Hey there. If you're in the startup phase of your online business and you're not quite ready to launch your product and services, but you want to earn a little bit of revenue, then you want to listen to this podcast. We're going to look into the world of freelancing here on the Resilient Faith Online Show. Welcome. I'm Arissa Shadwick, host of the Resilient Faith Online Show. I'm an online marketing coach and certified copywriter. In this podcast, you'll find a different perspective to the external and internal challenges we face as online content creators. Join me for some inspiration and practical tips as we create positive change online. To connect with me and my private Facebook group, go to marissah.com forward slash community. Oh, hello. How is everyone doing today? Thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. We're going to talk about earning revenue from home. And I titled this podcast, How to Start Earning Money from Home. So clever, right? So we're going to talk about this because sometimes when people are starting their online business and they're in that startup phase, they have a lot of things that they're building, like their website and they're in content creation mode. Maybe they started blogging or they started a podcast, but they're not really earning some revenue. And you want to offset some of your startup costs. So one way you can do that is by doing temporary freelance work. Freelance work is a great way to do that. So today I'm going to share some ideas of possible freelance work that you could do. Now, this came up because in my mastermind, I have someone that is very, very talented, this gentleman, and he's in the process of creating his business, but we noticed a skill set that he had. Oh wow, the you know, you caught that. I've read that through so many times. And all of a sudden, the idea came up that maybe he should do editing as a little side hustle. And so, of course, many of us, including myself, I said, I'll hire you. Because I had so much copy that was writing, but I needed someone to just look at it and give it a once over, not really a line-by-line thing, but just catch like big things that maybe I put an S at the end of something that shouldn't be plural. Because when we're writing, we do a lot of edits and we do end up with a little bit of writing fatigue or copy fatigue. And pretty soon we just don't see it. We run it through all the filters, we run it through Grammarly, we run it through the editors in WordPress, but we just don't see everything. And those tools don't always pick up everything. And so sometimes it's nice to have a second pair of eyes to take a look at something and just point out, oh, you know, here you started with plural and here you're talking singular, or here you capitalize all these letters except this one word, you know, those kind of things. Or here you need a question mark instead of a period. And so it's really nice to have someone do that. And I'm willing to pay for that. So I hired him a number of times to go through some email sequences and a sales page and things like that. And all of a sudden, he's earning revenue. And I had a colleague of mine that also hired him to do this too. And it's not hard to do. In fact, you can easily collect money from someone that wants you to do some freelance work through PayPal. It's as simple as that. So I'm gonna give you some ideas because I know my listeners are really talented, and so I'm gonna name off some things just to kind of stir the creativity. Now, some things, of course, like design is a given. Maybe they create like freebies, like lead magnets are really good at Canva and they can do design work, or maybe they're web design people that can do web design really nicely. So that's a nice little side hustle. Of course, writing is a great way to do freelance work, and you can designate what type of writing that you want to do, whether it's show notes or whether it's articles or blog posts and the word count and so forth. And you can give them a time frame of how much time you need to do that so you're not overwhelmed, especially if you have another job and you're trying to do this on the side, literally, it is a side hustle, then you want to be able to make it very clear what you do and do not do. So for those that maybe have another job, or those of you that are still in startup mode and you're not quite ready yet to promote your products or services, you can do this type of freelance work. Another type of design work would be logos. Logos sounds really fun. If I was artistic, I would design logos, but I'm not artistic. But logo design would be a great way. And nowadays there's a lot of tools, but maybe someone doesn't want to go through the process of creating their own logo and they'd rather pay you some money to do the logo. Another type of work that could be of interest to you is doing voiceover work. Now, I don't know if you're the type of person that likes physical books, Kindle books, or audiobooks, but you know how popular Audible is. And not all authors read the books. They hire someone to read the book and it becomes the audiobook. So there are platforms where you can post samples of your voice and you can put your profile and you can put a little bit of your information in there. So people that are looking for someone to do the recording of a book or maybe something else, a commercial, they would hire you. Editing is another, like my friend I was saying, does editing now. That's another possibility, and you can designate what type of editing you do because there's different types of editing. If it's just looking over for grammar, you know, you would designate what that is and how you want the information sent to you. In other words, you want a Word document, do you want a Google document? You can detail all of those things so that people know up front. And it stays within the guidelines that would make it a win for you and an easy process to be able to shorten the turnaround time and return the finished product to your customer. Social media is another possibility for freelance work. Nowadays, there are many tools that can allow you to schedule social media posts. So you can do that when you have margin and schedule out posts on various platforms. Or maybe you want to specialize, you maybe you want to specialize with Instagram or just Facebook or just LinkedIn. You could do that as well. There could be people that just want to be very visible on LinkedIn and want help with that. So social media is another option, and there's many possibilities or many combinations of services that you can provide. Another possibility is photography. Now, with photography, you want to have a place where they can see some of the photos that you've taken. And it could be for a restaurant or it could be headshots for an entrepreneur. I mean, it's endless the type of photography that you can do. And again, you can specialize in a certain type of photography, and you can even do it just locally. Maybe you photograph children or maybe you photograph babies. So you can decide if photography is something that I like, what would I enjoy taking pictures of? And you can begin to offer your services to people, both to maybe entrepreneurs for professional headshots or for consumers that just want family photos and that type of thing. Another is translator. If you speak a second language, you could potentially have a freelance gig where you translate either in written form or in audio form some type of text or content. So that's another thing you can consider as well. Another type of freelance work would be data entry. Maybe there's a business, organization, maybe someone local with leads and so forth. They need to get the data in so that they can review analytics and track things. So data entry could be possibly something that you can do as well. So the list is only limited by your imagination. If you're an organizer, you can find a way to provide freelance work for that as well, or some type of customer service work, or if you're really good at sales, maybe you can help an entrepreneur close a sale or take at least the initial call and be able to screen people. So the ideas are endless. It just depends on what you like to do, the time of day you want to do this, if it's in the nooks and crannies of your day, or if you can do it during the day and you're flexible. All of those things you need to take into consideration. So how do you find customers? Well, there's two ways, either locally or online. And if you choose the local route, depending on what it is you provide, say you're a photographer, it would make sense to leverage every connection that you have locally so that you can take photos, right? So some of the options would be types of lead groups. There are lead groups that help you do this and help network with other people. Lead groups typically are businesses, but you can always get referrals for people that know someone that needs photography. So lead groups like there's one that's international called LATIP, L-E-T-I-P. So those lead groups, of course, there is a membership for it. So whenever you consider something like that, you've got to bake that into your expenses when you begin to consider what you're gonna charge for photography or anything else that you're gonna do. Another for local would be Chamber of Commerce, depending on again what you're offering. Another connection would be local churches. That's where I found my photographer that took some family photos for Christmas cards that we wanted. It was just a type of word of mouth, and people saw the photos, they liked them, and this photographer was able to get a lot of bookings just from word of mouth. So churches is a great way to network as well. Organizations like Toastmasters, that's a great way as well because there's a mix of people. There's business people and there's people that are retired, and there's people that are just trying to improve their skills for work. And so you have a nice mix of people. And what do you do? You create speeches, right? So you can create these speeches that touch on aspects of the service that you offer. The other local connection would be any activities or hobbies that you have. For example, the gym. Usually, when you go somewhere regularly, you begin to make connections, begin to interact with people, you make new friends. So anything like a gym, or if you're a mom that takes kids to school, you meet the other moms, you know, the kids have birthday parties, you end up going to the birthday parties and talking to the other moms. So that's a way to find local connections. Also, friends and family, right? You can tell your friends and you can also get the support of your family to try to find leads as well. So let's talk about posting your skills for hire online. Now, there are various platforms that you can use, and I would just make sure you search it out really well and read all the details, figure out if they're gonna charge you a percentage of what you make or if they're gonna charge the customer. Work out all those details first because if it's gonna cost you money to sell and they're gonna charge you something, you want to make sure you bake that into your overall cost. And on that topic as well, any resources or supplies that you might need, you want to make sure you include that in your overall price. So there are various platforms. One popular platform is Upwork. You can post just about any skill on Upwork. Now it is pretty competitive. You see different prices there, but I think for any of these, you just need to be very consistent and test it out. Test out how you present yourself, maybe even tweak it. Maybe that's a copy in me talking. But again, test it out, see what you can do to be able to get some opportunities there. Another one, if you're a designer and you're good at that, there's 99 designs. You can be maybe one of their designers and do the same thing, just investigate really, really well. I've used Upwork, I've used 99 designs. There's also Fiverr, which used to be that everything was $5 and up. It's not so much that anymore, and that's good for the freelancers. But you could go to Fiverr and post something that you do. And typically when people go to hire someone, there's usually like a starting price, and then they tier the various levels of service. So Fiverr is another one, and there's another one that we don't hear about too often. It's uh people per hour. I have not used people per hour. I've used Upwork, I've used 99 Designs, I've used Fiverr. People per hour was founded in 2007. They've been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, in Forbes, BBC, but I know very little about people per hour. So you would want to again do your due diligence, do your homework, and check it out very, very well before you align yourself because this is a way for you to create revenue. So you want to make sure it's a good match for you. So here's my final closing tip. If you're thinking about generating some revenue quickly so that you can build your business or that you can earn some revenue toward your business while you're working full time, just know that this is temporary. This isn't what you're gonna do forever. It's just a way to bring revenue. And when you start seeing that money come in PayPal, it's a good feeling and you'll want to do it again. So make sure that you read the fine print, read everything really well as far as the platform that you choose. The second tip is make sure that you price accordingly. So if there's any fees at all, you want to make sure that what you charge will cover any bank fees, any platform fees, any of those things, any resources, any tools, any supplies that you need, make sure that those expenses are covered in what you ask. So when you're describing what you do, just let them know that for this amount of money, this is what they get. And if they see benefit or transformation or they're saving time or you're removing some type of headache for them, that has a lot of value. So charge by the project that you're doing, not necessarily by the hour. And then again, make sure that you consider all the pre-work, the work, and any post-work so that you make sure that you price everything accordingly so that it's a benefit to you and not just another job that you're doing that's costing you more time and not bringing in enough revenue. It's a practical and very doable way of earning some revenue while you're building your business, or if you're working full-time, it's your startup money for when you want to launch your online business. So I hope that was helpful for you. If you're thinking about doing some type of freelance work, if you have a skill that you want to offer, just reach out to me. There's not gonna be a lot of you, so I'm not gonna be inundated, but just go ahead and email me at support at marissach.com and maybe I can give you an email introduction to someone that could use those services. I would love for people to just start earning some revenue and start doing it and getting their feet wet because you know what it's gonna do, it's gonna create some momentum, you're gonna build your confidence. I mean, there are some basic expenses that we need to get started. So maybe this will help. So I'm happy to do that. Just send me an email at support at marissach.com. And by the way, if you enjoy this podcast, I would love it if you would rate and review it. I seldom say that on the podcast, and I really need to because I need to get some ratings and reviews. It would really, really be helpful if you enjoy this podcast. And if you do have a podcast and you're looking for guest speakers, I'd love to connect with you as well and talk to you and see if we can work something out. So until next time, take care and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Wait, before you go, if you found this podcast helpful, subscribe so you never miss an episode. Every subscription, review, or rating means so much to me. Remember, cultivate resilient faith online to create positive change in the world.