When I started freelancing, I had great experience and solid skills, but very little in my portfolio to help me get work. Rather than wallow in self-pity of the “I’ll never be a successful freelancer!” nature, I built up my business -- and my résumé -- with jobs I found on Craigslist. Now that I’ve got several years of freelance experience under my belt and some regular clients, I still use CL when my calendar is empty, and even sometimes when it’s not.
I hear a lot of freelancers complain that CL jobs are all low-paying and, thus, a waste of their time. Frankly, a lot of them are -- but not all of them. I do only CL jobs that pay well. My very first one was for $40 an hour, and that’s the absolute lowest I’ve ever gone. Since then, they’ve been mostly in the range of $65 to $85 an hour and higher. The jobs are there -- you just have to know how to land them.
Check hotspots (places where you typically find a lot of good possibilities) every day or every other day and respond immediately. If you’re responding to ads that are more than a few days old (or, in some cities, even a few hours old), the position has already been filled-- or they’ve gotten a ton of responses and there are 500 people ahead of you in the advertiser’s inbox. You can also get leads on CL jobs without having to wade through the listings yourself, by visiting job sites like Deborah Ng’s Freelance Writing Jobs or subscribing to a newsletter like Anne Wayman’s Abundant Writing News. Several Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups also provide job listings for various areas of expertise. Once you get a feel for how the whole CL thing works, you’ll find a system that’s right for you. Although I do use shortcuts like Deborah’s site and Anne’s newsletter, I also visit CL myself to hit up the listings under the major cities. Once I find something that sounds good, I use the “e-mail this posting to a friend” option to send any possibilities to myself. Then I sit down for 30 minutes or an hour and blast out the replies using a couple of form letters I’ve created for various types of work.
Now that you know how to find the jobs, do you know how to snag them? Be sure to check out "Send Your Freelance Career Through the Roof With Online Job Banks: Part II, Landing the Gig."
Kristen King is a freelance writer-editor and consultant from Northern Virginia, and the author of Inkthinker (http://www.inkthinker.blogspot.com), which was named one of the top 10 blogs for writers in 2006. Subscribe to Kristen's free e-newsletter at http://www.notes-in-the-margin.com.
