Successful Freelancing will cover everything from what to expect as an expert service provider to the practicalities of taking your business to the next level, as well as how to make sure your freelance career works for you.

It will offer practical tools to help you to plan, operate and scale a freelance business that meets your individual needs and your career goals, give you insight into successful working practices for freelancers and meeting your clients’ needs, and will deliver expert advice and guidance on building a successful freelance career.

This course has been designed to run over three consecutive weeks to allow you to fit this into your busy schedule. We also find that it helps attendees to retain information from the session.

It is split into three 1-hour sessions that take place between 1–2 p.m. (BST). We will send you one Zoom link which will be used each time you log on for the course.

£130 +VAT (or 50% off for BookMachine members)

Week 1 (Thursday 22nd April): Your freelance business

• Pre-course work: What does successful freelancing look like for me?
• Introductory Exercise: Setting success measures for you and your business.
• You as an expert service provider: How to pitch your service offer, understand your market and position your skills as an expert service.
• Discussion – Rates and Payments: Reflecting on rates and making them work for you (including hourly rates v. page rates v. value-based pay), improving your invoicing and making sure you get paid!
• Wrap-up exercise: What could go wrong? How to troubleshoot possible pitfalls in freelancing.
• Issue pre-work for next session.

Week 2 (Thursday 29th April): The successful freelancer at work

• Case Study review.
• What could the client and freelancer have done differently?
• Group Discussion: Lessons Learned to ensure client and freelancer satisfaction.
• Asking for feedback and what to do with it.
• What next? The importance of CPD for the freelance professional.

Week 3 (Thursday 6th May): Classroom hour

• Question and answer session

About the tutor

Melody Dawes is the founder and Managing Director of Just Content. With over 20 years of publishing sector experience, Melody set up Just Content in 2013, to offer on-demand editorial, production and project management solutions to publishing clients. Just Content works with hundreds of freelancers every month, collaborating with them to deliver services to clients for everything from Commissioning Editing, Development Editing, Copyediting, Proofreading, Design and Illustration and anything in between. With Just Content’s agile business model, based curating the best possible team for every project, Melody knows how to help freelancers to ensure client satisfaction and demonstrate the value of a truly expert service.