I believe freelancing is one of the most easy ways to make money online, if not the easiest, and although some people think it’s not the best way to do it since it’s not a source of passive income, it still is a good choice to quickly start making money on the internet, and therefore it can be used as a baseline for other, more business-like ways to make a living.
This list was written for people looking for telecommute freelancing jobs to work from home, mainly in the internet, although some of this points can be applied for local freelance jobs too. So let’s start with what interests you:
1. Trust in people: If you can’t trust in other people then freelancing is not for you. Here you will hardly sign a contract, they will pay you after you do all the work, and I bet you will never see their faces, so unless you can’t believe they will pay you as they said, then you better send your resume to some job on your local area and forget the freelancing option.
2. Apply to as many jobs as you can: There’s a lot of freelancing jobs, and there’s even more people who want them. So don’t get short and apply for as many jobs as you can using some kind of email template that helps you to send as many emails as possible (don’t forget to always put some kind of customized reference to every recipient).
3. Don’t send your resume as an attached file: Surely you have heard this one a lot of times: attached files are annoying, they can even carry some virus with them, so if you want to please your possible future employer, make them a favor and send your resume as simple text in the body of your message. Don’t forget to add the corresponding headers in the beginning telling them for what are you applying and why, and let them clearly know where your resume begins.
4. Have something to show: Freelancing is all about trust, in their side too. And although your resume counts, and maybe they will even believe what it says, you will dramatically improve your odds to be chosen for the job if you have something to show them now.
If you maintain a blog, a website or you wrote something in the past and it can be viewed on the web, then you have to tell them. Now, you will increase even more your odds if you show them something related with the job you are applying for, so if you are applying for a programming job, show them some public working code, if you are applying for a writer job, show them your blog and if you are applying for a designer job, show them some graphics. Is that easy and logical, you don’t need past working experience as long as you have done something useful by yours.
5. Maintain a variable hourly fee: When negotiating your payment, manage a variable hourly fee, i.e. a maximum hourly fee which you want to reach, and a minimum one that you will accept in the worst case. The hourly fee you can charge to your new employer depends on the size of the company, the kind of work to be done and their geographic location. So although the most logical decision is to try to charge the maximum hourly fee sometimes it will be just too much for your possible employer and therefore they won’t choose you. If you are in a great need for a job be very smart negotiating your hourly fee in order to maximize your chances to be chosen.
6. Know your employer: Make a lot of Google, Yahoo and MSN search for your employer’s name and company to be sure they are respectable people. Also try to speak with their past employees just to know if they have a good opinion about them. If you don’t find anything bad about your employers it’s a good start but once you are in you may try to speak with fellow coworkers about them or look for documents or other things than can warn you about some bad behavior. Particularly, if you are a freelance programmer, take a look at pre-existent code and search for comments about your employer (if they have failed to pay there are chances that past programmers have written something about that).
Some Links for u:
http://www.freelancewriting.com/newsroom/creative-freelancing.php
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