This article is guest blog by Sarah Lam.

Freelancing is not as easy as it seems. From quitting your day job to finding freelance projects that pay well, you need be careful in everything you do. Since freelancing is rather new in Malaysia, you might not know that there are many sites that you can try your luck in getting the best projects.

Common Malaysian sites such as Lowyat Forum and AsiaPartTime provide local opportunities but what if you want to try international projects that can be more difficult and yet more fulfilling, where do you go?

There are sites that require biddings while others are more flexible in terms of applying for the projects.

If you want to try bidding for projects you never dreamed of working on before, Elance is the best place to start.

Why Elance?

• Elance provides three free bids for you every month. Upgrade your membership if you want up to 20 bids or more. (It is not compulsory to upgrade since registration is free).
• Elance is using escrow to process payment so you are well protected from scammers.
• Elance has a huge database with thousands of projects to choose from so you can browse through the projects and pick the best three to bid on.
• Elance connects you to international clients and if you are successful, you stand a chance to have a long lasting relationship with your clients.

Other bidding sites include:

• Scriptlance
• Project4Hire
• Guru

However, apart from having to apply for projects, you can get potential clients to approach you in a simple way.

By using Malaysia Craigslist, you can advertise your services and potential clients will be able to contact you should they be interested in your services. While this is not a guaranteed way to score freelance projects, but it is worth a try. At least I managed to get a job through my ad on Malaysia Craigslist.

The key is to post your ad in the suitable category and the right country (I.e.: Malaysia).

Wish you all the best form us.

Freelancing is an attractive business as long as it is done with a proper spirit. Like any other business, you also have to work hard to reach to the success, but the added Freedom-Factor associated with freelancing makes it a lucrative way to go. However, if you find that you have lost your passion for the work, or in other words, can not motivated yourself enough to deal with the challenges, then it certainly is not a good news for you freelance career. Therefore, it is extremely important to keep yourself charged up and not dwindle under pressure. This article will discuss some of the methods that have been widely employed by the freelancers all over the world.

If you are a photographer or copywriter, it would be best if you always keep hunting after new and fresh works and snapshots. One good way to do that would be to subscribe with magazines related to new and innovative ideas.

Another way would be to always remember that accepting ‘Failure’ is tough and hardly acceptable, thus you always have strive to get the best out of what you doing and keep staying as far as possible from the word ‘Failure’. This should perk you up right away. One more way would be to think about the positive sides for which you have initially chosen this field of freelance business. Remembering those will surely bring the motivation back to your work.

Some freelancers engage in multiple types of work, such as graphics designer as well as writer. Therefore, try to have projects for both the sides and thus if one makes you bored at times, concentrate on the other. This mixing will bring freshness each time you start a topic. Few other freelancers will mix their activities between various day-works and projects on hand. This is also a good way to not become bored in one specific task.

Thus as you can there are various ways to encourage oneself to go about completing the projects. If you can successfully ride out this lack of motivation factor, surely you can succeed in this great world of freelance opportunities.

The earning potential in freelance business is pretty good and as such many freelancers enjoy a handsome amount on regular basis. And when you consider the fact that you do not have to work for others, and you are your own boss, the earning then seems more worthy. However, what if you want to extend your income beyond the “Pretty Satisfactory” to some higher level? Though it may not be easy, but certainly is possible, and some freelancers already have reached that level of greater satisfaction.

This article will illustrate few of the ways to achieve this success:

Charge Higher

This is certainly one of the ways, but many freelancers avoid this route due to the fear of insecurity and loss of projects. However, if you can do everything regarding the projects with perfection, do not give the clients any room to complain, then you certainly can have an attempt to spike your price up, and there will be a greater chance that clients will eventually accept it.

Expanding the Business

It has always been the case that freelance business owners are earning a lot more than the average individual earning. Though it is true that expanding a business is a laborious and complicated task, but the end result is good enough that will easily offset for the initial hard work. You can expand your business by hiring other freelancers to outsource your projects and do other outside but related activities, or you may want to develop more skills to take up different kinds of projects.

Selling Rare Information

This aspect of freelancing is often overlooked due to various reasons, but the essence is, if you can develop skills in some area that have high demand in the market but very few people are actually having a working knowledge that can be used to gain profit, you will be in some serious business as you can charge even triple your normal rate to distribute that knowledge, because in that case, clients will not mind about spending some extra cash if you can truly guide them into the right path.

Physical Product

Freelancing is not limited into intellectual products. If you can design and develop a physical object that may be really useful, you will find a great demand for it, may be the drudgery are quite problematic in this arena, but the reward is high as well for a truly remarkable physical product.

Passive Income Stream

It is hard to find anything that will consistently generate good earning with no or little work from your part. But if you really can find, then it will make your life a lot easier.

Thus, if you can adopt any of the above options, you will have a way to earn that extra to fly your overall freelance experience to a greater degree of satisfaction.

Freelancing may be a dream job to many people worldwide. But the fact is, that the failure rate in this business is also quite high. However, the surprising thing is, this high failure rate is not due to the fact that the freelancers are not competent at what they do, but for the lack of discipline and knowledge about the business itself. This article will explain all this misconceptions in a series of seven parts. This first part will focus on the issue of: UNDERESTIMATING THE JOB.

There are many people out there who think or spread the word that freelancers can a six-figure income yearly with just two to three hours of work everyday. Well that is a compete fabrication and it is absolutely impossible with this little amount of work. Even if you are able to earn that much yearly, before that you have to go through a lot of things and have to be clear about certain things such as:

Business Skill

Freelancers has to have some good skills in different business activities such as basic accounting, marketing and sales. You need these skills to manage your earnings, negotiate and handle clients successfully as not all the clients will be same. Also, skills in especially ‘Sales’ is important when you want to promote your work.

Feel free to read up Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. It is a very good book to learn up the cost-effective ways of marketing for your freelance business.

Relation with Client

You have to understand that when one client has been served properly, it is not the end of everything. As this client will come back to you if he later wants another job to be done, but to let that happen, you have to be nice with the client by employing some very basic ‘People Skill’, alongside being professional. This will help you to develop a relationship with client based on reliability and respect; and gradually small clients will become big ones and the big ones will become bigger in no time.

Value of Friendship

Do not hesitant to be good friends of people whom you know, in your workplace (if you are part-time freelancer), your neighbourhood or your relatives. Because you never know when they can become helpful, some of them may become your clients, some of them may be freelancing as well or some of them may bring you contracts. So, always be in good touch with people as it will not only help you in business but also will make your life more enjoyable.

So with this I’ll end the first part of this series, in the next part we will see the second failure - Overestimating Your Abilities. Just Sign up with our Auto-Feed Manager to deliver the next part to your Inbox automatically.

This post is summarized from the FreelanceFolder. Photo by Standord University.

In many occasions, the freelancers, especially the newbie freelancers are under the cloud of a false impression that basically all of their earnings will make to their bank accounts. However, this is not true at all. We are showing some of the avenues that will end up having a share in your income.

Freelance Job Sites

To be a successful bidder, you have to register with some freelance websites (e.g. GoFreelance.com, IamFreelancer.com, etc)  that let you ask for projects. In many of them you can register yourself as a free member. But the problem is, if you are a free member, your profiles will be buried down under thousands of other people.

The only way to consistently be on top range of the list is to be a paid member. Thus, the clients can have an easy access to your profile. In this case, not only you have to pay a membership every year, but for every successful bid, the broker may charge you a percentage of the deal. The incurring more cost from your part.

Workable Hours and Billable Hours

The natural trend is to charge the client only for the hours that is put into operation in carrying out the project work only but not the long negotiating hours communicating with the clients or keeping him abreast about the latest development. This extra tasks when provided to multiple clients, can add up to some significant extra job. The logical way out should be to charge the client for these communication and negotiation sittings. Many individual in other profession do that already as trend.

Accessories Charges

To do a successful business, you have to spend some extra bucks on various other helpful entities, though this shouldn’t be considered as “Hidden Cost”, but many freelancers often forget this. Thee extras probably will be Software, Educational eBooks, faster international connection, backup medias etc.

Outsourcing

You have to outsource some part of your job at some point or another, which again entails an extra cost. Outsourcing actually can benefit you more but in any case, you can not evade the charges.

As you can see from the above, not all of your income will go under your credit, as there are many other side-expenses.