How to Start Your Career as a Freelancer?

Freelancing is not only a great option for side income, it also serves to improve your knowledge and expertise. It is high time you gave it a shot but for first-timers, the entire process of signing up, sending proposals, bidding, and landing a job could be cumbersome. We are here today to help you with how to start freelancing and it all starts with visiting a portal for freelancers to sign up. Upwork is one of the most popular portals, additionally, there are several other well-known portals like Fiverr, Gig4U, and People Per Hour that have a good talent pool and hence a large number of available gigs to apply for.

As with most sign-ups, you need to enter your personal details post which you need to add your primary skill. Your primary skill could be a one-liner that best describes you. Next, you need to add your educational qualifications and the languages you are adept in. You also need to choose your level of proficiency where Basic is the first level and Native is the highest.

Next comes the add-on skills. This is an extremely important step in the how-to-start freelancing process as every portal’s algorithm mostly recommends gigs based on the skills added here after the freelancer sign-up is complete. Here you need to add skills that are related to your primary skills. Add-on skills increase your catchment area and allow you to qualify for more jobs posted by clients. You can add about 10-15 related skills in this section and then move on to introduce yourself in a short bio. This is perhaps the most important part of a freelancer sign-up process as clients come to know about you from your bio. Once it is done, you are ready to apply for jobs.

In addition to the portals above, many genre-specific portals allow freelancers to sign up. Some listicles or fact-finding websites hire freelancers directly at a higher pay rate.