll talk uh more about that soon and then you also have other no code tools things like Squarespace webflow Shopify and it's actually more common than you may think where a person can can be a successful freelancer and doesn't really know any type of programming language maybe a little HTML and CSS but I do know quite a few people that are technically millionaires from creating an agency that just creates word WordPress websites or or other no code uh based websites now they're really good at business and selling themselves and they know how to get the client what they want but they're not like Master programmers now I wouldn't recommend being a a I guess a no code freelancer because you want to know how to customize things to your client's needs you want to be able even if you're doing WordPress websites you want to be able to create your own themes and your own plugins and stuff like that it can be really difficult to give the client what they want when you have to use pre-made scripts and and plugins and so on so next we have a full stack web developer this is someone that can create custom web applications from scratch and they most likely know some kind of JavaScript framework like react or view as well as a backend technology like node and Express or PHP larl python D Jango and they usually know how to work with databases like postgres or mongodb as well as uh tools like object relational mappers like Mongoose SQ eyes Prisma and they might know typescript so basically all the the modern web stuff the stuff that you guys learn on this channel now if you're a single freelancer there's only so much work that like this that you can take at that level um you only have so much time and these projects do take a lot of time if you Outsource part of the work that can help I'll talk more about Outsourcing later and these projects can range anywhere from you know 5,000 to to 50,000 plus and I mean you're not going to find too many large companies that are going to hire one single freelancer to build them this huge project um but you can get lucky I mean I would say the highest paid job that I got as a single freelancer was about3 ,000 and that was for um like a sport a sport social platform and uh I did Outsource some of the work but I still made a pretty good profit and that was years into my freelancing career that's not something that you're going to get when you first start so lastly we have a niche developer that's someone that specializes in an area of web development uh or an industry and maybe you're good at like e-commerce websites or maybe you're really good at creating social platforms or 3 3D animation maybe you work with AI and machine learning apis um or just about anything I mean you can charge a lot more for your services if you're a specialist I know people that charge up into the six figures and the technologies that you use can vary widely so I can't really give you specifics it could be anything really now in addition to specializing in like an e-commerce or social platform type of website you could also specialize in a certain type of client so maybe you only work with medical professionals or lawyers or nonprofits these jobs aren't necessarily harder but if you're known as the person that create successful websites for let's say dentists um you can charge a lot more be than a basic web developer because you're seen as an expert in the field and this is called niching down or or positioning and it's a great way to stand out in a crowded Market all right so let's start to look at some of the the actual Technologies what you should be learning so regardless of which type of freelancer you want to be I would suggest you learn the basics of the web get a good foundation in HTML CSS JavaScript which are the structure styling and behavior of your web pages and I'm not saying you have to get into react or be an advanced front-end developer but know the basics and understand the Dom the document object model um before moving to anything else and I also think a CSS framework like Tailwind or bootstrap can be very helpful so to me there's there's freelance friendly Technologies so obviously you know WordPress content Management Systems stuff like that but also CSS Frameworks because they really help you move along in terms of styling it's a lot faster than writing custom CSS I also think a lot of the jamstack Technologies which I'll talk about in a little bit are very freelance friendly so static site generators headless content Management Systems things like that now when it comes to design since you're going to be single freelancer you don't have a a design or UI ux Department that just hands you a PSD or whatever you need to create the project top to bottom so you need to have a good eye for design and like I said earlier you don't have to be a graphic designer but you need to know what looks good and what doesn't you need to know about contrast white space color scale typography and there's a lot of resources out there to help you with this and I would suggest looking at sites like dribble and be to to get uh inspiration you can also look at um like template sites in fact that's something I wanted to speak on as well is pre-made templates you can buy a template or use a free one and customize it to your client's needs and this can save you a lot of time now you can find themes like on theme forest creative Market there's so many different markets out there where you can buy templates and themes and people have different opinions on this so if you ask me my opinion I would let the client know if I planned on using any kind of pre-made theme and I probably wouldn't use something pre-made if it were a larger project you know if they're paying tens of thousands of dollars they should have a custom design and custom branding that's my opinion I do know some people will use something pre-made no matter what they won't tell the client I just I I don't agree with that I think that if you're going to use something that you didn't personally create then you should mention it or you should ask them but that's just my opinion so WordPress is as I said still used a lot in the freelance world if you're talking about software developers at Google or Facebook you're not going to hear about WordPress but the freelance world is is more than just code it's it's about business and giving the client what they want and what they want in many cases is a nice website that they can update the content themselves sure you can use node.js or something like that to create a custom CMS but you're not going to do that for a $500 website if your goal is to create complex applications for specialized clients then you probably don't need to learn WordPress but if you're just starting out and you're trying to make some money and trying to build a portfolio then I would suggest learning it um it's not that hard to learn and there's a lot of resources out there that can help you you can learn a set of plugins that you can use for most projects and it'll save you a lot of time also PHP is the language that WordPress is built on and you don't have to be a PHP expert to use WordPress but it can help and you can create your own custom themes and plugins and so on you can also use PHP for other things like creating custom apis or or custom web applications and it's not as popular as it once was but when you're freelancing your main focus isn't on what's popular it's making your clients happy and using the most efficient way to get there and PHP is just great for Rapid development so another set of technologies that I think are really good for freelancing and is is probably what I would use if I went back into freelancing is the jamstack and the that stands for JavaScript apis and markup and there's a ton of technologies that fall under the jamstack umbrella so you have headless content Management Systems like strappy and sanity.io these work similar to Wordpress where you have a dashboard you can log into you can you know create and manage your content but there's no front facing website so you can use whatever you want for that if you want to use react or another front-end framework you could use a static site generator like Gatsby Astro nextjs gridsum these are all part of the jamstack and you could even use a no code tool like web flow and you could use a combination of all these and the point is that you you have a lot of flexibility and you can create really fast performant websites that are secure and scalable so if you want a solution that's a little a little more modern and something that has better performance than WordPress I would suggest looking into the jam stack just know that it's it's going to take a a bit more knowledge to get started than it would with WordPress all right so once you have the skills to become a freelance web developer there's some things I would suggest thinking about and doing when it comes to starting a business and you need to decide if you're going to be a full-fledge business or an individual freelancer and there can be certain rules and laws in place when you operate a business certain things you have to do and it varies by country and if you're in the US it varies by state so for me I'll just give you a little bit of my experience when I started freelancing I decided to make it a company you don't have to do that you can work under your own name but I knew I wanted to scale my business later on so I created Tech gu Web Solutions and I like that name because I could use it as an individual it makes sense but I could also scale it and it also makes sense to have multiple people working under it and you should set up a business bank account um I think that you should keep everything separate from you know your everyday checking account that you pay for dinner with you want to have all that separate separate business cards checks if needed this will help you keep track of your expenses and uh just make things easier when it comes to taxes and you can also start building business credit which can help you get loans and other things later on now when it comes to business types I can only speak on the US I don't know how it how it works in other countries if you're in the US you have a few options uh and I also don't know the laws in every state I'm in Massachusetts and when I got started I went to my city hall and I just paid $40 and got something called a DBA which stands for doing business as and this is if you want to operate under a different name than your own and I went to the IRS website and got an EIN which stands for employer identification number it's kind of like a social security number for your business and you often need that to open a business bank account uh and you can open a business name in your in your own name as well so this is I would say the easiest thing to do you can also register as a sole proprietorship which is similar to a DBA actually I think a DBA might be considered a sole proprietorship um you can also register your business as an LLC which is a limited liability company this gets a little more complicated and you do have to pay more money I believe but if protects your personal assets if you get sued um you can also become an es Corp which is what I eventually did with both Tech Guy and TR now traversy media so this is where you take a salary from the company so basically I have a main business account uh banking account and every week I pay myself a salary to my personal account okay my C my CPA set that up and I would definitely suggest getting a CPA getting an accountant um don't try to do your own taxes it can just it can can become a real mess so you want you want to find a good CPA that's some advice that I think is really really important um there are some tax benefits to being an es Corp which is why I did that um but again if you're just getting started you're you're not going to want to do that you're going to want to just be a sole proprietor um so uh and sba.gov is also a great resource um for starting a business in the US and if you want to learn more about this my freelance mastery course we really kind of go more in depth in this in starting a business so once you have your business set up you need to think about branding and this is your logo your colors your fonts Etc and I'd say even if you're using your own name it's good to have a set of colors for your website uh any business cards or any other physical media your social media accounts if you're running under a company you should get a logo done or make it yourself and I'd say create a logo even if you're using your own name you know to just use your initials or something and also take some good professional pictures of yourself for social profiles and also freelance job websites which we're going to talk about soon and then another thing I'd suggest doing is creating a business plan this can be a very high level view of what you want to accomplish with your business and it can be a few pages or it can be a few paragraphs it's just good to to have a plan to follow so your website and portfolio are key to your success as a freelancer it gives clients something that they can look at and prove to them that you can do the job and if I hire someone I want to be able to see what they're capable of now if you're just starting out I know it's tough because you don't have any any past work experience but you can show a couple of personal projects uh if you don't have any then create some although if if you're taking if you're thinking about taking on clients you should at least have something that you've created on your own whether it's a course project that you customized or what um in addition to your own website you should build towards having an impressive web presence in general and this includes social media websites so Twitter Facebook LinkedIn especially um even YouTube if possible if you can create some videos either highlighting your work or teaching others that would be a great way to get clients as well and it also shows that you're passionate and you know that you know what you're doing uh you could write blog posts on your website you could write articles for medium or dev.to this can help with SEO and just getting your name out there you can also answer questions on sites like stack Overflow or Reddit and last but not least be sure to have a GitHub account put some projects on there as well if you're more on the design side then you want to use sites like dribble just anything you've done that you're proud of you want to put out there somehow all right so now that you have your business you have your website it's time to start taking clients or or looking for clients and your first few clients are crucial because you need some experience and you need to get some reviews and testimonials and it can be difficult to get those first few jobs because yes you can sign up to all the freelancing websites you can apply for all the projects but you don't really have much to go on or much for them to look at we'll talk a little bit more about that as well so at first glance freelance websites can sometimes seem like a race to the bottom I've heard that phrase a lot and you have people from all over the world that can do the same job as you for next to nothing however I encourage to look around on these sites and I'll use upwork.com as as my example that's probably what where I would suggest to start uh I started on upwork back when it was called odesk um but yeah just look at what some of the successful Freelancers are making some of them are making a lot of money hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just on that website I started at like you know $200 WordPress websites and I ended up in the end building custom PHP applications for 10,000 plus and that's one thing that you have to be okay with is waiting if you're patient and you work hard you deliver you can make a lot of money unfortunately a lot of people quit before they actually get to that point um but yeah I would say start with these freelance websites it's definitely not the only way to get clients and it's not even the best way but I would say it's the way that will put you it'll put you in front of the most potential clients so that's why I always recommend starting there and it's good to just you know get some clients get some feedback and some testimonials as far as the the websites there's upwork there's freelancer.com Fiverr topt although that's a really tough one so I wouldn't I wouldn't start with that upack.com I would suggest putting most of your energy into one of them probably upwork but also create a profile and apply to to to projects on the others as well now in order to be successful on these websites you have to stand out and you want to show that you're worth the money and you can do this by having a wellth thought out title and description in your profile a clear and professional picture uh a good portfolio and display of pack past work history although again I know that's tough when you're first getting started um I would suggest creating and listing some personal projects on these websites if you don't have any any professional ones you could also do some charity work or work for like a family member or a friend and you might not be getting paid a lot or getting getting paid at all but at least you're building experience and you have something to show so some common mistakes I see are creating uh profiles that have too much text or too little text or they oversell themselves um or they don't have a professional picture I think one of the biggest mistakes is just not standing out and being too generic you know write write your portfolio or your profile in your own words and voice and and be yourself also make sure that you don't have any spelling and grammar mistakes I know that sounds silly but uh I've seen a lot of profiles with mistakes and it just looks un unprofessional now you're going to need to set your pricing and and pricing can be tough when you're starting out you'll usually work for peanuts like I said just to get your foot in the door and get some work under your belt so your pricing now when you start out is going to be very very different than a year from now or two years from now so don't get discouraged and to give you an idea my first year freelancing I believe I made around 18,000 and the last year that I freelanced I made around 200,000 and that was a span of about 7even or eight years um and that's me personally I also had two other developers on salary so the company actually made more than that now there's different pricing structures with upwork and sites like that hourly can be a good option for your first few jobs jobs because you likely don't know how much things are or how long things are going to take you after a while you'll get better at judging that time and you can apply for fixed pricing but I would probably suggest starting with hourly and there's also ongoing pricing which is not something you'll start with and this is when you do a project and the client basically wants you to be on call for things like updates bugs maintenance maybe hosting and other services it's definitely something you want to do when you're more established because it gives you a steady income even if you get no new clients for a while now as far as how much you charge after you're established I go into this more in my course but there's a formula that a lot of Freelancers follow and I would only apply apply this after you're somewhat established so you're going to first figure out what you want to make per year let's say 100,000 per year and you want to work 30 hours per week so the formula would be the target income divided by the work hours per year and that would equal your hourly rate so you would take 100,000 which is your target income divided by 1,560 hours which is 30 hours a week times 52 weeks for a year and that would equal 64 so your hourly rate would be $64 and this is uh this is something again you want to do after you have experience after you have a reputation nobody's going to hire you with no past experience for $64 an hour um so again what you what you start with now for pricing is going to be very different later on so once you have your profile set up and your pricing figured out it's time to start applying for jobs and I I suggest that you apply to as many jobs as you can but make sure that they're jobs you're qualified for and they should be ones you're also interested in and you're going to need to send the client a proposal either through the the website that you're using using or through email if you're not using a freelancing website so let's talk a little bit about proposals this is the first chance that you have to sell really sell yourself and this process is going to be different depending on if it's a job you're applying through uh a website like upwork or if it's a client from something like local Outreach or referral something like that so usually for clients that aren't from a freelancing site you'll have a pre-proposal step where you can ask some questions and get some info about the project you want to get as much information as you can because you're not you're not going through upwork where there's a you know a job listing that explains everything so you need to get that information so you can give them a proper proposal now you'll still write some kind of proposal even when you're applying on upwork or other job websites um you should show them that you understand what they want you want to show them that you can deliver and that you're passionate about the project I think a lot of people miss this part they write very generic proposals and they don't end up getting the job and you in my opinion you should show that you care about it you're excited to work on it put yourself in the shoes of the client um you would want someone that's excited to work on your project and I've worked on both ends and I can't tell you how many Freelancers that I've hired that just didn't seem to care didn't seem to give a crap they just wanted the money which you know there's nothing wrong with wanting money but you should also care about your work and and and what you're doing so my advice would be to come up with a formatted template for a proposal but then customize it for each job don't make it too generic so now that we have the freelancing websites out of the way let's look at some other ways to get clients and this is these are ways that you're going to use more so after you're established a little bit I mean it's my opinion that you use the freelancing sites first um just because like I said it puts you in front of a lot of eyes but this stuff is what going to get you the the good jobs so local Outreach is one that I had a lot of success with with you can reach out to businesses in your area you can go to their website see if it's outdated or if it's not mobile friendly or whatever and then you can reach out to them and offer to update or redo their website now this won't work if you're lazy about it you don't want to have some kind of generic pitch or template you really want to research the company and come up with um with something that will help them achieve a goal whether that's get to get more customers or to make their website more userfriendly and if you're generic it just comes off as just spammy so put some thought into it and put yourself in the shoes of the business so cold emails with local Outreach you can contact them in a few ways I would suggest going down to the business and talking with them directly and I know a lot of us including myself have like social related anxiety but this is truly the most effective way in my opinion opinion and it does take some time um so you you you could also consider emailing businesses and pitching your services that way but I would give the same advice whether you're talking to them directly or you email them put some thought into it and offer something that you truly think would help them achieve a goal next is content creation this is another really effective method that takes a while to get going but once you do it can be a great way to get clients I would say start with a Blog on your personal website this shows people that passionate and knowledgeable and you could also even create videos on YouTube I know that's not for everyone but it's something to think about you know that's actually how I started this Channel at one point this channel was techy Web Solutions and I wanted to create both business related videos as well as tutorials and how to guides and I ended up liking creating tutorials a lot more than I thought so ultimately I switch gears but I can't tell you how many people I still get to this day that ask me to work work on projects uh I could make a killing if I went back to freelancing just from my YouTube channel I just don't have the time with the other stuff that I'm doing so referrals and Word of Mouth this is probably the best way to get clients but it's not something you can do in the beginning it's something you do after you're established um if you do a good job for someone they're going to tell their friends they're going to tell their family and they themselves are also going to come back to you if they need more work done and you can also ask for referral referrals you know you can ask your clients if they know anybody that needs your services and this is how I got some of my biggest paying jobs social media so social media and web presence I would say is another way to get clients you can uh create a following on Twitter Facebook LinkedIn YouTube Etc friends and family so as I mentioned this is a good one for people who are just getting started out you do some work for for friends and family to get some experience get some reviews and you can also ask them if they know anything one that needs your services there's also freelancing agencies that you can work with I've never done this but they exist they they I guess take a cut of your pay but they also help you get clients so um again not something I've done before you can list your services on directories like Yelp and this will help people find you you know when they're searching for web developers in their area networking last but not least I'd say networking at events like meetups and conferences this is a great way to meet people and get clients uh I have like I said I have pretty severe social anxiety so this isn't something I do that much um but I know a lot of people that have had a lot of Success With It All right so now it's time to get to work and you may have a rough start because you you're figuring everything out for the first time and I'll tell you my first job was um it was for a dynamic Art website and I just I bid off a little bit more than I could chew I think I actually made a video on this but and ended up being a disaster and I didn't even end up getting paid I learned a lot from it though so it was worth it and I learned to ask more questions and uh and to make sure that I know what I'm getting into I also learned to to not take on projects that I'm not qualified for and you you you have to be honest with yourself and honest with the client and people always appreciate honesty and your workflow will look a bit different depending on if you're using a freelance website or not if you're using upwork for instance a lot of this process will be handled through the website including communication proposals and even payment um if you're working with say a local client you're going to have to handle all that yourself now the first thing you want to do when you get a new client no matter who how you you got them is a discovery phase and this is where you ask the client a bunch of questions about the project you want to know what the project is what the deadline is the budget um you want to get as much information as you can as well as any assets like logos and and site images or site content any any media like that now when you're ready to send your your proposal you want to send a contract as well I used a general contract for all my projects and I just customized it where needed um you can have find a lot of templates online you can also use a service like hello sign to get the contract signed um you want to make sure that you you have have a contract for every project and this is to to protect both you and the client and you want to make sure that you're you're on the same page you both know what's expected you want to make sure that you get paid and that the client gets what they want so on the contract I would outline the the project details the deadline the budget and the payment schedule and again if you're using a freelance website that will facilitate a lot of this for you so it's also up to you if you want to require a deposit or not I would suggest for larger projects at least you can also require payment in milestones and this is where you get paid at certain points in the project and this is good for both you and the client you don't want to to do all the work and then not get paid you also don't want the client to pay you and then you don't do the work so I required a 50% deposit for small projects and a 35% for larger and then I would get the rest on you know on delivery now when it comes to to billing your clients if it's not through a freelance Marketplace like upwork you need to use some kind of billing software and it's up to you which one but I would suggest something that makes it simple for clients to pay um there's a lot of options that make it as simple as just a click of a button you could go with uh with premium specialized invoicing or you could use something like PayPal or stripe both have invoicing capabilities I use stripe for everything from website payments from my courses to invoicing sponsors uh it's really easy to use and it's secure and um you can also use it to create like subscription plans for ongoing work and things like that now communication and updates you never want to have your initial Discovery consult and then never talk to the client again until the job's done you want to update them regularly via email or maybe you have a video call once a week or something like that and make sure that they know what's going on and that they're happy with the project so far so just let them know if you know if you're on track to meet the deadline uh it's up to you on on updating them on the schedule and I would suggest at least once a week you send at least send an email explaining what you've done and what you're going to do next if you have a Dev site that's live where you're working on the project send them a link to that as well maybe you want to send them a link to the GitHub so they can see the code um I just think that communic ation is key to a successful project all right so you'll be using all kind of kinds of tools throughout your freelance journey of course you have your text editor your Dev environment any extensions that help your productivity in writing code AI tools are extremely helpful um chat gbt can be a lifesaver uh it can also help with things like proposals and contracts um you can use AI for custom images with tools like mid Journey co-pilot for code assist existing there's so many AI tools out there that can just help you do a a better and faster job and project and task management to manage your projects is important as well maybe Trello or notion. todoist there there's so many programs out there um you may or may not need time tracking and billing software if you work hourly this can help um code collaboration of course GitHub or something else like G gitl or bit bucket you may need to a way to share code with your clients or even other developers or if you're Outsourcing you'll want to obviously you know share code then you'll probably want to have some kind of deployment process so learn a platform like vercel digital Ocean or if you're building simple websites or PHP or WordPress sites you can use cpanel and shared hosting so these are just some of the areas that you can utilize um productivity tools and in certain software all right so let's talk a little bit about ongoing work so as a freelancer you can use your your current skills or gain new skills to provide ongoing work and services to your clients and you could offer single services or combine them into a package deal so here's uh just a few things that you can offer as an ongoing uh process or plan so Website Maintenance this is where you update the website with new content images Etc uh you can also update the design or functionality of the website this would also include like error and Bug fixes you have ongoing tech support this is where you're on call for any technical issues that the client has this could be anything from a broken link to a having their website be hacked SEO and marketing not every freelance developer has SEO knowledge but it seems to be a popular option um in fact I offered SEO when I was freelancing but I outsourced it I didn't do it myself because I'm not an SEO professional hosting this is something I did do for years um many of the large hosting companies offer reseller hosting so you can buy basically buy hosting in the in the form of virtual private servers or vpss and create smaller shared accounts and sell them to your customers and you can charge a monthly fee for this you can also offer to manage the hosting for them um this is a great way to to get recurring income content creation this is where you create the content for the website this could be blog posts videos images kind of a separate thing from web development but it it is something that is is possible social media management you could also manage their their accounts their Facebook posts and things like that so this stuff is is definitely optional but it's a great way to to get some recurring income and utilize your clients for more than just one fixed paid project now once you decide which services to offer you can create ways to upsell your clients you can pitch ongoing work to clients where it makes sense um you can you can bundle Services together into packages so let's say for $5,000 you get a website you get hosting for a year and you get two hours of Maintenance per month and I'm just throwing something out there um you offer this for a year and then to continue they would pay $100 per month for the hosting and the maintenance to continue and I'm just throwing numbers out there but you get the idea and it could be hosting it could be SEO maintenance there's just so many different combinations that you can come up with you just have to figure out what works for you and what works for your clients but I almost always suggest offering some kind of ongoing service all right so no matter how good of a developer or business person you are there's going to be a time when you can't handle it all yourself unless you're turning down clients which you don't want to do so you can only work so many hours in the day so you have to figure out a way to scale your business and you can do this by Outsourcing some of your work so what's cool is you you can use those same websites that you looked for work on to find people to work for you in your company and you should look for the same type of profiles that you would want to have that I that I've already suggested you know you want to make sure that they're qualified that they have good reviews that they're unique and stand out one thing I can't stress enough is that cheaper is definitely not always better in fact it's almost always worse people usually learn that the hard way you know if you hire some person for let's say five bucks an hour then you're going to get work that looks like you paid five bucks an hour and obviously you don't want to feel like you're getting ripped off but if you find someone that specializes in what you need and they have great reviews they have good-look projects and they charge you know $50 plus an hour you're probably going to get a lot better work well you are going to get a lot better work and you're going to save money in the long run rather than hiring the $5 guy and you know trying to work with with them for for weeks and then having to start over and hire the $50 person anyway so when it comes to Outsourcing to use myself as an example I would Outsource a lot of the UI and design work it wasn't my strong suit uh I'd also Outsource some of the backend work I would do you know the main parts of the project and then have someone do else do the rest um another thing I did is as I said I outsourced my SEO I'd offer SEO and marketing services to my client but I would have someone else do that work and I would just manage the project so it's up to you on what you want to Outsource whether it's a full project or parts of a project just know in most cases even if you Outsource the entire thing you're still going to be managing it and talking to the client and so on you're not just going to say here you go see you later and and get paid so another thing you can do to scale your business is hire uh in-house employees and it does make things a bit more complicated for instance if you're registered as a sole proprietorship you're going to have to switch to either an LLC or an es Corp which is what I did and you'll have you'll add them to the payroll and taxes get a bit more complicated and you have to think about benefits and stuff like that but it can it can be worth it right you can Tech take on more clients and make a lot more money and just scale your business but it's up to you if you just just want to stick to Outsourcing then do that or if you're really really trying to scale the business you can hire inhouse so lastly let's look at some other ways to scale your business so in addition to hiring people you can scale by expanding your workspace you may run your business from home and you want to expand to an office space especially if you're hiring people you can offer new services you can sell products or license or white label your work an example would be you could create let's say a custom CMS that you use for your clients and even sell to other developers you could offer uh Consulting and coaching so there's a lot of different ways to to scale your business you just have to figure out what works for you all right so I hope you guys like this guide I know it was kind of long but hopefully it helps in your freelancing journey uh I have a lot more to say on the subject and I have have a course called freelanc mastery. deev if you want to check that out I'll have the link in the description and I just want to thank you for watching I know it was a pretty long video but hopefully you got something out of it and I'll see you next time