Following tips are from my experience. I work as a programmer and hence it will be more useful to those who work as a freelance programmer.

1. Be your own boss! – This means that you need to have discipline. Ensure that you have a time schedule. For example, you can set aside 8 hours daily for your work and then ensure that you work those hours.

2. Create a work enviornment – You need a place where you can work without distractions. You don’t want your daughter come up you and say “daddy, let us go to the beach” when you are neck deep in a programming problem. do you?

3. Networking – In order to have a successful freelance career, you need to have good networking skills with people. Sometimes you may have work that you need to outsource. Most of the freelancers work with a very small set of clients. The relationship is so good that the client won’t think of changing you even for a lower bid by somebody else.

4. Be honest and assertive – No one likes a guy who tells lies. So ensure that you are 100% honest with your client. If it causes a client to leave, it is perhaps good for you. Also don’t work under the client, but work with the client.

5. Develop a good portfolio – Ensure that you have a decent Web site up and running with testimonials and details of your previous work. You can also a run a blog which will cover the challenges you face daily. For example, I document all the programming challenges I face. You may get new clients through this medium.

6. Be part of the community – There are a lot of forums/websites for freelancers. You also have sites like rentacoder or getafreelancer which can be used to get programming work. Have a solid profile on these with “professional looking” photo!

7. Be organized – This is vey important. Organize your work and create a plan. The plan need not be elaborate. But it should help you in identifying whether you have too much work in hand.

8. Outsource the subtasks – You may not be good in web design or graphics design. But you have project to rewrite a website with PHP. What would you do? In such cases, outsource your work. There are a lot of good design guys out there who can be contracted for the web design work! A good programmer need not be a good graphics designer and vice versa.

9. Use tools – One of the most important things in freelance career is to enhance your productivity. More work = more money. Investigate which tools can make you productive and then deploy them in your regular work.

10. Enjoy life! – The reason why you went freelance is probably because you wanted more freedom/choice. Hence don’t forget to enjoy your life!