OnlineFreelance.com

The biggest problem that a freelance newcomer usually has is to get a first project. In this article we will give some hints for newcomers.

Profile

Filling out a profile is one of the most important things. You need to keep in mind that profile will show your personality to your future clients. Try to avoid extra creativity and focus on the description of your skills. Most buyers that I know ask for creative ideas only if they need it, while in most cases it is more important for them to get the job done. The best way is to find the top freelancers on the site that you work on, analyze their profiles and resumes and write yours basing on their ideas. Great artists steal :) But in this case it is more important for you to understand the standards that are most effective on this site.

Work samples and work experience are the keys to your project, I usually post links to my work samples right after the usual “Hi!” You need to give your best to get some work done before you start looking for a project. It is great if you already worked in a company or as a freelancer outside this website. If not, an important rule here is not to sit and wait for work. Work starts in your mind and not on your monitor. There are numerous possibilities out there, you can always write some articles, make a website or design something for your friends for free. It will help you to practice and if the work was done well, you can always put that into your resume. Some people even start that way and at some point they understand, that they are paid for their work, and can actually make a living from that.

Pricing

The best newcomer strategy is offering a low price. It is common on every site to offer some low rates for your first project, but try to avoid doing something for free. On the one hand, most of the buyers will have little trust for someone, who is willing to do a job absolutely for free and on the other hand, a project with $0 or $1 payment will not look very serious in your profile.

In work like translation or writing you can always offer to do a small part of the project for free as a test. So if the buyer is not sure about you, he or she can just choose another provider in case you skills were not good enough. In my experience of writing free samples, most of them were actually paid, even if I eventually lost the project to another freelancer. It is also important not to grab just any work. You can end up with a task that is too big for you or with a dull task where you need to do some copy-paste work for $0.10 per hour.

Be persistent and remember that all of the top freelancers also had their first difficult projects!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 00:41 and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.