Freelancer

What is freelancing?

If you are trying to learn about freelancing in the easiest way then your search ends here (Please don’t end your search without reading this article till the end J).

Think you are working in an office 9 to 5 job (in reality 9 to till you get mentally and physically exhausted) what you have to do is to follow some set of rules, be punctual, listen to boss because boss is always right (even if he says company is paying you market competitive salary), majority (not all) have lost their social life. Freelancing is a way to get rid of all of these bad experiences. Freelancing is to work from home set your time zone (usually not all the time) and earn as much as you want (depends upon your skills). Freelancing also enables you to generate extra income, so that you can start your own business, or you can make investments, or you can travel around the world (or in my case you can buy more food J).

Skills for freelancing

1. Graphic designing

Graphic designing is all about creative and attractive designs, the more your designs attract others the more you earn. Graphic designing related jobs can be logo, t-shirt, book, post, flyers, banner, email designing and many more. Designing can be done by hand, Photoshop, illustrator, after effects, Corel draw etc. Earning depends on type of work, country and nature of your client for example cost for logo designing in some countries starts from $150-$200 but in third world countries, logo designing may cost $10-$50. I will discuss graphic design and all aspects in my future blogs.

2. Content writing

Content writing is a very broad domain that can be further divided into multiple categories for example

Copy writing: copy writing is all about marketing and advertising a product. Copywriters are responsible for writing text on brochures, billboards, emails, advertisements or more.

Web content: web content writing is writing for websites, it may include HTML tags and CSS designs. Web content include text, images, sounds, videos and animations.

Technical writing: technical writing is about writing technical articles related to the latest technology and project management; prepare technical documents in collaboration with marketing team.

In short content writing is all about writing according to your interest. You may write short motivational, romantic, sad, horror stories for story apps on play stores, informational articles for magazines and entertainment, fitness or cosmetics related articles for websites.

3. Software development

Software development can be divided into multiple categories like web development, app development, game development, web designing and software quality assurance.

Programming languages for development:

Web development: asp.net, php, JavaScript etc.

App development: for android mainly Java is required and for IOS objective C, Swift etc.

Web designing: HTML, CSS, Vue js, bootstrap etc.

Quality Assurance:  manual testing involves documentation like test cases, bug reports and automated testing involves JavaScript, C#, Selenium etc. I have worked as a SQA engineer in a software house (I found it a little bit boring) I will write a descriptive blog about SQA in future to help those who want to start their career as a SQA engineer.

4. Lead Generation

Lead generation in simple words lead generation is a process of collecting information about people or company who can be contacted by sales person for generating orders.

5. Data Entry

Data entry is about entering/typing data from paper documents into form, excel sheets, word documents and the rate or cost is set per entry. Sometimes you have to copy paste data from different web pages in to one sheet or website. Honestly, in the beginning of my freelancing journey I have done data entry in very low rates so yes, I am a victim of “low payment+lots of work” process.

Other skills may include editing/proofreading, marketing, virtual assistance, voice over, translator, SEO etc. I am writing this blog only to define freelancing in simple way I will write other blogs in order to define each of the above mentioned skill separately.

Platforms for freelancing

Freelancing platforms can simply be defined as an environment or group where clients (who post jobs) and freelancers (who get the job done) come together and collaborate with each other to work remotely. For example Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer.com.

Drawbacks

The major drawback of freelancing is that some times when you hand over all the work to the client they do scam (Fraud) and block you without making payment that is why always research for legit platforms and companies, or you can ask for 10% advance payment to avoid scam.

In the end it’s a friendly blog you can all share your bad and good views. I would greatly appreciate your feedback and guidance thank you sooooo much.