5 Skills Freelancers Need To Make $100,000+ In 2024

Making a six-figure income as a full-time freelancer doesn’t happen by chance.

Although some online sources suggest that you can get rich overnight with minimal effort, the reality is that to maintain a sustainable level of success in your freelance career, you need more than just motivation and a few quick tricks.

As a freelancer, at least when starting, you’re a one-man band. Everything in your business—from the marketing to the financials, everyday customer service and support, to actually delivering on your promise to provide a service with significant value—comes down to you. And if you get any of those aspects wrong, your freelance business venture could suffer.

Forbes1 In 5 Freelancers Make $100,000+ In 2024—Here’s How They’re Doing ItBy

For example, through poor marketing or customer relationship building, you might end up losing clients to competitors in your niche, receive poor feedback, or not get any new clients at all, leading to your cash flow drying up.

This is why, if you’re really serious about breaking into the world of freelancing and pursuing self-employment (particularly if you’re doing it full-time) and making six figures or more from your work, you’ll need to learn and acquire several core skills so the goal of $100,000+ can become a reality:

1. Marketing Skills

Even if marketing isn’t your thing and you don’t consider yourself a digital marketing pro, it’s still essential to understand the basics since this will determine your success in reaching the right clients and securing long-term relationships with customers. Most of your clients will be found online anyway, either on social media, freelance marketplaces, or browsing Google.

And whether or not you plan to outsource to a freelance digital marketing assistant or a marketing agency, you should still understand the fundamentals of marketing since this will impact every aspect of your business, not just the promotional materials.

Two of the most critical areas you should concentrate on as a freelancer are building up your personal branding skills and learning to understand and recognize pain points. Personal branding skills empower you to set yourself up as an authority within your field and niche as the go-to service and expert while recognizing customer pain points within your market and intuitively listening to your clients when delivering your service allows you to find ways to improve and understand what you can do differently.

2. SEO Skills

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is worth learning about, particularly if you plan on being a freelance writer or are setting up your website or blog for your freelance business. Without understanding how to optimize your site and online content so that it appears across Google (including if your freelance business is YouTube-focused), you will hardly receive any organic traffic, leading to you missing a valuable opportunity to gain clients.

3. Communication Skills

Communication skills, part of interpersonal skills, should be in every freelancer’s toolkit. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should write perfectly crafted emails with the help of AI (although that is important, too).

What it does mean is that you should learn critical relationship-building skills such as active listening, speaking with confidence and faith in who you are and what you bring to the table, and you should be able to arrest the attention of potential clients on social media through your posts—enough to get them to engage and respond, leading to conversions.

Communication skills are also necessary for the customer support aspect of your work. You will need to be able to communicate in a professional way that wins the client even if they have a concern or complaint.

4. Technical Skills

The freelance market is full of skilled professionals who have monetized their existing skill sets. So, to stand out as a freelancer, you must do something different. You must work extra hard to refine and polish your skills, upskill regularly, and stay aware of current trends. This ensures that you can deliver the service you provide with outstanding quality.

The more you refine the technical skills needed to get the job done, the more you will increase your client satisfaction rates and the likelihood of receiving positive reviews and testimonials, including repeat business and referrals.

5. Project Management Skills

Another skill that will yield high income as a freelancer is self-organization and project management. Categorize your client projects, set realistic goals and deadlines for each to ensure they do not overlap and you do not burn out, and assign each client a dedicated folder on Google Drive or OneDrive.

This enables you to maintain an organized system where all critical customer contact information, files, and records of correspondence are held, and you can assign yourself to specific tasks as needed. Maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders and decision-makers for your projects, and always aim to give a client project a later deadline than it would usually take to complete so that you give yourself breathing room in case you cannot meet the original deadline.

All five of these skills are necessary to achieve your six-figure freelancer goal. You need marketing and SEO skills to build awareness of your personal brand and the services you provide while building trust and credibility with clients; communication skills cement that trust and help you to build relationships, while technical skills enable you to provide significant value. And of course, project management skills help you to stay on track and ensure your wellbeing is taken care of while freelancing.