My life in freelancing

Tomorrow I will be making a minimum of two posts on the subject of getting started in freelancing with AMAZING tips on how you can get started immediately with freelance work and make your first 5$ within a day.

Until then, lets start with myself and some of my experiences, to give you an insight in how a freelancer can be.

I started with freelancing when I was around fifteen years old. You all know the situation, you want some extra cash for videogames, candy or a new computer. Your parents aren't rich so they can't help you. Now, some would look for a summerjob or a job that pays per hour with a really bad wage.

Now, I loved writing essays. Whenever we were told in class that we had to write a ten page paper on a subject, I would always be finished within a day even though we usually had a month to do it. I'm not sure why but I've always loved writing.

So, when I wanted to make some extra money I decided to look into freelancing. My absolutely first gig* was to write an essay for a classmate. He knew I was superior than the average student since my essays always got B's or A's. He offered me the equivalent of 25$ to write a five paper essay on the subject of "How Apps are taking over the IT world" which was a topic we discussed in class the week before. I was already finished and hey, 5 bucks a page sounded sweet for a guy that writes a page in an hour!

Now, that was some easy cash for me and I fell in love with being paid to write. I used the money to buy myself a pizza and some drinks, while I was enjoying the fruit from my labor I started signing up on various of freelancing website. Odesk, Freelancer and such are all great platforms to use.

Now sure I was good at writing essays in Swedish, getting into writing in English was a bit different but I got a hang of it after a while. Since there are tons of great tools for correcting spelling it wasn't a huge issue for me that I was writing in my secondary language.

Due to that I also discovered a new niche for myself, translation. If I can write articles and papers in both Swedish and English, why not broaden my field and get into translating between the two?

To this day, writing in Swedish and translating between Swedish-English is still my major income. I tend to get my work directly over email or phone today though since I have such an established customerbase, platforms aren't necessary if people want to hire you specifically rather than risking their money on a lesser known freelancer.

Now I am noticing that this post is getting fairly large so I will be splitting this up in two parts. Part two will be released within a few hours, so sit tight.

In the next part I will be going more in-depth about my favorite platforms and how you can learn from my experience to make some simple side cash to pay your bills or buy useless junk.

And as always, feel free to show some love to the blog by sharing it on Facebook or Twitter! I'd appreciate it.