How to Start Freelancing Online

I’ve been freelancing online since 2008 and I can say it’s absolutely one of the BEST decisions I’ve ever made in my entire money-making life. Besides the fact that I work on MY time schedule (more or less!), I got to earn on the side maintaining a day job. When it was time for me to go full time, I’ve already established a good portfolio and a higher hourly rate.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you’re an absolute newbie to the work-at-home, online freelancing life, you probably want an answer to this one burning question first:

How do I start making money as a freelancer online?

My answer is another equally burning but all-important question:

What are the skills and services that you can sell in exchange for a fee?

There are many things you can do for money online but the main thing is, you need to zero in on one or two skills that you excel in before you start bidding on projects.

Introduction to Psychology: Some Takeaways

As I’m moving more towards a career in copywriting, I’m regaining my earlier fascination with psychology…how the mind works, why we feel what we do, and why we want stuff.

When I stumbled onto this free online course at Udemy, I immediately signed up with my Facebook profile.

Here are some of the takeaways from the introductory session:

4 Things About Perfection That I Learned From Adrian Monk

I have just finished watching Season One of  Monk, a TV show produced by NBC Universal. Despite the “defective detective” label, I totally identified with Monk—his uniqueness, his imperfections, and his humanity.

I learned four valuable lessons from Adrian Monk, obsessive compulsive, that helped me accept myself despite of and in spite of:

1. We all want to be perfect…

Accept it: there really is a reason why Monk and the rest of us sweat the small stuff.  We have been hot-wired since birth to want perfection because we were made for perfection!

Understand Before You Write

Previously, I ranted about writers who--by design or by accident--write articles so obscure they don’t bear reading or editing. This time, I’m ranting about writers who never take the time to understand the intricacies of what their writing about so they come off as witless and clueless.

I had an encounter with just that kind of writer recently. I asked her to re-write articles and turn each into 15 incarnations. The base articles were about chocolate tempering and making homemade chocolate candies, and I do understand that it’ll be Greek to any layman save the chocolate-loving kind.

Imagine my chagrin when she returned 15 articles which were nowhere near publishing standards! As I read the articles, it was clear she was absolutely clueless about what she was writing about.

Sleep and the Work-at-Home Maven

Lately, I’ve been fixating on sleep, body clocks and sleep disorders. I found I had Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, a sleep “disorder”.

DSPS simply means that my body clock is out of whack, that it has its own sleep-awake cycle that's unlike what the rest of the world (at least 99% of it) knows as "typical".

But DSPS is different from insomnia in that we:

• sleep 7-8 hours without the alarm clocks waking us
• are fully awake at night, like the kind of wakefulness and alertness that morning larks enjoy during the day
• are normal, except that we're night creatures (no not vampires, just night owls)

Diet or Regular, Soda is Plain Bad

I’ve long since given up on drinking soda, or what we call soft drinks from our part of the world.

Not because I’ve found evidence that it’s unhealthy, no. It’s because no matter how refreshing it is when taken with a rich meal, soda on a regular basis adds on the pounds to my already, er, weight-challenged body.


So why do I gain weight just by drinking soda?

The sugars are the culprit, we know, but just how much sugar are we ingesting with a regular can of soda?

Book Review: “Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout

With my decision to begin training as a direct response copywriter, I started reading books that—shall we say—get me into the mindset of one.

Lurking in copywriting forums, one of the recommended reading books for aspiring copywriters that I found was Al Ries and Jack Trout’s Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

I must say, it was such an engaging and enlightening read, I finished the book in two days!

A first for me, especially when I’m reading for self-improvement and not for entertainment. ;)

Write To Be Understood

One of my pet peeves as an editor is reading material that sucks overall—wrong word choices, faulty grammar, a story that has no focus, and a feeble grasp of the English language. When I meet these kinds of articles, my eyes glaze over and by the second paragraph, my mind shuts down, and I start screaming.

If I’m totally pressed for time and there’s no way to have the writer re-do the piece, I start crying because then, I’ll be facing two things: (a) if I refuse to use the article, I write it (less hassle but more work); or (b) if I brave my way into that mangled piece and try to make sense out of it, I know I'm in for a spell editing with a heavy hand through each word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph.

When I do have to edit, that’s when terror hits me: I know I’m in for a tortuous time and it would take me a while before I start the painful process. The piece would lie for hours on my work table, a quiet nagging that’s got its talons sunk into my guilty conscience, relenting only when I start work on it. Sometimes though, thoughts of murder and mayhem fleet through my mind as I wade through the material, wanting to mangle the writer as much as s/he’d mangled my peace of mind.

The Evolution of My Home Office

Since late 2008 when I started working online full time, my home office has evolved from its Spartan beginnings in a corner of my bedroom, to what it is today.

 I’m happy to report that my home (er, bedroom) office now occupies a third of the space. :)

Now, I have DSPS—delayed sleep phase syndrome. In short, my body clock is a time zone ahead of me. I’m awake when my part of the world is in dreamland, and I’m snoozing when everyone’s busy working their 9-to-5s.

One of the advice I often read—and what my doctor said—is never to bring work or TV into the bedroom. I'm not a great believer in TVs so I don't have it in my room. However, my room is a mini-library...and where my books are, so is my work desk.

the desktop of a work-at-home maven

So why not just set up my home office outside of the bedroom so I could sleep like any ordinary nine-to-fiver would?

Why Would You Work at Home?

It’s the ultimate fantasy for everyone who’s ever been on the 9-to-5 rat race and who’s had to battle more than an hour of heavy EDSA traffic on the way to work—working from home, discussing business strategy with a distant client, in your ratty tees and flannel pajamas.

I must confess I’ve been living that life since 2008 and it’s been fun. Of course, that joke about getting “paid per word, per project or perhaps” still applies to this life but I have no complaints so far.

I’m my own boss.

I work the hours that’s most convenient to me—with a few adjustments here and there when clients need me. And the coffee (or in my case, tea) breaks could stretch for hours. And don’t get me started on the lunch breaks, heh.

I learn new stuff every single day.

I meet new people from around the world regularly—and not just my clients.

I can declare days off and holidays unilaterally whenever my feet are itching to visit travel destinations...or just need to pop into the grocery store to stock up on supplies

What’s not to like?