14 Freelance Career Options for the Self-Starter

Freelancers are an interesting group of people. They hate the concept of having a boss looking over their shoulders and have excellent self-discipline. If you’re thinking of entering the wonderful world of freelancing, consider these 14 career options.

It isn’t an exhaustive list of career options, but they’ll give you a good place to start. You must have some knowledge of the online world as these options all require the use of the Internet to find work and enhance your skills.

See if any of these 14 options suit you and your skillset.

1. Graphic Design

Graphic design is perfect for the Internet as it’s where you can reach as many people as possible with a few images. Gain the trust of a few clients and it can snowball from here. Make a gallery of your work and wait for the clients to come rolling in. This is a very competitive freelancing career to enter, though.

2. eBay Trading

eBay traders only need to set up an account and they’re ready to go. It doesn’t cost them anything to get started. In fact, the only expenses you have to deal with come from running your auctions and buying the products in the first place. Have an intimate knowledge of the field you’re trading in before you embark on your new career, though.

3. Amazon Trading

Amazon is more of a site for selling things close to the retail price. You’ll rarely find a bargain here. If you can pick items up for cheap elsewhere, you can sell them through Amazon. You’ll have to pay a fee each time your item sells, and this is deducted from the amount the buyer pays.

4. Web Design

Web design is similar to graphic design. It’s a competitive industry and the Internet is the ideal setting for showing your images online. Utilize marketplaces dedicated to web design for selling templates and offering your bespoke design services. You can specialize in websites for any platform, including WordPress and Joomla.

5. Audio Typist

An audio typist is someone who sits down and types out a transcript of an audio recording. It’s boring and quite dull, but it pays you for putting very little effort into your work. You will need some skill at getting everything down and noting down the context of each sentence, especially for more complicated subjects.

6. Written Translation

If you know another language, put it to good use by offering your services as a translator. You’ll work as a more advanced version of Google Translate. You need to have a great deal of accuracy as you’ll need to put together complete sentences which read well. Ensure you’re fluent in your chosen language before entering translation.

7. Proofreaders

Proofreaders sit at a desk and read through pieces of text. They hunt for errors and mark them down. You must have a good grasp of proper English grammar and the differences between US and UK English styles to succeed in this field. There’s lots of proofreading work around from Indian and Pakistani clients.

8. Cartoonists

Cartoons remain a popular way to express yourself. It’s a skilled job and not everyone can do it. Make an online store and sell some of your cartoons. You can get work with specific publications or you can make posters and t-shirts and sell those. You have a lot of flexibility over what you do as a professional cartoonist.

9. Photographers

Photographers go out into the world and sell stock photographs or take direct commissions. It’s partially based online and partially based in the real world. Most photographers market themselves as event photographers. They’ll advertise themselves online and meet with clients in real life. Again, this is a highly competitive industry.

10. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can bring in lots of passive marketing if done correctly. It’s the practice of making a website and placing an ad on the site. For every ad click, you gain a certain amount of money. It’s slow to get off the ground, but if you do it correctly you can make quite a bit of money. A lot of professionals use it to supplement their incomes.

11. Reputation Building

The online reputation builder is essentially a consultant. You advise people on how they can improve their online reputations. It tends to split into two branches. You can offer to enhance reputations or eliminate bad reputations. You’ll need a few years of marketing experience to be successful in this role.

12. Marketing Consultant

As a marketing consultant, you’ll take on the role of an advisor. You’ll take a look at the marketing strategies of companies and tell them where they can improve. You can earn a decent living wage working as an online marketing consultant. You can even convert your new freelance career into a workshop where you sell talks and guides.

13. Programmers

Programmers have always been in very high demand. Your job is to make apps, program software, and think of innovative solutions. All you need to do is send the code to the client. The difficulty comes in making yourself stand out from every other programmer in the industry.

14. Technical Consultant

In short, this is a fancy name for an online computer repairperson. You set up a website where people can ask you for help with technical issues, for a small fee. You can make quite a bit of money from this if you deal with more advanced problems. Later on, you might even hire other consultants to cope with the increasing workload.

Article provided by Korha: Hello, my name is Korah. I graduated from the University of California and  now work as a freelance writer for College-Paper.org. After graduation, I worked as a freelancer – web design, proofreading and translation. But now I found myself in writing – and it’s great!