Freelancers in Cyprus – Has Anyone Told You This Secret?

Freelancing on an island like Cyprus is a dream come true for so many foreign visitors, and the prospect of remote work I am sure is appreciated by young Cypriots in the digital world.

Gone are the days when you had to sweat out your summers in an office full of people who mostly don’t even want to be there. Now we can power up our laptops in a coffee shop, with a beach view and take inspiration from the scenery around us.

What is the appeal of freelancing in Cyprus?

To most, it must be the sense of freedom it provides, not being chained to a desk in an office and still being able to make a living. This is really liberating, especially considering the fact that you’re not even chained to this country, you can literally go anywhere with your laptop. Most of the world is online these days.

But for me and some others, the appeal was different. Sure we wanted the freedom to freelance from a beautiful island like Cyprus, and the freedom to travel and work too. But our dream extended beyond this.

For us, freelancing was a stepping stone to something much more emancipating.

Unveiling the reality of freelancing

Freelancing can be very rewarding, but also unpredictable, it’s not a stable income and contracts come and go, quickly sometimes. You really need to be a special kind of person to work in this way, you need to have a lot of trust and faith in yourself as well as have a strong and stable mind. Plus a back up fund in case work runs dry for a while.

But long term, you start to see it as just another job. You still need to work, but that coffee on the beach doesn’t taste as good as it once did, because now you’re knee deep in a contract with a challenging client.

Why do they always insist on calling 5 times a day? On that note, is anyone else traumatised by the Skype or Microsoft teams ringtone?

You see, as someone who freelanced for almost 10 years, it really started to wear thin. Working by the sea was now a high and potentially expensive risk of me throwing my laptop into the water.

The secret to escaping the time for money trap with freelancing

While freelancing, even on the beautiful island of Cyprus, I always had in the back of my mind this dream of generating passive income.

Being free from an office and social standards is one thing, but if truth be told, I wanted to be free from work altogether. I wanted to go to the coffee shop for coffee, not for work.

The situation I found myself in was that I was working really hard on other people’s businesses and not enough on my own dream.

As an ex powerlifter, now an everyday weightlifter, I felt very passionately about supporting women in weightlifting. Long story short, what started as a blog, turned into the largest online resource exclusively supporting women in weightlifting.

I literally built the brand Lipstick Lifters as a side hustle while I was freelancing. And I don’t have a single customer in Cyprus, I service a global market, but the majority of my customers happen to be in the US and the UK.

Other freelancers in Cyprus are doing this

Something else I did in Cyprus, this time for people in Cyprus, was run a casual entrepreneurs meet-up in Limassol. We had a lot of different gatherings and it was a pleasure to meet so many different people who happened to be in Cyprus, either long term, or as part of their travels. The digital nomad community is growing fast and I think it’s great.

But the people I personally find most interesting are the ones running or building an online business of their own. It’s one thing working on someone else’s businesses remotely, but what gets my attention is someone working on their own online business. The entrepreneur in me is like a kid in a candy shop when this interaction happens.

What I found was that many of them were doing what I was doing. Using freelance income to cover their living costs, and the excess to pay other freelancers to do the things we didn’t have the skills or time to do in our own business.

I bet that got you thinking.

Freelance to learn

Freelancing is great, it taught me a lot, and if truth be told, the skills I developed while freelancing, are skills I still use a lot in my own online business, almost daily.

“Work to learn”, that was always my mantra since I left school. Most people work for money, and money they get, but at what cost? A lifetime on the hamster wheel, even as a freelancer, you’re only truly one step away from having an employed job. At least when they employ you they pay your social insurance, healthcare, sick pay and taxes.

My advice to freelancers in Cyprus

If I could give only one piece of advice to new and aspiring freelancers in Cyprus, it would be to spread your wings far and wide in terms of clients. Work with small to medium sized businesses and really dedicate yourself to the job you have been assigned to do. Give them your best work and then concern yourself with the bigger picture of what the opportunity has to offer you. What can you learn, what can you do with the things you learn, how can you turn that into your own online business?

Never go into competition with your clients, it’s a conflict of interest and unethical in my opinion. Your focus should be on mastering the skill they hired you for, by delivering your best work to them and seeing how you can spin that skill for your own long term benefit.

Cyprus Online Business Owners

Building and maintaining an online business is not easy, it takes a lot of sacrifice and hard work, but when you are passionate about what you do, it doesn’t feel like work anymore. And when you have a long term game plan that will generate passive income, you have zero problem giving up your precious time to work on it.

It’s lonely sometimes, there is no boss to ask questions to, and no colleagues to bounce ideas off, or even someone to complain to about that one annoying thing that you just can’t seem to figure out.

That’s why I created Cyprus Online Business Owners. My goal is to bring together other online business owners based in Cyprus in an informal way. This little side project of mine is still in its infancy, but ultimately my long term goal is to arrange regular casual meetings for other online business owners to just hang out.

We can share experiences, share our wins and our struggles, or we can just share a beer with a sea view and a conversation about anything else in the world.

If you’re already running an online business from Cyprus, or if you’ve got an idea for an online business that you’re starting to explore. Feel free to reach out to me through the above Facebook group. I would love to connect with you.

This article was written by Chloe Kyprianou, the founder of Cyprus Online Business Owners.