7 Best Freelancing Skills Students Can Build to Get Regular Freelancing Projects and Make Money Online
In this digital era, the internet is available to almost everyone through a smartphone or a computer. Therefore, freelancing has become one of the most sought after career options today for the young generation. Freelancing is one of the best ways a student can earn money online without hampering his studies or college life. It gives you complete freedom and several options to adjust freelancing projects according to your convenience. Besides, it allows you to work part-time, make a good living, and be self-dependent.
But the question that comes to every student’s mind is, as a student how they can effectively and efficiently utilize their time to start freelancing and make money online?
When you make your mind to start working as a freelancer, you will see that there are many fields in freelancing that you can start tomorrow with your existing knowledge and skill-set. In the field of freelancing, the variety of work is limitless and almost everything a business needs can be provided by a freelancer. Such as – search engine optimization, content writing, social media marketing, graphics designing, web designing, app development, YouTube content creation are to name a few.
If you are new to freelancing and never tried it before then it is quite obvious that you have no experience in this field. But that is definitely not the end of the road for you. Every year the number of freelancers is increasing and many of them start with little to no experience at all. But all they have is the will to start and determination to become successful in what they want. The truth is you have to get into freelancing to know what it is all about, even if you have never tried it before.
Here are the 7 freelancing options for students to choose from if you are serious about it and want to multiply your self-made income while studying.
But before we start, let’s see a few top-rated freelancing websites where you can discover several freelancing jobs depending on your skills.
- Fiverr
Fiverr is freelancers’ heaven. It lists gigs (freelancing jobs) on almost everything. Depending on your skills and expertise you can create your gig page mentioning all the details related to the job that you want to work on. Afterward, clients can buy your gig and when you deliver you get paid. - Upwork
Upwork (AKA Elance-oDesk) is another great platform for freelancers. It helps businesses find freelancers like you who can deliver the quality job on time while helping freelancers making a steady income. - Freelancer
Freelancer is a freelancing marketplace where you can start working as a freelancer if you are good at something that has a demand online. You can bid on projects that suit you and fit into your skill-set, and make a stable income. - PeoplePerHour
PeoplePerHour is a freelancing community where you can discover a ton of freelancing jobs based on your skills. - Guru
Guru is a marketplace for freelancers, where nearly 3 million professionals get a variety of freelancing jobs matching their talents. You can join the Guru platform, find projects related to your skills, work on them, and get paid for what you have delivered. - WriterAccess
WriterAccess is one of the best platforms for you if you are really good at writing excellent contents. It has more than 20,000 writers along with many editors and content strategists. You can get regular writing projects from this platform if you can build and maintain a strong reputation. - 99Designs
99Designs is the best freelancing job platform for creative designers. From company logo designing to business website creation, from book cover designing to video production, you will find almost all freelancing jobs related to designing at 99Designs marketplace. Besides, it hosts many design contests where skilled designers participate and the winner gets rewarded. - DesignCrowd
DesignCrowd is a designer’s den. This platform lets designers find millions of logo and graphics designing remote jobs in a few clicks. So, if you are a graphics designer, you can surely count DesignCrowd in. - DesignContest
If you are a professional graphics or web designer and want to try your hand in freelancing, you should definitely check DesignContest. - ARC (CodementorX)
This is one of the best platforms for freelance web and mobile app developers. You will get 100s of remote development projects that you can pick from the ARC marketplace and get paid online. - CloudPeeps
CloudPeeps is another full-stack freelancing platform for peeps (freelance professionals). If you are good at SEO, social media, paid ads, content writing, email marketing, designing, etc. you can get loads of freelancing jobs from CloudPeeps community.
So now without any further ado, let’s see the 7 best freelancing skills a student can build to get regular freelancing projects and make money online while working from home.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as an essential skill-set in recent years due to increasing demand for SEOs across all industries. SEO helps a website to get more organic visibility and thus traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. As companies are trying to improve their sites’ rankings on search engines, they are hiring specialized SEO professionals to help them reach their business goals and increase their sales.
As an SEO freelancer, your job is to declutter and optimize your clients’ website in a way that it naturally attracts more traffic from search engines with the help of keywords and key phrases that brands’ customers are most likely to search with. You need to update the client’s website according to the current search engine guidelines and rules.
In SEO freelancing, there is no particular education required but there are certain skills you should possess that will help you doing the best optimization and directing the search engine traffic to the client’s website. As an SEO freelancer, you should develop an analytical and creative mind to analyze each and every step in directing the traffic and in improving the organic rankings of the website.
There are a lot of good SEO courses available online that you can explore and try to build the required SEO skill-sets.
2. Social Media Marketing and Management
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. are gaining popularity with each passing moment. Almost all small, medium-sized, and large scale businesses are using several social media channels to promote their products and services and grow their brands’ awareness.
With a few several thousands of followers, one can easily reach out to the potential audience of a brand and start promoting its goods. Unlike a commercial advertisement on television or newspaper, social media promotions are more personalized and interactive in nature. Hence, if you are popular on social media channels among your followers, you can encash your popularity by positioning several brands’ products while helping them make more sales. And the best part of this is, there are a lot of businesses out there that will gladly pay you to make their social media profiles up and running.
If you choose social media marketing as a freelancing option, your essential job will be to advertise your clients’ products or services and find ways to increase their traffic and sales conversions. You will be responsible for creating attractive social media posts and contests for your clients, interacting with their users, and making their social media profiles stand out from the rest of the competition.
The freelancing jobs in this field are perfect for students especially who are enthusiast with the latest in social media and want to gain more exposure in this field.
Similar to search engine optimization, to work as a social media marketer, you don’t have to own any particular college degree. Instead, you have to develop your social media marketing skills to effectively help your clients attaining more sales. And when you have these skills, you can get hundreds of such freelance social media projects from multiple freelancing marketplaces.
3. Content Writing and Marketing
Content writing is one of the most demanding online jobs among college students. Students with prior experience in high-quality content writing have great opportunities of being recruited as freelance content writers by companies worldwide.
Content writing is probably one of the best paying freelancing jobs for students if they can steadily deliver top-notch, original contents to their online clients. This is more or less an evergreen freelancing option considering the fact that businesses and brands will always require contents to market their products and services online. Besides, freelance content writing gives you a lot of flexibilities in terms of time-management, and opportunities to work from anywhere in the world with a minimal setup.
In the beginning, you should start writing on sites like Linkedin Pulse, Medium, etc. Don’t limit your topic selection to any particular niche and do focus on writing painstaking contents, especially if you want to showcase yourself as an expert freelance content writer. Use the initial write-ups as samples to entice new clients. Later on, when you get paying clients you may have to write a variety of contents for them including blog posts, landing page contents, sales copies, social media contests, and many more.
4. Web and UI-UX Designing
A web designer is a professional who is responsible for the front-end designing of a website or a web application. Web designers program all the design elements in the right order, code the style sheets, and make the user interface of the website.
With all the great online resources and tools available today, anyone could easily become a website designer. But, that doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to become a top-notch web design freelancer. Although you can start here, you have to keep on developing your designing skills to consistently win new freelance designing projects.
Remember, user experience (UX) and web usability design are the two major skills that you must master in order to become a successful self-employed web designer. These two skills will allow you to design websites with better engagement and help you understand the psychology behind web designing and sales.
When you have sufficient skills, you will get a ton of such designing projects on the internet that you can do from your home at your convenient time.
5. Logo and Graphics Designing
One of the most demanding jobs in the freelancing industry is the logo and graphic designing. Big companies, small business owners, and even many self-employed individuals are always looking for someone to design their company logo, website banners, social media imageries, and other graphical assets for their businesses. You will find a variety of graphic designing projects available on multiple freelancing websites on the internet. Try to take those projects and start working on them to gain experience along the way.
However, you need to be creative and really good at graphic designing as competition in this freelancing field is exceptionally high. The right way to start is by working for small designing projects and steadily taking on the bigger ones. This will give you a better experience alongside a better reputation as a designer in the freelancing community.
6. Web and Mobile App Development
Web development has traditionally been one of the most in-demand industries to be working in as a freelancer. The demand for remote web and app developers is continuously growing, so the potential to find new clients and have a lucrative freelance app development career is strongly in your favor.
However, web and mobile app development projects require expertise on more than one computer programming language. The more technologies and programming languages you know, the more projects you will be able to accept, making this a vital first step.
Initially, start with languages that are both versatile and in-demand, such as Python, Blockchain, etc. and continue building your experience on more technologies over time. Continue to learn new programing languages and technologies to prevent you from becoming outdated as a developer and obviously expand your freelancing clientele as your skill-set grows.
7. YouTube Channel Promotion
YouTube may not be the quickest source of earning money online but it is definitely a compatible method for students to make a dependable side-income. Earnings from YouTube videos may not transform you from mere a student to a millionaire but you surely can make handsome money from YouTube after a few initial months of time. You just have to upload your own, high-quality video contents regularly after starting your channel and when you think that you are earning enough from this platform; you can even plan of taking it as your full-time profession and source of bread and butter.
First of all, you need to create and host great video contents that will entertain, educate, and add values in some ways to your audiences’ life. Your content should be informative as well as entertaining for your audience. After starting your channel in the beginning, you may get no or a few views, but you should not lose your hope, instead hold it strong and keep on uploading videos on a regular basis. With continuous learning and improvement, you can surely mark yourself among the profitable student YouTubers.
Wrapping Up:
Freelancing can be quite daunting at the beginning of your journey. However, once you get used to it, things will become much easier for you. Besides, you will know the flow of how things work, how to bid for projects, how to win new clients, and what clients expect from you. With enough dedication and determination, you can go a long way in freelancing and what seemed impossible at the beginning would become a reality in the near future.
An advanced All-in-One Digital Marketing Course.
Mentored by Mr. Soumya Roy, the Founder, CEO of PromozSEO Web Marketing Academy.
Being an entrepreneur and digital marketer, he loves to share his knowledge and experience in topics related to internet marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, branding, entrepreneurship, and many more.
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