As I said on Blogging for money: The good, the bad and the ugly, I have been earning money online since a little more than two years ago, most of it thanks to freelance jobs.

I believe freelancing is one of the most easy ways to make money online, if not the easiest, and although some people think it’s not the best way to do it since it’s not a source of passive income, it still is a good choice to quickly start making money on the internet, and therefore it can be used as a baseline for other, more business-like ways to make a living.

This list was written for people looking for telecommute freelancing jobs to work from home, mainly in the internet, although some of this points can be applied for local freelance jobs too. So let’s start with what interests you:

1. Trust in people: If you can’t trust in other people then freelancing is not for you. Here you will hardly sign a contract, they will pay you after you do all the work, and I bet you will never see their faces, so unless you can’t believe they will pay you as they said, then you better send your resume to some job on your local area and forget the freelancing option.
2. Apply to as many jobs as you can: There’s a lot of freelancing jobs, and there’s even more people who want them. So don’t get short and apply for as many jobs as you can using some kind of email template that helps you to send as many emails as possible (don’t forget to always put some kind of customized reference to every recipient).
3. Don’t send your resume as an attached file: Surely you have heard this one a lot of times: attached files are annoying, they can even carry some virus with them, so if you want to please your possible future employer, make them a favor and send your resume as simple text in the body of your message. Don’t forget to add the corresponding headers in the beginning telling them for what are you applying and why, and let them clearly know where your resume begins.
4. Have something to show: Freelancing is all about trust, in their side too. And although your resume counts, and maybe they will even believe what it says, you will dramatically improve your odds to be chosen for the job if you have something to show them now.
   If you maintain a blog, a website or you wrote something in the past and it can be viewed on the web, then you have to tell them. Now, you will increase even more your odds if you show them something related with the job you are applying for, so if you are applying for a programming job, show them some public working code, if you are applying for a writer job, show them your blog and if you are applying for a designer job, show them some graphics. Is that easy and logical, you don’t need past working experience as long as you have done something useful by yours.
5. Maintain a variable hourly fee: When negotiating your payment, manage a variable hourly fee, i.e. a maximum hourly fee which you want to reach, and a minimum one that you will accept in the worst case. The hourly fee you can charge to your new employer depends on the size of the company, the kind of work to be done and their geographic location. So although the most logical decision is to try to charge the maximum hourly fee sometimes it will be just too much for your possible employer and therefore they won’t choose you. If you are in a great need for a job be very smart negotiating your hourly fee in order to maximize your chances to be chosen.
6. Write a right-to-the-point resume: Everyone’s buzz-o-meter is pretty sensible these days, so don’t use those “buzinezz termz” that are so over-used everywhere. While writing your resume be sure to let them know exactly what interests them and nothing more (they don’t care where you were on primary school), so don’t get short and tell them even about that excellent article you wrote for that obscure hacking ezine when you were a teenager :P. And just be you! In the end, they will choose you for what you have done and who you are, so let them know you too.
7. Stablish everything before starting: OK, so you got the job. Now it’s time to start but what should you do? Easy, stablish with your employer exactly what is expected from you. It must be stored in a written document and you must cover aspects like how many hours a day they expect you to work with them, specific tasks to be done, how many hours you think it will take you to finish the work, how will you communicate with them, how much is your hourly rate (this one is obvious, isn’t it?) how they will control you are doing your job and what metric will be applied to measure your work. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent English quote, but in Spanish we say something like “clear pay bills keep friendship”.
8. Know your employer: Make a lot of Google, Yahoo and MSN search for your employer’s name and company to be sure they are respectable people. Also try to speak with their past employees just to know if they have a good opinion about them. If you don’t find anything bad about your employers it’s a good start but once you are in you may try to speak with fellow coworkers about them or look for documents or other things than can warn you about some bad behavior. Particularly, if you are a freelance programmer, take a look at pre-existent code and search for comments about your employer (if they have failed to pay there are chances that past programmers have written something about that).
9. Email/Skype as much as you can: This point could be named “Keep your work visible“, and this means that you must do your best effort to help them know you are doing advances in your work, and that you are accomplishing objectives. Telecommute freelance jobs have the difficulty that you don’t see them and they don’t see you, so if you don’t keep visibility they can think you are doing nothing.

   The easiest way to keep visibility on your tasks is to let them know, at least twice a day, how are you doing, if you have what is needed to finish the job or if you need more resources of some kind. And although email or skype can help you do this in the short term, I highly recommend you to use a web-based project management tool to keep track of every task and date, and let them log in there to review your job, assign tasks or give feedback. This way everybody will be able to see what tasks were assigned, when they were assigned and when they were finished without the need to surf on the heap of emails everybody have.

   If they already have such a tool, good for you, but if not, I recommend you to try Basecamp, activeCollab or goPlan. They are pretty good web-based project management tools that come in various sizes, shapes and prices.

10. Keep the contact alive: Given the nature of freelancing jobs, there will be time intervals where your employer won’t contact you. This can be for a lot of reasons, not only because they weren’t satisfied by your job, but maybe because they have a lot of work to do, a lot of problems to solve, or not enough time. But what is important to you is to maintain the contact alive, letting them know that you are available for future tasks and that you understand that currently they can’t put attention on you, but you will be waiting for them (just let them know that but it’s a good decision to look for other jobs too ;)). If you don’t keep the contact alive you are risking they will forget that it wasn’t you who stop the contact and then they will look for another person to do the job.

If you follow this list you can be pretty sure you will have a pleasant freelancing experience. But as you know, everything that start must end some day so the best advice I can give you for the day your freelance jobs ends is to finish the relation with your employer in a friendly way, letting the door open for possible future jobs. Don’t forget that they can open other doors for you ;).

Now your chances to make money online have been increased dramatically, so why don’t contribute to this blog subscribing by email or RSS? It will be healthy for you

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Freelancing, Lists, Quick money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.