Whether you freelance as a writer, a programmer or a designer, there are certain tasks that you’ll do again and again and some that you’ll do infrequently.  Cheat sheets can be a huge help for both those tasks that you do all the time, and the ones you do infrequently enough that the exact way to do them can be a bit hard to remember.  Whether it’s formatting a certain type of writing or how to use certain tools in Photoshop or Dreamweaver, cheat sheets can carve minutes to hours off the time it takes to complete a project.

Any kind of a template can be called a cheat sheet, and the beauty of them is that you only have to create them once.  You might have a template for press releases or grants, for a website design, or for CSS style sheets to help get you started. There’s no point in rewriting the same code a hundred times for a hundred different projects, so use a cheat sheet template as your basis then make the necessary changes.  Just be sure you use your template only as a starting point to avoid having to redo the basics.  Then make each project unique.

It’s not easy to make it as a freelancer in any field, but one proven step toward success is to keep your promises, and then go one step further–overdeliver.  Getting started  as a freelancer is the hardest part, because lack of experience is so easily equated with lack of skill.  And there’s no more important a time in a freelancing career than the beginning to set in stone a work ethic and principles to help you succeed. By giving the client what they want, and more, you’ll get their business again, and you can benefit from referrals they send your way through word of mouth.

Start on projects early.  If you know it’ll take you 5 days, don’t want until T-minus 5 days to start the project.  You don’t know what unexpected interruptions could slow you down, and you’re risking finishing the project late if you only give yourself enough time to finish it under ordinary circumstances.  If it’ll take you 5 days and it’s due in 2 weeks, start now.  You might have it done in 5 days, but you’ve gotten an early start and will probably finish it early.  And you’ve got a built-in cushion if something should go wrong.

If you start the project earlier, you won’t have to rush, which can cause problems.  You’ll be done early enough to be able to revise a little more before turning it in, too. While you might take a certain sense of pride in starting a project at zero hour and getting it done on time, how much better would it be if you’d had a day between writing and revising? 

Working from home, setting your own hours, taking a day off without filling out paperwork or asking a boss—these are some of the most wonderful benefits of freelancing.  But these can also be some of its greatest problems.  When there’s no time-clock to punch, it’s easier to push the work aside and do it later.  When there’s no office to call for a sick day or a vacation, it’s easier to take that day and tell yourself you’ll work longer tomorrow, or work over the weekend, to make up the time on those projects. It’s also easy to take on too much work, get behind in the bookkeeping, or become so disorganized that every day seems to be nothing more than one frustration after another.

Organizing your freelance life might seem daunting and will take a little time in the beginning, but once you get a system in place, every day will go much more smoothly and you’ll get more done in less time. The more organized you are when it comes to time and money, the more you’re freed up to do the creative work within that frame, and the more successful you’ll be.

Make a schedule and stick to it.  Look at your projects, and block out hours of your work day for certain tasks.  A common freelancing mistake is underestimating the time a project will take, so in the beginning, make a guess and add a few hours of extra time to your estimate just in case.  At worst, you’ll allot too much time and have that left over to do more prospecting or get a head start on another project.

When you work a 9 to 5, you have the benefit of learning about your co-workers, your supervisors and your employer and coming to a certain level of understanding about their expectations of you, their likes and dislikes, their skills and their attitudes.  But when you freelance, each client starts a brand new learning experience, and each client seems wholly different from the last, which can make managing clients a challenge.

All freelancers have a few easy clients who assign a project, disappear into the background while you do your work, pay promptly and cause few problems. And then there are clients with their peculiar quirks, who are great in one way and more difficult in others, and of course, the downright picky and difficult clients. Chances are good you won’t know which category a client falls into until you’ve already accepted the job.  You’ll get some who seem to want to make every decision for you, some who give no direction but then complain that what you’ve done isn’t what they had in mind, some who just don’t understand the technical side of things and make suggestions that would basically undermine everything you do. 

A trend among new freelancers is to take jobs at extremely low pay, sometimes no pay at all, to get a foot in the door or have something to put on a portfolio.  These freebies, they think, are just a way to get started and have work to point to when prospecting for clients.  And having something to put on that writing or design resume can make a big difference—you wouldn’t hire a typist, for instance, without some assurance that he or she could actually type, so no one’s going to hire a web designer unless they can see a website you’ve actually designed.  So a freebie or two let you create professional work for a client that you can use to get paying work.

The problem with these freebies is that so many people trying to break into freelancing are so willing to do them, that it tends to undermine their entire field.  If a client has 20 freelancers willing to do a project for free or for unbelievably low rates because someone wants the experience, and your rates are $50 an hour, your rate is going to look extremely bloated comparatively.  Even $20 an hour might seem high if almost everyone else is offering to do the same work for $5.  The more freelancers who are willing to do work for slave wages, the less everyone makes as a whole. 

How you handle an angry client probably decide whether you’ll get business from that client again, and whether or not they would recommend or discourage their business contacts from trusting you to do freelance work for them.  You don’t want to risk a client being angry and pointing out what he believes to be your shortcomings to everyone in his email address book.  Whether the client is angry for a reasonable reason or not, it’s in your best interest to deal with it quickly and professionally.  Once the situation is resolved and the client is happy again, then you can decide whether they were  unreasonable, and whether you want to work for the client again in the future.

First, take immediate action.  If you know your client is upset about something, anything, face it immediately.  You’ll look proactive and concerned about your client’s needs.  You might be tempted to wait to contact the client after a cooling-down period.  But don’t assume that everyone feels anger the same way.  The longer you wait to deal with the situation might end up being just a longer amount of time for your client’s blood pressure to rise.  Wait too long, and you might find you’ve lost the client completely.

Second, listen to the problem and acknowledge it.  The worst thing you can do when the client is trying to tell you what’s wrong is to interrupt or even try to explain that the client’s anger is unjustified. 

Whether you’re new to freelancing or you’ve been at it at a while, you’ll quickly discover that your field, whether it’s writing, design, programming or some other freelance endeavor, changes constantly.  What’s “hot” today might be forgotten tomorrow, and new software, techniques and knowledge keep things constantly changing and moving forward.  If you want to be able to compete as a freelancer, you have to keep up.

Continuing education is a great way to make sure you always know what’s new in your field.  Classes and workshops, of course, are an easy way to stay abreast of the latest search engine techniques or design principles.  But there are other ways to continue your education and keep yourself valuable as a freelancer in an ever-changing marketplace.

Participate in industry forums, message boards and mailing lists.  Before you’re able to find 20 articles online about that new trend in Internet marketing, you’ll hear about it extensively on a business message board. If you’re seeing freelance programmers start to talk about a style that’s taking off with their clients, you’ll know it’s time to look into it for your own business.

You might think that there are no freelancing pitfalls or drawbacks, at first glance.  Freelancing, after all, lets you set your own hours, work as much or as little as you want (within reason) and gives you an incredible amount of professional freedom. On the other side of the coin, though, are some potential problems.  Fortunately, you can learn to avoid these freelancing pitfalls with a little bit of planning.

Isolation is a freelance pitfall that takes many new freelancers by surprise.  Happy to be away from the drudge of the office and working independently, many freelancers find out right away that being alone for most of the day is hard to get used to.  Gone are the the co-workers heading out to lunch together, the water-cooler chatter, and all the social aspects of the workplace.  Now you have only yourself to talk to all day.  To avoid this freelancing loneliness, network with other freelancers online.  But don’t limit yourself to Internet relationships. Go out to lunch with friends occasionally and intersperse more social things like returning phone calls or calling a friend between your more concentrated tasks.

Often, one of the hardest things for a freelancer to do is set a price  Especially when you’re just starting out, the tendency is to charge far too little for work to be sure to get plenty of it.  That tendency will wear off when the work starts coming in more regularly and the fear of losing potential work because you’re charging market rates or too much is outweighed by the need to earn a reasonable wage.  But how do you know you’re undercharging, and how do you go about setting a price?

It sounds easy enough to decide on an amount per hour that you want to earn, and you should think this way.  But as a freelancer, it’s more likely that you’ll be billing per project rather than per hour, unless you tend to work on long-term projects where you are paid per hour by agreement.  Freelance writers will probably bill per article, press release, grant or other project, where designers might bill by website, logo or other graphic creation.

In the beginning, you could very well end up working for far less than your ideal hourly rate, simply because you underestimate the amount of time a project will take.  If you quote a client a rate of $150 for a project based on your desire to earn $45 an hour, for example, and the job takes you 7 hours, or 12, you’ve undercut yourself by quite a bit.  Those are live and learn moments—it might take doing a certain type of project a few times before you come up with the right quote for the time you’ll be spending. Among new freelancers that’s a common phenomenon.

Most people cite one of the reasons for becoming a freelancer as a sense of going nowhere in their regular jobs.  Whether it’s a job that doesn’t offer advancement, or a mindless job that doesn’t offer much of employees, a job that you’re unhappy with can make you miserable.  Freelancing seems to be the perfect solution for that.  You do what you want, when you want, for whom you want, right?

Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s impossible to get into a rut when you freelance.  It might not be as easy to stagnate as a freelancer than in that corporate cubicle job, but it can happen.  When you face new projects with little excitement, or find yourself, in the middle of projects, wishing a particular client wouldn’t call on you again, or even feeling like you hate certain projects, it might be that you’re stagnating as a freelancer.  What do you do? Stir things up a bit.