Freelance work is a growing trend. As time goes by, more people and companies understand the benefits that result from this form of work. People who work freelance can have more flexibility, better work-life balance, motivation to achieve goals and lower telecommuting costs.

After doing some research, we have come up with 5 articles that you must read, whether you are currently a freelancer or planning to become one in the near future.

4 tips to start working as a freelancer

Elisabet Parera, writer in the blog Workana, provides four tips for those who wish to start working freelance. She is aware that many freelancers who are beginners may feel a little lost.

Some of her suggestions are: to find an area where you may become a specialist; highlight your skills and strengths in order to be set apart from your competitors; learn to put a proper price to your work; and, finally, set a work schedule.

How to develop a good LinkedIn profile

Joshua Waldman, writer and blogger, gives advice to freelancer on developing a good LinkedIn profile. His article is very useful if you are having doubts on how to present your experience in an attractive way for potential customers. For example, you may decide to list separately every working experience you had with every client who hired you. This results on an extremely long profile, which shall probably repeat information and, consequently, is not appealing for readers.

Waldman recommends having a single section where you set the date you started working freelance. In that section you should include customers’ recommendations, samples of your work and characteristics that make your work stand out. If you have worked in different industries or if you have offered very different services, you should split this section, explaining the distinctive features of each job done.

In addition, if you worked with well-known customers, you can mention these projects in other experience sections. You must always be clear on the fact that you worked as a contractor, to avoid problems.

To conclude, Waldman suggests highlighting the projects in which you participated and to write a very attractive and adequate headline.

Tips to stay organised

Richard Feloni, Business Insider reporter, shares seven tips to stay organised if you are a freelancer. This is a key issue if you want to be efficient and competitive in a growing market. Feloni bases his article on the ideas of the freelance journalist, Michelle Goodman.

Like other experts, Feloni points out the importance of keeping an organised work schedule. Structuring your work will allow you to achieve a better work-life balance.

He also recommends not taking more projects than what you can really handle, stating that it is important to learn to say “no”. By saying no, you can analyse better the opportunities that come around and actually take the ones you are really interested in.

Other tips are: to keep all your ideas in the same place –to avoid losing them-, to Schedule time for yourself, to do a close follow up of your finances and to build relationships with customers that may become permanent clients.

Tools and applications that help in your daily tasks

In addition to the advice given in the articles we have mentioned so far, you may consider getting some help from technology. This article, published in dbiz.Today, provides a description of 14 tools and apps –most of which are free-, that shall help you to organise your work and become more efficient. To mention a few, you will learn more about SlimTimer, GoogleDrive and Asana.

A piece of advice for networking

In the last article web ring to you, Paul Gough, MD at Intouch Accounting, gives tips to do networking, a vital activity for freelancers. To begin with, he recommends planning, that is: to be prepared by keeping you resume updated, defining the price of your work and deeply knowing the area or industry in which you work.

Furthermore, Gough states it is important to make the most of events and conferences, where you must make an effort to stand out in the crowd. A good strategy would be to show genuine interest in the particular needs of the people you talk to and to let them know how you can satisfy those needs.

Finally, Gough says it is important to develop the relationships you established and he points outs that social networks are really useful to achieve this, particularly LinkedIn.