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Bitcoin Freelancing

Well, today I want to talk about a peculiar topic, one that I hope will motivate readers to stay with me until the end and maybe even inspire somebody to take their first steps towards becoming a freelancer in the bitcoin economy.

Anyone who’s been long enough in this bitcoin world, knows that people act and behave differently than elsewhere on the internet and in case you didn’t know, the home base of the majority of bitcoin users is BitcoinTalk Forums, with the number of members rising every day, and currently sitting at almost 900k total members. I don’t know about you, but I know that nine hundred thousand people, is a lot of people!

Another good gathering place for bitcoin users is Bitcoin.com Forums, but the amount of people here totals to about 7,700, so BitcoinTalk takes precedence!

Why am I mentioning these forums?

The reason is simple. These online forums are the gathering places of entrepreneurs, marketers, re-sellers, miners, graphic designers, gamblers, talkers and listeners. And they all have or at least want to have bitcoin!

And so do you. Or at least you should be willing to work for bitcoin, otherwise what is the point of reading a freelancing article in the first place? :)

First off there are many small jobs you could do without needing any sort of skill. These mostly include promotional jobs, where some individual is willing to pay just to have some sort of content shared on social media.

Finally! That Facebook account can start paying off in small dividends, but this isn’t any form of reliable income that you can count on to provide enough work, and allow you to actually accumulate a fair amount of bitcoin.

In order to have access to more opportunities, usually you have to go and create those opportunities for yourself. Create an announcement, that you’re offering such and such service, and also make sure to stop and think about the questions that people will have when you first start writing this service announcement.

But wait…

I have no marketable skills

I imagine this thought is going through the minds of some people reading this article right now. If you’re in this situation, there is only one way to go about this. You need to use the one skill that has kept you going through life up until this very moment.

Learning.

Exactly! Learning is an ability that helps any person develop skills. If you want to be a freelancer, you’re going to have to be ready to learn at all times and invest parts of your free time into learning more about the skills that you have or going a bit further and developing a new skill that enables you to take on different types of challenges. I hate to say it, but it’s time to go back to school.

Although, I’m being honest here, so I don’t hate saying it, because learning is an integral part of my own life. It’s what I do to keep growing and achieve more in life, and these results motivate me to strive for bigger things.

What skill should I learn?

There are many factors to consider when choosing a skill that you want to develop, through which you would accomplish quality results in a timely manner for your clients. I would suggest taking a course in soft skills first, mainly because I see quite a lot of people struggling with the finer points of exchanging ideas, negotiation, expectation and overall understanding of human communication. Soft skills are the type of skills that you could benefit from regardless of what you’re doing in life.

However, when thinking about skills are going to get paid for, it’s better of choosing a skill that’s balanced in terms of your desire to be good at it and customer demand. On one hand, it’s hard to measure the demand for a certain skill, but it’s equally hard to determine what skill you should invest time and effort into. Be patient with yourself and think deeply about how you would like to spend your time, energy and
effort. You can always try-out different things and see what you like.

Take a look at this chart, it was made by Elance.com in the first quarter of 2013, based on real data from their site. I understand it’s a little bit too old, but it should give you a general idea as to which skills are (or were) in demand.

skills-in-demand-elance-report-q1-2013

You could use free online resources to acquire marketable skills, such as content marketing, social media management, writing, graphics design, video editing, photography. All of these skills that I’ve listed have the potential to become profitable ventures for you as an individual, as a freelancer.

One suggestion is to use that small amount of bitcoin that you’re going to create by doing the social media shares and small jobs here and there and invest into a lynda.com account. They are quite popular on the forums and you can usually get them by trading with some of the members there.

What this account affords you is to access an online library through which you can develop the skills necessary in order to generate bitcoin revenue by marketing your own skill-based service to other people on the forums. You can learn all the skills I mentioned above, and a lot more options are available to you at this website. The idea is to keep learning up until the point you can confidently say (and believe) …

I have marketable skills!

Congratulations!

You’re ready to take the next step, which is to inform the community of your newly acquired skills and start to promote your personal brand and service to the world!

The usual way is to create a topic for yourself in the Service thread under Marketplace and go from there. Engage with people in conversation, regularly bump your topic, give out vouch copies to high reputation members and start earning that bitcoin.

Freelancing takes a lot of work, but one of the best things about becoming a freelancer is that you develop skills that allow you to earn any currency in any economy.

Make it rain! :D

If you need any help with establishing yourself as a freelancer, send me an e-mail and I will personally do my best to help you get started.

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