When you’re desperate, you make terrible choices and decisions. And that’s exactly why I advise you not to start freelancing to make money quickly yes it takes patience and lots of hard work. Let me explain the top 10 tips to start freelancing for beginners.
Thinking about starting freelancing, but you don’t know where to begin?
This article will help you a lot.
As an ultimate guide on how to start freelancing for beginners, I created this.
This will help you begin your journey in 10 easy steps, whether you want to start freelancing as a blogger, web designer, or developer.
I need to explain a few things you go any further.
Freelancing is far harder than you would believe. Some people believe online money can be earned by anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. But, that isn’t true.
Do it If you are willing to work hard to achieve your goal of becoming a freelancer and finding financial freedom, here I am guiding you on how to start freelancing step by step –
Step 1: Get the Right Equipment
When you’re desperate, you make terrible choices and decisions. And that’s exactly why I advise you not to start freelancing to make money quickly yes it takes patience and lots of hard work.
Freelance is not a simple scheme to get rich. It takes hard work to do that. It can take years to make a stable income as a freelancer.
I sometimes get questions from freelancers asking if they can do work using only a smartphone. The fast response is that there isn’t one. Not the ones that are worth doing,
Features of smartphone apps are minimal. For the job to be done correctly and to achieve great results, you need a laptop or computer to run the software.
So go get yourself a laptop or even an old computer would do the trick before you start working online.
Step 2: Find A Marketable Skill
Finding skills you can give as a service is the next, and most important, step.
This could be something as simple as transcribing a podcast or something as advanced as developing a mobile app. Whatever it is, the key to winning in freelancing is to find a skill you’re good at and have enough demand in the marketplace.
For example, if you are good at drawing illustrations or designing product packaging, go to a freelance market like Upwork or Freelancer and see if there are jobs for that type of work.
If there are enough job listings on those sites to give you the skill you’re good at, then you hit gold.
Step 3: Polish Up Your Skills
When you’ve discovered a marketable skill, make sure you can offer it as a service to your clients. you need to be very good at what you’re doing to be able to get paid for it.
Let’s assume, for example, that you want to be a freelance writer on health and wellness blogs. This category has a strong market for it. You’ve probably had experience writing about it at school or college.
However, that doesn’t mean you should write blog posts for online audiences. Blogs and web articles use very different writing and formatting types for posts. Mainly to reach the general public.
And now you need to learn how to write blog posts for online audiences. Find out how to use WordPress. How to make posts with graphics and many more things.
It’s the same with any other freelance skill out there. You can’t just dive in without first trying to learn the basic concepts. you just need to brush up on your skills. Read books, and subscribe to YouTube channels, and blogs related to your expertise and industry.
Even, taking online courses is the most successful way to learn and polish your skills properly.
It takes time to build an ability from scratch. So be patient and keep on studying and practicing. It could take weeks, months, or years. Only keep up with it.
Step 4: Build Your Reputation
Being able to prove your expertise and work will decide whether or not you will be a good freelancer.
If you have a college degree or years of experience, it doesn’t matter. They’re never going to recruit you if you can’t prove to clients that you’re skilled at what you do.
If you’re a blogger, you should have articles published on popular blogs.
And If you are a graphic designer, you should be able to point to a company and say you designed their logo.
If you’re a web designer, you should be able to submit a link to a website you’ve created.
In short, get some of your work out there. Do some free work if you have to. Go to blogs that accept guest posts. Do some kind of concept design work. Well, whatever it is, work to build your reputation.
Step 5: Create A Portfolio
Read this also: Best Upwork Profile Example
When you start building your reputation, be sure to create a portfolio to bring all your published/live work to one place as well.
A portfolio can be a website or a webpage where you can show all your work.
For example, if you are a graphic designer, you can create a portfolio page on a site like Behance to show off all your designs. That way, when you reach out to a client, you can simply link them to your portfolio to check your skills.
Just make sure that your best job is included in the portfolio.
Step 6: Try Part-Time Freelancing
Freelancing isn’t a cup of tea for everyone. The process of marketing yourself, selling your services, and dealing with clients may be overwhelming.
If you’re not sure if freelance is the right career path for you, just try doing it part-time.
Spend a few hours a day working on smaller freelance gigs. And learn the ways of freelancing.
If you feel ready to tackle bigger projects, you can decide if you should be a full-time freelancer or not
Step 7: Find the Best Freelance platform
This move plays a key role in how easily you can land jobs and the standard of the clients with whom you might be able to work.
The mistake most beginning freelancers make is to search for the most popular freelancer marketplace and join in to get started. Like Upwork and Freelancer.com.
These sites are now overflowing with millions of freelancers from all over the world. And because of competition, they are engaged in bidding wars to win jobs. To land the job, they would continually lower their rates. And it’s going to get you nowhere.
So the best approach and the approach that helped is choosing a new marketplace and joining it. It’s going to have fewer freelancers, so you’re going to have low competition. And your chances of landing jobs will increase.
Let’s See: How to deal when Client does not make payment?
Step 8: Charge The Right Price
It can be difficult to find out the best price for your services. Since consumers would never even consider hiring you if you ask for the incorrect amount.
The easiest way to find out the right price at the beginning is to look at common freelance markets and see what other freelancers are charging in your niche or industry.
Since you’re young, it’s not fair to charge the same rates as freelancers with experience.
Instead, without making yourself appear cheap, you can try to work out a middle-ground where you can deliver a better price than those experienced freelancers.
Step 9: Send your first proposal
It is important to write a proposal to a client in a linear direction.
It’s not like sending a daily email or composing a message on social media. Instead of all the other freelancers, you need to put some thought into it and find out how to convince your client to give you the job.
This is the central aim of a proposal for a project. At the same time, to impress your client and detail your strategy. In short, these features should involve a successful project proposal :
- An intro for the project about your skills
- Your strategy for the project
- Lots of images for the visualization of particular elements
- A quote for the project with a completion timeline
- A correctly formatted and competent template
Step 10: Deliver Beyond Expectations
The next step after you land a job is to make sure that you execute the project exactly as the client has requested.
Or, in this case, I want you to overcomplicate the job by going beyond the standards of the client
So, find a way that goes beyond expectations to do work. And learn to stand out from others. That’s the only way for a freelancer to create a lasting career.
What will be next?
Now you are guaranteed able to deal with the world of freelancing. You’ll be able to build a successful and stable career as a freelancer with a lot of effort and hard work, good luck
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