How to Jumpstart Your Freelancing Career in Writing

If you enjoy writing and you believe that you can write well enough so that other people will find it enjoyable or informative, you can start earning money from your talent. Because of the Internet boom, there are now countless opportunities for writers like us. How?

When you searched for “How to make money online”, chances are you found this blog presented to you by Google. There are millions like you all over the world looking for information. All the websites you visit has to have valid and unique information so that they will be listed by Google and other search engines. Every single day, thousands of stories and articles are needed online. Simply put, words, articles and content is the fodder that makes the Internet go round. Without content, a website is dead.
Because of this need, there is a huge market demand for unique content. This is where your talent comes into play. You don’t have to be a physically published author just to become a freelance writer. You just have to be a good writer with solid knowledge in the rudiments of the English grammar. Now, there are several things that you must know about before you actually start earning money online by freelance writing. Read on.

How to Start Your Freelance Writing Career

You need to decide upon the topics that you want to write about. Assess yourself and focus on your strengths. Here are several questions that you might want to ask yourself:

• Are you a techie who knows stuff about gadgets and technology?
• Do you know a lot of things about relationships, philosophy and human behavior?
• Can you write fiction stories?
• Do you have a background in sales?
• Do you write poems and other creative pieces?
• Do you like Internet browsing and research?

Your answer to any of these questions will help you find your niche. Take note that most website owners and online may need different sorts of topics for you to write, so be prepared to open yourself to different niches. Most articles that are needed these days can be easily researched online. You just need to know how to write about a topic without compromising your article’s uniqueness.

Market Yourself Properly

Once you have assessed your skills and your strong points, you can now build your profile. As a beginner, you can start off with your resume. But some online employers don’t bother with it, so the best option is to create your profile via your chosen freelance platform. Here are some freelance sites that you can choose from:

• Freelancer.com - This is a good platform for starters and beginners because the clients here are less picky and the articles needed are pretty generic. Just keep in mind that you will be competing against thousands of others here, but if you build a strong profile, you can get chosen rather quickly. I, myself, started with Getafreelancer.com 6 years ago, before they changed it to Freelancer.com and when the industry was just budding and not a lot of people were in there. Creating a profile in Freelancer.com is relatively easy. You just have to fill in the pertinent fields to create your online profile. Upload a really good picture so that your future employers can connect a face to your name. Showcase your skills, not only as a writer. If you have other skills like typing, research, data entry and translation, you can put those, too.
• oDesk - oDesk is the most popular freelance platform to date, with millions of freelancers and employers registered worldwide. This platform is pretty much like Freelancer.com , however the platform looks cleaner and the bidding process is much more streamlined. You can choose to work on Hourly contracts (which guarantees payments) or work on Fixed contracts (paid outright by clients). Building your profile in oDesk is advantageous because you can pretty much jumpstart your freelancing career here and be successful. There are thousands of people in oDesk who left their day jobs and just focus on freelancing. Why? Because it pays them well and allows them many advantages.

Now that you have chosen your freelancing platform, how will you go about building your profile and marketing yourself?

You have to put together several samples of your work. If you have been previously published in a newspaper or magazine, put the link or a copy of that work in your application letter or profile. Freelancer.com and oDesk allows job seekers to include their portfolio along with their jobseeker profile. If you are a regular blogger and you have some work published online, put the information in your profile, too. You can also tell your potential customer that you are open to a test article that will allow them to gauge your skills and writing style. This way, the client will be impressed by your enthusiasm regarding the possible project.

Put together testimonials and recommendations from your employers. If this is your first time, do all that you can to please your first client, and get a feedback from them. At the onset, tell your client right away that it is your first time, and that you still have a lot of room to grow. You can lower your rates a bit so that they can give you a chance, and build your profile from there. Building your online freelance profile always starts from zero, but as you gain experience, you will find that you will be able to get higher paying jobs as well.

A Little Self-assessment Goes a Long Way

Evaluate yourself. If your grammar is terrible and your spelling is not your strongest points, you have to acknowledge it. Bring yourself up to speed and upgrade your English. Review your high school grammar lessons and get the help of online grammar checkers. MS Word has F7, use it. If you see a red line in your document, it must be incorrect. Pay attention to what the spellcheckers say, and remember those words. Nobody starts perfectly, remember that. The key to a freelancer’s success is in acknowledging your errors and learn from it.

Read other Freelancer’s Works

Look for blogs made by freelancers and written for freelancers, like cashoutdecently.com. Try to emulate the tone, and learn how they do it. By reading blogs like this continuously, you will eventually pick up the tone and the style, which will eventually help you. You should be an avid reader, that’s very important in being a freelancer.

Also Read:

Top Tips on How to Make Money with Elance

Image courtesy of adamr / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How to Be Scam Proof Online When Looking for Freelance Opportunities

When looking for freelance opportunities online, you need to be very cautious as there are many scams online that take away a lot of your time and effort. Also, many a times you might do some work in the best possible manner only to realize that you will not be compensated for all your efforts. This is quite common and hence it is important that you be extremely cautious with your work online.

Online freelancing or work from home opportunities have increased quite a lot lately helping writers, web programmers and web designers, etc to make some good money from the comfort of their home. Many people have taken this freelancing quite seriously by quitting their day jobs and working from home. The best aspect about these freelance opportunities is the fact that you get to work on what interests you most. This means that by doing what you really like, you tend to enjoy your work. This joy makes earning money fun and interesting. However, you need to understand the negatives involved with online freelance work too.

• Firstly, it is important to realize that not everything that is posted online is genuine.
• Secondly, you will need some experience and logical thinking to understand the fake or scam job postings online and not waste your time on them.

If you are someone who is new to online work from home setup or online freelancing, then it will be very difficult for you to differentiate between a legitimate job posting and a scam. While you need some experience to easily point out this difference, what you also need is some careful analysis of the job posting. Here are some basic things that we often don’t consider but the fact it, it is the small things that will usually indicate a scam:

Contact Information

The first thing that you should be absolutely sure about before you start working for anybody online is to get their contact information. No matter how big or small your freelance project is, it is very essential to have the basic contact information with you. As a matter of fact, if the freelance job is for a considerable amount of money, you might want to try contacting your prospective client in order to be sure that you are dealing with a genuine person.

A company that is genuine will usually contact you with clear, crisp instructions and details and get you started. This will help you analyze if the company or client you are about to deal with is genuine.

Further Details

When reading about a particular job description online, you need to make sure that the company is providing details in a well structured manner. The job instructions provided and the way the company communicates should help you evaluate their standing quickly. A company that is looking at a fraudulent deal will either ask you to submit some original work as a sample or get their work done from you and suddenly disappear without paying you.

There are also scams online that take your contact information and encroach your privacy later.

Bulk Request

When you get a request from a company that is offering you some bulk work, it is important to consider if the client is willing to make a part payment. If the client is hesitant, it is probably a scam that you should stay away from. There can be times however, when a genuine reason would have been involved. Therefore, you need to use your judgment on trying to understand the opportunities that are feasible and those that are not.

For being scam-proof and to understand the possible scams online, one needs to be highly attentive when looking out for online freelance opportunities. The above tips will help you to a certain extent however; it largely depends on your personal impression about a particular client and then deal with it appropriately. This sort of understanding is important and often it comes with your experience as an online freelancer.

How to Win Work Bids in Odesk and Elance

Considering the growing use of internet as a source to provide opportunities that encourage people to work from home, there has been an increase in the number of people who have a kick-start to their freelancing career. There is no dearth of opportunities online for writers, programmers and web designers. However, as the number of freelancers who can offer these skills is much more than the number of such opportunities, there is intense competition.

Working from home as a freelance consultant for any of the most needed jobs that include writing, graphic designing, software or program development, etc gives you the advantage of deciding your work hours and your work timings. Without having to report to any boss, you will be delighted to work for yourself. Most importantly, when you work on internet as a freelance service provider, you do not have to worry about not being able to taking time off your busy schedules for family. Working on freelance can give you a lot of time for your family by helping you decide the amount of work you want to conveniently take.

If you are new and are looking out for sources on the internet that offer you freelance opportunities depending upon your skill set, you will quite surprised at the number of results that show up for your query on any search engine. That is because there are many such freelance websites that provide you the necessary information to make the right move. Elance and Odesk top this list.

Elance – The Basic Structure

Elance is perhaps the most popular websites of all that provides innumerable work related opportunities on freelance. In fact, Elance provides freelance job across various platforms. When you create your account and login to Elance, you will see a list of categories which are - Web and Programming, Design and Multimedia, Writing and Translation, Sales and Marketing, Finance and Management, Legal, Engineering and Manufacturing and lastly, Admin Support. Depending upon your skill set, you can choose the category you are comfortable with. There are also sub categories in each of these to further narrow down your search for the most appropriate freelance opportunity for you.

Bidding on Elance

If, for instance, you are looking out for writing jobs, you can choose the category Writing and Translation and find yourself a relevant job posting. While searching for jobs, you can even sort them depending upon the budget, the job end date, and other such parameters. Once you have chosen a job for yourself, you will be required to submit your bid. When submitting your proposal (with the bid amount), you will need to be very cautious with what you write in your cover letter. Also, focusing on your profile will help you to a great extent. The proposal cover letter and your profile have to be extremely impressive for a client to get interested in you. You might want to add a few samples from your previous work to further make your proposal interesting.

After having completed your cover letter, you will need to place your bid. It is always appropriate to follow a fixed or standard rate for a similar service. However, it is important to look at the budget range specified by the client so that you get an idea on how much the client is willing to spend. Bids that are vague and unreasonable will be straight away declined so be careful when placing the bid.

Odesk

Odesk works on pretty much the same grounds as Elance. On Odesk too, you have a certain set of categories that are created to break down the various opportunities in to broad heads like Web Development, Software Development, Networking and Information, Writing and Translation, etc. Again, depending upon your skill, you can choose the category and look for relevant opportunities. The bidding process then follows which is very similar to that of Elance.

Getting Projects on Elance and Odesk

For both Elance and Odesk, the profile is extremely important to win deals. Your profile needs to be complete and up-to-date with all the basic information about you and your experience in your respective skill. A complete profile will make you genuine and trustworthy for your prospective clients. Once you sign up on Elance and Odesk, you get a certain number of connects or quota respectively that will help you with your applications.

To conclude, Elance and Odesk both offer quite lucrative options for people who are interested to work from home but it is important that the person spend some time on these platforms to understand how they work. First few weeks might not really be fruitful but your consistent effort will win you some good projects to start with. Once you get that start, there is often no looking back!

Image Source: Elance homepage screenshot