Freelancing as a career

How many of you are interested to earn extra bucks by doing some small amount of extra work?

In my college I came to know that I can earn money, sitting at home by doing some task on the computer. I didn’t need any extra money for any particular reason but since I was a bit into computers and programming, thought it will be a good way to polish my skills and get some extra bucks. It seemed a very easy way to make some extra money, so I read more about the same. By my research I came to the conclusion that software development is one is most suitable skills for making money online, I had some basic knowledge of how to create a website so I started bidding on freelancing websites in order to get some work. It started going well and when I was done with my engineering I had enough knowledge and clients to continue it as a full time profession. I worked as a freelance software developer for around 2 years after completing my B.Tech, from an incubation center/co-working place in Pune.

The way it works is that people who want to get some work done, post the project and its description on a website like freelancer.com, there are many similar websites. Other people who are willing to do the work, search for the projects they are interested in and send a reply to the projects that have been posted with their portfolio and a bidding amount. Now the buyer has the option to select a bid from the bids that he has received. Once a bid is selected, the seller has the option to ask buyer to pay him in milestones as the work gets completed and store some amount in the escrow, so that the buyer is not able to cheat the seller and vice-versa.

The kind of work available online varies from software development, content writing, language translation, data entry and similar services that can be delivered easily over internet and much more.

There are many websites where you can find freelance projects, depending upon the work you want, the sources may differ:

a) One of the website, that many beginners hit is freelancer.com, as it has very good ranking on google, given the advantage it gets because of its name.

b) Another good website is oDesk.com (now upwork), it seems to be the most famous website for getting a job done.

c) A very interesting online marketplace that started in 2010 and was able to acquire good portion of freelance job market is fiverr.com, the name fiverr came from its concept that the seller have to create a gig of the services that they are willing to provide for $5, the buyer can browse through various gigs and choose the service they would like to buy, there is option to attach a video to your gig which made it very interesting to browse through the gigs.

d) There is another good website for crowdsourcing called peopleperhour.com where the users, i.e. the buyers and sellers, are mainly from the United Kingdom, maybe because it was founded in London. But nothing restricts you to join and get or post work there.

You must be wondering how do the payments take place internationally on websites like these since most of the time the buyer and the seller are from different countries, to facilitate the payment there are various online payment systems supported by these websites, the most famous of these payment system is Paypal, it takes some amount for every transaction it handles and provides a secure and smooth experience to transfer or receive the money.

One of the most important thing about profiles on these freelancing websites is the rating, a user has, after completing a job the seller and buyer have the option to give rating to each other. If a profile gets good number of good ratings they tend to attract more customers and thus have the option to take more orders or increase the price of the service they provide.

There are many service based startups which have these websites as the main source of acquiring the projects. The same can be checked by visiting the sources I mentioned and estimating the money flow that happens on these crowdsourcing websites. Because of websites like these people have the option to sell their skills across various countries and build their business abroad a lot more easily.

By my freelancing career I was not able to make the money I used to see flowing on the internet because I was choosy about the projects I accepted and some other reasons. If a person’s target is making money by freelancing, there is considerable market online.