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The Online Freelancing Guide

The Online Freelancing Guide 1 The Online Freelancing Guide - Introduction and History

The vast majority of people in the workforce are employees of companies—but many of them wish they weren’t. They dream of the freelancing lifestyle, where you can be your own boss, work your own hours, do what you want to do, and earn as much as your abilities allow you. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Well, many notions about freelancing are romanticized: it isn’t the panacea that full-time workers imagine. But even those with a realistic, balanced view of being a freelancer have, until recently, often been stymied in their efforts to adopt this style of work, for one simple reason: the difficulty associated with consistently finding work.

Freelancers must not only be very good at whatever their professions are, they must be strong businesspeople—especially, they must excel at marketing and selling themselves. Freelancers succeed or fail largely on the basis of their ability to consistently find clients and get projects to work on. With traditional freelancing, this is both difficult and expensive to do. And as a new freelancer, it’s even more so.

But the Internet is changing everything. The last few years have seen the rise of a whole new type of freelancing based around the use of freelancing marketplace websites. These services have revolutionized the process by which freelancing work is done, by making it far easier for freelancers to find clients who need work done, and for clients to find qualified people willing to do it. The result has been a veritable explosion of freelancing activity: online freelancing, or Internet freelancing, is growing at a tremendous rate, with some marketplace sites experiencing monthly double-digit growth in billings in 2010.

The Online Freelancing Guide will provide you with the information you need to determine if online freelancing is a good match for your work, and if it is, help you to make the most of it. In this short introductory section I’ll provide you with a brief overview of the site, including some history on why I wrote it, general information on how the site is structured and organized, and tips to help you navigate the Guide using your Web browser. I also include some “bookkeeping” material here: a notice about copyright, some important acknowledg­ments, and a bit of information about me.

The Online Freelancing Guide 1 The Online Freelancing Guide - Introduction and History