Freelance Jobs – A Step by Step Guide to Make Money Doing Freelance Jobs

Freelance Jobs: (a.k.a. Freelancing – one of the best ways to make money online for college students, teens and stay at home moms)

In this economic crisis scheme nowadays, there are more and more people loosing their jobs, and one of the best ways to deal with the facing difficulties is working as freelancers. Freelancing is also one of the best ways to make money for college students, teens and stay at home moms. (You can read about other online jobs for college students here)

What is freelancing?

Basically, freelancing means that people who doing these jobs can freely choose what tasks to do and what employers to work with, without closely sticking with certain organizers or companies. According to Wikipedia, “a freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are sometimes represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and labor contributed by its regular employees”.

Freelancing includes so many type of tasks, but there are some most common ones that can be listed: online writing, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), graphic design, video editing, voice recording, virtual assistant, computer/other platforms programming, website development, consulting, translation.

Today, freelancing is growing very quickly, as a result of increasing demands of outsourcing. There are many reasons why people like outsourcing: companies outsource to cut off the cost; or Internet marketers outsource when they have ideas in mind but can’t/don’t want to do them by themselves.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Freelancing (Freelance Jobs)

Benefits of Freelance Jobs

  • There are many chances for jobs since the outsourcing demands are currently very huge, and we are talking to an international labor marketplace. Many people from developing countries, such as Philippine, India, etc are very famous as a source of freelancers now. They can handle well with simple or hard work requiring tasks such as data entry, telephone communication, SEO, etc. However, with jobs requiring advanced skills, freelancers from US, or Canada still have own advantages. The typical one is writing, in which native speakers are highly recommended.
  • Freelancers have chances to sharpen their skills. If you writing frequently, you will write better; or if you do many SEO tasks, your SEO experience will be enriched. And the best thing is that when your skills are better, you often receive higher feedback from employers, and get more income.
  • Flexible time and place. This is one of the most important advantages of freelancing. When you are a freelancer, you don’t have to go to any office, you can work at home; you don’t have to work on fixed time from 9 to 5, you can work whenever you want. These things are very suitable for college students, who have to balance the work with studying.

Drawbacks of Freelance Jobs

  • The biggest disadvantage of freelancing is that it is temporarily. Thus, if you want a stable, long-term job, it is not for you. Besides, you have to be patient since just like other jobs, you can hope being a millionaire over night.
  • As a freelancer, you have to build your authority gradually if you want to have more tasks and be successful, and during this process, you will face with the competition of many other freelancers who are hungry for jobs just like you.

Some tips to succeed in freelancing and freelance jobs

  • Promote yourself: As a freelancer, you sell your skills to others, so it’s important that you show others your abilities and strength. One of the best way to do that is building a portfolio website. It will be much like an online CV including your information.
  • Make good and long lasting relationships: Not only freelancing, you should do this with all other jobs. Making relationships with customers, and with other freelancers are recommended. Let’s think about it: when you have a good relationship with a certain customer, you make them satisfy; there’s a high chance that they will introduce your service with other friends or colleges. That’s awesome!
  • Be careful when making contract: As a freelancer, protecting yourself before working for others is very important. You will not want to see yourself in a beautiful morning, can’t receive a single buck after work hard many days, just because the contract between you and customers have terms that are against you.
  • Well organized: This is also very helpful for your freelancing career. You are self-employed, that means no once forces you to do anything. That sounds good, but also not good if you can’t control your laziness and disorderly habits. I suggest a free to-do list tool that is called Wunderlist. This tool helps you to note down the tasks you need to do, so you won’t forget anything.
  • Face with fear and bad feelings: Working on online jobs is not easy. You have to face with your own fears: can’t make enough money; failures, losing money, etc. And also bad feelings: you can’t focus on only most important tasks because there are so many interesting ideas you want to go after. Those are all harmful to your developing, and you have to avoid them by a simple trick: don’t ever do multiple tasks at one moment. Just focus on 1 only. Follow my advice and you will find that your performance will be boosted rapidly.

Where to find freelancing jobs?

  1. Freelancers (huge job marketplace with so many job type)
  2. Elance (huge job marketplace)
  3. Odesk (have many programmers)
  4. Fiverr (work mico jobs for $5)
  5. Seoclerks (focus on SEO tasks)
  6. MicroWorkers (micro tasks)

Give me your thoughts by leaving them on the form below 🙂

Check out below links for more online jobs for teens, college students and stay at home moms: