Some times life can get tough, and you probably are
thinking, let me quit my Job and work for myself. In short, freelancing
definition is, working for your self; this is a plain and simple explanation.
Nowadays, there are many people in the field of freelancing. Top most reasons for that are:
A. You can work with the convenience of your own schedule
B. You can work from home
C. You dont have a boss of over you
Well these are the top most practical reasons of being a freelancer. For many people the dream of independence turns into reality when they become freelancers. Consulting or freelancing is the most straightforward path towards being your own boss. You can succeed with freelancing, with your commitment and seriousness with the work you do.
Freelancing will help you to set your own agreements; you can choose to be a registered freelancer as well. Freelancing does not put any work pressure on you.
Secondly, Freelancing can be your dreams come true. I am sure we all have certain dreams, where our careers are concerned, you might have a unique dream you want to get fulfilled and so freelancing can be one of the ways to fulfill your dream at the same time make you an independent proud person.
The last thing in freelancing is the importance of wining clients and spreading a word of your services. For many people this can be a challenge, but it is not all, that hard when it comes to advertising or spreading a word of your services. Email is the fastest and convenient ways to advertise of your services. You can also try yellow pages or white pages to advertise, but either ways, you will find, after all it is not hard work.
To win your first project at freelance site, you need to know lot of things:
Bidding and Rating:
Nowadays, there are many people in the field of freelancing. Top most reasons for that are:
A. You can work with the convenience of your own schedule
B. You can work from home
C. You dont have a boss of over you
Well these are the top most practical reasons of being a freelancer. For many people the dream of independence turns into reality when they become freelancers. Consulting or freelancing is the most straightforward path towards being your own boss. You can succeed with freelancing, with your commitment and seriousness with the work you do.
Freelancing will help you to set your own agreements; you can choose to be a registered freelancer as well. Freelancing does not put any work pressure on you.
Secondly, Freelancing can be your dreams come true. I am sure we all have certain dreams, where our careers are concerned, you might have a unique dream you want to get fulfilled and so freelancing can be one of the ways to fulfill your dream at the same time make you an independent proud person.
The last thing in freelancing is the importance of wining clients and spreading a word of your services. For many people this can be a challenge, but it is not all, that hard when it comes to advertising or spreading a word of your services. Email is the fastest and convenient ways to advertise of your services. You can also try yellow pages or white pages to advertise, but either ways, you will find, after all it is not hard work.
To win your first project at freelance site, you need to know lot of things:
Bidding and Rating:
You have to remember the fact
that new service providers cannot get work for high rates. This is because
there are lots of other service providers at freelance sites who are old
members. Old members have high ratings and lot of feedbacks. So they are the ones
who can get work for high rates. New comers have to work for the lowest
possible rates.
You always have to place
lowest amount of money in your bid. If the budget range is $100 to $250, then
you will place $100 in your bid amount.
When you are new at freelance
site, you then have to earn ratings. Do not worry about earning money in the
beginning. You have to work for cheap rates so that you can build up some
reputation. Reputation is the amount and quality of rating and feedbacks that
you will have.
Why you need to build
reputation?
Some buyers never give work
to new service providers. They only hire old members who have high reputation
at freelance sites.
Where some buyers do hire new
service providers but only if the offer from the new service provider is
extremely good (that is: the service provider is willing to do the job for very
low price).
Now the buyers who only hire
old members pay lot of money compared to the pennies that other buyers pay to
new comers. You most probably want to earn good money rather than earning just
few pennies right?
Why buyers prefer to
hire service providers with high reputation?
Many of new service providers
fail to complete work for buyers. Many people join freelance site in hope to
earn lot of money without doing any or much work. Such people waste buyer’s
time by not doing the work in the given time period or they do the work
incorrectly.
So, buyers do not want to
waste their valuable time by giving work to new service providers. Old members
who have high ratings and good feedback will most probably (almost 100% of
projects that are outsourced to service providers with high reputations) will
complete the work according to buyer’s need.
Sending Private
Message(PM):
PM is the message that
service provider can send to buyer and buyers can send PM to service providers.
In this way, both parties can communicate with each other. After service
providers place bid on a project, then they have to send PM to the buyer.
Unfortunately, many new comers do not send PM. If a service provider wants to
win a project then he/she has to send PM to buyer. There is no way to win a
project without sending PM.
What you write in a
PM:
What you write in PM is also
extremely important. You have to impress the buyer and for that you need to
send a professional looking PM to the buyer.
How to write a good
PM:
The best PM that a service
provider can send to a buyer is the one where the service provider send a
sample of the work that the buyer needs.
For example: if a buyer is
looking for some articles on the topic “Traveling”, then if the service
provider send a sample article of about 200 words on the topic Traveling, to
the buyer, this will be the ideal PM that anyone can send to a buyer.
If you see a data entry
project where one have to collect website URLs of some sites of specific
category, then you can search and collect few URLs and then send them in the PM
as a sample.
In case you need time to
create or make the sample, then you should send two PMs.
In first PM you will tell the
buyer that you will be sending a sample file shortly. In the second PM, you
will send the sample. Other than the above mentioned situation: Do not send
multiple PMs to buyers. Send one PM to the buyer and then wait for his/her
reply.
Mistakes in PM:
NEVER make spelling or
grammar mistakes in the content of PM that you send to buyers. Think and spend
some time to write PM.
To win your first
project at freelance site, you need to know how to do it right.
How To Catch the
Fishs:
The most important thing to
do at freelance site is to catch the newest posted projects. If you really want
to make money online at freelance site, then you have to spend some hours in
searching for new projects that get posted at freelance sites.
Open the main page where you
can see the newest project posted. Keep refreshing the page in that position.
As soon as you see a new project posted at a freelance site, open it and see
quickly if you can do the job.
If you can do the work, then
at once place a bid and then send a PM to the buyer.
Number of fish catchers is
high where the number of fishes is low if compared to the number of fish
catchers.
Alert:
Be alert all the time: that
is, you should use software or tool that can inform you about any new email
that you get. You have to make sure that if a buyer replies to your PM then you
reply back in very quick time.
Buyers will not wait for you.
Sometimes, people lose a
project because they reply just few seconds late.
A Freelance Secret:
There is one thing that works
very well. There are some projects where you may want to do the work even for
the money that is less than the minimum budget limit. But you can only enter
the lower budget limit as the minimum amount of money in your BID.
In such cases, you can write
something like this in your PM:
“I will do this work for any
amount of money that you are willing to pay”
Or
“Tell me, what is the minimum
amount of money that you are willing to pay for this work? No matter what that
amount is, I will do the job for that amount of money”
Or
“I am willing to do this job
for less than the minimum amount of money that we can enter in our bid”
Or you can write anything
else. Just try to get the buyer’s attention.
Experience Counts:
If you have any past
experience in the job that buyer want to be done, then you must mention your
experience in PM.
If you have done any work
that is little related to the work that is required by the buyer, then you can
mention that experience too.
Tell something to buyer that
he doesn’t know:
There is one thing that works
pretty well: that is, if you have some experience in the work that is required
by the buyer and that you know some information about the work that not many
people know then you should tell that little information to the buyer. This
will separate you from the rest of the candidates for the job.
For example:
Let’s say that there is a
project where the buyer wants someone to write content from PDF files into word
documents: now it is possible to convert some PDF files via tools to a format
that is editable.
You first check the sample
PDF file, that buyer will attach in the project, to see if you are able to
convert these files or not. If you can then tell this information to the buyer and
tell him that you will save lot of time and money for the buyer via doing the
whole job using simple tools.