How Freelancers go from $30 to $300 the Hour??

hey guys I have somebody here who is a embedded real-time embedded engineer and he says that if he doesn't expand his skills his skill sets that means he's doomed as an employee his entire career so I guess with embedded engineers you're gonna constantly constantly be updating your skills because technology changes over time but that has that's to be said about a lot of technology related professions to be honest with you you got to be on top of things although I have to say in the web stack in the web space dynamic websites web apps etc the technology has matured quite a bit in the last 10-15 years and it's been pretty stable the last four or five years with some minor exceptions it's been pretty stable more stable than it's ever been in its history but this is a normal cycle of any industry the industry starts lots of changes lots of changes it has things mature levels out the whole web stack is really leveled out quite a bit so he has three questions I like nice six ink bullet points in the email sent to me you're much more likely to get a response of anybody out of anybody including myself if you keep your questions short to the point so number one question a couple of months ago you mentioned earning potential for freelancers so I was wondering questions about earning potential for freelancers here it is number one what didn't your opinion is a differentiator between 300 and 300 our freelancers answer skills knowledge and branding all of the above yeah so what makes you go from $330 to 300 well it depends on the type of projects that you work on it depends on how skilled you are somebody who's just starting out there's not worth the same price as somebody who's been doing for three four five years there's no way why because the beginner is gonna make mistakes the beginner is going to work much more slowly the beginners end product is not going to be as as clean and sophisticated somebody who's been doing it for four or five years three four five years or so on in time as you develop your skills as a professional developer regardless of the type of work that you do you're just going to become much more efficient you can have better workflows which means you didn't get stuff done much more quickly now when you go out there and compete as a freelancer it's very rare but somebody's gonna actually hire you on a per diem basis pitch with the first big project what does that mean they're not gonna pay you by the hour they're gonna ask you what you're out per hour rate is but actually what they're gonna do is judge you based on the total cost of the project because small businesses these are people - we hire freelancers they are going to they are going to want a fixed price for their project and that's that situation there that fact that most small businesses medium-sized businesses are going to want fixed prices for the projects therein lies the opportunity to get a lot more money for your time that comes out of workflows internal efficiencies on your parts leveraging frameworks using your own frameworks and just managing the prod project and your clients very effectively so that your per hour rate really increases so for example when you're just starting out and you're starting you're charging more than $20 an hour let's pick a number you're working at a certain level of efficiency so you may it may take you 30 hours to produce a project in the early stages of your career but as you become more mature and you develop all the things I just talked about also what took you 30 hours to do you can now do it in ten so you're working at three times the efficiency you see what I mean there could be even much more so than that with me in my last couple years as a contractor developer I was working a tremendous tremendous speeds compared to what I was in the past and for a few reasons a I had my own framework with which I knew like the back of my hand so I was able to get things done so quickly a great workflows I just know what I was doing and I also steered my clients properly so that their projects aligned well with my workflows and aligns well with my framework when possible not always the case but it can be done a lot of times but this is a subject of probably a few a whole course could be done on this whole thing about freelancing maximizing freelancing earnings anyway number two question number two what kind of pathway towards becoming a web developer would you suggest to someone like me with at least some core knowledge relevant to web development also which of your courses would you recommend well my interactive web developer course is like you know 10 courses put together just do that and what you want to learn as your core your foundation first that's the html5 css3 javascript the PHP I teach PHP for server-side cars for freelancers PHP is by far king by far King so many small businesses dependent on PHP if 80% of them so you want to make a lot of money as a freelancer you got to know your PHP but the great thing is you learn PHP and in that PHP course I actually teach server-side programming so all the lessons that you learn PHP apply to any other language there's a service like programming if you don't know what that is that's the programming what you do on the web server if you will anyway I'm going to teach that here you can check out my course so the path is to learn your core so you have a deep good understanding of the core languages next thing is to put up a site to showcase your talents make sure it looks good and then to do one or two freebie gigs or cheap gigs just to start developing your skills in terms of working with clients one thing to build a project on your own through a tutorial or for your own site there's nothing to actually work with clients get requirements set up for the contracts properly set the expectations properly with the clients that's a big part of the job of being a successful freelancer if you learn to manage clients of projects properly it goes back to question number one how do you get from $30 an hour to 300 that's part of it managing clients managing expectations question number three how stable is freelancer you come from web drivers with different skill levels well like any other business it's not stable in the beginning but that's a short window because once you've done a few good projects for small businesses guess what small businesses owners small business owners rather they have many other friends who are small business owners and they'll tell their friends and next thing you know you're gonna have tons of work it usually case the solidus as if this is a graph it will go like this not too much work that's rich work Oh lots of work lots of work and then OH much more work much more work it just works that way all the time I've been teaching people web design development since all three I've been mentoring people since that time as well and that happens time and time again it's like one of those universal things that always happens when you go freelance that's the process in the first year freelancing it's a little bit spotty depending how many contacts you have but it starts to pick up starts to pick up becomes more and more consistent over that time you're developing your skill sets well as a developer you're developing workflows your understanding your frameworks properly you're learning how to manage your clients you're learning how to manage projects this all comes into it and then you'll see very quickly it will start to escalate in terms of the amount of money you're gonna make and you'll be surprised how quickly this can grow especially if you implement the right strategies right from the get-go again like I said this is not something I'm guessing at or something I read somewhere I've been doing this since the 90s and I've been mentoring people and action in fact some of my students who went on from freelance - some have gotten really good jobs after backers that decided they prefer working for people some have went up went out and started companies where they were VC funded of that I've had a couple two or three at least that I know of so there you go just a superficial look at freelancing and how that all works out in terms of earnings and consistency and so on let me know if you find this whole freelancing end of thing end of things interesting for you bye bye

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 33,634

Rating: 4.9741936 out of 5

Keywords: freelance salaries, how much freelancers can earn, how to increase the money you make as a freelancer

Id: 5mO0vNgEMCQ

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2018