Blogging for a living

So a few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine about this blog. We got talking about making an income from blogging and he was curious on how it works and how much I make from it. That conversation got me an idea for a post.

So first of all, I currently don't make an income from this blog. I have already started to get a fairly large amount of traffic to it but I am not sure on whatever I should monetize the blog or not. After all, this blog is mostly a place for me to write about what I do, it's almost like therapy in a way for me since I have so much to share. I don't see it as a job however so monetizing it might feel wrong, anyhow the future will decide that I guess.


Anyhow, I will today be talking a bit about blogging and how monetizing on it works since I have quite a bit experience on it from the past.

Now if you're considering starting a blog, let's make something clear. A lot of people involved in marketing will tell you to target specific niches. "Make a blog about healthcare" or something like that. This is the completely wrong way to go about it. Blogging about a subject that you're not passionate about will be nearly impossible.

Instead, start a blog about a subject you love. I love my job as a freelancer and I could talk about it for days without a break, which is why I can keep posting long (Sometimes too long) posts on the matter. However if someone asked me to write about dieting or something like that, I wouldn't be able to make more than a post or two.

So write about something you love, one of your hobbies or the subject you're studying about. Anything goes if you're passionate about it since it will inspire your readers and pull them in. They will want to know how you work and what your world looks like when they notice how interested you're in it. You can compare it to how we sometimes can get stuck on weird subjects on Wikipedia. We might not care for the subject but we keep reading about it because it's darn interesting to find out how things and people work. Humans are curious like that.

Now don't start out by coming up with ideas that will let you earn from the blog, wait a month or so until you get traffic to it. Which brings us to the next topic, traffic.

Traffic, or in more layman terms, visitors. It's one of the biggest issues for a lot of people. "How do I get more visitors? My blog is so nice and it has tons of interesting posts but only a handful of people read it..." etc.

Now whatever you get traffic or not is decided by factors since there are different ways for people to find your blog. They might find it linked on other websites or blogs, or they might find it on search engines.

Now for search engines, it's all about SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Now this is a large subject and I wont go further into it since there are much better blogs and websites for that. One is Googles own SEO starters guide, thirty pages of pure gold facts. Find it by clicking here. (PDF)

Another good source of info on SEO is Moz own beginners guide, amazing website in general for anything Internet Marketing related. Find that one by clicking here or by going to moz.com.

Now it's important as a blogger to connect via social media. Use your facebook or twitter account to inform people when you've made a post, and don't forget to use appropiate hashtags! For help on hashtags use hashtagify.me. If you feel uncomfortable using your private twitter/facebook, just make a new one with your blogs name as username!

Now there are other ways to gain visitors. There are sites that will sell you visitors. These have gotten a really bad reputation lately due to the fact that some provide fake, botbased visits. However not all of them are bad. Some provide visitors to their customers via redirects, so from an old expired website in your category/niche. This is completely legal and a good way to make your blog rank better on blog directories! These types of visits can also convert into real fans on your website. One of these trusted sites for example would be maxvisits. They provide real visitors and work even with ad companies such as Google AdSense. I have personal experience with MV in the past when I ran a news website and it really boosted my rankings so even after I stopped hiring them I kept getting new visitors that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. There are also people on sites such as Fiverr that can provide similar services for good prices.

So don't go judging people too hard before you have a clear view of their services. Using Google to check up on these companies is always a good idea before hiring them. But the legit ones also tend to have money-back guarantees if you dislike their service.

So is blogging for a living possible? Yes, yes it is. Is it for you though? No idea, only you can answer that.

Remember that blogging is a long-time project and using cheap shortcuts tends to backfire quickly, such as duplicating content from other blogs or websites. So if you have the time and passion to start a blog, do it! It's a ton of fun and you learn a lot of new things.

Fiverr - What it is and why your career as a freelancer starts with it

So as promised, here comes a "guide" of sorts on how anyone can become a freelancer today. Deadsimple for some, deadheard for others.

So what is Fiverr? Well basically fiverr was a website launched five years ago with the slogan "Browse. Buy. Done.". It's a marketplace like any other webshop, but instead of selling items such as iphones or t-shirts, it sells services.

Now I was among the first freelancers on the site, back in 2010. Back then, you would put up an ad on the site for some type of service that you offer in exchange for a fiver, 5$. Today the site is a lot different, you can make money up to several hundred USD for any service you offer via special addons to your small little five buck gig.

Fiverr has several million different services being offered right now and it doesn't matter if you need someone to post a flyer for you in another country or if you need some quickly made blog posts, they definately have at least one freelancer offering exactly what you're looking for.

Fiverr has more than us professional freelancers though. Girls (Mostly) willing to sing songs written by you, people willing to do voice-overs and such. Pretty much anything you could ever want that is digital is offered. So why should the rest of us make money there and not you?

So being a huge marketplace with millions of offers up many would assume that the competition is fierce and that it would be impossible for an amateur to get into the Fiverr game. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people are scared of freelancing. But the fact is that the freelance market is so large that people forget that the competition between freelancers is much smaller than one would imagine.

Lets take one of my largest freelance niches for example. I translate from Swedish to English and from English to Swedish. Now, there are only about nine million people worldwide that know Swedish fluently enough to work as translators Among them, about two million are too old to work. Another four-five million are already employeed in basic 8-5 jobs. Another 1 million are students. The remaining one million? 200k of them are sick and go on wellfare, another 100k are employeed in higher positions or are academics. Then we have a few hundred thousand that are unemployeed. Which leaves us with what, maybe 70-100k that could do what I do? Among those we have lazy people and people who want to get a job. Which leaves us with about 1000 people who can do what I can do.

Now here comes the funny part. I said people who know Swedish fluently but how many of those are actually good with language based skills like writing? One of the most popular areas of freelancing happens to be webdesign and graphic related skills.

Actually, I can count my competition on Swedish translation, at this moment there are 18 people including me who work with translation. There are about fifty more or so, but they consist of people who haven't put down any time to get any real customers so they don't count as real competition.

Now, how would I go forward? You see Fiverr is easy, you put up a gig about what you want to do for five dollars. Translate a few hundred words, design a logo, design a template for a blog or something like that. If you have any type of skill, you can most likely profit on it. Just check out the weird things that sell there, I mean really, there is a girl there doing a killing by recording herself for 15 seconds on webcam to say anything the customers want. I mean seriously, if she can make money (Mostly based on her looks is my guess) then so can you with your hobbies or skills.

Now remember to make your profile on Fiverr/Freelancer/Odesk look real. If you're not too shy, use a picture of you and don't worry, the odds of your friends ever finding your freelancer profile is zero, so far no one I know has ever found my profiles, mostly since they are too lazy to work as freelancers.

Now it actually is important to fill out your profile info. Make sure to list whatever skills you may have that the customers might need for their business. I mean really, just list everything you excel at.

Tip:Dumb the info down, don't use overly advanced terms to describe it, makes it much easier for your customer to understand. Say you design logos instead of "Graphical design" for example. On my old account, I literally had "I translate shit to Swedish" as part of my description.

Now for posting a Gig. In my opinion, it's best to check out your competition. Look at the best selling gigs in your field and see what they offer. Especially look at the gig descriptions since the best selling gigs probably have the best, most catchy descriptions.

Now, for pictures just go with anything, no one cares much about them unless you work with anything graphical, if it is then you MUST put up some work that you've done to showcase your skills.

Now on Fiverr, there is always the issue with "Gig video". It's basically a feature that allows you to upload a short video about your offer. Now most sit in their webcam and talk in a message. Some record themselves while doing whatever they offer.

Now, I already know most of you are trembling going "Oh but I am too shy to talk in a message, way too shy to show my face!" Yeah, I know. I have never shown my face on a webcam so trust me, if anyone knows a way around this it's me.

You see, you need a gig video. Or well, need is a strong word but basically it's been proven on Fiverr that having a video increased the sales chance with 200%. Now this might sound bogus but it's true, and I will now tell you why.

1) People will think of you as a more serious seller if you have ANY kind of video. Since a video means you've put time into your gig offer, more than the others who have just a basic text description.

2) Buyers can search specifically for sellers with video, so this means your offer wont even show if you don't have a video. Many buyers use this function to only get the most serious sellers.

I will go more into depth of how you can whip up a sales video with little work put into it but still all that extra sales value. That post will be released in the coming week so stay tuned for it! For now lets move on.

Now the last step is of course how we handle the competition. Basically, the trick is to crush the competitor by being better.

Now for this I will once again go on my own field, Swedish translations. Most sellers working with it on Fiverr will translate 500 words to or from Swedish for 5 dollars. The delivery time is usually between 5-10 days. Now, how can I beat that?

Alright, for starters, I know I can translate way more than 500 words in 30 minutes. In thirty minutes I can translate about 700 words if it's just a simple translation. Alright, so instead of translating 500 words like everyone else, I'll go with 600. This means I am already providing a larger quantitiy than my competition. But hold on, I am new to the field and the competitors have a ton of reviews and sales already. Lets make it 700 words, in other words, an estimate of 30 minutes of work per gig.

Alright so time limit. 5-10 days you say? Well sucks for you, I'll put it on three days and offer to have it completed within 24 hours in exchange for five dollars extra, a so called Gig Extra.

So as you can see, I am better and faster than my competition. Now, with a gig video and some examples of my work and any buyer will see that I am way more high-class than any other translator there. In other words, even though I have 0 sales and 0 reviews, I can guarantee that I will have made a sale within 24 hours.

Now to end the awfully long blog post, lets see how much this offer alone could earn me. Now at a minimum, the minimum amount of orders would be 1 a day. That means between 25-30 a month. 30x5 is 150$. Now about half of the customers tend to go for the Extra Fast gig extras, no matter what gig it's about. The end result would then land between 200-300$. That's for this gig, at a minimum. Now most freelancers offer about 5-10 gigs. They do some varied work since if you can translate, that means you can write for example. I don't only translate in Swedish I also write articles in Swedish for bloggers and such.

Now most people in for example translation, writing and such, they order more than one gig per placed order. My average for 600-800 words, tends to be three orders per customer. Now lets say I have 50 customers (I tend to get between 40-60 a month for translation). Lets say 20 of them place just one single order, and the rest place double orders. The first twenty garner me about 150$ for ten hours a work, that is 15$ an hour.

Now the remaining thirty order 2-3 translations per gig. Now, some will order Extra Fast, some wont. Lets say I get a total of 70 translations from those thirty, that's about 450$ for 30 hours of work. So a total of around 600$ for a total of around 40 hours of work. Now thats for one gig. I barely use Fiverr nowadays but when I did, I would have about four-six gigs running at the same time, work about three or four days a week for six-seven hours. For a total of about 2500-3500$  in monthly wage, if you can call it that. Now sure, we're not talking a high salary, but do keep in mind that I only worked half-time compared to a normal person and on top of that I would work directly from home. In my opinion, it's the best part of being a freelancer.

Now that should give you a good idea on how Fiverr works. If anything is unclear or if you want some more in-depth info on anything, don't hesitate to leave your opinion or question in the comment section below. Until then, enjoy. Please share this blog post if you found it interesting or helpful.

My life in freelancing part two!

So as promised, here comes part two! In this post I will cover more specifics of what I have done as a freelancer to show you some examples.

Now my favorite platform for freelancing is still Fiverr. When I got started there, a whole new era in my life started. I quickly gained myself a notority for being fierce against my competition while at the same time providing the BEST translation services for Swedish. Nowadays I am only use Fiverr part time to broaden my experience rather than making an income but I still hang there daily reading the amazing articles the dev team posts, keeping myself updated with the community and such.

Let me start out by explaining that being a freelancer isn't easy. It's one of the best professions there are but at the same time it's one of the roughest ones as well. The reason is simple, you're your own boss and your own employee. If you mess up, make a mistake or deliver a gig* too late, it's ALL ON YOU.

*Gig is the term freelancers use for "job". Start using it to sound more professional and experienced!

No one will be there to pick up the pieces, apologize to the furious customer or anything, it's all up to you and trust me, you will make mistakes. I have never delivered work too late though like many others do once in a while, I am too motivated by the pricetag on the article I am writing or translating to let myself be late with it.

I will be covering Fiverr a lot more in the near future since it's played a major part in my career so I can easily help anyone get started with it. Late today or tomorrow I will be releasing a "Getting Started" post specifically on the topic of Fiverr. I can also announce a sweet surprise for anyone whole follows the help in that post since I will next week release surfire methods on getting popular quickly on Fiverr!

Now being a freelancer is tough as I mentioned. So what you need to do is to make sure you're prepared for it.

You must be dedicated to your customers. Realise that you might have to postpone fun once in a while to get successful. It will all pay off though when you get to reap the fruits of your labor, cold hard cash that is!

In my career as a writer and translator I have managed to stumble upon some amazing things. You get to learn a ton of interesting things as a freelancer since you get in contact with so many different people in various fields. One of my first larger translation gigs for example was a medical research book on the topic of hair loss. Translating scientific terms is much tougher than I thought it'd be...

One of the best parts of being a freelancer is also the way the work pays off the more time you spend in the business. Making five dollars for a shorter article might sound dull to do but if you get happy customers the odds are high they will start paying you better and offer you much better work. For example, when I got started with translating for people in Fiverr, I one day translated a small 400 word blog post for someone. The day after, he contacted me and wanted me to translate the hairloss book I mentioned earlier. Sure, it took me about a week to translate but he also paid me nearly three hundred dollars to do it! So from doing a five dollar gig I suddenly rose to a three hundred one.

So once again the article is getting a tad long. I will leave it at this for now. I will probably keep writing about my career in the future and if there is anything about it you're curious about, don't hesitate to ask in the comment section below!

And as always, I'd appreciate it if you'd share the blog on social media! Only if you like the content so far though.

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.

Sweden Freelance launches!

Hello non-existant readers that will most likely not read this post because it will be too far down!

On this blog I will be writing about various subjects but mostly all will be related to freelancing. I've worked as a freelancer in various different niches and categories for about seven years now. Translating, writing, design, marketing, PR, Social Media and such.

In my work I've experienced quite a lot and run into various situations, both good and bad. Since freelancing is getting more and more popular lately I decided to do what I can to help people out as much as possible.

My goal will be to post a minimum of three times a week but I hope it will end up being more often than that!

If there is anything you're interested in or curious about, feel free to drop a comment and I'll see what I can do. I'll also gladly help out if you're struggling with freelancing!

If you feel like showing this blog some love, feel free to share it on Facebook or Twitter, I wouldn't mind the extra help.