The readers and contributors at Nation1099 community have figured out that to become a professional freelancer and build a successful career boils down to consciously working on these four categories:

1. Domain skills

Be excellent at the particular service you are selling, and keep getting better at it. Whether it’s freelance writing, engineering, coaching, design, photography, or any of the other hundreds of professional skills that can be the basis of a freelance career, make sure you are top notch in your field.

Related reading: Be sure to check out our Meet the Indi series to see how your peers built their freelance careers

2. Business operations

All the stuff that makes a business run smoothly from day-to-day and to keep bringing customers through the door?

You’re responsible for that if you want to become a professional freelancer.

That includes payroll, HR, insurance, bookkeeping, IT, marketing, benefits management, sales and mopping the floors — or the digital equivalent of these activities, like keeping your website looking good and your Dropbox folders organized.

Just mentally walk tour the office you work or used to work in. Who’s there? Remember the woman who knew how to make printer work? The guy who stocked the snack bar? The team who hustled for clients and closed deals?

Those are all you now. You have to know how to do all of it.

3. Business strategy

You can just go out and start selling your services, but you’re unlikely to thrive over the long term. You’ll be bidding to provide the lowest prices on all the freelance websites and marketplaces out there.

To build a successful freelance career, you need to build a plan around some deep thinking about who your audience is, what need you’re solving, who your competitors are, who you will differentiate yourself from them and how you will capture more value for yourself.

One very simplistic example: Will your strategy by high volume/low margins or the opposite?

4. Work-life balance

Professional freelancers are really entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs have to solve a seemingly impossible physics problem: every moment is devoted to building the business but they still have time to enjoy life. As our friend Ed Gandia said in this interview, it’s certainly possible to create a terrible job for yourself as a freelancer if you’re not careful.

That would be a shame, because as these stats on the work/life balance show, the whole point of building a freelance career is to take back control of life and career.

Be sure to check out our Thrive section for more advice on maintaining a good work/life balance as a freelancer.

Keep paying attention to those 4 elements and you will be on track to become a professional freelancer.