5 Hard-Earned Remote Work Lessons
So you don’t have to learn them the hard way.
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I’ve been working from home for over 10 years as a freelance writer and editor.
These days, clients search me out and invite me to work with them …
But it wasn’t always like this.
I’ve learned several lessons about remote work, particularly while launching my work-from-home career.
Some of these lessons were costly in the form of time, some in dollars and cents …
But they all taught me something.
In sharing these trials and errors with you, I hope to save you from making some of the same mistakes and enable your work-from-home career to be more successful.
Lesson #1 — Start Where You Are
When I began working on Elance (now Upwork), my hourly rate was low.
Very low.
For my first project, I asked for five dollars an hour. This was back in 2010, but it was still below the American minimum wage.
At the time, I was living in India, so the cost of living was less than in the U.S.
I was also more in the mode of “I’m going to try and see if this even works” rather than “I need to earn a living.”
As I got more jobs and built a portfolio on Elance, I started asking for a higher rate for writing and editing projects.
Because I was open to working for such a low rate, that first client I worked with kept me on for several years.
By the time I did my last editing project with him, he was paying me $12 per hour — more than twice what I’d started with.
And each project with him taught me quite a bit.
He was a print-on-demand publisher and gave me a lot of helpful information about working with Microsoft Word.
He taught me how to use …
- Styles and formatting
- Headers and footers
- Content tables and indexing
- And aspects about track changes I hadn’t known
