How to get freelance work

During 3 years of successful freelance work, I have several times been asked by friends and family members "how do you get work" or "From where do you get work". This blog post is to answer these questions. I am going to update this post soon so stay following me.

Ok so here I am to tell you my secrets of getting work online. First and foremost thing I want to tell you that there are many fields in which you can find freelance work. Here I am listing few fields for which I saw posts on freelancing sites.

1) Teaching
2) Writing
3) Software development
4) Data Entry
5) Website management
6) Software testing and QA.
7) Palmist
8) Psychiatrist
9) Medicine

I am sure you can add many more fields if you search it on the internet. My experiences are related to software development but the key points I am discussing here will apply to the other fields as well.

Now the question is "how to get the work of your interest"? Well there are thousands and thousand of sites offering you to start your online business. Like for software development famous sites are rentacoder.com, elance.com, scriptlance.com and odesk.com. I have worked with rentacoder and elance. Both are robust but I was able to make good profit at elance because of their low fees. For teaching there are tutor.com and liveperson.com.

There are many sites which allow you to create a free account and start bidding for the jobs. Many sites ask you to pay a certain amount to create an account. I would recommend that you consider a free account to start. You may switch to paid service later if you get success in your business.

To create an account was the easiest part of the job. After you create your account you will be able to see the job posting and you will be able to post your comments and pricing to do that job. Reading the post is also easy task but responding to them and making bids is a difficult task. To me following points are important.

1) Read the problem carefully many times.
2) If you think that you can work on the project but you don't understand it fully, write to the buyer immediately. Because it is important to communicate on urgent basis. At rentacoder.com I found that there were messages and bid from other providers within minutes after a new project was posted.

3) Do not bid if you don't fully understand the requirements.

4) If you understand the requirements and can work on the project try to be the first or among the first few who placed the bid. Yes you will have to be very quick. You know the buyer sometimes gets tens of bids, he cannot read each bid and cannot respond to everyone.

5) Tell him the truth. I have seen providers asking you to finish work in two days while the work cannot be done in less then one week. Do tell them that you cannot deliver in 2 days.

6) Respond quickly and promptly. If you receive any query from the buyer respond quickly. Its better to keep checking your emails after other hour to make sure that you will be able to reply him quickly.

7) You may offer him demo of small part of the work he wants. My second project at rentacoder was an online file management system. After reading the requirements I made the bid and within few hours I created a short demo for that. I showed him my work and he was surprised with the quick work and immediately approved my bid.

8) Write a proposal. Its better to write proposal to make bid. What I do is that if the work is small I simply write my proposal in an email message. Like once I was given work to add one field in a form in php. I wrote following points to the client

a) I have to put the html code to add this field.
b) I have to write javascript validation of this field.
c) The is a username it needs to checked for duplicate entries, so I need to put ajax based validation from server.
d) I have to write code to handle and show error.

Above points show that I fully understand the problem and it also lists the tasks that need to be done. By doing this you are making it easy for the buyer to choose you.

If the work is more complicated then write a neat proposal. List all the modules and what you think will be done in each module. Put pricing and hours/days for each modules separately. It ensures that you understand the requirements. It is often better to multiply the estimated time with 2. But never multiply the estimated cost by any number :).

9) If you get the work start immediately. Divide the agreed upon number of days by 2 and take the result as your deadline.

This is all I do. Sometimes my project goes well beyond the deadline but my clients are satisfied at the end. Just because I do all my work with all my honesty and sincerity. If you succeed to get you project and you deliver quality work on time then it is easier to get more work.

If you are also a freelancer, I would love to hear your story. Please share your experiences with us.