A Comprehensive Startup Guide to Your Freelance Career (part 1)

Working as a freelancer is great ways to start your own home based business and earn a residual income for a better living.

As a freelancer myself and having employed for a few times, I’ve experience with many issues that you should know to build up your freelance career. But before going in depth, I’ve to outline some basic things. So, let’s start:

What is freelancing?

A freelancer or freelance worker is somebody who is self employed and offer their services to employer without a long term commitment. This day’s freelancer refers to copywriters, proofreaders, programmers, designers and so on. They often charged by hour, day or job. Working as a freelancer is called freelancing.

Here is the startup guide:

Quality First!

The main requirement to becoming a freelancer is to have a high skill and expertise in your field. It’s not matter whether you’re working as a programmer or designer. Because, there is no senior employee to correct your mistakes. So, you must have to be proficient.

Create a Showcase:

You’ve a great working skill in your field, but nobody will trust you unless you show them what you can!

Yes, every employer wants to see some of their work examples before hiring someone else. So, it’s better to put your work examples together.

So, where to put your work examples?

In your showcase! I mean your online portfolio. So that anyone can view your work examples anytime from anywhere.

Having your website is a bonus!

If you’ve a website, you’re one step ahead than those who don’t have. For instance, you’re a great writer and want to do copywriting jobs as freelancer, if you’ve a website (or blog) where you can write and show the world your writing skill.

Again, think you’re a seo expert; so rank your website up for a specific keyword(s) and then let employer know that you’ve ranked your website up for this keyword. I bet you, you’ll get many (at least few) potential clients.
Checkout my portfolio and see how I’m shoeing my work skills.

Important: If you’re going to have a website, make sure that you’ve a top-level domain (no sub-domain). The top-level domain indicates that you’re professional and make sure you’ve created service or portfolio page.

Where to find the work?

Sure, getting the work is the key to start your freelance career. Okay, let me ask you question; what do you do when you need to buy a product?

Of course, you enter the market and look for the product you need. So you’ve to go to the marketplace to start working.

Wait! Have you ever heard about oDesk? The biggest marketplace for freelancers. Hundreds of jobs are being posted there every single day!

I’ve been working for a while at odesk and I’m getting enough job and getting paid to quit my day time job.

Go to oDesk.com and crate your free account. Creating account on oDesk is so easy, just like creating an email address.

So, get registered there and start working.

Cheers!

P.S. This is an ongoing series to help people to build up their freelance career. There are more articles to be published about how to get work on oDesk, being paid and so on. So, make sure you won’t miss it. Subscribe to my feed or get our next post by email, so that you can get it delivered to your inbox.

Tagged as: freelancing, freelancing for money, get freelance works, home based business, how to get started freelancing career, make money with odesk, odesk startup guide, what is freelancing