The practical guide on building a career as a professional freelancer online. How to actually make the income and feel the freedom of it?

I started freelancing in 2016. Sold ~3500 of my hours already, hired 5 persons for myself and a few more for companies I worked with. I’m apart of two networks: Upwork and Toptal. Toptal has a very intense screening process and only 3% of candidates pass. Upwork, on the other hand, is an open platform and anyone can join. When you reach good stats on Upwork it will provide you benefits like Toptal such a personal manager, close networks of best freelancers and similar. Also, Upwork is way more transparent about money and taxes.

If you are interested in building a career as a freelancer, you may be interested in joining this group at Facebook.

Primarily, I use Upwork but you can easily find other great freelancing sites online like freelancer.com or fiverr.com. However, I have never used freelacner.com and barely used Fiverr.

Over the years, my profile rose to the top and I started getting more and more questions about how stuff works on Upwork and freelancing in general from people who are just starting to explore the world of freelancing or failing to climb this path.

I believe you can choose any network that have enough clients who pay for the services you provide. I also value transparency of rules when it’s related to taxes, salary options and protection from the network. You need to trust the network you choose.

I have chosen Upwork because I believed it was the biggest at the time, it was clear how taxes and contracts worked. Also, I was looking at fiverr.com and freelancer.com but Upwork seemed to match my profile best. The only thing is choosing a network and sticking with it.

A single great profile with great stats is way better than having a profile on each network with average or no stats.

Hopefully, this article will answer most of the questions on how to build your profile,get the job and build a career as a great freelancer.

Can you work as a freelancer?

Upwork alone has plenty of jobs for probably anyone. From something that requires a super high-level of expertise in some fields for hundreds of dollars per hour to anything like sitting at your laptop and training some AI model by saying in which photo you see a boy and in which a girl or anything else.

Freelancing online can be a good career path for many people. Starting from stay-at-home moms who might not have the time to go for a full-time office job to someone who now sits at an unpleasant workplace with people who don’t like each other and for those who would like to travel and work at a new place every day.

Now, if you just create a profile and expect to get that money for nothing, that won’t happen. I will try to cover many different aspects of how to actually get it. What I found out during my experience as a freelancer and also as someone who hires people via Upwork for myself or the companies I work with.

If you don’t have deep experiences in any field, you don’t need to worry because I’ve seen a ton of jobs that involves managing something for others, including Airbnb accounts to collecting some data from the internet and just putting it into some spreadsheet, for instance, a person may even just need someone to find contacts of all schools in a city. Someone has to Google it. It may be you. And you may get 10–15$/h for it and if you have a good profile on such tasks, it will be easy to collect 2000$+ per month without ever wasting time on traveling to and from the office.

For any low qualification job, I would start from 10$/h. Which is 1600$/month for 160h. Of course, you will have to manage your local taxes but that’s generally my current recommended starting point and I understand that this is actually good money for many people around the world. You can climb to around 15–20$/h with fairly easy jobs that don’t require very specialised skills. And this is already $2400-$3200 range before taxes for 160 hours. All jobs, of course, will require some skills but in this range, those skills are easy to get.

With skills in particular fields, an hourly rate can be anything between $25 and $65 per hour. I have a very strong profile as a JavaScript developer and got 55$/h continuously which is $8800 before taxes for 160 hours. You can read here how I reached this rate.

Basics

To start, you will need to choose a network, create a profile and understand how to get a good job and grow your profile.

The network

I have chosen Upwork because it looked like it was a good place for me. It was and in my opinion, it still is one of the biggest freelancers network on the internet which means it will the most offers and most people who would like to take those offers. Basically, it will have the biggest competition and most opportunities.

Overall, only you will know which service is best for you. Find the top 5 biggest networks on the planet and check the profiles of other freelancers that you are aiming to get to and the jobs you imagine you would like to take. Make sure you get into the details of taxes, how payment is made, how time is tracked etc. etc. I will give an introduction to Upwork, while I know it best.

The profile

Think what you know best, what experience you have and what you want to do. Find jobs to apply to and check the requirements and expectations from that type of job. Make sure you have an understanding of those things and you have at least some experience in some of them. If you want to get a higher hourly rate, you will need to be a perfect fit for a job, with experience on each requirement and research all the context of the company/people/product you will be working with.I’ll talk more on that later.

You can find an overview of the path I took here

Primarily, you need to fill out all the possible details on your profile. You will need to invest in this at least a day. Verify your identity, write a good description, upload a high-quality photo where people can see your face. Use every available opportunity to improve your profile.

How to apply for a job

People who hire are searching for results. You must want to give them those results. That’s your target.

Always keep in mind that you do it not for the money but to deliver the results and help someone. In change, you will get great reviews, connections, recommendations, and money.

Great reviews, connections, recommendations will allow you to build up your profile and get better connections, better recommendations, and more money. That’s basic.

The target is to deliver the results. How to do it?

Result and evaluation of it depend on a couple of things, for example, someone has some tasks to do:

• Use LinkedIn and ask every sales manager in the city of ____ about their day and offer to work together with a company ______
• Build a mobile app with VR and AI tech
• Do research on which country has the most families with 2 or more kids
• Visit 1000 websites and write a brief overview of what they sell and at what price range
• Various jobs with texts: correct, translate, transpile, find images, prepare files ready to print a book, etc.

Some tasks require skills that are hard to get and require great focus to master, others are way easier to get. Of course easier skills will provide less money but in any case, the money could be considered a lot in many places around the globe.

Step-by-step guide on how to deliver care and get cash for it

Step 1: Choose your target. Let’s say your target is to do researches, find data on the internet and aggregate for the client in some spreadsheets.

I’m choosing this as a target because this is a simple job that doesn’t require any deep technical skills and can be done by mostly anyone who has a computer, internet connection, willingness to deliver results, care, and empathy.

Imagine how you would do such a job and the preparation involved. You will need to use some kind of software. You will probably need some office type applications. I highly recommend google docs while it’s free and has awesome collaboration tools. Google about google docs and learn how to use it. There are plenty of tutorials on Youtube, blogs and other places online. Spend a week or two to get used to it. Find some tricks, not only basics.

Pro tip: If you’re still writing with one or two fingers or just slowly in general, that’s an issue. You must fix it. Take your keyboard and put it under the desk on your knees and write. If you don’t know what to write, re-write some articles. Don’t look at keys at all. Click random stuff till you find where it is and do it for 30 minutes daily for 2 weeks. Your typing issues will be fixed. Don’t have a keyboard that you can put under the table? Get one or just cover your hands with a blanket. It doesn’t matter how you will do it, get it done. Results matter.

Step 2: Find an offer & apply to it with empathy and care

Find an offer that would perfectly fit your current skills or would be too easy for you. Especially when starting with a fresh profile. You need to over-deliver and get 5 stars review. When an offer is found, check information about the client. Does it have verified payment information? Does it have at least some history of hires? How much paid to others? Will you be cheap or expensive for this client? All the details you can find about the client on your chosen network.

Pro tip: When starting it’s best to be a cheap force for the client. It will lower expectations and will provide a better chance for you to get 5 stars review.

Anything you can find about the client will give you a better context and understanding if it’s worth your time to pay attention to the offer. If all seems to be good, pay attention to the offer. All the details. Make sure your current profile description is matching the offer. Make sure you are confident about delivering expected results. If you don’t know something — google it and learn. Come back another day. If this offer is gone, your knowledge will stay with you for another time. You will find another offer.

Pro tip: Always try to lower the expectations. If a client asks how long it will take, never tell what you think it will take. Add yourself at least 30% of extra time. Always make clear to the client that it’s hard to tell the exact time while there can be unexpected things like x, y, z (depending on the offer). This will show your responsibility. If the client doesn’t understand that, you probably don’t want to have any connection with him/her in the first place.

Choose up to 3 offers per day and send your proposal to those only. Make sure your profile description is matching all of them so all of them should be about the same thing. Don’t write generally that you can do anything. People are looking for something, not anything. Choose what you want to do and do exactly that.

When finding the offer read it at least twice, google about the company, people, keywords. Get as much information as possible about everything you can from the description of the offer and person’s profile who posted it. You will need to write an introductory paragraph. Be honest, never lie, show empathy, show that you googled. E.g. offer coming from the company who does SEO researches. They are looking for someone to translate some text from English to French and doesn’t mention anything about the content of the text or the company. Your introduction paragraph could be something like

Hey, I found your offer and I think I could be a perfect fit for a job while I’m interested in the French language and culture, I have translated 3 books from English to French before and helped students to study the language. I also have some basic understatement about SEO as it seems you are working in that field. Do you have any samples of text I will work with? How do you manage the progress? Do you use some tasks tracking site? How do you communicate? Slack? Skype? Hope to hear from you soon with more details on how things get done while working together :)

In this single paragraph, you show it all. That you want this offer, why you are a perfect fit. You show you googled about the company, you cared about the task. You showed your will to understand and adapt to the client. You showed that you have at least a basic understanding of how things are done online.

Most introduction paragraphs are like this:

Hi, I’m Name Surname, I think I could help you with your task. I can speak English, French, and Spanish. I did that and that. I use Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice. I’m responsible, willing to adapt and provide the best results. I can do any tasks related to English-French-Spanish translations, transcription. Correct blog posts, websites copy or literally anything.

It can be sent to 100 offers without even reading the offer. It has no context at all. It doesn’t show any empathy. It shows that you don’t care who hires you or what the task is, you just care to get the money. Most of the time this paragraph is 5x longer to cover more jobs, which makes things worse because again it becomes more about anything and more general and shows less care of this exact offer and the person behind the offer. As a company, I would just skip such freelancers. People who send such proposals are worrying about the limit of how many proposals they can send per day and they eventually fail or are in a race-to-the-bottom position where everything that matters is how cheap a freelancer is. There are many people who hire for the price but you don’t want to have any connections with them if you want to build a professional career online or offline.

Step 2: the interview

When your profile is new and empty it’s 100x harder to get into the interview and pass it. The more reviews you have, the better the stats are, the easier it gets. For me, it takes nothing more but just activate the profile as available and wait a couple of days. I will get enough offers that are a perfect fit for my profile to get a great contract.

During the interview, you deploy the same care as during the introductory paragraph. Ask questions, get details about how the company works, what they expect. Who will hire you? Who will work with you? How quickly you need to deliver results? Is it one time task or they plan to have more in the future? Do they use an Agile management style? Do they often have hard deadlines?

Pro tip: Ask for profiles of those people to know them better. You can ask before the interview inside the introductory paragraph for profiles on LinkedIn or anywhere else to get more context.

Don’t promise what you can’t do. E.g. don’t promise that you will work together all year but you can show your will to do so if everything goes well. Stay calm, relaxed, be yourself, lower the expectations to have more chances to over-deliver.

Don’t promise to do everything but show your willingness to do what’s in the scope of your skills and show your willingness to learn new things if it is required to deliver the results. Show your focus of care and results.

Pro tip: If you are scared and your nerves takes over you before the interview, do something about it. I found that an ice-cold shower for 2 minutes works great when your nervous system goes haywire. You can dance, sing, walk, run, meditate. Find your way to manage emotional instability and deploy those tactics. Do it a couple of times before the interview, don’t go into the ice-cold shower for the first time in your life just before the interview. Try it upfront and repeat before the interview if needed.

Step 3: During the contract

Keep the same theme of care as in the previous steps. Make sure you understand your task. If in doubt — ask for clarification. If the task seems clear it would still be best to double confirm so that you are both on the same page — state in the final sentence all the details that you understood and service you will provide to ensure that it is correct. Like “Ok, so I will translate 3 first paragraphs and will ping you when done”.

Always keep the contractor informed about your progress. Completed a task? Write a note like:

FYI, I already translated the article “Blogging during the weekends” and will move on now with “How to cook the omelet?”.

Need some clarification — ask for it. Don’t make him/her pay for your wasted time which got wasted because of miscommunication.

Step 4: End of the contract

Suggest ending the contract and leave each other a great review. Give feedback on how you liked working together. Stay positive even you didn’t enjoyed it all. You need your 5 stars review. Nothing will change if after all this you say something negative. Just leave it and use it as a learning experience on how to choose a contractor the next time around and if something went wrong, stay positive because negativity will never help.

Money

Fun facts:

If you want to earn more than 67% of the citizens of the USA, you have to make 48,251 USD per year

If you want to earn more than 99% of the citizens of the USA, you have to make 389,000 USD per year

And just keep in mind that the US has one of the best salaries around the globe. In your country, those numbers may be much lower. I just found stats from the USA.

So, to hit the 48 000 USD mark per year, you will need about 26–27 USD/h with full-time coverage. I think it is possible for anyone on this planet with freelancing. Although, to reach such a rate will require some kind of skills. Learn something and sell your knowledge. Go narrow. It will be easier to get higher rates.

Doesn’t matter where you came from, what’s your gender, skin color, religion, political position. You just need to stay professional, do what you like, target to over-deliver the results, deploy care and empathy, get 5-star reviews and you will make it.

Extras

To show off your profile make sure you do everything you can to fully complete it. Validate your identity with ID card or passport, add a photo, take tests, show your related experience. Make sure you know how to get badges and other boosts on your profile. For Upwork that would be Top-rated and rising-star badges together with Job Success rating. Google about each and get to know how to get them. It matters a lot. When you pass rising-star badges it increases your hourly rate a bit. Do it again after getting the top-rated badge. Also, you can charge more if you have a job success rating of 95%+. Every bid on your profile gives extra confirmation for the client that you are trustworthy.

Avoid any contract that is for a fixed price. This almost always leads to issues and bad ratings because the person who will expect results for the fixed price may try to get more than you imagine and you will have to either deliver it for free or get a bad result. I personally used fixed prices only for the very first contract to get a profile off the ground. The job was way too easy for my skill level and it was super short. Like for a day or even a couple hours. It was quite a safe bet that I will deliver a result quickly even if it will require unexpected extras for the same price. Now, I never work with a fixed price, only with an hourly rate. But with hourly rates, you always have to keep your contractor informed about what you do and how it’s going so he/she could manage the expenses on you.

The higher your skills, profile, and rate become the more freedom you will get because people will trust you more and won’t manage your performance that intensively as with fresh profiles.

If you have questions about freelancing, career, Upwork — I have just created a group and page on Facebook. Feel free to join the community and feel free to invite whoever you think would be interested too.

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