You are probably reading this if you're a college or a graduate student and are planning to freelance. Your reasons could possibly be the need for extra income, or some hands-on experience, or just something to do with your free time. Guess what, these are all legitimate reasons that you can utilise for your own benefit!

Yes, the working world may be daunting and force you out of your precious Sunday morning sleep, but the benefits are worth it. Here’s what you get out of freelancing.

As discussed in our another article The Importance Of Networking, networking is the key aspect of landing jobs when one works from home. Freelancing may not always provide a steady sustainable income, hence it is of utmost importance to reach out to people and keep all options open.

Now, what if you're shy? Quiet, shy or introverted, whichever you call yourself, it is understandably difficult for you to communicate with strangers or initiate conversations. It is a misconception that shy people cannot network. Networking is not based on being outgoing, it's about building relationships based on trust, sincerity, and generosity. If you're struggling to meet new people, here are a few things you could try to improve your network.

Work-from-home is a professional set-up where the worker is self-employed, usually to businesses or to several clients at a time. He or she doesn’t need to go to an office and can work from the comfort of their private homes. Essentially, you are your own boss!

However, it is inevitable that you end up going easy on yourself, and since you are your own boss, self-regulation is the key to succeeding as a freelancer. Discipline is essential to maintain a healthy work ethic. Following are some tips to inculcate that work ethic and be motivated in your job without slacking off.

One could say that freelancing is the lazy man’s way out of office-going. It involves working and generally doing everything from home, digitally. The travel to and from the workplace and all the running around is taken out of the equation. Seems like a dream, right? Your body would say not. Sitting around all day with the least amount of movement leads to sluggishness, lethargy and god forbid, obesity. The brain is active undoubtedly, but the body needs activity too.

So how do you keep your body, mind, and soul active through long hours of staying cooped up at home?

There are two types of freelancers - one, who work for experience and mostly go for the internships, and second, the people who freelance as a profession. In both cases, the stipend or salary offered plays a big role, because the end goal is to earn a living. Hence, the money offered by an employer to the freelancers is a key-player in attracting potential applicants.

The amount that the employer pays should be in accordance with the amount of work that the freelancer is expected to do. The amount is also affected by the seniority of the job position, and how much experience the freelancer has.

It is normal to screen part-time or full-time candidates while hiring them for work, but little do they know, screening freelancers is equally helpful. Not unlike stay-at-office workers, freelancers can also have a major impact on how the company is perceived by the public. Especially with the big boom of the start-up industries, more and more start-ups are hiring freelancers to do jobs such as graphic designing, coding, content writing and so on.

These businesses are usually run by youths; hiring youths and they tend to be more flexible on the stock idea of an office setup with drab metal cubicles and water coolers. Companies that are just starting might also have space constraints, and hence prefer virtual / remote professionals to work with them. With its advantages, it also becomes imperative to keep checkpoints for hiring freelancers, because you will not be able to administer them physically and have to trust them to do your work diligently.

As a freelancer or entrepreneur, one is always on the look-out for jobs. To put a twist on the famous dialogue from Spiderman, 'with great flexibility of work-life balance, comes great responsibility'.

The responsibility is to make yourself known as a freelancer and be available in the market for hire. Long gone are the days where one used to put an advertisement in the newspaper and hope someone would read it and give them a call.

In this generation, it is all about word of mouth and word of social media. If you are a freelancer, you gotta hustle.