What I’ve learned as a freelancer content creator last two years?

My experience as a freelancer content creator

As a freelancer every year is another challenge for us, shootings, editing, traveling and paying bills of course.
Having too much break due to global pandemic made me think of past freelancing experiences, good memories, bad ones too, and mistakes inevitably.
This article is going to be my long-term evaluation, perhaps share some of my experiences, and thoughts as a freelancer mainly doing content creating such as photos and films basically.
Last two years was quite busy years for me, doing photoshootings, mostly weddings, making videos, dealing with stock photography, spending nights with other side hustles such as retouching, Youtube, even though I couldn’t spend much time on Youtube, I hope to share more there, put some more effort, and share my experiences on that here as well. I guess the good think about being jobless these days is being able to create whatever you’d like to, and share with potentially a huge community.
However, first things first, let me start with what I’ve learned over the last two years working as a freelancer.

You should be expecting the unexpected

Yes, I know it sounds cliche but let me give you an example, 2019 was “the year” for me, I was able to get into filmmaking more than before, thanks to the gear I was able to buy in the beginning of the year with the money I made previous year from photography.
The more job I do, I rapidly asked for more, and while it was keeping me busy it was also frustrating because I was not ready, or I was not expecting to have that much job at the moment, I found myself having more expenses, buying hard drives every month, upgrading my cloud storage, client proofing services, all these things costs of course.
The lesson I got from this was I should have been better at time management, and planning my investments, If I was working 5 hours in a day, I had to work 2–3 hours more, which kept me away from the college, If I was editing my footage from 500gb external drive I had to buy 1tb one, because I had more or bigger sessions, I needed more storage.
These are really small things, but seeing these coming, knowing these will happen would make my life a lot easier.
So if you are getting ready for this season, even if you do not plan to have much jobs make sure you are safe with gear, shooting and post production wise, so you don’t suffer as I do LOL
And make sure you are having 1–2 hours of free time every day so when you get an additional work, you’ll be able to make it happen in time.

Don't be flexible, or free
Being freelancer doesn’t mean that you should be flexible, it doesn’t mean that you should say yes to everything from clients, don’t forget to respect and protect yourself, even though some people don’t respect freelancers, since we are not like a company, they are not scared of asking things.
I’ve always thought that
I’m a freelancer, I should give a reason to people to work with me. I should be cheaper and flexible with them. I should do whatever they want because I want them to work with me.
That’s true but reason shouldn’t be “yes to everything”, clients will come and ask you
“Can you stay more in the photoshooting ?”
“Can you do another version of this video ?”
“Can you give me the raw materials ?”
These are just a few examples you might here from clients, and they are not bad things. The bad thing is saying yes to those things for free, every keystroke, mouse click will take your time and as a freelancer your time is money.
If you are going to stay more in the wedding and capture more, it will cost you even more time because of post production, which means, don’t say “yes, of course, no problem” like I did many times, ask for additional payment from the client.
If you are going to do another version of your work, charge more.
Once you do something for free, client will come back asking for another thing, for free.
Value yourself, your effort, and your time.

Have a back-up, literally back-up of everything
The more you work, your gear will get tired, shutter count etc. Having a back up body or lens will save you more than you can imagine, I remember doing a video for one event and thanks to the crowd I dropped my lens and it broke, that was the wide angle, and I had to finish the shooting with a zoom lens because I didn’t have a back up lens.
Even if it was fine, I had another event the day after so I found myself looking for a lens to rent or lend from a friend, believe me you don’t need this in your life :)
That’s pretty much it for the last two years :), 3 lessons I got from last two years of my life as a freelancer, of course everything is another experience :)
So we’ll see what experiences we’ll get in the future.