When you are new to a freelancing website, it can often be difficult and frustrating to obtain your first job. This seems to be a major factor in determining whether somebody will succeed at freelancing long term. If it takes you a long time to get your first project and then you struggle through it and end up making $100 for three weeks worth of work, it is very doubtful that you will continue to pursue freelance work. I have done a project like that or worse before and can guide you through what to do and not to do to avoid the problems I have personally encountered.

Put yourself in a potential client’s shoes and think about what you would want for your money when you are bidding on a project. Various forms of feedback and rating systems are used on freelance websites and can often play a major role in whether you win or lose a project you are bidding on. Unfortunately for a beginning freelancer, it is hard to win your first project because of a lack of feedback or ratings. There are things that you can do to help overcome this obstacle though. It will help if you have experience doing the type of work that you are trying to get. Many freelance websites will have user profiles that consist of various ways to talk about your experience and even display work that you have done. It can help tremendously if you can show a potential client what you have done in the past to give them an idea of what type of work they can expect from you. Obviously, if they see some amazing work in your portfolio then they will be eager to choose you to work on their project. Portfolio work and experience is not always from work that you have done for money - this can even be things that you have done for yourself or even for fun, as long as they are relevant to the kind of work you are trying to get.

Another tactic to making your first dollar is bidding on an extremely short and simple project. For example, I obtained some of my initial feedback on a few freelance websites by doing simple php bug fixes. These projects would often take less than a couple of hours and sometimes only 10 minutes. If you can obtain a couple of these projects each day on a regular basis, you can often make a fair living that way. If you can find someone with a simple project that will only take a few minutes, you can even offer to do the project for free to get your first feedback or rating on a freelance website. Be sure to remember that freelance websites generally charge fees when you win a project and there is often a minimum fee of something like $5. It is common practice to offer this first project at $5 or whatever the minimum fee may be just to cover your expenses on it. The client gets their job completed at a very fair price and you get a good review that the next client can see to know what kind of worker you are.