How You Can Start Freelancing at this Very Moment

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“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” –Seth Godin

Where do I start? What do I do? How do I make money from freelancing?

You my friend, are about to become a freelancer. Can you handle this responsibility? Sure you can.

Let’s start off by simplifying this whole freelancing process. You don’t need a degree from a prestigious school nor do you need to be some trained athlete to make money through freelancing. You can make money freelancing right now.

All you need to start making money through freelancing right now is:

1. Your product or service.

You need to offer something that you’re going to sell.

This could be your freelancing service or some sort of a product if you plan on selling your services in a package. You need to specific exactly what your service is going to be.

• Will you write articles?
• Will you teach kids how to play the guitar?
• Will you work as a personal trainer?
• What will you do?
• What important problems will you solve?

It also helps to put together a juicy offer based on your service. You can refer to this as “branding” or as “marketing yourself.” All that matters is that you have a service and a way to spread the word about what it is that you can do.

2. Customers.

You need someone to offer your product or service to. If you have a service but nobody to sell to, then you don’t have much of a freelancing career. Right?

It’s highly recommended that you have specific customers that you’ll target your services to. Being a general fitness instructor is probably fine and all, but you need to be specific. You’ll get much better results when you target a specific piece of a group.

For example, my friend Justin switched gears and aimed his guitar teaching business at kids that wanted to get into it. These kids have their parents bring them for every lesson. Oh and of course the parents pay for it. This beats trying to market your services to a college student that will change their mind whenever they get a new girlfriend or something else fun to do comes along (usually takes a few weeks).

I on the other hand, wanted to expand my freelance writing career. Instead of looking for random gigs I targeted personal finance bloggers that shared similar views with me so that I could write about a topic that I was passionate about instead of finding a writing gig and then trying to learn about the topic.

It always helps to niche it down and target specific customers if you want to find new freelancing clients.

The good news is that finding customers is easier than ever. Common online channels like Facebook and Kijiji can help you reach new potential clients in a matter of minutes. We’ll get into this later on this guide.

3. A way to get paid.

How are you going to get paid? How will you collect your money?

You won’t have much of a freelancing career if you’re not getting paid.

If you do work in person you can charge cash or check.

When you do work online you’re going to need a Paypal account.

You simply need a way to get paid.

A quick note on Paypal: It’s safe to connect your Paypal account with your bank account. I did this a long time ago and I can’t recall any issues.

Another quick note on freelancing: Free work is okay when you’re first getting started. There’s just one important condition that needs to be met. You do free work only on a trial basis. You don’t want to wait six months and then find out that you won’t be getting paid.

Create a service, find clients, and get paid.

Now you’re ready to be a freelancer. It’s that simple. Look at you, Mr. Freelancer!