FREELANCERS UNION BLOG

  • Advice

Start a successful freelance business – even when you’re on a time budget

When you’re starting your new freelance business, perhaps the trickiest challenges you’ll face include how to find the time to work on your business… and how to avoid feeling completely overwhelmed with everything you need to do.

If you work a full-time job and are freelancing on the side, you might find that you only have brief pockets of time here and there to keep your freelance business moving forward.

...and as a result, things can move along veeeeery slooooooowly, indeed!

Luckily, you CAN build a successful freelance business even when you’re short on time. In fact, you can make serious progress as a freelancer in only 15 minutes/day.

Here are a four steps for making that happen…

1. Identify where you want to be in the next 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.

Strategic business planning is fundamental to making progress in short bursts of time!

When you know what your business goals are, you’ll be in a significantly better position to assess what actions you will need to take to achieve those goals, and which areas of business you want to focus your energy on.

2. Choose ONE area of business you want to prioritize working on first.

For example, you might want to create your business plan, or you might want to get your freelance services webpage up and running, or you might want to pitch your services to 5 potential clients, and so on.

Pick just ONE thing that you will work on first so that you will be more focused and intentional about your 15-minute daily actions.

3. Break that business area down into smaller goals.

Let’s say you want to create a business plan. You might decide to set aside a full month to work on that, in which case you can chunk it out into weekly goals.

You may choose to divide the business plan into four sections for each week: doing business plan research in week 1, putting together your vision/mission statement and planning your business goals in week 2, creating your ideal client profile in week 3, and figuring out your marketing plan in week 4, for example.

4. Break down the smaller goals into manageable daily tasks.

Once you’ve chosen your four goals, you can break each one of those goals down into smaller, bite-sized 15-minute tasks, or daily action items!

For example, week 1 could include learning about the purpose of business plans on day 1, choosing what components you want to include in your business plan on day 2, finding a business plan template on day 3, and so on.

Set aside some time at the beginning of each month to plan out which tasks you’ll focus on for each day of the month so that you don’t have to waste time trying to decide what to do in the moment… and so that by the end of the month, you’ll have a tangible result!

It all feels a little less overwhelming now, doesn’t it?

Plus, when you’re strategic about which action items you work on at which stage of your business, you will save yourself huge amounts of time and ensure that everything you do contributes to your business goals!

Like the idea of doing daily 15-minute action items, but don’t want to spend time planning out all the action steps every month?

No problem! Join the free Begin Your Biz Challenge to get access to a new 15-minute action item you can take every day for your business… created for you!

Sagan Morrow Hi, I'm Sagan! I'm a healthy living lifestyle blogger. I also teach new and established freelancers how to achieve real success in their freelance businesses via my book and online course.

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