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How to Start Freelancing in 9 Steps

1. Define your goals for freelancing

It all starts with knowing your goals for starting your freelance business.

You wouldn't get in your car and start driving if you didn't have a destination, and you shouldn't start a freelance business without a destination either.

Without a destination, it's hard to know what direction to move. Goals provide that destination for starting your freelancing business.

Start with why you want to start freelancing

Simon Sinek is famous for his TED talk encouraging the audience to "Start With Why."

Every day, you'll need to motivate yourself to find clients and do exceptional work for them – and the first step is understanding your own "why."

Why do you want to become a freelancer in the first place?

To create some income on the side?

To replace your full time income?

How much do you want to earn while freelancing?

The reason why you want to become a freelancer will be your north star for whether or not you are successful.

2. Choose which skills you'll start freelancing with

Whether you're set to become a freelancer full time or on the side, your business will be built around the unique skills you have to offer. Those skills are your greatest asset.

So step one is identifying the different skills you've built over the years that other people may not have and want to pay YOU to use.

Start with a simple spreadsheet. In the first column, start listing each individual skill you can think of.

 

Start freelancing with skills from previous jobs

It'll be easiest to start with all of the skills that you've already been paid to leverage. It doesn't matter if the job was full time or part time, as long as you were being paid.

If an employer was willing to pay you to do that work, chances are that you're pretty good at it! That's a skill you can likely leverage to start a freelance business.

Think about your last several jobs: what were you being paid to do for those companies?

Don't hold back – it may be customer service, graphic design, photography, or financial modeling.

If those roles required creativity or use of a specific software, it's even more likely that someone would be willing to pay YOU rather than take the time to learn that skill themselves.

Some common software examples would be Adobe Photoshop, Figma, Sketch, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, and so on