How to make money when you dont have a job - The Secret of Freelancing

I wanted to share some helpful tips I learnt scaling all the way up to be ranked as no.1 freelancer on some popular freelancing websites today.

It all started about 8 or 9 years ago. I will cut that story short but I did not get into freelancing because I wanted a job. I have always been employed ever since I started working full time when I was 18. 11 years now it has been and freelancing has become a part of pride, passion, learning and fun.

Many years ago, I wanted to find ways to write, give my hobby of writing wings, write amazing things that all those who encouraged me would enjoy and motive me more. But most importantly I wanted to write and get more readers to what I write. I wrote blogs, I still do blogs and as you can see I suck at it. I only got about 18 thousand readers past year.

Imagine writing an article for someone who gets 80 thousand readers in a week? Or he publishes your writing into a book? Awesome isn't it? this is what I felt and I started writing.

I wrote to many content sites, starting cbronline.com; bloomberg (in their initial days of health and wealth mags), readersden, eblog, elanor, cathay, and numerous others.

slowly I ventured into web development, web designing, SEO, SMM and so on.

What I achieved out of this is a sense of confidence that I can still make money and not be dependant on job salary.

Here are some secret tips I wanted to share on freelancing.

1. Do what you know or love doing: Dont waste time buying a franchise business, instead sell a skill you know. Ramesh Raj (Name changed) a friend of mine who was laid off last year from a data analyst job found himself struggling in a hotel franchisee.
Offlate he started pitching his services to Educational institutions, financial organizations and guess what? He has landed a cool consultant gig and as a freelancer, not as an employee.


2. Spend Judiciously: Things are very costly these days. You might want to buy a Apple Mac instead of a windows 7 or windows 8. Buy Apple only if you have specific reasons to go for it, else settle for what will get the job done. Remember the key is to keep enough money in the bank as savings.
I want to start an Internet Radio. I have all the information I need. But I still need a 10 MBPS connection with a Xenon Server running Windows and a media streaming server subscription. Plus the hardware cost of a 4 channel mixer, mike, phone line, legal registrations etc., are separate.
But I know that on day 1 of my launch I will have 5000 subscribers and according to my business model I would break-even in the 3rd quarter itself. Yet I will go for second hand products where necessary and cut as much costs as possible

3. Bid with a demo:  If you are bidding on a freelance website and not getting that job is because you have done nothing better than everyone else. Its not flowery english or flattery words that win bids. Its your readiness. Sometime ago I landed a exciting job on peopleperhour.com. The job was to transcript a interview of a Doctor and a professor. It was a 40 minute interview for $80. I saw that there were already 15 bids made for it by the time I saw it. Yet, I got that job.What did I do differently? I transcribed 20 minutes of that interview and said " I have done half of your job, I will finish the other half in 30 minutes. Let me know if you are interested, pay me that 80$ you have quoted" thats all it was.
Preparation always pays.

4. Create Digital Footprints: you have to be a star. you have to be an expert. You have to be reliable. So set up your freelancing project history and your customer feedback in as many places as possible. For some, if they dont find you on google you dont exist. Some customers can become your Anchor clients and work with you for a long time. They become your Anchor clients based on your digital presence.
So write blogs, write articles, be on social media sites, showcase your work, share your masterpieces, offer help to others, do less time taking work for free, gain contacts, network with people, make an impression and thus your digital foot print will be made. It will not happen overnight, this has to be earned slowly over a period of time.

5. Integrity: Lastly, you have to be truthful. Do as committed. Under-promise and Over-deliver. dont take up things you cant finish. Dont depend on others to finish a job. Do it yourself, and do it to perfection. Do not limit yourself to one skill alone. I am sure one can do anything from repairing a laptop, being a virtual assistant, copy editing, book keeping, translating, transcribing, writing, developing, troubleshooting and tones of many more stuff that can be done on freelancing and get paid legitimately. Integrity and Consistency is KEY!
To myself I keep telling "Dont get complacent, keep working harder." this has helped too.

Hope these tips will help you well if you are on that track of freelancing


Thank you
Regards
Maddy

Chinese Cusine

For no reason, this is my first post on this blog page since december 2013. It took so long to come back here. Writing here meant the most as compared to me writing in other blogs and articles on various other pages I do as a hobby/passion. But, it has taken 6 months to make this comeback to this blog today. I was busy, I still am very busy. My close friends and family would complain that I am lost!
I have been writing a lot, but not writing here.
This blog post has been in existence for a long time now and I have always loved writing. May be because there are no rules here and I can make mistakes, get childish, playful and get more stupid at the way I think and express.

 But enough about me, I have something thought provoking to talk about. That's why I am here.

In the summer of 2012, five top super star American companies bid on a project for a demanding, famous, revenue generating client: THE CIA! (Cental Intelligence Agency) The American spy agency funded by the Government and the UNOs, was collecting too much data and information that its computers could not keep up. To deal with this massive onslaught of data, the CIAs CIOs and CTOs saw the need to scale up their infrastructure and build its own high secure private cloud data center. A second to none version of vast fleets of efficient, adaptable, reliable, redundant and secure servers that could run complex services. For the Agency the power of cloud was tempting and tantalizing.

They decided to put this open for bidding. Whoever won the bidding would get a 10 year $600Million contract and they would spend five times of that on data analytics and data security. A mouth watering deal brought many bidders.

IBM was one of two finalists. But Amazon won the deal.

The pioneer ecommerce company hard butted a century old IBM out of competition from a dream deal.
Today Amazon has successfully met CIAs requirements, but there is an important lesson for the rest of the world.

As quoted in Bloomberg "No single deal encapsulates a 103-year-old company with a market capitalization of $185 billion. But the CIA butt kicking is a microcosm of larger problems IBM is having as it struggles to adapt to the cloud era, in which clients large and small rent technology cheaply over the Internet instead of buying costly fixed arrays. Under Rometty’s leadership, revenue has declined for eight consecutive quarters, a period when most of corporate America has flourished. In January, after a year in which IBM was the only company in the Dow Jones industrial average whose shares lost value, Rometty and her top executives turned down their annual bonuses, worth in her case as much as $8 million. (Rometty, 56, who goes by Ginni, declined to be interviewed for this article.)"

1. IBM is not able to cope up with technology?
2. Top executives turned down their bonuses and saved 8 million dollars! WTF?
3. Rometty doesnt want to comment? 8 consecutive quarters Revenue has declined!
4. Cloud taking over what was once physically present on earth!

What did Amazon have that IBM did not? Chinese developers and American Management.  Indians are customer support nothing beyond that. So this means Amazon, a American company has Chinese products for the American CIA.

Lesson: Tides are changing. Everything is changing. WE have to change too!
There are many such examples. These companies are like humans too. Like they acquire other companies, we have to keep on acquiring new stuff. Like they have a strategy, vision, goal, mission statement, we need to have one too and keep on evolving it on a timely basis. We all have stakeholders, we have customers called friends and family, we have investors whom we call bosses and managers. we are answerable and this we have to keep on improving. 

Let me quickly tell you something else thats a bit deviating. Another comparo of whats happening somewhere else that looks like it has nothing to do with us or our lives and yet, how its directly proportional and related to us and our future.
Last weekend about 10 million Chinese students took the National University Entrance Exam known as Gaoko. In comparison, 1.5 Million students taking SAT or 1.2 million taking IIT JEE exam in India.

Thats right. China is that big. They can beat a country like India by sheer numbers.

You know how many kids make their own mobile phones? Think of those Chinese mobile phones, guess where they come from? who makes them? Chinese kids! ofcourse! There is more than that. They make every product that possibly exists in China and most importantly THEY SELL IT outside of China. Funny eh? Plus they know Kung Fu by birth! (joke)
And you thought only Jackie chan's and Bruce Lees are awesome!

China is way ahead from India in every measure. I am not talking out of thin air here. I can support this statement with data in every field. China is big, everything they do is bigger.

For the 3 or 4 messaging apps like hike, whatsapp and others we use in India, there are 150+ messaging apps and over 50 of them have more than 2 to 3 million users. They have their own facebook like social networking sites, their own twitter and their own video sharing platform. Unlike India, we only have shaadi.com and nothing more than that. China have everything Chinese, it makes a sort of an Encryption for people outside china to know whats going on in China! They can do anything and get away with it, google translator struggles to translate and its only 65% accurate. Fertilizers to machinery, automobile, education, breweries, agriculture, tools, their own coca cola too and everything else, they have their own brands, their own way of doing it. Thats where their economy is sturdy and stronger unlike our country's swarm of foreign brands.

If I were a startup I would look for China for innovation and startup ideas.
Anyway, the reason I brought China and IBM is because somewhere we are stalling behind unless we do something about all this.

I was talking about Change. We all have to change. And change cant be overnight.

All we have to do is three things
First let our kids know the value of our culture, heritage and history.
Second the next generation should not chase materialistic things instead they should be chasing entrepreneurial dreams of contributing something to this world and becoming an expert in their area of interest.
Lastly, as current generation, we have to leave behind better footprints to follow for the next gen kids so its important we see clearly why it is not good to violate traffic rules, why its bad to dirty our roads, why its important to recycle, why its good to wear seat belts and many trillions of such small things that are overlooked but are very important.

Else, get ready for China to take over the jobs and while India will remain a under developed country! No Modi can do nothing if we cant change from within! 

Just something top of mind I thought I will share. Not that I woke up to wipe off some creative dust. Hope you got some food for thought :)

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thank you