The freelance industry seems to constantly booming inline with the internet expanding. Thousands upon thousands of websites are created every day with huge budgets set aside to employ freelancers to help create content to improve the SEO of the website and gain organic traffic in the long term. Therefore, we should all be able to understand why freelancing is becoming the job to move too – in the last year alone, I know ten blogging friends that have actually quit their daytime job to pursue a full time career in freelancing.

However, what actually makes a good freelance? If you want to pursue a career in this sector, you need to know how to become good at it and employable to others. Therefore, talking from experience of both freelancing myself out and employing several freelancers for other websites I own, here is my take on what makes a good and employable freelancer.

#1 Content First is Key

The first and most important area to being a good freelancer is making sure the content you produce is good enough to freelance even to begin with. After all, the whole point of freelancing is to write content for others, usually in a specific and niche field. If your content is not up to the standards of the employer, you can pretty much expect the employer to question hiring you for the future. Therefore, only pursue freelancing when you have mastered 1) the content you are writing about (and understand everything you are writing about) and 2) SEO – many employers want SEO articles as standard.

#2 Cheap to Hire

After the content, I find that the next area which is crucial to making yourself employable is making sure you are cheap enough for people to want to hire you and say to themselves ‘yes, I think for the content she/he can write, she/he is worth the rate’.

For example, when I was employing people for one of my websites, I had many CVs coming in telling me their background and why they are great for writing about the content I wanted them to write about. Therefore, already I was thinking a tick-in-the-box for ‘Content First is Key’. The next step is to look at their rates and this varied from a staggering $300 down to $7 – of course, the higher the rate the more specialized the writer. However, who is not going to try the $7 first before the $300? The rate freelancers offer themselves out at immediately makes the employer prejudice to how good they think that freelancer is which is wrong – the rate freelancers offer themselves out at will also depend on their living circumstances and other important factors we all seem to forgot about.

#3 Always Be On Time

If you have a freelancing job to write articles for set days at set times, make sure you always manage to schedule your posts to go live and published at these times – having a freelancer that is unpredictable when they publish articles does not help the employer one single bit. Therefore, if you are going to be late writing articles this week, which will happen if you are ill etc. then warn your employer about this so you can decide what steps should be taken next (whether you should write double next week or carry on as normal).