How to Freelance from Home and Earn Extra Cash

What is freelancing?
Freelancing is working independently off of gigs, events, and/or particular leads. You may be designing websites or writing articles or babysitting. It's all freelancing if you are not under an umbrella organization or agency. The pros: You don't pay excess costs and you keep the profit. The cons: Less budget for long term growth like big time marketing. For the very talented that can get clients to talk about them, its fantastic as full time. For the rest of us, there is no reason freelancing shouldn't provide supplemental income.

Why should I start freelancing?
- Need to pay off bills
- Establishing additional cash to fulfill dreams
- Escaping a bad job, long commutes, poor working conditions.
- Maintaining independent intellectual curiosity.
- Get in control of your life.

How do I start?
Tory Johnson and Robyn Freedman Spizman have written a fantastic guide called Will Work from Home: Earn the Cash--Without the Commute but let me give you some of the gist.

It comes down to finding a need and then proceeding to fill society's needs independently.
Here are some ideas about what you can offer:
- Tutoring
- Billing Specialist
- Remote Consultant
- Virtual Concierge
- Be a Virtual Assistant

Decide what talents you have, what you can offer others during your free time, and then make an offer using the world wide web. On Craigslist, Twitter, Facebook, or any job board. Don't restrain yourself to the local environment.

Advice: Find third parties you can work with, or for, from home as an independent contractor.
Remember: Prove your expertise, knowledge, and talent!
Tip: Try online job boards, forums, or even searching twitter "I need...." for freelance work.

Kiss your cubicle goodbye!

In the movie, "Office Space", big business bureaucracy and the evil nature of a cubicle are turned to a classic comedy. But the affects are real. You feel poorly utalized. Your creaitivty drops off. Your drive vanishes. You work only for the money. That's no way to live.

Don't go crazy for the profit of others for any longer!

If you work in a dead end job towards no means, you have options. This new age of technology, start-ups, and freelancing with low barriers and a high learning curve should be your ground to make money doing something you truly love.

Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneurby Pamela Slim offers fantastic advice for those that want to start new, for those that want to be independent and be successful.

The book explains your options that don't involve working for someone else. Options like:
- Home based business
- Brick and mortar
- e-Commerce
- eBay
- Franchising
- Licensing
- Multilevel marketing

The book reminds you how easy it is to identify what you should be doing.
Just ask yourself these three questions:
1. What do people pay you to do?
2. What do you love to do?
3. What do you feel meant to do/genetically encoded to do?

Think of the work that makes you feel like it's your purpose!

I'll have more great tips tomorrow and pieces of advice for establishing a small business on your own (remember to check back), but for now here is some food for thought:

Open your eyes!
Look at situations, difficult problems and ask yourself why this happening or how it could be improved and (1) figure out a solution, (2) develop the solution, (3) monetize the solution. Add value to the world with your solution.

A Guidebook to becoming an Entrepreneur

If you want to make money while you eat, while you sleep, while you work an unrelated job, while you learn, and while you have fun then you must embrace the mindset of an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs innovate, create, and find new ways to monetize. They identify problems and establish solutions. From there, they do people a favor by spreading their solution. They add value to the world. And so can you!

In fact, you have an advantage over established entrepreneurs and big business: You can be more efficient and more effective than the big guys.

Unlike big reputable organizations with brands to protect and liabilities to preserve, you can act quickly. Realize that you can spend 1% of your time strategizing while big corporations spend 60% of their time doing strategy. You have no bureaucracy to tie you up so go out and do, spend 90% of your time doing stuff, selling stuff, calling people, acting!

Achieve with:

1. Growth through creativity
2. Growth through direction
3. Growth through delegation
4. Growth through coordination
5. Growth through collaboration

Be flexible and add to your income income through:

1. Freelancing (babysitting is freelancing too!)
2. Bargaining (ask for a raise)
3. Renting/leasing (extra supplies, equipment, property, resources)

Want to learn more about thinking like an entrepreneur? Check out The Successful Entrepreneur's Guidebook by Colin Barrow, Robert Brown, Liz Clarke. I really enjoyed the read and it is incredibly inspiring.