Determine what you want to do. You can become a graphic designer, web designer, developer, digital marketing specialist, content marketing specialist, content writer and basically a lot more. But pay attention – if you are a native English speaker, I would recommend you become a content writer because lots of clients ask for native content writers and it will be easier for you to start and not many people will question whether or not you are a beginner. What would matter that is you are a native speaker or not so take this chance and start writing content, take certifications.
Next – what you want to do is take certifications. if you are a digital marketing specialist, content writer, developer, designer, there are lots of online certifications or online resources for you out there so you can get started and take the certificate and let the world know that you are certified. When you google like for example digital marketing certifications, you will get a lot for example on Hub Spot, on SEMrush and Google and a lot more. So all you want to do is look for certifications in your niche.
Look for internship opportunities. Next, look for internship opportunities. If you don’t have job experience at all, starting from an internship is a good choice. Why because when you take an internship, people like your team or your online team is ready to help you. The main thing they want to do is to help you get started because you help them with your maybe free internship. But still this is a good chance for you to get started, to build a career and why not create a good portfolio. So look for internship opportunities. For example on Reedit, there is a subedit named “Internships” you can go there and post about your experience or like the type of internship you are looking for and people will tell you if they have some opportunities for you or not.
There are a lot of other places you can go check out for internships and if you can get a good internship this can be the best thing, the best start of your freelancer career. Use your network. If you have friends that are in the same niche as you want to work in, ask them if they can help you. If they can give you some tasks and then check out if you did your job at the best and give you feedback on what to improve. This is really great because if your friend gives you a task this can become some part of your portfolio – you can include this in your portfolio and let the client know that you actually have some experience or previous work samples.
So turn to your friends, ask if they have some opportunities for you. If your friend is a developer, you can ask them to teach you some stuff or give you some tasks to do and if you can include it in your portfolio. So basically the key here, the key with starting with a freelancing career, is to build a network. A network of people from your specification. For example, if you’re a developer, there are lots of platforms, there are lots of forums that you can join and ask questions to the developers get answers. The same is true for digital marketing specialists, designers, content writers. So the first thing you want to do is to find such platforms like forums and Reedit, Quora. Ask a question on Quora – how people can help you, how you can get started and there are lots of lots of people who will guide you, who will give you some certification links to take. So basically this first step of making research and finding people to help you is your first step of building your freelance career with zero experience.
Of course, all of this takes time but if you want to have a profession, if you want to show your clients that you are really skilled, you are not a beginner and even if you are, you are a good, strong beginner, they will not take you for granted. They will not be like – yeah this person just wants an opportunity, this person wants to make money… ignored. So you don’t want that to happen to you. Create a portfolio or work samples. If you have friends who can help you or if you can do some projects on your own, maybe you like drawing something and maybe you want to create a new logo for BMW or a famous outstanding brand.
This will be more interesting to clients and you can include this in your portfolio. And maybe you even have some ideas for the brands you follow and then you create something for them and email them your ideas and you’re like – hey you know I’m just a beginner and I just created this for you, you can take it for free. And then you have it on your portfolio. This can be a good start look for low-paying jobs if you just get started and if you don’t have experience outside freelancing platforms like in real world, this makes your job more difficult because there are some specifications, there is a back and forth communication or lots of things that you might not know. This is why you want to look for low-paying jobs so that the client will not have too many requirements for you. You have to find jobs that are for beginners.
On Up Work, the jobs are like for beginners, intermediate and experienced. And if you see that the job is for beginners – like usually you can spot it because there is just one dollar sign the intermediate is two dollar sign and experienced is three. So if it’s just one dollar sign, this job is for you this is for beginners and but you want to make sure to read the description and see that the client doesn’t require too much stuff because lots of the times there are clients who write the skill of the freelancer beginner and they have lots of lots of requirements and they just want to save money.
So be specific, take a good look at the description and make sure that the work is low paying and the client doesn’t have too many requirements from you. So basically this is it. This is most of the things that you need to get started with zero experience as a freelancer. It’s not going to be easy as you can already see. You have to make lots of research on your own and to make it easier for you, find forums find subedits about your specialization, and find people who can help you, who are experienced, or people who are just starting and are ready to learn with you. Get started, build your portfolio and go out there, find new clients and new job opportunities.
Let me know in the comments below if you already started looking for a job opportunity as a freelancer or if you already started working on becoming a freelancer with zero job experience, how is it going. Tell us everything.
