Selling Yourself
There are many way to make money online. Sure you can make money from Adsense and other ad networks, but what about selling services you can provide? Take a hard look in the mirror and decide what you can and can’t do. The beauty of selling your talents online is you past work acts as the qualifications. You don’t need fancy degrees in this or that, you just need to know how to complete the work.
The hardest part can be forming a back catalogue of work, known as a portfolio. If your just starting out then you have nothing to show, so people are less inclined to take you on. You can either try and push through this phase or produce work for yourself to primarily act as portfolio content. Once you have a developed portfolio of work you will need somewhere to show it all off. This would be a good time to find a catchy domain name and develop a site to suit your services needs.
There are many components to making money online, simply putting all your effort into one sector can become boring and maybe not be as profitable as diversifying.
Finding work can also be tricky to begin with. The best option would be to post on active webmaster forums announcing your services, showing your portfolio off. You could then move on to job forums, people ask for specific jobs to be completed. You tender for the job, giving a quote and hopefully given your good portfolio you get taken on by the client. When I first started to look into offering services that I can provide myself, I was astonished at the sheer amount of money being thrown at things I could do! It seemed silly to me to ignore this possible stream of income.
So my message is this, sell yourself online. If you can design logos, code websites etc then look into the market and find a gap for you to fit in. People want jobs doing all the time, and people pay. They pay for knowledge and time, that’s ultimately what you are selling. You’re selling yourself.
I want to move into graphic design, offering my services for logo and banner design. I have no qualifications in design, no certificates to show I can use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, yet I have years of experience with both. So I need to depend upon a solid portfolio of work. From reading various forums I came across a quote similar to this:
Self taught people have confidence, they had no teacher to help them out during the hard times.
I know people that run small the medium size businesses here in the UK. They have no degrees in business or anything like that. They have the drive and focus to succeed. Confidence is key in this world; you have to be confident in what you can do. Then you need to get out there and do it!
