According to Wikipedia,” Freelancer, a person who pursues an occupation without a long-term commitment to any particular employer.”
Freelancers are the persons who don’t stick to a single company for work rather they are self-employed, they find work through marketplaces mainly. Clients in marketplaces awards tasks, projects or different services to freelancers based on who they consider eligible for executing their tasks in the best manner. Freelancers can work for multiple companies at a time.
Most people start freelancing as a part-time before pursuing it full time. I would suggest you have a 9-5 PM job and in spare time taste freelancing.
General Freelance Jobs Marketplaces
As you know what is freelancing, now I would like to introduce you to general freelancing marketplaces. I have divided this category further into 2 sections, Full-time, and Freelance jobs.
Full-time Jobs
1. FlexJobs
Sara Sutton launched it in 2007. It lists remote, partially remote, on-site jobs, part-time jobs, full-time jobs. Every job displayed here is monitored so scam posts are not shown to users. Considering the efforts behind this platform, it is a paid option. I would suggest you to opt-in if you are wandering here and there for a full-time job.
2. Indeed
It is the largest directory of jobs. You can find full-time jobs easily by selecting the city for jobs. Indeed has 250 million monthly users, and it’s FREE. You can also search for remote jobs easily.
3. Cloudpeeps
Cloudpeeps is also a paid option focusing remote jobs in the category of copywriting, social media management and marketing. It offers a free plan which is useless as you can’t view jobs with this plan. You can get high price jobs through this platform.
4. College Recruiter
Student or recent graduate? This is the best platform to search for an internship, seasonal, entry-level or a part-time job which may lead to a full-time job.
5. Craigslist
Craigslist is not just a buying and selling platform. It also has a separate section for jobs where you can find remote as well as a local job.
Tip: You can search for remote jobs by entering a “remote job” in Craigslist of corresponding cities.
6. Simply Hired
This website is available in 12 languages across 24 countries. It offers jobs in multiple categories from writing to designing. You can find a job for yourself surely through this site.
Freelance Jobs
7. Upwork
Once upon a time, odesk and elance were leading freelance marketplaces catering freelancers from the entire world. These two marketplaces combined to make the world’s largest marketplace, Upwork. It has over 12 million freelancers and 5 million clients. Upwork takes a 20% cut of your income. Competition is hard and at the start, you can only survive by giving services at a low price.
Fiverr
As the name shows, every job at Fiverr starts from 5$. You can list your service here from 5$-5k$. You have to list your services with a video or image and description of your service so that people can hire you. Here listing services is called gig. You can make more money by adding Gig extras like
- fast delivery for 5$
- an additional 200 words writing for 10$.
If you know well about what you are doing, you can give a test of your skill. If you pass it, it will be shown in your profile which will help you in building a portfolio and getting more work.
Freelancer
This site offers a variety of projects including fixed-price projects, hourly projects, and contests to prove your skills. The only drawback of this site is you get 8 bids/month to bid on projects. If you want more bids, you have to pay membership fees. Bids are replenished at the rate of 1 bid every 90 hours for FREE membership accounts. It also offers tests for your skills.
PeopleperHour
It is the UK’s largest marketplace. You can find work here from writing to web development, etc. Its Free plan gives 15 proposal credits/month to every user which are stacked to 15 bids every month whether you use one or all.
Tip: Don't forget to submit proposals on invited as well as notified projects (you receive notification for these projects.) No proposal will be charged for submitting a proposal on these projects.
Guru
Guru is a platform with 3M+ freelancers and 1M+ jobs completed. Guru’s free plan comes with 10 bids/month and takes an 8.95% job fee. If you opt for the paid membership, the job fee is reduced to 4.95%.
ServiceScape
It was launched in 2000. This marketplace provides work in graphic designing, writing, translation, and editing. There is no bid system. The project is assigned to you directly by the client. It has 271K completed projects and 82K clients. Servicescape takes 50% of your earnings.
Workana
Workana is the largest marketplace of Latin America with more than 1M+ freelancers and 20K+ projects monthly. You can offer your services here for all categories. It charges a flat 20% commission for the first 300$ work with a client, after this threshold it charges 10%.
Rule of Success
Send as many proposals as you can. Don't send a general proposal to all. Send according to project details. You may find it boring, but you have to do it.
You can get orders early by offering your services at a low price to get more work and start building a relationship with your clients. Always try to provide more value than promised.
Best way to build a long term relationship with a client is "deliver more than promised."
Tools to win more projects
1. Install Auto refresh chrome extension, it will refresh your webpage after a specific time interval you choose. It may be 30 seconds or 5 minutes depending on your choice. This extension will help you in bidding new projects before others do so the possibility of winning the project will be more for you.
2. Use Grammarly, a free spelling and grammar checker tool. If you are not a native English speaker, then its a must have tool in your toolkit. Proposals with good English win more project than others.
If you know any other general freelance marketplace, please mention it in the comments section.
Note
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