Professional Practise 3: Developing Freelancing

 Professional Practise 3
Developing Freelancing

• Updating Commission pricing
• In order to update my commission pricing, I wanted to fully calculate how much I would be spending per month if I were to live alone. With the help of my parents, I went through the general costs of the car, insurance, rent, etc. I put together a final cost sheet, which gives me a better idea of my daily and hourly rates, so I know how much I should be charging for commissions when I finish.
• Here is my costing sheet:

• Branded Invoice:
• In addition to updating my commission pricing, I updated my Invoice to be much more on-brand with the rest of my work. I decided to keep it simple, still, with just the added brand colours and Ozwald logo. 
• Further improvements:
• I think I would try to add the green colour in the future, or try to lay it out similarly to my CV, however I think this works well for now, because of it's simplicity.
• Here is the updated invoice:

• Developing an upload schedule for Social Media
• In order to develop on online schedule for Social Media, I needed to understand the times where my audience are most active. I also need to understand the best times globally to upload to social media. I found this website which analyses the overall traffic for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and more. 
• Here is the link to the website: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/best-times-to-post-on-social-media/
• This website also covers the changes to social media due to COVID-19. This is particularly important if I want to understand the best times to post and grow my online presence.
• Here is what I found:

• In order to develop a more detailed understanding of engagement, I additionally looked at my statistics on Instagram, which shows the times your followers are most active. I found that my followers are most active on Sundays and Fridays. On these days specifically, they're most active at 6pm. They're also most active at 6pm on Wednesdays.  If I wanted more global engagement, I would post based upon the times listed from SproutSocial.com.
• Here are the statistics for Instagram:

• Based upon these statistics, I will continue to post every Sunday at 6pm, however if I have additional work to post in that week, I may post based upon the global engagement times, which would be 9am on a Friday. 
• Developing personal work
• In order to develop my personal work, these past few weeks, I've been creating fan-art, mixed with personal art. I think this is a great way to develop my following and grow my online presence. Some fan-art I have done is for Disney and Video Games. Here are some work I've done over the past couple of weeks:

• Overall, what went well:
• I have developed an efficient and well thought out upload schedule for posting work to social media. I have also understood now my daily and hourly rates and therefore can charge accordingly with commissions.
• What could be improved:
• I think I need to be posting more animation content to my social media, which will be something I will focus on after finishing work for University. I would like to do more animation studies and try to build my skills that way!