The Freelancer Within
By Sharon Davis
Every day, I'll get an email that goes something like this: "I've been looking for a homebased job for x number of months now...with no luck. I just want something I can do in the evenings or on weekends so I can supplement my income. Can you help me?"
You might be thinking, "Yeah, I'd like that too... can you help?"
Well, I just might, though my suggestion might not be exactly what you had in mind.
A lot of the peple who email me have marketable skills. Skills like typing, word processing, accounting, human resources, transcription..the list goes on. Here you are working all day long, then spending all this time searching for that ever-elusive telecommute job. Well, there may be another option- freelancing.
You might say, "Me? A freelancer? I don't think so. I don't have the time to go out drumming up business."
I say, "Oh, but you do!" Among all the other nifty conveniences the Internet has given us (Finally, a place where I can get garden gnomes 24 hours a day!), there are now "Freelance Marketplaces". These are sites that enable the freelancer and the employers who need freelancers to hook up.
Most of these sites work something like this:
ABC, inc. is a relatively small company that doesn't have a Human Resources department (or Accounting department or Transcription department). Rather than take on the expense of creating an in-house HR department , they want to contract out their HR related projects. They go to a Freelance Marketplace, post their projects and then wait for the bids to roll in.
This is where you, being the consummate Human Resources Professional (or Accounting Professional or Transcriptionist), will go and post your bid for the project..and voila! You're a freelancer.
Some sites that offer this type of service are eLance.com and Ants.com. While both registration at both sites is free, Ants.com charges a fee of 5% for all jobs completed by you. eLance.com is currently offering their services for free during the Beta period, but it is clear that this will change at some point. At eLance.com, freelancers (or e-lancers) can leave feedback regarding project posters. This is a handy feature that can help you to decide who you want to do business with.
The beauty of being a freelancer is that you can often do your work on a part-time basis- at your convenience. The bottom line is that you will typically have a deadline to meet, so when you do the work is flexible. Another benefit to this is that as you build your clientele and your reputation as a freelancer, you may find that you have enough business to freelance full time.
© Copyright 2001 Sharon Davis. Sharon Davis is the Mother of two girls, the owner of 2Work-At-Home.Com and the Editor of the site's monthly ezine, America's Home. In her spare time she reminisces about what it was like to have spare time. To subscribe to her free ezine, Click Here
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This page last updated — Friday, January 21, 2011 6:44 AMST
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Thinking About an Affiliation with Profit Being You
There hasn't been an update in a while here at SCGP, and we're about to start fixing that with a site redesign as well. While surfing around investigating some of our most recent endeavors, we've run into a website that specializes in people that wish to make a living with a blog, specifically word press, and the ways to set it up and monetize it. It's still in start-up, but being Kimberfly Castleberry, more on her in the following paragraph, is the heart and brains behind this, we feel confident in mentioning this start-up for the benefits we're sure it could offer some of our members. So drop by and sign up, then tell Kim hello at Profit Being You.
And While Thinking About an Affiliation with Profit Being You, it Brings us to Just Ask Kim as Well
We stumbled on Just Ask Kim around the same time, and this too is a site related to Wordpress blogging. However, the slight differences here is that Kim tends to focus more on the plugins and innerworkings of setting up your blogging software for maximum results, including some of the best plugins for SEO, traffic funneling and generation, and some other things as well. So, if you're a Wordpress blogger or thinkig about being one, Kim can definitely help you get started out the right way in your work from home business venture. Drop by Just Ask Kim and learn just what it takes to set up your Wordpress blog for maximum returns.
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This week's site ( yeah, we know, clickfire stayed up a bit longer than a week, we might need to make this a MONTHLY site :o) ) is brought to you courtesy of Sean's Web Design Help Pages.
Sean's site offers some tools, some tutorials, and also some stuff on web accessibility. He's even published an interview with Jakob Neilsen, a reported usability expert. He also has a case study he published on Tesco's accessible website, a company that reportedly brings in £13m a year.
He tosses in some software tools and rounds the site out with some 3D text and design stuff. Drop by and take a look.
About our Link Quality.
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Search Engine Positioning Part IV and V
We have two new articles on search engine positioning now available. These articles look into link popularity and link relevancy, and then we show you how to use them to leverage your search engine positioning. The articles are VERY similar, and they should be, both go hand in hand with each other. We also added an article on the business side of the website design business. Look at what's needed to start your own website design business.
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Take a look at how the CANSPAM Act of 2003 will affect our marketing efforts, or look into Affiliate Strategy and ways to leverage your affiliate marketing efforts. You could also take a look into the personal side of a webmaster's life and read about time management for webmasters. You can find these articles in our webmasters resource area.
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