I’ve just written my iGCSE and am going to be doing a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science in about 2 months. Although I haven’t done the the courses here for quite some time, I’ve definitey improved dramatically with frontend development. I’m proficient in Typescript (superset of Javascript that’s strictly typed), Tailwind, AstroJS, ReactJS and a little bot of GoLang. I’ve also dabbled with Databse Management systems like SQLite and as a result of it had to learn basic SQL. (for you more experienced nerds out there, I used Prisma ORM in pair with SQLite in a node project.) I’ve linked all the tech I mentioned to their relative sources and site just to help some of you who may not know what I’m talking about out. I’m turning 17 years of age in about a month too so, lots has been happening
Now, on to the actual reason for making this post. (sorry about the personal-life novel) University starts sometime next year late-january to early febuary. I’m not sure if this pertains to this forum, but it was one of the few places I though I could get good knowledge from. (thought about reddit, but they aren’t always kindly) I’m looking to do some freelance work and generate some passive income before University starts to make things easier. The primary places I thought of are Fiverr and Upwork but I’ve no idea how to start and more importantly for me, the efficiency of them. I’m looking to create portfolio and landing page sites (3-5 pages) or even blog sites if that’s something that’s in demand - whatever meets my skills listed above. Some of the questions I have are:
am I going to be waiting upwards of a week to get an order?
how do I price my services competitively?
are there better ways for me to go about this? (i.e. different sites / methods)
These are just the headline questions I have that I can’t answer myself. The rest feel like things I learn through experience. It’s great to be back in this community. It’ll always remain the place I remember when I think “where I started my development career,” if I even make it that far
I’d appreciate any insight at all into this, even if it’s “ask somewhere else” or “don’t use fiverr, you dope”
it could be hard to hear, but you could be waiting forever, you are one of thousands on Fiverr or Upwork, you need to have something special you are offering if you want to shine through
freelancing is much harder because you need to market yourself and each time convince a prospective client that you are the best to be contracted for the job
also freelancing is not passive income, you need to work hard for each client, you need to market yourself
you need to put yourself out there, have a portfolio to show what you can do, start offering your work to people that may benefit from it, start easy and work in exchange of reviews and referrals if you are not able to get payed work soon
There is one that comes to mind, and its basically do the same thing but for free.
As mentioned above, freelancing isn’t passive income. You are essentially running your own small business and kick starting it from scratch, which isn’t easy. It is possible to get some passive income after a while, but doing that out of the gate is basically impossible, as you have no business until you get clients.
Going back to the whole “same idea but free” approach would be to take a different route by selecting specific clients out of freelancing networks, and doing work for free.
First, you’d have more control over the situation since if it doesn’t work out the business loses nothing. The business you can target are ones willing to work with you to some degree, say a mom-and-pop sorta shop that has a bad website or web presence. You can just directly talk/reach out to them and be forthcoming with what you are trying to do, which is learn.
This bypasses a lot of the “small business” problems, help gives you a real world scenario to do something, and since its basically volunteer/charity work you can go about talking about it in the future as well.
Finally, keep in mind what your doing is still serving someone a solution to a problem, not going out of your way to learn everything/do anything you don’t actually need to do. IE don’t build a full stack complex solution using a bunch of tech when you don’t need it, nor your client needs it.
