For anyone who is already doing so—or thinking of it soon—here are 5 factors that contribute to long-term success for your full-fledged freelance business.

1. Embrace Your Craft

If you’re freelancing, chances are you wanted a greater degree of enjoyment out of your work. Rather than dragging yourself through the corporate rat race, you launched out on your own and are trying to “make it” doing something that you love. 

If that’s the case, one of the most important factors to keep in mind as you go along is to preserve your passions. This may sound easy for some and impossible for others—and the truth is, it can be both.

While both of these attitudes are common, though, it’s also possible to find a sustainable middle ground—if you try. No matter what stage of the journey you’re in, always strive to remind yourself that you’re doing something you love. Jack London is a good example of this. The author had countless responsibilities, but throughout it all, he still loved to write—to the point where he wrote so much that he forgot to eat at times.

Remember, even though many responsibilities come with running a freelance business, at its core, you’re doing something you’re passionate about. Is it hard? Sure. Are there challenges? Of course. But that’s always true with professional pursuits. The important thing is that you’re pursuing a form of employment on your terms. It’s an encouraging and empowering mindset that can be critical in keeping you motivated over time.

2. Create Long-Term Infrastructure for Your Freelance Business

You may be a solopreneur with a tiny, one-person business but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the corporate side of your business activities. On the contrary, it’s important to invest in the business side of things, including putting long-term elements of your freelance business in place.

For instance, if you send a lot of invoices, create a template to streamline the process. If you need to build a network, invest in things like social media and measure your success over time. If your job is location-dependent, consider things like moving nearer to an important client or living in a city center where you can easily access clients who are within walking distance of one another.

If you’re serious about freelancing, take the time to look past today’s workload. How can you invest in the long-term infrastructure of your growing business?

3. Adopt an Entrepreneurial Attitude

It doesn’t matter what your freelancing activity is. You could build websites, walk dogs, write blog posts, and the list goes on. But at the end of the day, there’s one thing that all contractors share in common: they’re business owners.

That said, it’s important to adopt an entrepreneurial attitude as you go about tending to your business. This includes practical elements, like paying bills and communicating with clients promptly.

It also requires some more nuanced activity. For instance, it’s wise to spend time understanding, identifying, and managing potential risks. Do you have long-term clients? Do you have money saved up for temporary lapses in income? Should you purchase business insurance?

Along with risk factors, consider your mental and emotional state. Look for ways that you can cope with failure—because chances are it will come. When setbacks happen, how will you respond? Work on building resilience and positivity to help you get through the slow or difficult times.

4. Stay Organized

If you want to both attain and maintain a successful freelance business, you need to figure out how to stay organized. This applies to every area of your professional activities. Networking, paying bills, doing your taxes, maintaining equipment, creating a schedule, and of course, doing the work that you’re hired to do all require organization.

There are many ways for freelancers to stay organized. One of the most essential of these is pulling together a commitment tracking system (or CTS for short.) This can be something as simple as using Trello to track open loops and keep your short-term activities and long-term projects in one place.

Your CTS should be a system that helps you track all of your personal and professional activities. As a freelancer, it’s too easy to blur the lines between personal and professional work. Using a CTS helps you tend to your responsibilities without being controlled by your work and personal commitments all of the time.

5. Define Success for Your Freelance Business

Finally, take the time to define success—to you. Don’t look at what others have set as their own benchmarks. Take the time to personally define what it looks like for you to have officially “succeeded.” Is it a financial goal? A time-based goal? A certain lifestyle? A combination of these and other factors?

This isn’t just a fun exercise to see how high you can fly as a freelancer. It’s a critical element of maintaining your own sanity and stability over time.

By defining your terms of success, you establish parameters for you to work within. You can set attainable goals that can keep you motivated. If you’re a workaholic, these boundaries can also help you avoid slipping into an endless pursuit of “bigger and better.”

Setting the Stage for Freelance Business Success

Freelancing is popular, but it’s also tough—especially if you want to freelance full time. Nevertheless, there is a high ceiling for those who go about building their freelance businesses thoughtfully.

So, use the tips above to make sure you’re setting the stage for long-term success with your freelance business. That way you can dive into each day’s work knowing that you’re working toward something that will be sustainable far into the future.

Tell us in the comments: How have you set up your freelance business for success?

Indiana Lee is a writer and journalist from the Pacific Northwest with a passion for covering workplace issues, social justice, environmental protection, and more. In her off time, she enjoys hiking with her two dogs. You can follow her on Twitter @indianalee3, or reach her at indianaleewrites@gmail.com

The post #5onFri: Five Factors that Lead to Freelance Business Success appeared first on DIY MFA.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you interact with valuable data assets. Unfortunately, data breaches by cybercriminals against businesses are on the rise and the methods they use are continually getting more advanced. When data gets stolen, your clients are likely to experience severe financial and reputational losses. As such, the steps you take to keep data secure are essential to safeguarding clients’ businesses and retaining their trust.       

We’re going to dive a little further into a handful of ways you can help keep clients’ data safe during your freelance activities. 

1. Keep Accounts Separated

Setting effective boundaries plays a key role in various areas of your freelance writing career. This is no different when it comes to data protection. Particularly when you are just starting out, you may not see any harm in aspects of your home and professional life blending. But this can soon become an organizational and cybersecurity nightmare. You need to make sure there is a distinct separation between the online tools you use in your personal life and those you use for work purposes.

This isn’t just relevant to work and personal email accounts. It should also apply to cloud storage platforms and document creation tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Wherever possible, make certain you also establish separate work folders for each client and assign specific sharing permissions only to relevant clients. This helps to make sure your clients’ data and assets aren’t inadvertently shared or accessed by unauthorized parties.

2. Exercise Password Protocols

One of the most basic forms of cybersecurity is often one of the most overlooked. Exercising responsible password protocols for all your accounts helps to make sure any data related to your clients is stored and handled safely. When you start freelancing full-time, you don’t always have the same cybersecurity structures and reminders in place that you would when working as an employee. You have to take responsibility for these yourself.

The simplest method is to set a monthly calendar reminder to change your passwords for all your work accounts. These shouldn’t all be the same password and shouldn’t be versions of a password you previously used. Use a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. 

However, you may find it easier and more effective to utilize password manager software. This stores all the passwords for your accounts, allowing you to create strong and unique options for each without struggling to remember them all. (Editor’s Note: At DIY MFA, we use LastPass for this)

3. Consider Your Family

It may be the case you’re pursuing freelance writing because it allows you to spend more time with your family. But it’s also vital to consider how your work’s proximity to your family’s activities can pose data security risks. This is particularly the case when all family members share devices you use for work and even are all connected on the same network.

You need to make cybersecurity a regular point of discussion with your family members. Talk to your children about methods for safe internet behavior, particularly surrounding sharing personal information and passwords. This will help keep them protected online and reduce the potential for external parties to gain access to your clients’ data. If you’re sharing devices, it may be worth using parental locks on apps you use for work.

4. Review Your Portfolio

A great portfolio will be key to your continued freelance writing success. You need to keep this up-to-date and it’s only natural you’ll want to fill it with your best work. That said, it’s not unusual to overlook how this simple self-marketing tool can result in a breach of client data. 

This is especially the case when you’re a freelance writer of technical manuals or internal documents. Featuring these items in your portfolio may well constitute an inadvertent leak of your clients’ valuable intellectual property. As such, it’s vital to talk to your clients first about what they’re happy for you to share and even if there are any elements you need to redact for the sake of privacy.

It can even be worth keeping these sections of your portfolio behind a password-protected section of your author website. Your clients may be happy for you to share examples, but only with prospects not connected to the same industry. This private portfolio allows you to share it only with those in approved sectors.

5. Utilize Security Tools

While your secure behavior is important, it’s not the only way you can keep clients’ data safe. Investing a little extra time and money in cybersecurity tools can prevent breaches. This should begin with the basics of regularly checking for and installing security updates on your devices. 

It’s also worth utilizing a reliable virus protection platform. There are plenty of free versions on the market, but these will often have limited features. Where client data is concerned, you need to protect against malware and ransomware. Subscribing to a specialist antivirus platform can minimize the potential for exposure here. 

Alongside antivirus software, subscribing to a strong virtual private network (VPN) platform may be appropriate. If you occasionally work from a coffee shop or a coworking space, using public and shared networks can leave your device and client data vulnerable to breaches. A VPN creates a secure connection that is protected against external attacks. It also allows you to share data through an encrypted tunnel.

Conclusion

Your freelance clients have a reasonable expectation that you’ll keep their data secure. As such, it’s important to maintain secure behavior to minimize your vulnerability to cybercrime. These efforts shouldn’t just be targeted at your own behavior but also consider the actions of your family and the public. These security elements can take some time and effort. But they keep clients’ data safe and demonstrate you’re a trustworthy and responsible contractor. 

Indiana Lee is a writer and journalist from the Pacific Northwest with a passion for covering workplace issues, social justice, environmental protection, and more. In her off time, she enjoys hiking with her two dogs. You can follow her on Twitter @indianalee3, or reach her at indianaleewrites@gmail.com

The post #5onFri: Five Ways Freelancers Can Keep Clients’ Data Safe appeared first on DIY MFA.