Freelance has long been able to become a separate business area in which millions of people are involved. With the advent of telecommuting and the ability to transfer data over the Internet, the industry of services provided over the network has developed simply at an unprecedented scale, attracting millions of people. Designers, programmers, copywriters and other specialists got the opportunity to earn income without leaving home, working with customers around the world. This became possible due to such a concept as remote freelance exchanges.
Only professionalism
There are several positive aspects to this form of employment. They are mainly associated with the ability of each person, regardless of his education, origin or age, to get additional work that can pay for his existence (and not only). You will not be asked if you have children, will not look at your appearance and will not be treated in a special way due to nationality or religion. You are a performer, from whom one thing is required - a qualitative result in the form of a completed task.
Free schedule
The second point is the ability to work anywhere and anytime. We all know that many people do not like the way to the office, they hate to get up early and are sometimes not happy with their team at work. All this is not suggested by the freelance exchange. It is difficult for a beginner to imagine how this can be, but working remotely, you really build your schedule yourself. And this, in its way, gives freedom to the performer.
Skills improvement
The third advantage that freelance exchanges have (including for beginners) is the opportunity for professional growth. We’ll talk about it in more detail in another section of our article, but now we just note that a freelancer can start earning more by developing their professional skills, searching for other customers, and performing more complex projects. There is fair competition in this area, but there is no boss who will tell you that all the places are occupied and you have no career opportunities. On the contrary, developing as a specialist, you yourself will accept new tasks and, as a result, you will start earning more.
disadvantages
At the same time, a freelance exchange for a beginner can conceal negative aspects. The first is the competition already mentioned. Each site that hosts a portfolio of artists contains hundreds of thousands of profiles. Hundreds of specialists work in each of the niches presented, due to which it can be very difficult to get an interesting order. Your way out is to develop your portfolio, look for customers who will leave feedback about you, work for smaller amounts - but gain some authority.
The second drawback is the need to work at home. In fact, working through freelance exchanges is not always so easy. For beginners, everything looks very cool when no one forces you to rush to the office, get down to business, do not push and do not oversee. In fact, this is often lacking for many of us - so that some external factor encourages us to do our job better. Not only that, at home we are waiting for a lot of such “distracting” activities from work, such as eating, sleeping, talking with relatives - there is also no socialization factor at home - when you communicate with colleagues, discuss the latest news and the like. Believe me, working without this is also not easy.
How to start?
A beginner freelance exchange can be an excellent platform for further development. And it’s not so difficult to start your activity on it - it’s enough to create an artist account and take up the first order. As you understand, from a technical point of view, it is very simple.
Another thing is the need to have certain skills in order to be able to perform the tasks that the customer poses. We will recall them in the next section. But in short, let's put it this way - real experts will certainly be appreciated on the exchanges, while people without the necessary qualifications will simply create a lot of problems for themselves and others. Hence the advice - before you register on the exchange, be sure that you have the skills that are required in a given task.
It is not necessary to be a guru in an area where you would like to try your hand. Any freelance exchange for a beginner provides the same chances of getting a successful order as for a professional. However, you need to improve your skills. This can be done, firstly, with the help of practical tasks (performing simpler orders, increasing their complexity over time); and secondly, through the study of theoretical material, in particular, by watching video tutorials, reading articles and the like. It can be completely free - on the same Youtube you can find hundreds of thousands of lessons on any topic. The main thing is the desire to learn, and then the best freelance exchanges will be up to you.
Scheme of work
If you have never dealt with such services, then, of course, you will be interested to know the general principle of work. Therefore, in this section we will reveal the basis of user interaction with the site. So, suppose you created an artist account, after which you want to take an order. It is simple to do this - most services have a special section in which applications from customers are placed. By answering them, you become a potential contractor in the event that the author of the order chooses you. When this happens - you should get to work.
When the task is completed, you need to notify the system in a certain way, after which the procedure for checking the work done will begin. The customer is given a certain period of time, after which he pays for your work. Money comes, as a rule, to your account - in the future you will be able to order their payment to your e-wallet, card or in any other way.
Of course, certain specific actions may differ in essence or in priority as a whole; but everything happens that way. Weblancer.net exchange, one of the largest in Runet, is a confirmation of this.
Exchange wages
If you do not have experience with exchanges, then you are probably interested in the issue of payments. As already mentioned, they are held in the form of electronic currencies, to the card and in other ways. It should also be clarified that everything depends mainly on the geographical location of the audience of the resource on which you earn.
For example, any freelance exchange (Russia and the CIS countries) accepts the most popular electronic currencies in this region - Webmoney, Yandex.Money, Qiwi - and makes payments in them. That is, you just need to specify your wallet and confirm it in your account.
Payment "separately"
In some cases, the freelance exchange (Ukraine has a service such as Freelance.ua, which can become a vivid example of what we are talking about) can only deal with “mixing” the customer and the contractor, after which all interactions are directly regulated between them. This can be a bad decision for the reason that the contractor has much less means of protection against non-payment of remuneration at the end of the activity. Therefore, we recommend working with services that have reputation indicators that give at least some hope of success, for example, Weblancer.net.
Payment in other payment systems
Those methods of withdrawing funds, as you know, are relevant in our country and a number of neighboring ones. However, this is far from all such resources. There is still an English-speaking audience. So, these are, in fact, foreign freelance exchanges that pay money either directly to the recipient's credit card, or work with systems like PayPal or other online services (common in the West). There are many, but those mentioned are the most popular around the world.
Specify how to withdraw funds before you make them - so that there are no problems in the future.
Capabilities
In fact, the prospects and possible ways of further work in the field of freelance are simply unlimited. These are graphics, and the development of IT technologies, work with texts and more. All this and much more is available to everyone - we can start making good money on this. The main thing is the desire to learn and a little rational thinking. In order for you to understand this, we will demonstrate which freelance exchange (Russia) deserves attention. For example, Fl.ru, Freelance.ru (one of the oldest), Free-lance.ru (a very famous project), Work-Zilla.com.
Foreign services
By analogy with domestic sites, you can find foreign ones - where foreigners provide jobs. They pay there, naturally, more. For example, these are the American oDesk.com, guru.com, Elance.com, origondo.com and others. All these exchanges have a universal profile, but there is always a huge number of people here, which is why it is not so easy to get an order. There are narrowly targeted exchanges, for example proz.com, where translators work exclusively.
It is also worth mentioning interesting Ukrainian services, for example Freelancejob.com.ua. This is the freelance exchange (Ukraine), which is interesting in that it contains indicative examples of cost and tasks. Thus, it is much easier to understand how much a particular task will cost. There is still freelancehunt.com - it is beneficial to use it for the reason that a large number of both customers and performers from all CIS countries are gathered here. Finally, if you yourself are from Ukraine, kabanchik.com.ua, a portal for providing micro-services, will be a useful service (deliver a parcel, transport a package of products, and so on).
Russian exchanges
After a brief description of foreign projects, of course, mention should be made of domestic sites. In particular, these are services for webmasters (Telderi, GoGetLinks, Sape), for students (Help-s.ru, Reshaem.net), exchanges for engineers and designers (Projectants.ru, MyHome.ru, Fotogazon), for lawyers (Pravoved ), for copywriters (Advego, Etxt), for programmers (Modber, Devhuman) and others. There are a lot of them, and each service specializes in a certain direction, depending on what services are offered and ordered here.
Aggregators
In addition to the exchanges themselves, the so-called “aggregators” can also be used to find work. They are services for collecting ads from several exchanges. For example, Ayak, Donanza and SpyLance can be called the largest. The advantage of such sites is that you see a lot of ads from all directories at once, and thus, there is no need to register on each separately.
Service selection
In fact, there are a large number of exchanges today. You can learn about them as your professional activity develops. You can start with any one service (even a large one). Perhaps, after the promotion of your account there, you will not want to move to another site.
To know where to start working, see how big and old the freelance exchange is. Reviews about the service also play a big role - by them you can understand how convenient the site is at work, and whether any worthwhile orders can be received here.