Whether you’re a new freelancer, an employee considering to go freelance or an established freelancer in your country – this article can prove useful to you. Being a freelancer in your home region or native country is one thing. Succeeding internationally can give you many extra things to have to take care of. In this article you will get some tips on how to approach this.

One thing is for sure; freelancers can be found behind every tree and underneath every rock out there. In America alone there are an estimated and unbelievable amount of 42 million freelancers divided into a wide range of niches. This is an example of what kind of competition you can expect. Obviously not all of these are in your niche or competing for your clients, but you get the point.

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For many freelancers their skills and interests will limit them to work in their own country or region, while others (like for instance web designers, graphic designers, different types of writers and so on) can theoretically take on work from pretty much any region of the world.

Are you happy with things?

The first thing to ask yourself before doing any changes to your current situation is “am I happy where I am today”.

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For many of us the comfort of working with clients that are close to use geographically, speak the same language and can be met in person is what makes us successful. For some freelancers, going international is not something that will be worth it or feel right. So make sure to think things through for a while before getting your hopes up and diving into things. Taking the step into the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily have to be the best solution for you if you’re happy with your current situation. But, if you’re not pleased, this can be an opportunity of a lifetime.

Now let’s have a closer look at some things that can be rewarding and challenging if you’re going international.

THE POSSIBILITIES

Endless amounts of potential clients

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By opening up your business to clients worldwide you will have many potential projects out there. If you’re struggling to find fitting projects “at home”, taking the step out into the world will give you a better chance at finding projects that fit your expertise.

Additional income

Looking for clients in other parts of the world can provide you with a nice additional income on top of what you’re currently earning. Many freelancers that have some spare hours when their regular projects are done find this a great way of getting a valuable income stream.

New experiences

Working with clients from other parts of the world can give you some very valuable experiences that may not be present in your home country. These can look great in your portfolio and help you become even better at what you do.

Meeting new people

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Getting to know new people all over the globe is a positive experience for many of us. This can give us a great creative boost and also benefit us in our everyday life. Personally I’ve gotten a lot of valuable inspiration from working alongside freelancers that work hard, stay positive and value what they have in a completely different way compared to many people I knew before.

Learning new things

No matter which clients you work for, there’s a good chance that you will get knowledge of things you never thought you’d learn or even get use for. This often adds positive energy. And let’s just admit it; gaining knowledge is a good thing, no matter the topic.

More exciting projects

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When taking a look outside your own area you will soon see that there are many exiting projects you can be part of. This can be very useful and the experience can be priceless and life-changing in some cases.

THE CHALLENGES

Language

The language barriers must not be underestimated. One thing is that you have to at least have English skills above average, and additional languages is a plus. The reasons for this are many. Misunderstanding the projects can cost you valuable hours if something has to be completely redone. And your clients also have to be able to communicate well. One way of preventing unnecessary problems related to this will be to always ask any questions you may have. Asking one extra time is usually a good plan.

Competition

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As mentioned earlier you will meet a lot of competition. You will need to be prepared for this and have the strength to deal with many turn downs before you finally get a project. Trying and failing will help you in getting to know how things are done “out there”.

Standing out

With more competition, you will need to find a way to stand out in the crowd. Make sure you know your One of your best tools in this process will be having a good portfolio, as good work usually speaks for itself. Remember to show your variety and prepare to put in your best effort and numerous hours making the portfolio a good one. Additionally you will need a good website. This is very valuable as it is accessible for anyone with an Internet connection, in this case all of your potential clients.

Contracts

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Working with clients abroad can mean many changes to your standard contracts. Not only will you have to get this translated the correct way, you also have to make sure that they are correct for the types of products/services and the countries involved. My tip would be to talk to a lawyer or someone else that has expertise in this field. Doing things the wrong way can become very pricy and give you extra work.

People not being who you think they are

Meeting new people is great and while most people are honest and serious, there are always some rotten apples. When working with people you are unable to meet or get valid references from it can be hard to know how things will turn out. Maybe you’ll be unlucky and end up not getting paid and so on. There are many things that can be done to prevent “scammers”, but you will never be 100% sure. An advantage of working locally is that you can check with others or get good references that can easily be contacted.

Not being able to meet in person

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There are more things to this than people being someone else than you thought. Not being able to meet your clients in person will increase the chance of misunderstandings and give you challenges regarding communication in general. When you’re not able to meet someone, you will need to compensate by having a good dialogue via phone or mail.

Payment issues

One of the most common problems related to this type of work is often of a financial type. There are many things that can affect this. You have to have agreed upon a payment method that works for both parties. Theres always the chance of delays, extra fees and tracking payments can be harder. This means that you will have to find a policy of when you’re supposed to get paid and when to deliver the finished product.

Pricing your services

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People earn differently in various countries. You may not think of this as an issue at first but this can eventually mean that your hourly wages will be considered extremely high in some areas and decent in others. Always check out what the usual price range is in the actual country and calculate what your earnings will be in your own currency before deciding.

Legal issues

You have to know about any legal issues, like copyright, taxes and so on. When you start doing business outside your own country it’s very important to gain proper knowledge of which laws that apply.

Conclusion

As you can see there are both benefits and challenges that will enter your freelance-life the minute you take a leap into the world. If you have the right attitude, do your things well and prepare, you can be in for a lot of positive things as well.

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The advice I’d give you is to have a look at each of these points, read up, consult professionals and make your decision. A healthy great way of exploring this new opportunity can be to start taking on smaller projects part-time until you have the experience to go all in.

As usual we’d love to hear your own tips and experiences.

Good luck!

Every design enthusiast want to have a sparkling online portfolio for showcasing his/her work, but there are few people who can build an awesome portfolio for themselves from scratch. Fortunately there are many online services making portfolio creation process effortless. You just need to sign up before showing your creative work off to the whole world. In this article we have reviewed 10 best solutions for creating your online portfolio in matter of few minuets.

1. Carbonmade

Carbonmade was established in December 2005 by Dave to manage his and his friend’s online portfolios. Later it was opened for everyone. Carbonmade helps you in managing your online portfolio with variety of tools that allow you to customize the way your work should be presented. It is very effortless to use, as you don’t need to have HTML knowledge for updating portfolio or its theme. Ideal for displaying illustration, photography and videos online, you get custom sub-domain for your portfolio. Carbonmade provides you a personal blank canvas, without any advertisements and other crap stuff, just to show your work to whole world. It provides free as well as pro plans. Free plan allows you to upload 5 projects and 35 images. Pro package costs $12/month and allows you to show 50 projects, 500 images and 10 videos.

2. Krop

Krop is an excellent choice for building resumes and portfolios, which offers simple and elegant template enabling you to manage your work quickly. You can show your work to the whole world with your own personal and unique URL, without any advertisement. It is a professional portfolio solution, not a social networking site where you get comments or likes, these things don’t belong in professional world. You can try Krop for free having limit of 10 images, pro plan costs $9.99/month unlocking image hosting limit.

3. Behance Network

Behance Network is a very well-designed and professional website to showcase your creative work online. You can exhibit images, text, video or audio, you can also embed your projects from Flickr, YouTube or Vimeo having no uploading limit. It is a completely free platform to promote yourself instantly, get exposure and get hired. You can find other creative people to work with, to share tips and media or to get feedback. Behance Network ensures maximum vulnerability on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. Awesome traffic stat is an insurance that your creative work will get seen.

4. PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter is the best choice if you are a photographer interested in building your online portfolio, selling photos, marketing yourself as an accomplished photographer. Over 65,000 photographer worldwide uses PhotoShelter to power their success online, using awesome features of PhotoShelter, like easily searchable photo galleries, secure photo storage, elegant templates and easily searched photo galleries. It helps in selling your images quickly at very reasonable price. You can try it for $1 for 14 days. Other plans start from $9.99 per month up to $49.99 per month depending on the storage space you want.

5. Coroflot

Coroflot is a fast and easy way to get your creative projects online and expose it to the world. Coroflot is used by over 200,000 designers and artists worldwide, hosting more than 1.4 million images of diverse disciplines of creative work like graphic, fashion, interior and textile designing. Coroflot also offers an active job board where you can hire creative people or get hired by multinational organization. Creating portfolio is absolutely free with unlimited file hosting.

6. ViewBook

Viewbook was launched in 2008 to help creative people to present and promote their work with simplicity and creativity. It provides a minimal design without any fancy designing, advertisement or any other distraction so that your images wont lost their beauty and taste. You can make your images private as well as public, choice is yours. You can try Viewbook for free for 30 days, plans starts from $4 per month.

7. deviantART

deviantART is the largest online social network for artists created in August 2000, having 13 million registered members, 100,000 uploads daily and 35 million unique visitors per month. You can configure your online portfolio is matter of minutes, upload or import your images and publish your portfolio. You can use deviantART as a digital place where artists are looking to co-operate and helping each other to improve their artistic skills. You can choose from Basic or Premium Portfolio. Free portfolio offers hosting up to 100 images, provides you advertisement-free domain and easy-to-use interface with no HTML required. Premium portfolio offers unlimited image hosting service, personal domain and password protected access option. It costs $4.95 per month.

8. Jobrary

Jobrary is resume and portfolio builder for designers who want minimum effort for maximum impact. Use just need to have creative projects, Jobrary will make sure that your portfolio looks stylish and modern.

9. SmugMug

SmugMug is one of the best website for showcasing and selling your photos online. You can sell your photos and earn up to 85% of the markup, share on Twitter and Facebook and make your gallery looks hot with full-screen slideshow. You can try this amazing professional service for 14 days for free, then you have to upgrade to pro plans starting from 39.95/year. SmugMug is worth paying as you can earn huge amount by just selling your photos, enjoy pleasure of unlimited storage and traffic, also you get advertisement free space to display your work.

10. Sortfolio

If you are finding talented web designer for your project then you should not overlook Sortfolio as it offers services of best web designers from all over the world. Sortfolio is a hub of creative web designers to interact and get hired, you can find web designer or if you are a web designer and looking for work then you can get listed for free. This service also offer same services for web designers and freelancers as they do for web designers. Sortfolio is a free platform for clients and firms to interact, it is not involved in any kind of financial transaction between them. You can build your own portfolio for maximum exposure.