Freelance Jobs for Beginners

The digital age has made it more possible than ever to make money from home, travel while you work, and all around be your own boss. While many entrepreneurs find success in freelancing, breaking into the gig economy can be tough if you don’t know how to find the right freelance jobs for beginners.

Don’t worry, though, we’ve got your back. Legiit is the marketplace made by freelancers for freelancers. We’ve all been there. Stuck as a newbie in a vast sea of experienced sellers with hundreds of reviews to their name.

Just like getting your foot in the door in the traditional work world, finding success in freelancing isn’t a cake walk—especially when you realize that 53 million people are working as freelancers in the U.S. alone.

But with this guide to freelance jobs for beginners, we hope to offer you a handful of solid ways to find work and stand out from the competition.

The Opportunities are Endless

The first thing to realize if you’re on the hunt for freelance jobs for beginners is that there really is no end to the number of opportunities out there. On Legiit, for example, we break services down into 8 categories and more than 50 sub categories. Everything from logo design to virtual assistants.

And since freelance work is a $300 billion global industry, you shouldn’t have to struggle too much to find a niche with plenty of clients ripe for the picking.

But just because there’s a lot of business, that doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to have to fight for it. Throwing up a poorly written service description with grainy images isn’t going to make you stand out from the millions of other freelancers vying for attention. (For more on that, don’t miss our complete guide on how to find consistent freelance work.)

A Quick List of Freelance Jobs for Beginners

Alright, let’s get on to it, then. If you’re serious and committed to being your own boss, here is a quick list of freelance jobs for beginners to help you brainstorm ways to get started.

Copywriting

At the time of writing this post, there are more than 1,940,055,137 websites on the internet. That’s almost 2 billion blogs, small businesses, international brands, and more that need content.

The possibilities are endless. If you’ve got a knack for the written word, you can make money writing articles, sales copy, product descriptions, and more. Heck, people will even pay you to write up their Facebook posts.

And beyond just creating fresh content, you can also sell related services, such as editing, research, or outlining.

Virtual Assistant

With more and more businesses going officeless, traditional secretarial work is being replaced by remote virtual assistants. The great thing about working as a VA is that you generally don’t need much in the way of special skills other than a willingness to learn and good communication. It’s really one of the best freelance jobs for beginners if you can’t find any other niche to break into.

As a virtual assistant, you can expect to do everything from data entry to email outreach to web publishing. Generally, your clients will provide detailed step-by-step directions for the tasks that you’ll be completing—and you’ll probably be doing them a lot, over and over again.

While the pay for VA work might not be the best, some money is always better than none. And, it is going to open up a world of possibilities for you. For example, maybe you work for six months as a virtual assistant for an SEO agency. In that time, you are going to get tons of real-world hands on experience in search engine optimization. Later, you can sell those skills to new clients at a higher rate.

Video Production

While you might think that video production is an impossible industry to break into if you don’t have years of experience, it’s actually one of the better freelance jobs for beginners. While there are certainly people out there looking for big productions with expensive recording and editing software, you can make decent money with much simpler jobs.

If you are willing to invest a little bit of money and a good amount of time honing your skills, tools like PowToon and RawShorts significantly reduce the barrier to entry of video production.

Think of it this way: thousands of school teachers with very little tech skill use tools like this to make educational videos for their students every day. If they can figure it out, so can you. And once you’ve got it down, plenty of business owners would be willing to pay you for your time and skills rather than investing in the software themselves.

Graphic Design

Just like video production, businesses are always in need of visual creatives. Whether you design logos, infographics, or 3D product mockups, if you’ve got artistic skill then you have a leg up on about 98% of the rest of the workforce.

Even if you aren’t particularly inclined towards graphic design, there are plenty of little websites that just need a simple logo that looks mildly decent. The webmasters aren’t usually looking to invest in a professional work of art. They just want to pay $5 for something that’s on topic and not grainy. This is the sort of design you could throw together with free software like GIMP in less than 15 minutes once you get a process down.

Web Design and Support

If you can build a WordPress site, you’ve found your entry into one of the more lucrative freelance jobs for beginners. If you can’t, there are countless free tutorials and videos that will give you the knowledge you need to get started.

Beyond building websites, you can also find very specific web support microtasks to sell. For example, tons of entrepreneurs use ClickFunnels to build their sales pages. But actually figuring out how to get their web host to connect with ClickFunnels could take an hour for them to figure out.

Do you think they’d pay you $10 to save themselves an hour of headache? Probably. And once you figure it out once, you can probably get the job done in two minutes.

SEO

Remember those 1.9 billion websites we mentioned earlier? Most of them want to rank well in Google. So if you have experience in any aspect of search engine optimization, you can sell your freelance services to larger SEO agencies or even small businesses.

A good strategy is to find the tasks that other people just find a drag. For example, scraping domains for a PBN (private blog network) can be one of the most mind-numbing tasks out there. And if people hate to do it, that means they’re willing to pay you to do it instead.

Just be careful entering the SEO realm. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen, and you need to do your best to NOT become one of them. Whatever services you decide to offer, make sure that you test them out thoroughly so that you are actually helping your clients instead of hurting them. While SEO is a solid freelancer job for beginners, it’s not one you can go into blindly.

Check Out Legiit for More Freelance Jobs for Beginners

Honestly, this post could go on forever. As we said earlier, the possibilities are endless when it comes to finding freelance jobs for beginners looking to break their way into the market. This list is meant to provide you with a broad range of services that real people are willing to pay real money for.

If you are still looking for ideas, just take some time to browse what other freelancers are already offering on Legiit. Look for tasks that you could do or learn to do. Even better, search subcategories for services that aren’t being offered yet or don’t have much competition. If you can find a way to stand out in your niche, you’ll make a name for yourself in no time.

So if you’re serious about finding freelance jobs for beginners, don’t give up until you found something that works. It could take you time, but all things do. So get to work, make some sales, and most of all, remember to keep it Legiit.