There are quite a few things you will want to be cautious of as a freelancer, especially if it is how you earn your living. Many new freelancers often find out these lessons the hard way and usually suffer financially and mentally because of it. Two of the most important rules of freelancing involve payments and the scope of a project’s work.



Payment


Unless you are working with a client you have done work with before or someone with excellent feedback, I would strongly urge using something like Scriptlance.com’s escrow system to get paid. Once someone selects you to work on a project, they place money in escrow to pay you. This money is held until you complete the work and then is released to you. In the event of a disagreement, Scriptlance.com will mediate the situation and make sure the money ends up in the hands of its rightful owner. You will often be working in situations where you are vulnerable to being cheated, so try to be cautious about who you are working for and under what terms. If you take a month long project and then deliver it trusting you will get a paypal payment once they approve of your work, what is to stop someone from not paying you? It is easier to be cautious ahead of time than deal with a problem that has already happened. You should request escrow for long projects or those involving a lot of money. You can also request that a project be broken down into parts. This still gives you incentive to finish the project and makes the client invested in the project as well and unlikely to stiff you on the last payment if they have made the rest. If you do get stiffed in that situation, it will likely be on the first payment and at least you can be happy you didn’t do the entire project before getting cheated.



Scope of Work


When you are dealing with projects that you have to bid on a price for a completed job, you will often run into people who are not very clear with their project requirements and find yourself in a sticky situation when working for them. Before you bid on a project, make sure you are absolutely sure what work is going to be required of you. This will help you deliver a more accurate bid on a project and also show the client that you are thorough. There is nothing wrong with asking a potential client questions about the work to be done and can often end up landing you the job over people sending generic, pre-made bid solicitations. If you go into a project with unclear requirements, a client can often continue to add things to the project without you even knowing about it and those two hours of work you had planned turns into two days for the same price. You should always make some type of communication with a potential client before accepting a job for them. Don’t let the possibility of money blind your judgment.



Lack of or Bad Feedback


It is important to look at a potential client’s history before deciding to place a bid on their project. Take a few minutes to look at their feedback ratings and what other workers have had to say about them. This can give you an idea as to whether you will get paid in a timely manner (or at all), how clear they are with project requirements, as well as telling you about their demeanor and communication skills. There is such a thing as a project that you don’t want and it sometimes is because of the person offering the project.



Foreign Clients


While not all foreign clients are bad clients, it is important to make sure the two of you can communicate with each other clearly in order to ensure a smooth process for the both of you. If there is a bit of a language barrier, you may find yourself having to redo work because it did not turn out the way a client wanted it. It costs more to live in certain countries than others and as a result different clients from different countries may have various budget levels or a different idea on what a certain amount of money is worth. For American workers, it is hard to find someone who isn’t American, Canadian, Australian or European who will communicate with you clearly and pay you properly.



Long Term Projects


In some circumstances, you want to stay away from long term projects found on freelancing websites. You should always be careful of long projects because they are easy to underestimate and can wind up making you work for much less than you would like. With freelancing sites, the freelancer generally does the work without anything up front and the client pays upon completion of the full project. When you are dealing with people you have never worked with before, you never know what to expect when it comes time to get paid. The client may request more work to be done, may have delays in paying or may take your work and run without ever paying. If you are depending on payments from your freelancing work, getting tied up in a long term project can be enough to break you especially if you do not have much money to use as a cushion while you work on the long project. I believe that some clients intentionally misuse this system of freelancers doing the work and taking all of the risk. I have seen projects that involve article writing before and the client wants 52 articles over the course of a year (one a week) and will pay upon receiving the final article. You would think that nobody would even think about bidding on a project like this yet there are numerous of them every single time. Too much can happen in a year’s time to trust that you are going to get paid at the end of a project like this. What if the client doesn’t even have the money to pay for the work and is depending on the length of the project to earn him/her some money off of your work. That is a horrible practice and should not be encouraged. If you are willing to take projects like that, please invest the time in working for yourself for free and then use your work to make money just like these clients are doing with it. My philosophy for long term projects is to not begin work until there are funds for the entire project in an escrow account.