So you want to join the workforce of the 21st century—by working as a freelancer? No matter whether you want to work on the side or full-time, you need to earn some trust first. Clients want to see that you are a reliable freelancer who can finish tasks successfully.
To this end, it makes sense to complete a few easy jobs first, before you move on to the next level of difficulty. However, the rule is that the messier the job, the higher your pay. After all, you are getting paid to solve problems!
I’ve divided the article into two parts:
- Easy freelancing gigs for everybody, and
- Easy freelancing gigs for people with basic programming knowledge.
Easy Freelancing Gigs for Everybody
Here’s a list of small and super easy projects with which you can start to create your profile (not limited to coding projects):
- Make small selfie videos for companies. A few weeks ago, I’ve hired a dozen of professional freelancers to answer questions about their work as freelance coders in selfie video format. I wanted to add helpful content to my Python freelancer course. It was very easy and fun for them and they earned good money.
- Copy typing. Yes, you can just type in other people’s text. Say, a book author wants to publish their book on his WordPress blog. They often don’t want to copy&paste everything themselves and check for countless formatting errors. That’s where you come into play: do it for them. Here’s such a “copy typing” freelancing job example which pays for every 1000 words a few bucks.
- Customer support in Telegram/WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger. Many companies need help in answering their countless customer requests. You can do just that: getting paid for writing WhatsApp messages with customers or users of their apps. Here is such an exemplary job on the Freelancer.com platform.
- Simple web research. Here’s an interesting (and very simple) job description I found on Freelancer.com: “I am looking for a freelancer to help me with my project. The skills required are Data Entry and Internet Research. Should have time and its a simple job, I am happy to pay a fixed priced and my maximum budget is $30.” Everybody can do that.
Easy Freelancing Gigs for Programmers
If you already have some basic programming skills or you even have finished my Python freelancing course, you can (and should) start going for the real meat.
- Write basic Python scripts. Oftentimes, clients want to have basic Python scripts (e.g. “write a Python script that connects to my server, upload a folder, and removes files that were created before a specific date.”). These scripts can increase the productivity of your clients greatly and they take only very limited time for you to solve (with the help of Google).
- Do web scraping. This is a very trendy project area and there are many web scraping jobs. Some include retrieving all current stock prices from a trading exchange. Others focus on the price data on retail stores. It doesn’t matter, these jobs are doable for someone with a little programming experience. Have a look at this example project.
- Simple data mining. Collecting a data set from various sources (manually or semi-automated) is an easy way of delivering value for clients. And there are many such projects online: hundreds of projects have been posted in a single week on this freelancer platform.
- Blog writing. Consider the following project description: “Given a specific keyword such as “Python lists”, write a blog article that answers the following questions: …” Projects similar to this one are plentiful. If you love to write, this is a fun and profitable way of earning a few bucks while improving both your writing and coding skills at the same time.
All of those projects are simple enough to be solved by anyone who is committed to bringing value to the marketplace. If you are serious about your new dream life as a freelancer, select one of those simple projects now and start implementing them in practice.
If you still feel in doubt about how to start your freelancing career (in Python software development), join the most popular Python freelancer course on the web for both beginners and intermediate Python coders.