I have made over $100,000 as a freelancer. In this article, I will tell you everything that you need to know to start freelancing to grow as a freelancer and to become a top-rated freelancer in your industry, and make thousands of dollars. If you can stay on this article for ten minutes without clicking on something else, I’ve got some news for you. The next 20 minutes are enough to change your mindset. They are enough to give you the best tools and tips to build a successful freelancing career.
I am going to talk about a five-step method that you can follow if you’re starting freelancing from scratch. The freelance platform market size is estimated at $6.5 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach 14.17 billion by 2029. People think they are late to the party. When the party is just getting started. You can start your freelancing career today. You are not late. Starting today can be even better. You can learn from successful freelancers in the industry and see what works for them and avoid the mistakes that they made. So let’s get started with the steps.
Skill
The first one is your skill. You need to start by learning a skill. Understand this. The only way to make money as a freelancer is by providing value to other people. Don’t go after the money first. Prioritize intelligence and knowledge and spend time refining your skills. Aim to be the best in your field and money will eventually follow. Choose a unique skill if you want to stand out in your career. It’s not just about working harder if you just work hard, but if you are headed towards the wrong direction, you will never reach your destination. What really matters is finding your own track. Just because everyone else is becoming a video editor, you don’t have to follow them. Don’t follow the herd. Find the industry in which your skill perfectly fit in. For example, Sam Kolder is one of the best travel video editors. There is no one who can beat him in this, because he has found the industry in which his skills perfectly fit in. That makes him stand out in the market. Focus on what makes you different. The real trick is spotting these areas and opportunities. So your skill needs to create value, and there has to be a demand from the audience to become a top rated freelancer you need to provide a mix of uniqueness and value.
So once you identify the skill, you need to combine hard work, knowledge, and smart work. If you do it right, money will eventually come. Once you have selected the skills and know the basics, I would suggest getting some exposure. You can get exposure by working for someone else. In the early days of my video editing career, after learning the basics of the software, I did an internship for six months where I was getting paid $60 a month and I was putting in long hours. Even though the pay was low, my skills were getting better each day. Those six months of internship improved my skills a lot. I was able to handle long and big projects all by myself. I also learned how to communicate with the client, how to send emails how a team functions, and how marketing and sales work. All these helped a lot when I started my own freelance journey. So exposing yourself to different experiences is very crucial. When you are starting your journey, you have to understand how your skill fit in the world that you are entering.
Now, you might be wondering how beneficial it is to join a startup instead of directly starting your freelance journey. I would say it’s really beneficial. Do note that I did not say a corporation. I said a startup. Usually when you work for a big company or corporation, you don’t know how the business is functioning. You are just aware about small tasks. But if you are working in a startup or a small business with a team of 5 to 10 people, you get to see the whole picture. You get to see the revenue, the profit, the team dynamic, the sales, the marketing, client onboarding. It’s a fantastic way to understand how a business functions. At the end of the day, you need to see freelancing as running a small business. So I highly recommend gaining that exposure by working for a small business or a startup.
So now once you have chosen the skill and you are getting the exposure, spend time mastering the skill it typically takes around 10,000 hours to master a skill. Think of this time and effort as an initial investment. So let’s say someone wants to become a doctor. They would spend around six years of time, effort, money in educating themselves so that they can prepare for the job. If you are starting a freelance career, you just need to spend 5 to 6 months mastering the skill. If you do it right, you will get paid more than a doctor. When you think about it that way, 5 to 6 months is not a lot of time. So dedicate yourself and mastering the skill. You can master any skill from YouTube these days.
Let’s say you want to learn graphic design. You can just go on YouTube and search for it and you’ll get a lot of free courses. Not just graphic design. From coding to web design, you can find everything on the internet. Keep redefining what you do until this is true. So give it everything and be the best at what you do. All it takes is time and effort.
Portfolio
Once you have mastered the skill and you are the best at what you do, you can start building a portfolio. A portfolio is a collection of your best work showcasing your skills and talent to potential clients. Your portfolio is a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why people should work with you. Think of your portfolio as an introduction to new clients, because when you reach out to new clients, your portfolio is the first thing that they see. So make sure your portfolio is so good that anyone who sees your portfolio goes, I want to work with you.
Many of you who are reading this article might not have any previous experience or example to showcase in your portfolio. What you can do is you can create a sample project. When putting together your samples, make sure you are showcasing your problem solving abilities and your expertise and skills in different tools. Here are few points to consider while creating or maintaining a portfolio. Share a story about each service that you provide. If you are good at more than one thing, make sure your portfolio reflects that. For example, you can be a video editor who is also good in motion design, so make sure you create a separate sample for the motion design work. For each sample, define what tools you use, what was the process and how can this project help someone in real world? And third, keep your portfolio updated. Think of your portfolio as a living thing. As you keep upgrading your skills, you also need to upgrade your portfolio. Make sure your portfolio reflects the latest trends that are going on in your industry.
Social Proof
Now you have mastered the skill and you have a really good portfolio, you need to collect some social proof. Social proof is a psychological and social phenomenon where people copy the actions of others In choosing how to behave in a given situation. In easy words, social proof is when we look at what other people are doing to decide how we should act in a certain situation. If we see other people are doing something, we tend to think it’s the right thing to do. When we are unsure about what to do, we often believe the people who are around us. These can be experts, celebrities, or friends who might know better, and we usually follow their lead. That’s why a lot of advertisements have known faces or celebrities.
We figure out what’s right by believing what other people think is right. Usually following what others do works well. We make fewer mistakes when we are following others, so if a lot of people are doing something, we believe that it’s the right thing to do. Now why am I telling you this? You need to take advantage of social proof now. When you’re starting as a freelancer, you can’t go and hire a celebrity. But what you can do is you can collect social proof by reviews, ratings, and testimonials. So when people see these reviews, ratings, and testimonials, they will feel more comfortable working with you and you will be able to land clients faster. So let’s start with reviews and ratings. So first, focus on building a good reputation. Instead of running for money, offer your services at a discount in the starting to land some good clients. When I started, I used to work for $5 and provide unlimited revisions and great quality, which resulted in a lot of five-star reviews which made a good base for my freelance earnings. Now you can collect these review ratings anywhere you can collect it on Google. You can also ask people to say good things about you on LinkedIn.
Testimonials
Next, you can use testimonials. Testimonials is a strong way to gain trust and enhance your profile and portfolio. You can get testimonials from anyone. It can be your teacher or your employer or maybe the internship that you did. You can ask the manager to leave a testimonial and then later you can show these testimonials on your portfolio page or your website. If you have worked with good companies, you can also display their logos on your portfolio page. It’s all about showing yourself in the best light and build trust.
Fiverr and Upwork
Now once you have mastered the skill, you have a good portfolio and you have social proof. Now we can go and find clients. Now to get clients, you would simply have to tell people what you are offering or else how would they know? Marketing plays a major role here. So there are two options. Either the client can come to you or you can go and find the client. So first is obviously a freelance platform. So you can create an account on any freelance platform. The best one are obviously Fiverr and Upwork. Now the best thing about freelance platforms are these already have warm leads. What I mean by that is these are already people who are looking for freelancers like you. So if you somehow show up on the first page of these platforms and then convince the clients that you are the best person to work with, you will get clients just like that. For everyone who thinks freelance platforms are too crowded, they won’t work for me. You need to ask yourself is what I am offering good enough? And if it is, you’ll definitely get clients because millions of people are getting clients on these platforms just like that. And if these people have similar skills to you and getting clients, why can’t you? Now, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Just making an account won’t get you clients, so there are other soft skills that you would have to combine here.
First one is obviously communication, so to perform well on any freelance platform you need to have good communication. So that means if you want to work with international clients, you need to be fluent in English. Second, you need to learn persuasion, which means you should be able to persuade people to work with you. Along with that, you need to be good in sales and marketing to perform well on these platforms.
As I said, there are two major platforms in the industry, which is Fiverr and Upwork. I have been on Fiverr since 2019 and made over $100,000. I am a top rated seller on Fiverr, and I have already made a complete guide on how to make money on Fiverr, how to set up a profile, and gigs that show up on the first page. You can earn money on any platform if you have the right skills, and I’ll be making a complete guide on how I did it and how you can make money on Upwork too. I personally think freelance platforms is the best way to get clients as a freelancer. Apart from Fiverr and Upwork, there is also people per hour and also you can offer your services on LinkedIn, so see what works best for you.
Now the second way to get clients is by cold emailing. So cold email or cold DMing is basically reaching out to people or reaching out to potential clients and telling them that this is the service that I offer. Would you like to work with me since you will be contacting random people, so it may take some time to convert leads into clients?
Third way to get clients is by referrals. Understand this the more people know about who you are, what you do, and for whom, the more likely it is that you will start bringing in word-of-mouth referrals. Data from business school shows that customers who are referred to you are often more loyal, profitable, and take very less to acquire. I mean, think about it. If you want to try a restaurant in a new city and you already have a friend who is living there, would you trust your own judgement or go with the referral of your friend? Most likely you will go with the referral of the friend because you trust him. Same way client referrals work Now to start getting referrals from client. Once you impress them with your work, simply ask if they know someone else who might be interested in your services. You can then request an introduction or ask them to recommend your services. If you have budget for marketing, you can also run social media ads such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Instagram ads to get new clients.
Now, if your offering is really as good as you think, you should ideally land your first client within 1 to 2 weeks. Now, if that does not happen, you should go back to step one again and then start by refining your skills. See what you can change. See how you can improve the small things because that makes a major difference. And after that, follow the entire process again and see what else you can improve. And then look for clients again. It is difficult to get clients in the beginning, so keep trying until you find the first one, and once you do, it will be a regular thing.
Now we will talk about payment and management tools. In this section I will tell you what are the best options when dealing with international and domestic clients. Be very careful with the payment tools, especially if you’re working outside of any freelance platform. So the good thing about freelance platform is that they have a good system in place. And because of that, your payment is always safe. But if you’re working with clients directly, make sure you have a good contract in place for domestic clients. Use whatever is available in your country. When you are working with international clients, you can use stripe, PayPal or pioneer. All three are really good and have good customer support just in case there are any problems Dos and don’ts when working with clients directly. Always keep active communication. Make sure you and the client are both on the same page, and don’t ghost the client just in case something goes wrong. Make sure you always communicate with the client. Create an agreement or a contract. When you are working with clients, you can find a lot of templates on the internet. Just copy paste and then upload to ChatGPT and then ask it to enter your details for payment. Always request a 50% payment upfront to avoid any fraud. If the client is not agreeing to 50%, do at least 20 to 30% payment or you can also do a milestone project and next revision. Almost 90% of the projects that I work on have 1 to 2 revisions, so always leave enough time, energy, and patience to do any revisions if asked.
Now, if you start getting a lot of clients, you might need to use some management tools for project and client management I use Trello. You can also use Notion if you want. Both of these tools are really good. They can help you stay organized. It’s also very user-friendly and it will save you a lot of time. So you can use these tools to create workspace boards and create an assembly line system for projects. For example, this is our Fiverr Trello board. So we have boards for priority projects, revisions, approval pending coming up, and then completed projects. Inside each board there are multiple cards, and inside the card we can add the details about the project and also assign to one of my team members. Similarly, since we work with a lot of monthly clients, we create a workspace for them for their entire projects are at one place. Trello is completely free up to ten people. Similarly, for client communication, we use slack where we create different groups and channels to communicate with the client.
Now you have everything. You can start your journey from these four points, but every business needs growth and eventually you will also feel the need to earn more. Increase your prices and make a lot more money. So let’s discuss the best ways to grow as a freelancer and to eventually become the top rated in the industry. So you can start by upselling. Upselling means persuading your customers to purchase a more expensive version of your service. In freelancing, this could involve offering a service at a higher price. However, suddenly increasing your price a lot can upset a few customers, so make sure you are slowly increasing your prices. So when I initially started, I used to charge around $5 for one one-minute video. Now I charge $100 for a one-minute video. So every month when I had enough orders or enough projects, I used to increase my price by $10. And slowly as I kept getting more and more reviews, the client felt that it was justified to pay that price.
First, we’ll talk about growing on freelance platform so you can either grow by getting in more clients or by increasing your price. Once you have a good base of reviews and reviews keep coming in, you can start increasing your prices. You can also add some add ons. For example, we do a usual two three day turnaround on Fiverr. But let’s say if a client wants a delivery in 24 hours, we charge around $100 fast delivery charge on that. Similarly, you can add a lot of extras, for example, more text animation, more revisions, more stock clips, etc. another way to build a predictable income as a freelancer is by offering subscriptions. For example, a client needs five videos every month. You can offer that package as a subscription, and it will keep on repeating every month, which will give you predictable revenue. You can grow as a freelancer by improving your skills. You can invest in professional skill development and learn new skills. You can enroll in workshops, online courses or read more books. Another thing you can do is you can build a brand. Your brand is super important to grow as a freelancer.
If you portray yourself as an expert in your industry and create content around that, you’ll start getting a lot more opportunities. Another way to grow is by finding your niche. So, for example, my friend Sejal who is a video editor. But instead of offering video editing services to everyone, he just offers his service to dentists. So he has established himself as an expert in dentist communities, and because of that, he is able to charge them high prices and make a lot of money while getting a lot of new referrals in the community.
So to summarize, first you need to start by discovering your skill. Once you have identified your skill, you need to get exposure. You can do that by working for a startup. After that, spend enough time mastering the skills so that you are the best at what you do. Once you have mastered the skill, you need to create an attractive portfolio. Second, you need to get social proof, get reviews on any platform, whether it’s Fiverr, Upwork, LinkedIn, Google or any other social media platform. Third, to find clients, either you can reach out to them or they can come to you. You can reach out to clients via cold emails or cold DMs. Your profile should be visible on freelance platforms. At Last we talked about growing as a freelancer, which is a continuous step. So you have to keep building your profile and you have to try becoming a better version of yourself every single day.
