The COVID-19 pandemic noticed a major improve within the progress of the freelance trade. In response to Web site Planet, there have been about 1.1 billion freelancers worldwide in 2021.
So, what’s driving these professionals to undertake freelancing?
Apart from higher monetary prospects, freedom and suppleness to decide on the kind of work are the primary explanation why professionals swap to freelancing.
Nevertheless, freelancers face their very own share of challenges.
What Are the Challenges Freelancers Face?
Listed here are a number of obstacles freelancers face when managing their work lives.
- Improper time administration – Freelancing requires an individual to put on a number of hats. They need to juggle varied duties and capabilities, from gross sales and advertising to accounting and undertaking administration. Juggling a number of tasks can eat a variety of effort and time, offered they set up themselves. That’s the reason having wonderful time administration expertise is a vital talent within the freelancing world.
- Lack of focus – The thought of multitasking varied initiatives concurrently is thrilling due to the publicity and expertise one will get. Nevertheless, the disadvantage right here is that the freelancer finds it robust to focus or delve deep right into a process assigned. This in the end impacts their high quality of labor.
- No motivation – In a office surroundings, we frequently have colleagues and seniors to problem and push us to attain extra. Nevertheless, freelancers need to go on from one process to a different by themselves. Due to this fact, they should inspire themselves to attain targets. Sadly, that’s not at all times potential. As a rule, freelancers face a dip of their motivation ranges, inflicting their work to undergo.
Apart from the factors talked about above, the absence of an organized workflow considerably impacts a freelancer’s motivation and productiveness.
However the gig financial system is right here to remain! Freelancers centered on bettering their working fashion and boosting their productiveness have perennially trusted technologically superior instruments.
Instruments like buyer relationship administration (CRM) platforms, communication instruments, undertaking administration platforms, and time trackers have helped freelancers overcome varied challenges they face.
As an example, know-how has introduced folks throughout all areas nearer. This implies freelancers can collaborate with clients and different stakeholders anyplace across the globe and have simpler entry to alternatives than earlier than.
This globalization is triggered by digital transformation that has enabled freelancers to go for versatile engagement fashions at their comfort. In consequence, freelancers are getting a chance to select desired initiatives based mostly on their experience and no matter the demographics.
Amongst all of the digital developments which have helped freelancers keep organized, the position of the Kanban strategy has been phenomenal.
Let’s perceive the Kanban strategy and the way it may help freelancers enhance their efficiency.
How Kanban Strategy Can Assist Streamline Your Freelance Enterprise
Kanban strategy is a workflow administration strategy for outlining, managing and bettering your processes to ship the very best to your shoppers. It helps you visualize your processes and your work to maximise its effectivity.
This strategy to undertaking administration helps you determine the potential bottlenecks in your workflow processes and repair them to yield desired outcomes quicker and cost-effectively.
Allow us to now perceive how the Kanban strategy may help you set up your corporation processes successfully.
1. Monitor and Handle Shopper Initiatives
Kanban is the most-used undertaking administration strategy for managing consumer initiatives. Kanban board offers a superb overview of your initiatives. It helps you create and handle duties, set deadlines, and maintain observe of the undertaking’s progress.
Along with managing duties, it’s also possible to set priorities and deadlines to your duties to make sure their well timed completion.
You can too use Kanban boards to maintain tabs in your consumer conferences, cellphone calls, and different particulars. Utilizing Kanban for consumer work eliminates the necessity for extra software program apps as you’ll be able to set up a number of initiatives and plan out the supply of duties at your comfort.
With the Kanban strategy, you’ll be able to invite your consumer to collaborate with you in your board. As well as, some undertaking administration boards like Jira provide role-based permissions to the customers for seamless undertaking administration.
Basecamp, a undertaking administration instrument, presents a superb chat function (campfire) to speak with shoppers in real-time.
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Equally, the Jira-Slack integration allows customers to speak with their shoppers by way of Slack.
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Listed here are some ideas you could observe to expedite your processes.
- Write a fast undertaking scope doc for each undertaking and share the identical together with your consumer.
- Create e mail templates for outreach, gross sales pitch, and different marketing-related duties.
- Use invoicing software program like FreshBooks or Invoicely. Jira additionally comes with a module to create, save, and ship invoices to your shoppers in a number of clicks.
2. Collect Content material Concepts
The Kanban strategy is usually a excellent medium to brainstorm, verify, and plan your content material earlier than they’re despatched to your editorial calendar. Acquire content material concepts to your freelance enterprise by conducting devoted brainstorming classes, doing market analysis, and maintaining observe of content material requests out of your viewers.
You need to use a Kanban board to avoid wasting all concepts for future blogs, articles, eBooks, and different forms of content material items with out disturbing your ongoing work. By following this strategy, you’ll by no means lose out on content material concepts in your head.
RescueTime, a productiveness and time monitoring app, makes use of the Kanban strategy for managing content material concepts for his or her weblog. This concept board is a centralized repository of content material concepts for his or her future weblog posts.
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3. Construct and Handle Your Editorial Calendar
Take out the struggles of content material publishing by having a devoted editorial calendar to your freelance enterprise. From matter concepts and drafts to completed content material, you’ll be able to observe your entire lifecycle of your content material items and handle every thing seamlessly with the assistance of the Kanban strategy.
With the assistance of Kanban playing cards, you’ll be able to retailer content material particulars just like the key phrases, useful resource hyperlinks, reference hyperlinks, and different particulars in your process immediately. You can too create customized checklists to your content material items to make sure you don’t miss any step of the content material creation course of.
Buffer, a social media publish scheduling instrument, makes use of Trello to handle their editorial calendar.
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Their easy workflow consists of six levels – Content material Concepts, Pipeline, In Progress, Modifying, Able to Ship, and Shipped. The Buffer staff tracks the duty standing as they transfer throughout this workflow.
4. Handle a Social Media Calendar
Maintain a pulse in your social media advertising initiatives by following a Kanban strategy. Strategize, set up, and publish branded content material in your social media pages with out breaking a sweat.
You possibly can plan out your social media technique in small actionable steps. You possibly can create duties for –
- Brainstorming publish concepts
- Creating content material for the posts
- Designing belongings for the posts
- Put up scheduling
- Monitoring the efficiency of the posts
- Partaking together with your viewers
Listed here are some fast ideas for managing your social content material higher.
- Leverage design instruments like Canva for designing your social posts. Canva presents over 400Okay+ design templates for varied social media channels.
- Use on-line cloud storage, resembling Google Drive, OneDrive, or DropBox, to retailer media information, specifically photos, movies, and infographics.
- Join a social media scheduling app like Hootsuite or Later and take away the pains of manually posting content material on each social web page.
Kanban for social media advertising can set up your social campaigns and guarantee posting on social accounts is completed promptly.
5. Monitor Outsourced Work
Managing and monitoring outsourced work is a problem for many freelance companies. There may be usually a spot in collaboration, communication, and data sharing. A Kanban strategy to such conditions can scale back this hole considerably.
A easy Kanban board may help you observe the duties and maintain a whole maintain over the undertaking progress. Share duties with a well-written description explaining the work expectations, set a precedence and deadline, and different data, if wanted. It will make sure the outsourced staff will probably be in sync with you.
It is possible for you to to see who’s doing what and determine the challenges you may face. Kanban board additionally eliminates the necessity for a number of software program apps because it presents you every thing you might want to handle your outsourced work.
Listed here are efficient ways that may assist you with outsourced staff administration.
- Signal your contracts, proposals, invoices, and paperwork utilizing a digital signature. It will considerably quicken the signing course of and assist save each time and value.
- Talk with the outsourced staff incessantly. Conduct common standups and weekly conferences to debate the progress of your initiatives.
- Share the required belongings – writing tips, design tips, undertaking scope, and different details about your organization and the initiatives with the staff earlier than beginning the work.
6. Share a Public Roadmap
Listening to your audiences and offering an answer to their ache factors contributes considerably to strengthening your model picture. Likewise, viewers suggestions can also be a robust issue that shouldn’t be ignored.
Having a Kanban board to seize your buyer’s suggestions and requests is essentially the most helpful strategy. You possibly can additional make this board public and provides your clients entry to allow them to drop of their feedback or ideas seamlessly.
Trello, the well-known undertaking administration software program, has a devoted board for managing function requests from its clients.
Conclusion
To enhance productiveness and streamline their processes, freelancers ought to concentrate on making their workflow seamless. A method of attaining that is by utilizing the Kanban strategy.
If you’re a freelancer seeking to streamline your corporation, this strategy will assist you velocity up your work supply. It is going to set the precise stability between precedence and deliverables at hand. So, go forward and use the Kanban strategy to remain organized and enhance your productiveness and income. Glad freelancing!
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