How to Make Money Freelancing and 9 Websites to Do It

Making money freelancing online is about finding something you can do that you’re either an expert in or that someone else just doesn’t want to do.

This post about making money online as a freelancer is one of the most popular on the blog for a reason. Freelancing is one of the fastest ways to launch your work from home story and the cash flow is immediate.

That’s a great benefit compared to other ways to make money online like blogging and self-publishing that take longer to pay off.

Most of the bloggers I know, including myself, started their work from home success story by freelancing. They worked as online independent contractors to pay the bills while their other home-based businesses took off.

After just over five years, I do very little freelancing anymore. I don’t need to! I make thousands on my blogs and books.

Get started on Fiverr today and finally get that project done!

By now, you’re asking yourself, “Ok, so how do I start making money freelancing?”

I’ve got you covered.

This post is the fourth of our five-week series on how to make money through different resources online. There are enough scams and wastes of time in internet side-gigs so I thought I would put together a series of legitimate ways to make money freelancing online.

Check out the other posts in the series to make money freelancing or through other online resources:

Avoid the Hype and Make Money Crowdfunding
How to Make Money Online Selling on Craigslist
How to Publish a Book and Make Thousands a Month

How to Make Money Freelancing Online

Freelancing is just another way of saying running your own business. You market your service through different sources, agree on contract terms and perform your work for clients.

Clients will most likely start out as one-time project requests but may come back to you for regular services.

Why would you want to start freelancing online? Besides a great way to make extra cash, freelancing can be your ticket out of the 9-to-5 rat race. It’s not that you’ll be able to stop working after launching your online freelancing business. In fact, you might find yourself working even more hours than you did with a traditional job.

The difference is that you’ll be in control of your financial well-being and will be doing something you enjoy.

I talked about my own experience making money freelancing and how the hustle became my life in a previous post. Start your online freelancing business in something you’re passionate about or enjoy doing and you won’t mind the work. You’ll work your butt off at first but will come to love the challenge and the idea of building your own business.

What can you freelance? If you enjoy doing it, you can freelance it!

Anything that can be delivered over the internet is going to be the easiest to freelance and can allow you to live wherever you want. This includes anything that can be delivered through writing, audio, video or downloads.

There’s really two ways to make money freelancing

First is the job in which you can provide an expert service. This will require some time learning the subject on your part but will pay off over the long run. It usually pays better rates because it involves more training and you can build a name for yourself for quality.

Tutor
Writing
Sales
Consulting
Social Media Strategy
Graphic Design
Website Management
SEO Strategy

The other type of freelancing job is one that people just don’t want to do or where they can pay you to do it for cheap. These are going to be rote tasks like spreading a link around the internet, posting on social media or some customer service tasks. These jobs don’t pay quite as much but money can start rolling in immediately without a lot of training.

Repetitive SEO tasks
Social Media posting
Article Writing
Lead Generation
Mailing Lists
Transcription

Of course, there’s a fine line between the two types of freelancing jobs. What may start as the second type may develop into the first after you’ve learned enough to provide real expertise in the subject. A lot of freelancers offer both types of services to make some quick money in the rote tasks while building their client list for tasks in the first type of jobs.

Browse around the websites linked below and you’ll get a good feel for different types of jobs and how much you can make.

Can Freelancing Bring Stable Income?

Freelancing may be a dream come true for many people who are tired of the monotony of working for someone else, but it takes hard work and dedication to make this lifestyle profitable. It allows you to spend more time with family and friends because you create your own for work projects. While clients often make unreasonable demands, you can set your own hours and decide when to take time off. Freelancers also enjoy more flexibility in determining their rates and fee structures.

On the other hand, freelancing means that you no longer receive company benefits such as health insurance or holiday pay so you must start a business, and it can be difficult to find new clients as well. It takes dedication to manage projects from multiple clients while keeping on top of deadlines, billing cycles, taxes and marketing strategies on a daily basis. If you do not have experience running a business or managing accounts, this will likely create more stress than it alleviates. However, starting up a payroll company is straightforward if you have basic bookkeeping knowledge.

Freelancers earn a significantly higher hourly rate than individuals employed by larger companies, but it may take time to build up a steady source of income. If you require an immediate paycheck, consider accepting a job with a company while keeping your freelancing work on the side until your rates have increased and you are able to sustain yourself fully through this method of employment.

However, despite the drawbacks associated with starting a freelancing career, many people believe that creating their own schedules; controlling their daily activities; and doing what they love outweighs all other factors. If you possess strong communication skills; sound judgment; creativity; and enjoy working independently for multiple clients at once, freelancing may be the ideal career path for you.

If you are interested in starting your own company, consider signing up for courses in digital entrepreneurship to learn the ins and outs of running a business effectively. By taking control of your future today, you will soon discover that the benefits of freelancing far outweigh the disadvantages.

Click through here to search for these tasks and others on Fiverr.

How much money can I make freelancing online?

This is the first question people usually ask about making money freelancing and unfortunately it doesn’t really have a good answer. For every person that has made a really good living freelancing online, there are ten more that get disappointed busting their butt for very little pay.

There are two problems for new freelancers. First is that, most likely, you won’t really have the experience or skill to charge top rates. Read my story about how I got into freelance writing online. I didn’t start out charging $45 an hour and I had to do a lot of unpaid work to get my name out there in front of the right people. Mix in paid work with stuff that will further your career and you’ll eventually get noticed and start turning down the low paying gigs.

The other problem for freelancers is the huge competition from overseas providers. Instead of getting mad at low-cost providers willing to work for $5 an hour, accept it as just normal competition. For every Macy’s in a city, there are five Wal-Marts. Macy’s doesn’t get out of the retail business because of the competition, it just figures out how to provide a better service and distinguish the brand.

Got a freelancing idea but not sure if it will work? Just want to bounce some ideas off someone? Use the comment boxes below or send me an email. The community here at My Work from Home Money is great for helping each other with ideas and feedback. We’ll have you making money freelancing in no time!

Summary for How to Make Money Freelancing

List the projects and topics in which you like to work
List the projects and topics in which you have the most professional experience
Brainstorm a list of easy freelancing projects you can do quickly
Brainstorm a list of freelance projects that take more time but mean more money
Put together a simple website to highlight your experience and previous freelance projects
Scan the freelancing websites for available projects and ideas

Some final thoughts on making money freelancing online:

Putting a simple website together to showcase your work will go a long way to establishing credibility, getting more jobs and getting paid more. Posting once a week to your blog will start bringing search traffic from Google that you can convert to customers. You might even start making money from advertising on your website.
Charge what you are worth! Do not accept a job for less than you will be happy with, either through monetary gain or exposure. Your work will be sub-par if you grudgingly accept and then don’t want to do the work.
Many, many jobs on the freelancing platforms do not get assigned. Project owners either don’t know what they want or don’t find it. Spend the time on the sites with projects that are most likely to be filled, you’ll get a feel for these pretty quickly
Contracts probably don’t mean as much as you think. Are you going to chase a non-paid contract to another state, paying hundreds or thousands in travel and legal, just to collect on a few hundred dollars? Get at least 35% upfront from new customers. Legitimate project owners will not have a problem with this.

9 Freelance Websites to Make Money Freelancing

The process making money freelancing online can happen several ways, from direct communication through your website or through one of the platforms listed below. Through the freelancing platforms, people with jobs or projects will post a description online. Freelancers browse through the projects and bid on the work or are invited to apply by the project owner.

You’ll probably have to answer some questions about your experience or interview for the project. If you are selected for the project, you’ll be rewarded the job on the site. Once work is done, the project owner pays the site and the site pays you.

Elance bills itself as, “The World’s Leading Site for Online Work,” but most sites have a similar claim to fame. There are 27,539 jobs posted currently across eight categories from IT & Programming to Legal. A little more than a third (37%) of the jobs are in IT & Programming with another 21% of jobs in Design & Multimedia.

DesignCrowd is another great website to make money freelancing in graphics and design. The site lists 42 categories from corporate design and branding through T-shirt design and brochure building. The site runs on the traditional freelancing model where project owners set their budget and freelancers bid on the project. Again, it is extremely important to show the quality of your portfolio and your ability to work with people. Put yourself forward as a professional and campaigns won’t mind if your prices are a little higher than others’.

99designs.com is a great site for design and marketing jobs. I like these targeted-freelancing sites because they seem to attract projects that are more likely to be filled. Employers know what they want and are looking for a professional in a very specific field. The site runs on a unique contest model where projects pay for a design package before the project goes to the marketplace of freelancers. For freelancers, it’s a great break from the traditional bid-down strategy where the lowest bidder usually gets the project.

Udemy isn’t necessarily a freelancer site but a great place to launch your side-hustle in video courses. Freelance for more than a few months and you will start building some real expertise in your field. There is a very good chance that others will be looking to learn those skills whether to make money freelancing themselves or to just to their own work. Udemy reports more than eight million students and that the average instructor makes $7,000 on their courses. It’s pretty easy to put together a few-hour course but it will take some time to plan and shoot the videos. Even if you’re not planning on giving a course, Udemy is a great tool for learning the skills that will make your freelancing a success.

Fiverr.com is a freelancer website I’ve started using more over the last couple of months. Freelancers offer “gigs” for $5 which include limited services but then try to upsell into more services for more money. I haven’t tried to offer services on the site but have bought a few gigs. I know a lot of freelancers that do well on the site but you really have to upsell and use the site to draw people into your marketing strategy. Try building a relationship with new customers so they come back to you each project, even if your prices are higher than the competition.

Tutor is a good option because of its focus and pricing plan. Clients buy subscription packages for one to three hours at a cost of around $39 per hour. The site helps match students with tutors in 40 subjects and claims tutor support 24 hours a day, 361 days of the year.

Hootsuite Pro is not a freelancer website but a great tool to manage your social media management side-hustle. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are the second largest traffic source to most websites. Everyone from Fortune 500 companies to individual blogs are building a social media presence and most of them are clueless about where to start. I’ve outsourced some of my own social media marketing myself and I know a lot of bloggers that outsource their entire social strategy. Hootsuite makes it easy to manage a clients social networks by linking all networks and making it quick and easy to share.

Freelancer is one of the older sites, established in 2004. The site has one of the larger inventories of projects, though it doesn’t offer a site-wide or category sum of jobs. It does seem to be more closely focused on the technology and technical jobs. Freelancer was actually the first site I came across when I first started trying to make money freelancing online but I never found much on the site.

ProBlogger is one I’ve brought up a few times on the blog. It’s probably the best job board for finding online writing projects. While it seems that more of these jobs are actually filled, as opposed to employers just testing out the market on other sites, the rate offered is still pretty low on a lot of them.

Making money freelancing through customers from your own website should be a longer-term goal. The freelancing platforms provide a quick connection to thousands of potential customers looking for freelancers but you’ll have to weed through a lot of postings to get work. It’s difficult to distinguish yourself among all the other freelancers and the rates you’ll get will be lower compared to what you can charge on your own website. Build your own site and create a real sales pitch through prior work and you’ll be able to charge top rates and attract legitimate customers.

As we’ve seen in the other posts in the making money series, there’s no quick way to make money freelancing online. Any website promising a freelancing strategy where you’ll make thousands a day, or even each week, is likely a scam. Making money freelancing online requires patience and years of building your business. Give it a little time though and your part-time hobby can easily become a full-time job or even pay the bills on a less-than-full schedule.

Read the Entire Making Money Through Freelancing Series

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