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Let’s break down the 10 best freelancing skills and how you can get started.
If you want the luxury of working on a variety of different projects, then consider becoming a freelance graphic designer.
For example, you can design infographics, book covers, movie posters, email templates, billboards, illustrations, YouTube thumbnails, and much more. You can either be a generalist that does a little bit of everything or choose to find a niche based on your personal interests.
Established freelance graphic designers can earn over six figures per year because they have built an impressive portfolio on sites like dribbble.com.
If you want to get started as a freelance graphic designer, one tip to learn quickly is to train your eye to distinguish good graphic design from bad graphic design. Study the works of the best graphic designers daily. Seek inspiration from what you see in your everyday life.
As a beginner, it can be challenging to compete with more experienced graphic designers, but you can still find clients through apprenticeship. For example, you could find local businesses that have poor graphic designers and create better designs as practice. You can then share those graphic designs with them for free, and let them know that you’re happy to continue helping based on a rate you negotiate.
You can also actively apply to freelance graphic design jobs on sites like WeWorkRemotely.
One of the highest paying freelance skills is web design. This is because websites generate tons of business for brands, so brands are willing to pay top dollar for beautiful and functional websites.
Established freelance web designers can easily make over six figures per year because they will only accept projects from high value clients and charge what they want.
Freelance web designers typically spend their time improving their web design craft, finding work by seeking out clients or deciding which clients to work with, and, of course, designing websites in design tools like Figma or AdobeXD.
If you want to be a freelance web designer, one of the best ways to get started is to learn the fundamentals of web design through our free web design course available in this YouTube playlist.
After that, you can improve your skills by building your first website, such as a personal portfolio that will help you get clients in the future.
Once you’re ready to take the next step, you can learn from our Web Design: Becoming a Professional course which will also give you access to our Flux community of freelance web designers.
You can find gigs in our Flux community, or you can seek them out on sites like Upwork.
We all use web apps every day. Google Docs, Trello, Reddit, are a few examples of web apps. In 2022, the demand for web app developers is significantly higher than the supply. As a result, learning web app development can help you land high paying contracts. The average freelance web app developer charges over $60 per hour.
The best way to learn web app development is to learn the basics first. Hone your skills in HTML, CSS, Javascript. Although learning coding might sound intimidating, there’s a massive online community of web app developer resources available to support you. Web app developers often joke that to be successful in this role you just need to be a good Googler.
After you learn the basics, start applying those skills by building your portfolio website. Seek out existing code from forums and adapt them for your own website. After your portfolio is live, keep building web apps that solve problems that interest you. Share the web apps you build on social media sites. Over time, clients will start coming to you because you’ve established a reputation for solving those problems.
You can also seek out freelance web app developer roles on Upwork.
Freelance digital marketers help their clients shape their brand perception, increase brand awareness, and drive profits. A business can have one of the best products or services in the world, but without digital marketing, nobody will know about it.
Digital marketers are always in demand because they help businesses find quality leads and convert them into paying customers.
If you want to be a digital marketer, then you can decide what type of digital marketer you want to be because digital marketing is very broad. Digital marketers create ads, blog posts, video commercials, email & SMS campaigns, and more. They can also offer marketing consulting services to businesses.
If you want to learn digital marketing, the best way to get started is to reach out to a local business and offer to help them. Business owners are often too busy with running their business, so they will often pay freelancers to handle their digital marketing.
The best part of digital marketing is you’ll always have metrics to measure how effective your digital marketing campaigns were. For example, if a local business is currently getting a few website visits per day, and you help them get hundreds of website visits per day through an email marketing campaign, then you’ll know that your marketing campaign was effective in driving traffic to the website. But maybe your campaign failed to get people to click on links on the website, so you can iterate your next campaign to focus on increasing clicks. Over time, through creativity and testing what works, you will build a solid reputation as a freelance digital marketer.
You can also get started by looking for freelance digital marketing jobs on Upwork.
Freelance social media marketers are digital marketers that focus solely on social media channels.
Freelance social media marketers are always in demand because social media platforms are where many people spend most of their time. Businesses rely on social media marketing to find customers.
If you want to be a social media marketer, decide what social media channel you want to focus on because each social media channel appeals to different age groups.
For example, Facebook tends to appeal to older generations. Snapchat and Tiktok tend to appeal to younger generations.
Each social media platform also has unique features that require different marketing strategies. On Facebook you can pay for Facebook Ads or advertise on Facebook groups and stories. On Instagram, you can advertise through influencer paid posts and original content on Instagram carousels, stories, or reels.
After choosing which social media channel you want to specialize in, one way to get started as a social media marketer is to offer free social media account audits to businesses. You can let the businesses know their social media strengths and weaknesses and provide them with some tips to improve. This establishes your reputation and makes it more likely a business will choose to hire you to help them manage their social media marketing strategy.
If you love social media, start applying to freelance social media marketing positions on sites like Upwork today.
Virtual assistants can offer a wide variety of services to businesses. They can help business owners reply to emails, schedue meetings, book flights, and much more. It’s a great way to learn how different business owners operate.
If you want to be a virtual assistant, you can either be a jack of all trades or niche down on a few specific tasks. For example, you could specialize in data entry and package that as a service that you sell for a fixed price to multiple businesses. Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, and start building out service packages you can offer. Then, create a simple website using any no-code website builder so that you can highlight your services. This website helps establish your personal brand and builds trust with future clients.
There’s many ways to secure your first client. You could share your website with your personal networks. You could see what small businesses that you admire are lacking and offer to fill that gap with your assistance. For example, join business Facebook groups and see what problems business owners are facing. Perhaps they’re struggling with responding to customer complaints. Or they’re feeling unorganized and overwhelmed. If one of your services is keeping email inboxes clean and organized, you could reach out to them and offer helpful tips to stay on top of emails. Then, send them a link to your website if they’d like to learn more about hiring you. This tends to work well because people like to hire those who have helped them and demonstrated their value.
If that doesn’t work out, you could also apply for freelance virtual assistant jobs on sites like Upwork, Fiverr, Flexjobs, etc.
Freelance video editors edit videos to tell engaging stories. Video editing is also important because it makes or breaks the pace and tone of the video.
Video editors are in high demand right now because there’s millions of hours of video content uploaded to the internet everyday.
If you want to get started as a video editor, find a video editing software you like such as iMovie and start editing existing videos in different ways. There’s plenty of free, online tutorials for many video editing software.
For example, if there’s a specific Youtuber you enjoy watching, you can practice editing their videos and then share it with them. If they like your work, they might even hire you to continue editing for them.
If you decide to try this method, target relatively small YouTubers who are starting to earn enough income through Adsense or partnerships so that they can afford to outsource the video editing to you. Even if they don’t hire you, you can add it to your portfolio as a case study to show future clients.
You can also apply to freelanve video editing jobs on sites like Upwork.
Thanks to fast internet, cloud storage, and cheap software, freelance bookkeepers and accountants are rising in demand. Any business that spends money needs bookkeepers.
Freelance bookkeepers help businesses by maintaining accounting software, reconciling taxes, and providing financial email support.
There’s two ways you can sell your freelance bookkeeping services. One way is by offering your bookkeeping services as product packages. This allows you to increase profitability and decrease the amount of hours worked. Clients can choose from your service packages that outline exactly what services they’ll receive for a fixed price.
The second way is to provide personalized, financial consulting for higher paying clients. You can negotiate a high hourly rate for your expertise. This method typically requires longer working hours due to each client having different needs.
The best way to get started is to get familiar with popular bookkeeping software. For example, Airbase helps businesses with virtual corporate cards, employee expense reimbursements, and bill payments. If you master Airbase, you can start marketing your service packages to online businesses. For example, you could offer a service that focuses solely on processing employee expense reimbursements. Many tech companies offer their employees reimbursement benefits, so they will need a freelance bookkeeper to process it all. The great thing is you can include the monthly cost of using Airbase as part of your service package.
To get some experience, you can also apply to freelance bookkeeping jobs on sites like Upwork.
Freelance Online Community managers are becoming increasingly in demand lately due to more and more brands realizing that communities are essential for long term success. Just having customers isn’t enough to stay ahead in today’s business world.
Freelance community managers work to engage a brand’s community members. For example, they might moderate forums or chats, answer questions from the community, write engaging newsletters, or host fun, virtual events. This role is perfect for people who get energy from hanging out with others online.
If you want to be a community manager, you need to have strong interpersonal skills to work well with a diverse group of community members.
The best way to start building those skills is to join a community you like and become an active community member. The more helpful you are in a community, the more trusted you will become, which increases your likelihood of getting hired if a community manager role opens.
For example, maybe you are really passionate about fitness. You could join a fitness community on many media networks, like Discord, Reddit, Facebook, and then be helpful by sharing fitness tips, answering fitness questions, and hosting fitness challenges. After giving tons of value to the community, you could ask the people in charge of the fitness business if they’d like to hire you as a community manager for more services.
You can also find online community manager roles on sites like Upwork to gain experience.
The demand for quality freelance content writers has skyrocketed lately. Most businesses understand that they need consistent, well-researched, and original content in order to rank high on Google. As a result, they will hire freelancers that can produce long-form, engaging content.
Freelance writers typically earn money for each word, article, or project they write. Freelance writers can earn over six figures, especially if they produce a high volume of content. For example, if you were to earn $140 per article and write 60 articles per month, you’d earn $100,800 per year. While 60 articles per month sounds like a lot, it’s only 2 articles per day. With practice, you will develop a process that helps you write faster. Some writers even use speech-to-text tools to type faster. You could also choose to take larger projects that pay more.
Because all you need to write content is a phone or laptop, the competition is high. To stand out, start writing about your personal interests on a personal blog website. Your writer’s voice shines the most when you’re writing about topics you’re passionate about.
One tip to improve your writing is to use simple sentences. Americans typically only read at a 7th to 8th grade level. This means you should avoid using overly complex words or sentence structures. You can use free tools like hemmingwayapp.com to make your writing more readable.
Once you’ve published some posts on your website, start applying to freelance writing jobs on sites like Upwork. That’s what I did when I first started out as a freelance content writer. I found my first freelance content writer job on Upwork, where I earned $12-$24 per 150-300 word article.
If you’re wondering which skill is best for freelancing, the truth is they all have high earning potential. Choose a skill that fits your personal interests, even if you feel you’re not good at it yet. A common theme among all these skills is to just get started by practicing, and over time you will build up the subject-matter expertise and inter-personal skills you need to be a successful freelancer.
That means you need to choose a freelancing skill that you’re truly passionate about, or you’ll lose motivation during difficult times. Although there’s many perks to freelancing, there’s also some downsides when starting out. As a freelancer, you’ll inevitably have bad clients, take projects that restrict your creativity too much, or struggle to find consistent clients.
You have what it takes to make your own path. If you want to launch your freelance career today, then go for it, even if you don’t have all the skills required for freelancing yet. If you’re truly passionate about the skill you want to learn, then you’ll get better at it over time. Plus, most freelancers are never completely satisfied with their skills and are always seeking to improve.
Don’t be afraid to be an apprentice. Many successful freelancers started out by helping out someone they admired for free. To be clear, you should never accept freelancing jobs that don’t pay you or offer payment in exposure or experience. Willingly producing one work sample to share with brands you admire is different from being taken advantage of.
To be a successful freelancer, you also need to develop your client management skills. If you hop on a call with a client unprepared, the client isn’t going to trust you. If you want step-by-step guidance on how to get clients, confidently hold meetings with clients, and negotiate pay, consider our 6 Figure Freelance Course. This course covers business principles that will help any freelancer. When you start the course, our community of talented freelancers is ready to welcome and help you.
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