Holding Fort: Being Professional With the Client.

Freelancing is a finicky business, where you will find many kinds and types of clients all through the day. There is a good chance that while the client is looking for someone who is not affiliated to a company or a firm - and therefore would charge less - they will also expect a level of professionalism in the freelancer that they are hiring. A freelancer should keep in mind that he or she is the only person who would be able to either take their profile and position up in the world of freelancing, or bring it down into the doldrums. It is entirely the freelancer's responsibility to make themselves look professional, so that they are well accepted by the world of business. Here are some tips that the freelancer should consider to have a professional outlook:

Visiting Cards/Letter Heads/ Etc:  

Gone are the days when visiting cards and letter heads would take a month to make a week to give out. With technology, making visiting cards and letter heads is just a half day work, and the impression that a nicely designed visiting card would make on the client is surely worth the trouble.  Also, with digital age printing, you can actually print out a thousand visiting cards or a thousand letterheads within a few hundred dollars. 

Official Phone/Cell Phone: 

You might be working from home, but that does not mean that if your client ever calls you for something important, they should hear Junior's chatter. If you are working from home,make sure that you have a separate phone line, which you provide to your clients so that they can contact you without the hassles of talking to someone whom they haven't been properly introduced to.

Web Presence:

Making a website is no longer that $10000 with $1000 as monthly expenses thing. You can have the perfect websites for small businesses under $100 per year, and what's more, you do not need to be a technical guru to run these websites on your own. Once you have these websites sett up, you can actually run and update them yourself. 

The Right Email ID:

You are forgiven if you have a web mail id like Gmail, Yahoo or MSN if you do not have a proper website. But if you have a website, there is no reason why you do not have a official, corporate sounding email like 'roy@acmecreations.com'.  And make sure that you right the right web mail address, if you do not have any other option but to use it. Try to stay away from those accounts that heralded you as 'bloodysaint@xyz.com.