Getting Gigs
The most important thing about being a freelancer is you need to find enough jobs to support yourself. If you don’t have paying clients, you don’t have income. For the most part (especially getting started), my clients are “who you know” people. Friends or family of friends that needed websites for their business or their idea. But over time I have found a number of resources to find gigs. These are great for me at this stage of the game.
- Craigslist: A free website where people can go and list information on anything they are looking for, Craigslist is pretty good for finding gigs. The site is broken down by region, and they recently expanded to a lot of new ones. I’d be careful with who you are dealing with on Craigslist though, because it is free and anyone can post.
- FreelanceSwitch Job Boards: As a resource for freelancers, FreelanceSwitch provides lots of great advice for the freelancer, as well as job boards broken down by designing, programming, writing and misc.
- 37Signals Gigs: Another set of gig boards by 37Signals.
- Authentic Jobs: This is my favorite site of the ones listed. It’s organized by full time/freelance, design/development, and most of the jobs for freelance have a location listing of “Anywhere,” which opens up a lot of options for someone like me.
I should mention that with FreelanceSwitch and 37Signals, they also have a listing for “Anywhere,” but Authentic Jobs has much bigger numbers (at the moment at least). The last three also are people paying for that space, so it might be a little more legit than Craigslist.
UPDATE: Today (6/12), FreelanceSwitch had a nice post on How NOT to Apply for a Freelance position. Pretty good timing if you ask me!
Thanks Joe, good links.I’d agree with being careful on craigslist — for web development a lot of the poster’s strategy is to have a lot of people give them “test” designs. This equates to you spending time working on something that they may or may not even hire you to do, or spending time helping the poster by inadvertently letting them use your design as a guide for whoever they actually hire.
Joey,
What bothers me about my Biology major is that most of the careers are pretty static, and if you don’t know what you exactly want to do you might end up in a clinic asking people for another blood sample for DNA testing for 11/hr.
Oh right, I don’t know what I want to do.
It won’t be all that bad, considering I can always tell myself ‘I’m going back to grad school…’ although that’ll get old after a year. My other option is to live up in Philly with my sister and find a higher paying labwork job for Merck or something.
I guess my point is that I think freelancing sounds cool and exciting. With the gig searching it seems like we’re in the same boat at the moment, somewhat.
Cheers,
Bobek