If you are reading this, you are either a freelancer in India or aspiring to be a freelancer. If you are little aware of the market then must know that the freelance market in India has been growing on a rapid scale since the 2020 pandemic.
Everybody wants to be their boss, rather than work for others daily from 9 to 5. Especially 80% of the younger generation thinks like this.
Generation Z is now hitting the workforce. People born after 2000 are more willing to move for a good job and more likely to believe a job should have a greater purpose than money, according to this survey https://t.co/sRgWyMTg1g pic.twitter.com/UQU9Ayy2Ou
— CNN (@CNN) September 4, 2018
But there are many insider things that I want to explain to you today, which no linkedin top creators or other freelancing websites and platforms are gonna tell you.
This is going to be the secret sauce to become the top cream among fellow freelancers in the upcoming decade.
challenges of working with Indian clients
We are seeing that India is booming and going to be self-reliant and many startups are rising in India, and the MSME sector is also the dominant one, which greatly contributes towards the growth of our GDP and Indian economy.
As per the latest information received from the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, the share of MSME Gross Value Added (GVA) in all India Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during the year 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 was 30.5%, 27.2% and 29.2% respectively. The share of MSME manufacturing output in all India Manufacturing output during the years 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 was 36.6%, 36.9% and 36.2% respectively.
As per the information received from the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS), the share of export of MSME specified products in all India exports during the year 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 was 49.4%, 45.0% and 43.6% respectively.
I totally agree with the above statements. But, the question is is it going to be similarly favourable towards the Indian freelancers? Let me put it again. Are the MSME industries going to pay well to the freelancers as per the industry standards? are they going to consider them as their business partners?
I know what you are thinking now. it’s a straight NO. Companies and industries in India, want more revenue and make more profits but paying their employees, spending more on marketing, etc are in the optional category for this type of small MSME businesses. and coming to thinking about well paying the FREELANCERS is nearly impossible.
Even if you are the one who skyrockets their branding and sales, and the alpha of your work, you do the best with the best peers, the best equipment, software, and delivery, it doesn’t matter to them. They will compare you to other guys who provide the same kind of work for very very cheap rates.
You’ll be treated like an asshole. A person who is greedy, and stubborn to decrease his charges. Your investments in campaigns and sales and the market will just be burnt out. Trust me you’ll get ZERO ROI on Ad spend.
And all this I’m saying from my personal experience.
Okay so, shall you stop freelancing? Hell NO. Till now I talked about my experience of FREELANCING in India, not for the tier 1 countries.
And from here the party and the story begins!
Shift in focus: Why targeting tier 1 countries is crucial for freelancers
I never said that you shouldn’t do freelancing in India or can’t do it. I’m saying that if you just want to work like a hard-working labourer who is working on a construction project just to earn his daily livelihood, then you’re most welcome. You can leave this article from this line, But if you are a person with big dreams in your mind, big aspirations, a good future, a decent life, with healthy food options, good living and a decent quality of life, then trust me you can’t achieve by working for Indian clients. You have to work day and night restlessly damaging your body to earn similar results.
Working for Tier 1 countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Singapore, and Europe you work with those people who understand branding or whatever service you provide them. They respect the effort you’re putting in for them.
It’s not like you’ll get 100% of good clients from the abroad countries but much better than Indian clients that I can guarantee you.
They pay well. They pay as per the industry standard. There you can charge on an hourly basis, rather than working hours and hours without having any kind of monetary benefits.
Some of you will teach me gyan about serving the country, but for what purpose? for generating wealth for a particular individual or a single company you’ll compare it with the service of the nation.
Let me clear you about this, when you receive dollars from international countries your country’s foreign reserves grow, and it becomes much more prosperous. it’s going to be a big gig economy, by exporting your freelancing services you are also providing export services for the country which in turn a kind of service to the nation in a big way.
You’ve to come out of the labour mindset. Working for money, or working to save time. By working for money in India, you’ll be working for a longer period to earn and build a big corpus, rather than if you work to save time, you can build a big empire by working abroad, or working for abroad clients.
Here you’re not exploiting the abroad clients, You work for those who have value for work. Who understand the stuff you can achieve for them by your service. There’s a huge demand for skilled manpower abroad.
You’re just filling the gap, and why not if you can earn more then definitely you should do that, if someone chooses to work more for less, I think it’s a total waste of time, money and energy.
One more thing that I’ve to make clear is that if you find an Indian company that wants to work with you on your terms wants to have that mutual understanding and respect and wants to pay equally then I’ve no objections to it. In that case, you must work for Indian companies first, even though the payment is a bit lower than foreign standards but much better than other so-called clients, who just want to exploit the freelancers just for their self-growth and individual achievements.
And trust me with my experience of working with more than 100 clients and talking to much more than that I can say that more than 90% of them are like the ones to try to exploit you. and others are just poor who have intentions but less budget to fund you. Trust me, this is the reality in India.
The rise of platform competition and oversaturation in India
In the name of freelancing in India, the three most popular platforms are Fiverr, Upwork and LinkedIn. But if you are also like me and do stuff like graphic design, and digital marketing then you must be aware of the heavy competition not less than the government job market in India.
One vacancy or one freelancing opportunity has many applications from India, and Pakistan combined, because the FIVERR market is dominated by Pakistani freelancers, and Upwork is a premium platform for which you have to buy credits to apply for a sufficient amount of Upwork freelance jobs. and Linkedin is now no less than Facebook and Instagram, full of nonsense with so-called gurus, and experts, with heavier competition than anywhere else!
So what’s the solution in the oversaturated market in India? Personal branding. freelancing is also a kind of business, and you must aim for a long-term game rather than a short-term lottery. It’s not at all like that and don’t dare to think of Freelancing as a lottery to become rich.
Moneymindedness can give you a kickstart but long-term game needs consistency. The continuous efforts to build a brand, stabilise it, grow it, and promote it in a 360° marketing approach. You have to do content marketing on your blog, social media and YouTube.
You have to do paid advertising campaigns, you’ve to do cold outreach on social media, WhatsApp and company emails. You have to do SEO for your business website and other platforms. You have to make cold calls to clients.
You’ve to do a whole lot of things that are a lot more than you do by just working as an employee in any agency or company.
You’re building your future of existence and survival. You can’t think like just any other day job to work from 9 to 5. And read this very very carefully, you have to, you have to work from early in the morning or whenever you start to late in the night.
You have to be your boss and your employee. You have to be your manager, own HR, own content creator, own employee, own accountant and a lot more.
It’s going to be hell in the beginning for a few years when you start on your own.
Many days will be full of new projects, but some other months will be empty of any freelance tasks.
One more thing keep in mind that like any other business, like any other business you have to invest a hell lot of money in this freelancing business to grow it, to make branding, to create content, to manage stuff, to manage platforms, to pay the subscription of the apps, websites, hosting, software, advertising and more!
Payment delays and low budgets from Indian clients
Getting payments is very easy right now with new-age tools like Zoho and Razorpay.
Sending invoices with Razorpay is a lot easier, receiving payments with new-age payment systems like UPI is very good in India and even you can receive invoice payments with Razorpay by linking your Paypal with it from the dashboard of Razorpay. it’s that easy.
Okay coming to the topic again, getting payments is a lot easier, but getting payments from Indian clients is a hell lot of a task. You have to follow up. They will not give the advance so easily, even if they will, they will bargain at 20% or 30% and after the delivery some will block, some will ignore, some never respond, and some will pay much less than the fixed amount during the initial discussion at the beginning of the project.
Sometimes you literally have to beg every day multiple times to ask for payment for the task that you had many days or months earlier.
It’s a literally daunting task, much frustrating to deal with Indian clients. But with foreign clients payment most of the time is a smoother experience. What I have seen is that they don’t bargain with you like the Indian clients like a fish market or Mandi.
Indian Clients Unwillingness to pay for premium services
We must have seen many such amazing memes on social media right? They are true. Let me tell you my story. Some clients will come asking for doing them a good-looking website with an e-Commerce facility. At the beginning of my days, I used to charge very little. So If you collectively take building a website and try to build it with genuine efforts, you’ve to pay for a lot of things, like hosting, domain, themes, and plugins like Elementor which is used in design. and these things cost money.
So for example, let’s assume I charge for my services 5000, and the tools cost another Rs.5000, and when I quote this to my clients, it will cost Rs.10,000 to build the website, and they will start behaving like a rude guy out of nowhere. They will tell me that they can build a free website on a blogger, they know someone who can do it for very less, or someone who is providing at just Rs.3000, unaware of the final results and meeting their expectations, and costs involved in the project.
These types of instances break our motivation to work hard and give the best results for the clients and demotivate us. Some clients whom we trust a lot like a friend or mentor exploit us more, asking for more tasks and paying nothing in return, and out of courtesy and future earning possibility we have to do those tasks literally without any payment.
But abroad clients do understand the cost of time spent not all, again, but most of them do value it.
Lack of appreciation for creativity and effort
Let’s say before you begin a project, you’ll ask them about their exact requirements, deadlines, competitors, content, budget, and more, trust me most of them will tell you nothing. They will tell you that they trust you, make it your way, and we can figure it out later. But this is where you get into trouble. After you work hard for days, and deliver it, They will call you with full crazy amount of inner hatred and ego, will tell you that you disappointed them, you didn’t make it, and the expectations are not achieved.
you need to correct all of them. and then have to submit it again. it will eat a lot of your time, energy and self-esteem.
Freelancing in tier 1 countries like the USA, UK, and Australia
in tier 1 countries there’s a culture of respecting, nurturing enabling, and motivating the talent to grow more, not like us who always try to pull the leg if some of us will grow more.
Indian clients value quantity over quality. If you deliver them 30 social media posts for 30 days with way less budget and poor quality work, they are extremely happy and satisfied, rather than providing 10 high-value quality posts that can impact their business in the long run.
but foreign clients crave quality rather than quantity. The philosophy that our ancient scriptures taught us to make a work-life balance, to take care of our body, mind and soul. We forgot everything. We forgot Yoga, inner engineering and many more things like chanting bhajans and meditation.
But the abroad countries took from us, translated them, practice them, and do understand what’s the quality of life. If you are aware a bit you can find many abroad people who like to walk or cycle more rather than just riding and burning fuel in their car. They value the environment, they work for the carbon neutral future, what are we doing? What’s our system doing? I can’t say much now. But I will some other day in some other blog including our education system and all.
I’ve known many big agency owners in India and freelancers who grow multifold and earn six figures or more every month just by working with foreign clients.
High ticket sales are possible through dealing with foreign clients, Indian clients get feared of paying Rs.10000 a month to get their social media managed by a freelancer or someone making content for them. it’s the harsh reality.
Most In-Demand Freelance Skills 2024, Where India Falls Short
| Digital Marketing and Content Creation | Design and Creative Services | Technology and Development | Business and Consulting | Other In-Demand Skills |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO (Search Engine Optimization) | Graphic Design | Web Development | Virtual Assistance | Translation and Interpreting |
| Content Writing | UI/UX Design | Mobile App Development | Project Management | Transcription |
| Social Media Marketing | Video Editing | Software Development | Business Consulting | eaching and Tutoring |
| Email Marketing | Animation | Cybersecurity | Data Analysis | AI and Machine learning |
Even though there’s a very high demand for the above-skilled talents, India lacks it, because of its current education system. It’s all okay till the school, but it doesn’t matter to them at all in the college. at the end of the semester, they will charge you to pay you for the certificate or degree which will be useful for you to apply for any government job or any advanced courses, Otherwise, the degree is of no use.
No institute is teaching them the trending skills, because one they are unaware of the job market and the trends, and two the teachers or professors who work there do not know the latest courses, curriculum, demand skills etc.
I experienced that research mindset and question mindset are discouraged in Indian educational institutions, rather than rote learning, giving ranks or marks is all that matters to them.
In future, I’ll write about my opinion on the Indian education system, and how it can be transformed into something better and revolutionary.
How to start targeting Tier-1 countries as a Freelancer?
The only way to target those countries is to outbound reach. You’ve to reach to them on their email, social media, website contact page, targeted paid ads etc.
But remember, your message must have really strong and personal touch points or else, you will be discarded straight away. You’ll get rejected hundreds of times, But one client can change it all. You just have to work hard trying to reach as many people as possible.
Try Meta ads and sell your services through them. You have to use a 360° marketing approach to get foreign clients for freelancing.
don’t rely on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, it’s simply just waste of time, money, energy and resources.
Become a T-shaped Freelancer, who has in-depth knowledge about a particular skill task, and knows all other modern tasks trending in the market and in high in demand in abroad countries like the USA, by this, you will be able to achieve great success.
So I think you got the answer!. I wish you all the very best.
Read my other articles on Freelancing here.
Thank you.
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