Want To Start Freelance Work...Need Some Ideas

[pemba]

Hi,

I live in a VERY rich Booming town driven by oil. My town has about 60,000 people and the average income is somewhere around $150, 000. There are a lot of locally owned businesses here.

I need to take advantage of my location because i am going to be staying here another 2 years. I am in the process of starting a web design company and outsourcing everthing. I also am thinking fitness consulting wich is very easy for me to do, and some other kind of consulting. I need atleast one more thing i can do. I was thinking of maybe something to do with travel but i am not erally sure.

I need some suggestions and advice.

Thanks

[rene_stpierre]

I'm not sure exactly what type of work you are looking for.

However, people in this town must have needs. Identify them, see if they are met by other businesses, if not, there's an opportunity for you.

For example, in families with high income, usually both the man and woman work. This means, they do not have much time for: taking care of the yard and pool, cook dinner, shop for groceries, clean-up the house, do little repairs in/on the house, think how to decorate various rooms and buy the stuff, etc, etc.

There could be opportunities for you.

Good Luck!
René

[tstesen]

As a freelancer myself and the managing partner of a design firm I would recommend finding your niche. This is really vital to the success or failure of your business. I would recommend becoming the expert and go to person in your area in one particular field or area versus trying to be everything to everyone.

In you were not planning on outsourcing I would recommend working on several different projects in different areas. By exploring completing different projects you may find that you enjoy one area in particular over the other areas.

By submersing yourself in one field you can grow your skill set and become more valuable to your clients. I'm not sure how I'd feel about having my business web site or marketing materials designed by a company that also consults on fitness. I would have to ask myself why it is they have their hand in so many pots.

Good Luck!

Tanya

[pemba]

Originally Posted by tstesen

As a freelancer myself and the managing partner of a design firm I would recommend finding your niche. This is really vital to the success or failure of your business. I would recommend becoming the expert and go to person in your area in one particular field or area versus trying to be everything to everyone.

In you were not planning on outsourcing I would recommend working on several different projects in different areas. By exploring completing different projects you may find that you enjoy one area in particular over the other areas.

By submersing yourself in one field you can grow your skill set and become more valuable to your clients. I'm not sure how I'd feel about having my business web site or marketing materials designed by a company that also consults on fitness. I would have to ask myself why it is they have their hand in so many pots.

Good Luck!

Tanya

i plan on doing web design fulltime and do fitness consulting on the side, and since i will be outsourcing i think i will have alot of time to do other things.

[1000feet]

I would simply talk to a lot of people and see what they could use help with - then find a match with your skills and, as others have said, specialize to increase your value.

Outsourcing the services you're selling can be a good idea but I would be cautious. As a freelancer myself, I've had people try to make a lot of money simply by forwarding messages between me and a paying customer, while trying to avoid paying me well. Something like that can easily go bad - if a service is earning you a lot of money it's ok to put in some effort of your own to make sure the person paying you is absolutely satisfied and to make sure the person doing the work is happy with it.

[Tristan]

Hello,

My recommendation is to pick one service that you can deliver that you're so passionate about that you would literally do it for free if you could and focus in on that. That will help you avoid branching into too many areas at once, which is the pitfall of many starting entrepreneurs. Highly successful entrepreneurs focus their entire efforts on one business and use the success in that business to launch into another one.

The other area of concern is to test your market. You mention that your local area has quite a large number of affluent people with purchasing power. That's great, so if you want to capitalize on that, you will want to deliver a service that caters to those local individuals. In that respect, personal training might have a larger amount of willing buyers for you because web design services are not locked into any fixed location these days. In fact, web design is not even fixed to any place in the United States anymore, since the service can literally be delivered through the internet from any country, many of which have competent technicians who can deliver a quality product at prices that would barely even feed us here in the States. You mention outsourcing which is great to keep overhead low, but what's your unique selling position to keep your customers from "shopping" you? Also, outsourcing everything is a bit tricky unless you have a very strong standing relationship with your service vendors. Project management with a variety of independent contractors can be difficult to achieve a quality product for your customers because of communication gaps during the project phase. These things need to be taken into consideration.

Affluent people, demographically speaking, are more concerned with their health, and if there is little competition in your area for personal training services, you could easily dominate a winning market if you're competent at delivering a quality service that provides real value for those people.

[yakito]

There are lots of people earning a lot of money designing websites, banners, etc, freelance via sites like elance or guru.com

I recommend you to take a look at them as they worked grate for me.

[codefreeze]

I think it's a good idea to have several income streams. The website design thing could be a good source of income. But you need some other fillers too (as you said).

You mentioned you live in an oil town. Oil people tend to be very busy - working shifts and long hours so there must be an opportunity to help them make their lives easier - depends what you want to do. How about mobile car valeting - my brother makes a really good living doing that (he has other sidelines too).

Having worked in the oil industry myself for 4 years I know that two things I didn't have were time (long hours) and energy (hard physically and mentally demanding) work. Not sure the physical fitness thing will fly - but certainly anything that save oil workers time and makes their lives easier has potential.

There also plenty of potential in just going round companies and asking them what they need.

[alexinspire]

1. Find a profitable market (Problem that people have and people are willing to pay for the solutions).
2. Identify what you are good at and how you can use that to create a solution.
3. Build yourself as an authority in that area.
4. Spread the word.
5. Continuously improve to be more effective and increase profitability.

[Terumoto]

Have you considered online freelance work?

I'm a student and it's my only source of income. There's some really good networks and systems for it these days, I only use one site which is Outsource to Freelancers, IT Companies, Programmers, Web Designers from India, Russia, USA, and more - oDesk . The way that site operates is amazing. It gets rid of every problem there has ever been with online freelancing.

I don't know what kind of skills you have, but there's bound to be jobs on there you can do. This might sound like advertising, but it's just that I have actually seen the site work and made decent money from it, so I strongly recommend it.

[oldbiker]

the most important thing is to know who you are gonna make a job for
i mean know you targeted costumers before start anything