Freelancing.. easier than expected?

[JamesR]

Since I had trouble landing a job, I recently decided to give a freelancing website http://www.odesk.com a try. I made a profile on there a couple months ago. And forgot about it for awhile.

Suddenly I got an invitation to interview for a contract job within odesk.com. Since then, I've been doing a bunch of contract jobs on odesk.com for the past 3 weeks. I'm getting more invitations, especially once I got feedback.

Since odesk.com is global and I'm competing against workers from third world countries, I was initially careful about setting my hourly rate on my profile. I set it to $20/hour, which is quite low for a Ruby on Rails developer (web programming), and I was worried it wasn't low enough. I made it obvious that I am located within US timezone and fluent in english on my profile, as I thought that would be the big selling point to potential employers.

Keep in mind that the rule of thumb for contractors is TWICE the hourly rate of an employee. Even simpler is just to take the first two numbers of an comparable employee's salary. For example, if employed salary would be $50,000, then contractor needs to charge $50/hour. This is due to business overheads & downtimes between clients/jobs.

Basically, I am working like a $10/hour employee at this moment. However, now that I'm getting feedback which shows up on the profile and building a bit of a track record, I can start to raise the hourly rate.

Sadly, I didn't realize that getting web dev on odesk.com would be this easy, or I would have been able to do this while in Thailand for 1.5 years.

However, contract work isn't that easy! I've only been averaging 2-3 hours of actual work a day. I need to setup a routine and get better at sitting down and doing the work. That's going to be a big thing for me.

My current plan is to start exercising every morning, and then eat a healthy breakfast (eggs mostly), and then do 4 pomodoros (25 minute time boxes with 5 minute breaks) first thing.

Anyone else have good experiences with freelancing? Tips for staying productive?

[JamesR]

A couple of things I forgot to say.

There are many freelancer sites: ELance, Freelancer, ODesk, Guru, GetACoder, PeoplePerHour, Fiverr

There's a lot of different kinds of work that you can do on freelancing sites. It doesn't have to be coding. It could be writing, design, being a VA (virtual assistant), management or solving problems of different kinds, research, CAD, etc. Whatever you can think of. Check out fiverr.com to see lots of ideas.

[jacob]

I found my freelance gig (the copyediting I did in 2008-9) by responding to an ad on craigslist on a Saturday morning. Two hours later, I had it.

While technically freelance being paid by the piece (according to how many hours it took to finish) and being issued 1099s instead of W-2s, I only had one client.

I'd say it was a pretty easy to make a little money (enough for my needs and wants) but that in order to copyedit for 8 hours a day, I would both have to find additional clients as well as incur traumatic head damage. (Copy-editing requires quite a bit of focus. I couldn't do it for more than a few hours per day.).

Also, since DW's job put us in the 15% tax bracket, the effort of my additional work, thanks to self-employment FICA tax, city business tax, and CA state tax, meant that 40% of my $30/hour effort went to taxes.

Without DW's work, I wouldn't have to grind against those brackets and it would have been a pretty good arrangement since it was location-independent. As it was, I decided to focus my effectively $18/hour effort on editing the ERE book instead.

[workathome]

Another nice thing about freelancing is you can open yourself up to a lot of work-related deductions. Your internet, smartphone, computer, etc.

[SilverElephant]

JamesR, how "skilled" would you say one has to be, in this case at web programming, to compete as a freelancer? I'd been thinking about doing some PHP/JavaScript freelancing but all the "education" I have is the thousands of hours I spent toying around with it in my teens. That means my skill is not polished and I'm not into most of the "best practices", but I found that I can pick up any of the frameworks that are around for PHP and JavaScript very quickly when I get to play around with them, i.e. my basics are solid. What has been your experience with the skill level demanded or the required skill level for the projects you've been signed to?

[workathome]

Silver - you can do it. You may look at job listings and simply apply to those which you would feel comfortable enough to begin. There are both hourly opportunities and fixed priced available as well.

[JamesR]

SilverElephant:

You can definitely get work, just setup a profile that highlights the amount of experience you have etc. Set the wage somewhat low initially, get some jobs done and get feedback on the jobs, and then your profile will show those & the feedback, which further helps sell yourself.

Honestly I don't actually have much of a portfolio. I added a couple of ugly/basic unfinished sites, but I don't think anyone is actually looking at them, especially since I didn't include a screenshot.

[nomadic]

I've been freelancing for years living in Southeast Asia. Writing web content, blogs, email marketing, etc.

My best gigs bring me in about $100 per billable hour, and I lived all of last year on one of those clients working about 15 hours a month with an odd job thrown in here and there. I just recently started marketing myself after my main client stopped ordering though (I tend to get lazy out here because the cost of living is so cheap) and have been taking on some cheaper clients to fill the gaps. But it doesn't take long to fill the schedule when you've done it as many times as I have.

Even in my earlier days of freelance, when I charged around $30 per blog post, there were some clients ordering 30 articles a week on a very steady, long-term basis. I put a team of writers together for a while and had them write the content while I marketed, managed, edited, and catered to the clients. Doubt I'll ever do that again though - managing people online is a headache.

A lot of money in writing, and if you just focused on upping your rates you could get by pretty comfortably on a few hours a day, with maybe another hour set aside for marketing purposes. Or you could make a real business out of it if you wanted to build a nest egg - the top writers are making well over six figures these days, and there's plenty of room in the mid-range.

I'm planning to really ramp it up this year to pay off some old debts and then start putting together investment funds to live off in the future. I self-publish fiction on Amazon too and would eventually like to do that full-time.

[simplex]

@nomadic
How do you market yourself and get the jobs? Are you also on odesk.com like JamesR or do you get your clients from a different market?

I think for most here there are 2 (related) problems:

- What is a skill people will pay for? e.g. Ruby on Rails programming, writing web text

- How can I get clients and marketing? e.g. put up profile on odesk.com.

Probably the first is easier to solve.

But the clients problem is that mostly there is much advice which is not directly actionable, e.g. go networking. (Yeah but what do I actually have to do? Especially how do I bootstrap a network as an ERE interested person which gives not much about talking to people which spend a lot and own businesses)

Related is also that some have very specialized skills like astrophysical modelling (Jacob) or root zone wetting dynamics. How do you market that skill? Obviously you can branch out into something else like quant modelling like Jacob did, but staying in your field may be practically impossible.

[JasonR]

o

[JamesR]

I do have questions similar to what simplex asked as well.

Questions like how to properly value one's skill-set, as well as finding clients.

However, I realize that having solid evidence of your skills is probably critical (a portfolio or good work history or solid github profile). I haven't properly developed those yet. Those are things I need some help with I suppose.

Would love to get up to $100/hour, that would be absolutely fantastic.

[nomadic]

Hey guys - sorry I haven't answered your questions. I've been a bit scattered. I'll try to pop in this weekend and offer some suggestions.

[JamesR]

Just heard about http://breakingthetimebarrier.freshbook ... arrier.pdf. Looks good, it's about pricing for value.

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464153

1) Inexperienced Joe's most pressing problem as a result of inexperience is attempting to find a job by looking at job ads. Joe does not yet know, but should learn, that most jobs in fact have no associated ad, and that jobs which do have ads are disproportionately jobs you do not want to apply for. Instead, Joe would have been better off attempting to get his name in front of people who have the authority to hire junior programmers, who are a) legion and b) overwhelmed with their current inability to source candidates who are capable of producing working programs/systems/etc.
1b) Not posted job description anywhere accurately represents all parts of the job, and for the right candidate, companies are willing to ignore virtually anything. The right candidate is "anyone who can convince the decisionmaker that they're the right candidate." Decisionmakers at many companies value grades a lot less than Joe, in his inexperience, believes they do.
2) There actually do exist many companies which invest, heavily, in being the first job you'll ever have. Fog Creek and Matasano spring to mind, and I'd work at either. Both of them do it in part reaction to the fact that if they didn't experienced talent would be available too infrequently and priced too high for them to hire the quantity which they want to hire, which strikes me as a common enough problem that other companies probably adopt quietly the policies those guys adopt publicly.

Also: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ram ... rged-more/

[simplex]

@ JamesR,

Thanks for posting the resources. They are valuable in itself.

However I still see a problem, which is not directly treated:

If you want to get a job/freelancing by non-traditional means (i.e. no job posting and odesk/elance), you need to network and make yourself known.
Especially the first two references write about this. However this strongly depends on your location (as also in the complete discussion in the second ref). If you live in Macedonia, you don't have (direct) access to personal networking in the US or EU. And decision makers are naturally reluctant to hire someone strange from far away.
This puts you back to something like odesk/elance.com.

So for me the biggest question still is: how to do remote marketing / networking?
Another aspect of this relates to personality: You can be an extremely good coder/worker but suck at networking. Then you won't have a big chance.

Excuse for the somewhat incoherent post.

[JamesR]

Simplex,

Yeah finding clients/networking is something that I haven't fully worked out yet.

But there's a lot of ways to get clients beyond just odesk/elance.com. By the way the freshbook pdf basically said that clients tend to come via referrals.

A great way of getting clients would be having an active domain-specific blog that demonstrates your expertise in the area of your focus.

There's also posting on craigslist/classified sites, forums, and the like.

Also helping out people with technical problems in chatrooms or forums can also lead you to client work.

Also if other contractors in your field know you, they can refer clients to you.

I don't think that being in a different country is _that_ much of a factor. I think it's more important to at least be on a similar timezone to your clients, so perhaps target the UK instead of the USA for example.

When you work remotely, you have to think of yourself as a business anyways. You're not getting "hired", you're getting contracted to do a specific job. Business people contract out work all the time, they don't really care where you are either. As long as the work gets done and as long as there's a way to wire the money (or use paypal or whatever).

[simplex]

@JamesR
Thanks for your reply.
Currently I am also trying to work out the "recipe" in finding clients and networking. By "recipe" I mean some collection of steps to follow with thought to get to clients with a high probability, so no 100% guaranteed no brainer.

My impression is that you need to find a match between your personality (i.e. how you yourself approach the market), the marketing/networking method you use and your potential clients.
After reading and trying different methods, I have not yet found my personal perfect recipe, but I keep on trying. A book i recommend is: "Marketing your services" by A.O. Putman. It is written in the pre-internet age but still a very good read for knowledge workers.

[JeffD]

Its easy to find freelancing jobs. I got started joining contests and built up a client base there. Now, I don't go look for clients, they just come thru word of mouth and made friends and long term clients.

First, choose a niche. A small niche that you could be really good at. If games, what kind of games? Mobile? Web games? Desktop? Puzzle? Adventure? If web, what kind of sites you are good at making? Ecommerce? Small business sites? Wordpress?

Second, work for small pay at first. You need to build up a portfolio and a client base. I did contests so most of my work are free if I lose. But that was a long time ago, now we have odesk.

Third, create your portfolio. Demonstrate your skill. Build your own portfolio site and Github.

Fourth, start writing and create how to guides/tutorials about your craft. Writing will give you "street creds". If some big sites happen to pick up on your article, its a good way to get exposure.

Fifth, be nice to your clients.

[workathome]

I recently hired an app developer and was really impressed that he had entered some contests that were leveraged into actual news articles. Definitely helped him stand out from the competition.