My freelancing experience, how I earned more than $3000 in two months.
Tips and tricks for new vendors to grow their freelance business and get clients !
Hey! In this article I want to tell you about my experience in freelancing, if it's the first time you read my articles, don't forget to follow me to receive other interesting articles.
My experience as a freelancer
I am a signal processing engineer, I tried to freelance for about 2 months, during this experience I was freelancing in the field of machine and deep learning. Freelancing was not my only source of income, in fact, I had a full-time job as a signal processing engineer. When I started freelancing, as a beginner, I had a lot of questions that I would like to answer now. In this article I will try to answer the following questions :
Why should I start freelancing?
Am I ready to start freelancing ?
How to create a competitive profile? Besides these questions, we will also see the advantages and disadvantages of freelancing
Why should I start freelancing ?
Freelancing is not only about selling your skills, but also about practicing what you have learned in a specific field. Usually when you start learning something, you start by studying the theory and then practice through a few projects. Freelancing allows you to practice while having time constraints, which will encourage you to do your best in the time allotted and try to deliver a good job to get the client's satisfaction. In addition, freelancing motivates you to hone your skills and acquire new ones so you can work on other projects.
Am I ready to start freelancing ?
This is one of the most important questions that most beginners ask themselves. In fact, there is no standard criteria that can tell you whether you can start or not. You can start even if you don't have advanced skills, you can find people who only need simple algorithms in Python or any other language as well as you can find people who want to work on very advanced projects that require experts in the field. Experts will not waste their time working on a simple task that someone with little experience can do, but they will prefer to spend their time on a more difficult task that will pay them more.
How to create a competitive profile?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of challenges that people face when they start freelancing, the first thing is competitiveness, in fact, if you decide to start freelancing in the field of machine learning for example, you will find hundreds, if not thousands of people already freelancing on that platform. In order to compete with them, you need to create a competitive profile. To do this, before you start freelancing, you need to create a portfolio in which you show the projects you have worked on. This allows the client to confidently choose between vendors. In addition to working on your skills, you should create a portfolio where you demonstrate these skills through projects, blogs, videos.... In short, the seller must be able to convince the client to buy his skills. After getting the first order, the goal now is to deliver good work in order to earn the customer's satisfaction, which will open new opportunities for you. For example, the client will come back to you whenever they have projects to work on, they will recommend you to their friends or give you positive feedback that will make your profile grow and be recommended automatically on the platform.
In short :
Work hard on your skills, learn constantly and don't stop practicing.
Work on the portfolio (projects, writing articles, videos...).
Provide the best possible work to earn customer satisfaction.
Pros and cons of freelancing
Pros of freelancing
As we said before, freelancing is a good way to practice your skills and learn new ones, to earn some money that can be invested in paid courses, books, or to build your own project. Freelancing will also allow you to develop your communication skills and meet new people in the same field as you from all over the world, which will make you discover the latest technologies in your field, the most important things to focus on and, of course, make new friends !
Cons of freelancing
Although freelancing has multiple benefits, there is no denying that it has its drawbacks as well. For example, freelancing can be time-consuming, especially if you're still struggling to solve problems in your field. It's better to spend that time learning and honing your skills rather than trying to work on a difficult project just for the money.
Finally ...
What do you think about freelancing? If you have ever been a freelancer, you can share your experience in the comments. If you have other questions you want me to answer in this or future articles, don't hesitate to write them in the comments. Don't forget to follow to receive more articles !
Thank you for reading !