Pick your fighter: Full-time vs Part-Time Freelancing. In this article, we cover the pros and cons of both options.
If you work for a marketing agency, or in-house at a brand, chances are you’ve considered freelancing at one point or another.
Perhaps you’ve learned a valuable skill at your day job in Paid Social or Email Marketing and dabbled with a client or two “on the side”. You might have even gone full time with your “side hustle” and turned it into a full income of its own!
If you’re undecided and want to make a decision, this article will help you weigh the pros and cons of each option.
Assuming you plan to freelance outside your 9-5, the first thing you want to do is measure how much bandwidth you can allocate to freelancing. This will help you understand how many brands you can help, and how much income you can realistically make on top of your 9-5 salary.
AFTER your typical work day is over and you’ve knocked out of the park everything you needed to do at your day job, how many more hours do you have left? Out of these extra hours, how many are you willing to sacrifice to work on your freelance clients, as opposed to sitting and watching Netflix?
Remember that your full-time employer is currently paying for your time, and the last thing you want to do is coasting on your day job. You should always do right by your employer for as long as you’re on their payroll. One day you might have employees of your own, and the last thing you’ll want is for people you pay to just coast, especially in a work-from-home world.
A lot of us learned our skills while working at a 9-5, whether that be at an agency or a brand, so an even greater reason to do right by the people who helped you learn a lot of what you know today.
And even if all of that wasn’t true, your reputation is everything in this business, and you should always be getting the job done until the very last day of your contract, whether on your full time job or on your freelance accounts.
Plus, if you absolutely despise your employer, then you should quit your job, sign up for our newsletter and learn how to freelance full-time!
Now that’s out of the way, let’s dive into pros and cons.
Freelancing outside your 9-5 comes down to doing it ethically while avoiding burnout. Naturally, there will be restrictions to how much time you can dedicate to it, but the extra income can be well worth it.
Now, for those of you taking the leap of faith and transitioning to freelancing full-time, the number of hours you dedicate to freelancing will depend on how much you want to make. Some freelancers I know work 80 hours a week to maximize their income and save while being young, and others work 20 hours a week because they value freedom and travel more than making an extra dollar. The beauty of freelancing full-time is that it’s up to you to decide what fits you best!
"If you’re reading this and pondering with freelancing options, consider yourself extremely lucky for having a skillset that allows you to make extra cash, or even making a full-time career out of it. Most traditional careers don't."
Ever since COVID and the work-from-home era began, plenty of skilled marketers took a leap of faith and moved into freelancing full-time. Many of them started by freelancing outside their 9-5 until they got the confidence, and the client pipeline to quit their job and do it full-time.
While there are pros and cons with either option, the decision to go full-time or part-time freelancing will largely depend on your level of risk, your family situation, and your taste for entrepreneurship.
On one hand, freelancing part-time comes with a safety net and valuable extra income, but can also get quite stressful if you decide to scale it.
On the other, freelancing full-time comes with unlimited earning potential, freedom of time and location, but no income safety and potential instability.
Regardless, if you’re reading this and pondering with either option, consider yourself extremely lucky for having a skillset that allows you to make extra cash, or even making a full-time career out of it. Most traditional careers don’t offer that flexibility!
The Modern Freelancer helps highly-skilled digital marketers navigate the waters of freelancing. If you want to keep an edge and stand out in the increasingly competitive freelance landscape, consider signing up to our weekly newsletter.