Tuesday 25 August 2015

The Best Freelance Websites - Earn £250 in 30 days

I love finding new ways to earn money with as little time and effort required as possible. A lot of people can spend months if not years building up their online credibility to start earning money, but I think with the right tools, you only need 30 days. In this blog post I will outline how I earned over £200 by simply registering and selling my skills on some of the best freelance websites. I must mention that this technique is not going to work for everyone, but you need to take the time and find what works for you.

Before you register on freelance websites and start wasting time, here is what you need to do.

Each freelance website that is listed below is know for a specific thing, so make sure you do your research to see how other freelancers are attracting constant buyers. In my case, I make my money by blogging and other writing services. I only use 3 freelance websites and they work really well together because it seems when orders are quiet on one, the other has a huge wave.

Best freelance websites

I started off using Peopleperhour as a way to earn extra cash while studying. At the time I didn't know better so I simply listed Blogging and Proofreading skills with all my credentials. After a month or two of getting no orders I was getting really frustrated, so decided to have a look at some of the best bloggers and proofreaders to see what was better about them.

I noticed that the most successful sellers had these things in common:

  • At least 1 positive review for their service that was quite long and detailed
  • A niche that they are passionate about (travel writing, novel writing, fashion writing blah blah)
  • Plenty of time on their hands (I'm a stay at home mum, I'm a freelance writer, I am currently on holiday, I work only 2 days a week)
So this is exactly what I done, I mimicked the most popular profiles and filled mines in to make it sound as if I was doing this for a hobby, as if I have every piece of credential for my service under the sun and as if I had no other priority in the world but to serve the people on Peopleperhour that order my hourlies.

Oh and very important tip, try to keep your account online as much as possible, being available is an attractive trait.

So after my profile had a spruce, I immediately started getting invited to apply for jobs and once I did my proposals were accepted because I was available, online and ready. After the 10 piece of positive feedback, I added more hourlies that basically did the same thing just worded differently. Some people look for music writers or student writers, it's all in the wording.

Once my Peopleperhour profile was a well oiled machine I moved on. I really liked the look of Fivesquid because it allowed you to do the smallest tasks quickly for a small fee. You might think that £5 is very low, but if it takes 2-3 minutes to complete, I will take it. I listed my profile on Fivesquid using the same formula as on Peopleperhour but I tried to play around with the pricing. First I listed a £5 service was editing a mere 100 words. But then that was quite common so I mixed it up, for £10 I offered to transcribe 30 minutes or audio... BINGO. I was getting orders a solid week for something that took hardly any time or effort. And the best thing about fivesquid is if you pay attention to the look and feel of how you present your service, every time you get positive feedback your service appears on the homepage so you get even more orders.

So now I have 2 freelance websites working as bringing in new clients. On a weekly basis I have around 20-50 orders from both websites, which pretty much takes up 3 days of the week to complete. With the extra 2 days I decided I wanted to really increase the price value of my skills.

I registered on Upwork. This is a platform for professional freelancers who have been practising their skills for a long time, which means that they are in a strong position to charge extra. In order to make my credentials work even more for me I summarised the amount of feedback I have from other freelance websites to show that I have not only freelancing experience but also strong writing skills. The type of work I would only be available for is Academy Research, Novel Editing and Research. This is boring and time consuming work but it pays very well. Within a week someone posted a project with a budget of £300! I immediately sent my proposal with a lower quote of £250 as I was new to the website and needed that positive review to kick start my account. I was even surprised when I got awarded the job.

It turned out the job was a lot more time consuming than I thought because it required a lot more research. To help me save time, I paid £5 to a few lovely ladies on fivesquid to help me out with the research which worked really well. So for 2 days worth of work I bagged myself a positive review and £245. I can just imagine how much a freelance web developer would get paid for a few hours of work on sites like these.

I constantly update my profile and grow my portfolio to ensure it all stays fresh. I think to prevent your account from going dry you also need to the Freelancer UK Guide which explains how to set up your profile so that over time you also attract new clients through the organic search on google.

Let me know how you are getting on and if you've come across any challenges when freelancing.







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