The role of soft skills in securing high-paying freelance gigs cannot be overemphasized. Freelancing demonstrates a way of offering life. It’s a creative culture that encompasses a lot of soft habits.
The creative skill you have developed overtime is clearly the primary service point in the market… Unfortunately, they would only carry you to an extent with your clients.
There are soft skills that would help you through your time as a freelancer. These soft skills would help you work with a team, build an audience, connect with colleagues, and even keep a client.
The funniest thing is that these soft skills are really easy to learn and hold on to. They aren’t like the professional skills you are looking to offer your clients.
The concept of soft skills and how it can help a freelancer is the point of this post. We are going to get into the nook and cranny of this notion, including how to develop them.
What are Soft Skills?
These are skills that help a lay man communicate better, work with a team and relate better with colleagues. We can describe them as personal habits.
These kinds of skills were mainly highlighted in a book “how to win friends and influence others.” And of course, it was a total banger. Hence, I’d advise anybody to read that inorder to improve the normal person-person skills.
Let’s get back into the line of freelancing. Soft skills can guarantee you a survival in the job market of any niche. Even without a proof of work in other niches, you would be able to work in the same niche.
Importance of Soft Skills in Securing High-Paying Freelance Gigs
Soft skills reflect your personality and qualify you to only clients that are attracted to your personality. In fact, even if you have been hired and your soft skill isn’t worth the initial personality show off, you might be losing your clients.
Here are some of importance of soft skills in freelancing:
1. Getting Clients and overcoming exploitation
No doubt this is the main reason everyone out there is looking into the idea of freelancing. However, you need soft skills to be able to manage yourself and keep yourself in check for your proposed client.
If you are so good at negotiation and communicating effectively, you would be able to keep your service in line with client motivation all the time and to escape all forms of exploitation. I will advice you read this article for better understanding How to Overcome Worker Exploitation in Freelance Marketplaces – 6 Examples
2. Retaining Clients
Another important part of soft skills is that it helps in retaining Clients. Those clients you have worked hard enough to get, how would they stay with you? Can you get them to still communicate with you every now and then? With soft skills, you’d be able to retain clients.
3. Networking
The act of networking has nothing exactly to do with your proof of work, creativity or experience, instead it depends mainly on your soft skills. With soft skills, you’d be able to learn more about your industry trend and share it with your community.
4. Gain Referrals
See, clients mostly only look at the side of freelancers with good off work skills coupled with their creative skills when determining who they should refer to their friends. No one, even you, in the place of a client, wants to hire a grumpy freelancer.
You might think you need only the creative aspect of your to charm a client about your work output or result, However, no. If a client can not see you as their familiar person, they would just keep complaining about your level of delivery.
Funny thing is this happens a lot in freelance marketplaces, and I described it in my earlier post about freelancing on marketplaces and the downsides of this strategy.
Essential Soft Skills of a Freelancer
As a freelancer, these are off work skills you should keep at the back of your mind at all times, in order to retain clients and high paying jobs:
1. Communication
Communication is the most important aspect of any relationship, whether personal, business, academics or any kind of relationship. In as much as you can keep a steady line of communication with your client, you are in for a long favour.
I have clients, who even though we have not worked together in over a year, I still talk to them at least every weekend. This help keep the “you are not a robot gimmick” out of clients mind
2. Expertise
Even though we keep expatiating on the regards for off-work, basic skills, we should also discuss how far you understand the sector of freelancing you are working at. Mediocre don’t get jobs, and even if they do, they still wouldn’t be able to keep jobs.
If you have a good network of freelancers and experts around you, network Effectively and keep community basics with you, you would always keep up with clients demands.
3. Negotiation
If you are a freelancer, you would definitely need to do the negotiation and contract setting with your clients all by yourself. How would you have gone about this? Communicate and compensate your clients while also showing them a proof of work that they can’t over run except to accept your offer.
4. Marketing
The effort freelancers must put into marketing their ability is not something worthy of being proud of. Communication is also important in marketing. However, another important point is being shy about telling people about your service because of what they would say or how they would react.
5. Stress Management
Health is wealth, they say, and it would be wrong for us to leave out this part where freelancer stress or work-lifestyle habits need to be managed. Always make sure you don’t accumulate your work and leave out procrastination from the helm of your service. Finding a way to balance freelancing and the other part of your life is very adventurous.
Conclusion
Freelancing demands a certain level of innovative thinking, learning, relearning and creativity. Without taking your time to go through the right process, your freelance business might be haunted in the long run.
What’s the way out? As much as technical skills are the primary service of your career, don’t leave out the soft skills that would aid keeping and managing clients. Your ability to work with a team and people around you is as important as those hard skills.
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