As a programmer, I feel the best way to earn some money on the side is by freelancing and understanding how the business works, and how to deal with clients to make them trust you. There are going to be mistaken, lots of them and you don’t have to be discouraged (I am saying this to myself as after being discouraged by this I deleted my Gig 🤦🏻‍♂️).

The Story:

The story starts on a day as I was constantly thinking about starting a freelancing gig on Fiverr and making some source of side revenue. YouTube started recommending me content about freelancing and how it has changed their lives and made them financially independent. I had tried freelancing in the past but have failed to get any clients and so I thought of giving it another shot. And so I created an account on Fiverr (as most people recommended Fiverr for beginners). And created some backend development gig, I don’t remember. But then I started applying to buyer requests.

What are those you ask? Buyer requests are like job postings posted by buyers on Fiverr but for freelancing projects, you can apply to those, and if the client responds you have to make the project for them and they will pay and rate you if they like your work. Buyer requests are better for beginners as you can apply to projects that you are interested in and also as you apply to projects directly you don’t have to market the gig and hope somebody would order (which is very difficult).

After applying to a few buyer requests one of them got back and it was a job about cloning an existing website it was about his website or somebody else’s website I don’t know but the website was in Portugal, I think. And here comes the first mistake.

Don’t Be Lazy in your work.

After he asked me for the cloning I immediately opened the website, hit right-click, view page source, and you know, Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (on Mac so ⌘, but you know it’s a meme). But yes you should do some work don’t be like it even if it works at the start for small projects it surely won’t work on a large project later on so why not get the habit of doing work on small projects too.

Don’t Be Greedy.

Here is the important thing, every time he asked me to add something new to the project I asked to increase the price I got so excited as it was my first client, I didn’t focus on the project but on how to make money from it and establish myself as a full-time freelancer. Please don’t do that as it backfires so quickly, he straight up started denying me as a seller and you don’t want that.

See it as a learning opportunity.

This one complements the above that you don’t have to think about money but think about what value can you provide to the client or how much from the project can you learn if you can’t learn the thing in the time that the client wants the project to be done don’t do the project learn to say no it will be beneficial for both you and the client.

Conclusion:

Though I might not try my hand at freelancing, hope these mistakes might help you in your freelancing journey.

Side note

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