[Andy_B]

Hey y'all.

I'm a Canadian who currently makes most of his money from online freelancing.

I have read a lot about people who manage to save mad cash by working for western clients at western pay rates while living in less affluent nations.

Is this a major topic of discussion on this forum?

If so, what is the consensus on the best country to go to for living this lifestyle?

[HammockLife]

It's certainly a very viable lifestyle arbitrage method. I have been freelancing online for about three years now, and if you can get work where the customer doesn't care where you're located, it works very well. What will you be doing, exactly?

I do believe it has been discussed on the forum before.
I'm not sure there's a consensus on the best nation, but the ones that I recall coming up (on this forum or others) are DR, Colombia, Panama, Argentina, Brazil (mainly Americans and Canadians, I think) and Thailand (Europeans). Some freelancers I know are located in the Philippines as well, but that's more of a Third World country than Thailand, although Thailand is still pretty cheap by Western standards.

[Vacancier Permanent]

Andy, first, welcome to the forum man!
HL mentioned the usual suspects, however a major factor to take into consideration is whether you have to contact your North American clients during regular business hours or not. If yes, then the DR, Brasil, Colombia, even Peru or Panama, Costa Rica. If not, then Asia (Thailand, the Philippines, Bali, Malaysia even China) would be a great place to live and work while taking advantage of geo-arbitrage.

Hope this helps!

[ersatz]

How do you get your clients and jobs? Is it in any way dependent in meeting face to face in your city? If not, I would move to vamos promptly to a warm and cheap country that has blue skys and nice weather. You'll save a lot of cash, and get out of the canadian weather and get to do a ton of fun shit that you just don't get with the same old north america. Travel around for a bit, see which one you like the best and maybe settle there for a while. You might want to stay close to the same timezone as your clients so you avoid communication issues.

[Andy_B]

(01-02-2012 01:41 AM)ersatz Wrote:  

How do you get your clients and jobs? Is it in any way dependent in meeting face to face in your city? If not, I would move to vamos promptly to a warm and cheap country that has blue skys and nice weather. You'll save a lot of cash, and get out of the canadian weather and get to do a ton of fun shit that you just don't get with the same old north america. Travel around for a bit, see which one you like the best and maybe settle there for a while. You might want to stay close to the same timezone as your clients so you avoid communication issues.

I get my business through elance, odesk, and warriorforum. My business is fully online and I work mostly at night anyway.

(01-01-2012 01:20 PM)HammockLife Wrote:  

It's certainly a very viable lifestyle arbitrage method. I have been freelancing online for about three years now, and if you can get work where the customer doesn't care where you're located, it works very well. What will you be doing, exactly?

I do believe it has been discussed on the forum before.
I'm not sure there's a consensus on the best nation, but the ones that I recall coming up (on this forum or others) are DR, Colombia, Panama, Argentina, Brazil (mainly Americans and Canadians, I think) and Thailand (Europeans). Some freelancers I know are located in the Philippines as well, but that's more of a Third World country than Thailand, although Thailand is still pretty cheap by Western standards.

Web based copywriting. Sales letters, squeeze pages, video scripts, e-mail copy. I'm also thinking about expanding into video production, so the ability to paint a wall green wherever I move is one factor I need to think about (I'm guessing some places are more open to these kinds of renovation than others)

[ersatz]

You don't necessarily need to paint a wall green, you can get one of those large green photography background scrolls and just mount it.

When I looked at those websites it seems like the pay is generally pretty low relative to what you can get in a professional job and you have to compete with $2/hr Indians promising the world and delivering shit, how do you stand out?

If you move out of Canada, you can also take advantage of a far lower income tax rate. Possibly even %0 if you set it up right.

[Andy_B]

(01-02-2012 11:58 AM)ersatz Wrote:  

You don't necessarily need to paint a wall green, you can get one of those large green photography background scrolls and just mount it.

When I looked at those websites it seems like the pay is generally pretty low relative to what you can get in a professional job and you have to compete with $2/hr Indians promising the world and delivering shit, how do you stand out?

If you move out of Canada, you can also take advantage of a far lower income tax rate. Possibly even %0 if you set it up right.

you make yourself stand out by charging way higher than average.

buying psychology 101, price is a value indicator.

I charge $30/hr and I only lose bids to people who charge $50/hr or higher.

[KingofScotland]

Can anyone who is making money freelancing break down the best way to do it, some tips & hints, strategies to follow and so on. I'm looking to get into it myself but I'll be honest I don't know the first thing about it and would be good to hear from an expert.

[Beyond Borders]

I make the bulk of my income freelancing - mostly writing web content but I dabble in web design, seo, etc as well. The money is pretty good. On my writing jobs I typically average about $50 an hour and if you position yourself right you can make quite a bit more.

The biggest challenge when it comes to freelancing while living in places like Thailand, where I've been living most of the last 4 years, is maintaining your focus. It's really easy to end up working a day or two a week and spend the rest of the time screwing off.

But if you really give it your all it is definitely possible to build a 6 figure a year business with online writing alone.

To get started, set up a profile over at Elance.com and possibly guru.com. Fill out your profile as thorough as possible, do a few jobs cheap to build up some good feedback, and then start raising prices.

Don't compete on price! You only want to price yourself cheap for a few small jobs so you can that good feedback - reputation is everything online. The real key is to set yourself apart by offering more value - underpromise and overdeliver.

Other great places to get jobs include the Warrior Forum, Craigslist, and emailing local businesses (offline businesses are the best customers you can target). Eventually, you should put together a professional-looking website but you can get started without one.

One of the better books out there about commercial writing is "The Well-fed Writer." I haven't picked it up yet, but I'm planning to read it before starting a campaign to double my current rates, and from what I've heard it will really be a game changer.

[Andy_B]

(01-02-2012 04:43 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

I make the bulk of my income freelancing - mostly writing web content but I dabble in web design, seo, etc as well. The money is pretty good. On my writing jobs I typically average about $50 an hour and if you position yourself right you can make quite a bit more.

The biggest challenge when it comes to freelancing while living in places like Thailand, where I've been living most of the last 4 years, is maintaining your focus. It's really easy to end up working a day or two a week and spend the rest of the time screwing off.

But if you really give it your all it is definitely possible to build a 6 figure a year business with online writing alone.

To get started, set up a profile over at Elance.com and possibly guru.com. Fill out your profile as thorough as possible, do a few jobs cheap to build up some good feedback, and then start raising prices.

Don't compete on price! You only want to price yourself cheap for a few small jobs so you can that good feedback - reputation is everything online. The real key is to set yourself apart by offering more value - underpromise and overdeliver.

Other great places to get jobs include the Warrior Forum, Craigslist, and emailing local businesses (offline businesses are the best customers you can target). Eventually, you should put together a professional-looking website but you can get started without one.

One of the better books out there about commercial writing is "The Well-fed Writer." I haven't picked it up yet, but I'm planning to read it before starting a campaign to double my current rates, and from what I've heard it will really be a game changer.

Got the well fed writer for Christmas. Can't wait to start reading it.

[ersatz]

How well does iPhone, android and web programming do? Is it easy to book yourself for full time amounts of work? If you already have a website and examples of your work, do you have to do a few cheap jobs to build feedback on the website proper or will your brochure website do? Can those 6 digits amounts go past 200k?

[Andy_B]

(01-02-2012 06:17 PM)ersatz Wrote:  

How well does iPhone, android and web programming do? Is it easy to book yourself for full time amounts of work? If you already have a website and examples of your work, do you have to do a few cheap jobs to build feedback on the website proper or will your brochure website do?

Well, my gig is copywriting, but in pretty much any of these online freelancing niches, the better you are, the more money you make. If you produce crap work, clients will give you a bad score. I would imagine that you can get good rates for app development. That said, web designers aren't making what they used to on some sites, because so many people can do half-decent work for cheap now thanks to the thousands and thousands of website templates and customizable wordpress themes out there. I don't know much about the app market but if it's like web design with the templates popping up left, right and center, it might not be what it was (earnings-wise) two years ago.

[ersatz]

(01-02-2012 04:43 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

I make the bulk of my income freelancing - mostly writing web content but I dabble in web design, seo, etc as well. The money is pretty good. On my writing jobs I typically average about $50 an hour and if you position yourself right you can make quite a bit more.

The biggest challenge when it comes to freelancing while living in places like Thailand, where I've been living most of the last 4 years, is maintaining your focus. It's really easy to end up working a day or two a week and spend the rest of the time screwing off.

But if you really give it your all it is definitely possible to build a 6 figure a year business with online writing alone.

To get started, set up a profile over at Elance.com and possibly guru.com. Fill out your profile as thorough as possible, do a few jobs cheap to build up some good feedback, and then start raising prices.

Don't compete on price! You only want to price yourself cheap for a few small jobs so you can that good feedback - reputation is everything online. The real key is to set yourself apart by offering more value - underpromise and overdeliver.

Other great places to get jobs include the Warrior Forum, Craigslist, and emailing local businesses (offline businesses are the best customers you can target). Eventually, you should put together a professional-looking website but you can get started without one.

One of the better books out there about commercial writing is "The Well-fed Writer." I haven't picked it up yet, but I'm planning to read it before starting a campaign to double my current rates, and from what I've heard it will really be a game changer.

How do you do health insurance/visas/ taxes while living in Thailand? Do you pay taxes through you home country and have insurance and everything else based on there? Do you do visa runs all the time or something else?

[Beyond Borders]

I haven't really come up with a solution for the health insurance yet but medical care is dirt cheap in thailand. There are plans in that country that you can get as a foreigner, but I haven't done the research - yeah, I know I need to. Taxes you handle with the states and slip by under the radar in Thailand; it's kind of a don't ask, don't tell kind of thing and tons of expats are working online.

Anyhow, no matter what country you go to, just get on the expat forums for that specific country and you'll find most of your questions have been answered already. If not, just post a question there and you'll get feedback from a bunch of guys who have been living there forever and know all the ins and outs. Or just talk to long-term expats while you're there to learn the ropes.

I do visa runs and with a little hustling can turn a 2 month double entry visa into a 6 month stay and then renew. If you have enough money, you can pay the right person and get a work visa - or enroll in language classes and land yourself and education visa. Or you can spend part of your year in one country and part somewhere else.

There are plenty of solutions out there if you do the research; you just have to find out what works best for you. Thavisa.com is a good place to research if you're considering Thailand specifically.

[Parlay44]

I this thread. It's one of my goals to do this. Please share.

[Andy_B]

(01-03-2012 12:00 AM)Parlay44 Wrote:  

I this thread. It's one of my goals to do this. Please share.

For me, necessity really was the mother of invention. After years and years of getting fired from job after job, I decided I had to find my independence or die.

The first thing I did was to try freelancing for local media outlets in my city. This paid reasonably well, but it was annoying work. It involved a lot of chasing interviews, following annoying political stories, and generally doing things I didn't want to do. It was better than having a job, but still, it wasn't exactly what I wanted.

after that, I went looking for opportunities to freelance online. After a couple days of searching, I found out about sites like elance, odesk, vworker, etc, sites where employers would post freelance gigs and have workers bid on them.

I was initially discouraged when I found that articles were selling for as little as $2 a pop, but I combed the site for the diamonds in the rough and managed to find a few gems.

However, it was not until I discovered copywriting (i.e. sales writing for businesses) that I started making real. Businesses will pay top dollar for sales copy written to sell their goods and services. Many people charge $2000 plus for a sales letter; some even charge $10k PLUS a cut of revenues.

Of course, there a bunch of other skills that make decent money onine, but you really need to look around to find that nice intersection between your skills and what makes money. The following are some links to resources I recommend (in no particular order):

http://freelanceswitch.com/

http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/

http://www.elance.com/

https://www.odesk.com

http://www.amazon.com/Well-Fed-Writer-Se...592&sr=1-1

[KingofScotland]

I don't think I'll ever be happy unless I am my own boss. I just cannot stand to work for someone else. I hate having to go to an office every day at a set time, told what I'm going to do and how long it should take me, everything dictated to me and someone else having all the power. I need to start freelancing and working out how I can make money for myself. For the past couple of years I've made money on the side online (at one point I made all my money from online gambling in fact) but I've never had something which is sustainable and long term and I need to start working on that or it's forever going to be a life of work / make money for 6-8 months before quitting a job and leaving to travel for 6 months before having to come back and find work / money all over again. I need something that can be done continually and sustainably that allows me to travel when I want and work from anywhere in the world. It's time to get real and try hard at this.

[Parlay44]

I used to work for a major consumer electronics manufacturer doing phone tech support. Not to customers but to TV repair guys in the field. I'd get 50 calls a day from techs asking me stupid ass questions. I'd tell them which part or board to replace then I'd log the call info into a database.

We used to outsource some of the call volume to some independent guys working out of their house. Just needed a laptop, avaya phone software and Internet access. Calls coming in to the 800 number get forwarded to any number you supply at login. It could be a cell phone if you wanted.

They would pay $5 per call answered and logged into the database. I got burned out doing that shit and had to leave for something more fulfilling but it could be a good situation for the right person. You could live anywhere.

If anyone is interested PM me and I can give you some contacts to call or e-mail.

[RichieP]

Is anyone doing freelance programming?

I'd love to know how long it would take someone intelligent and analytical (physics degree) to get "good enough" at something like Javascript to earn enough money to pay the bills (say $1000-$1500) from freelancing.

I kind of get the impression that as a programmer you're up against people who do it all day with years of experience. Then again, maybe actually you're up against unreliable/shortcutting Indians, or guys who have no idea how to market themselves - in which case it should be possible to do well.

[Ami5]

What are some of the major Freelancing sites to get started?

[Freedom]

I just started freelancing after several years of full-time employment. I recently started copywriting which I like a lot, because you don't have to rely on hardware speed. Heck, I wouldn't mind copywriting on a tablet PC while traveling.
I currently don't have clients, however I registered to odesk and elance, filled out my portfolio and details, but SH*T!

Those site are flooded with Indians low-balling every gig. I even hired one some time ago for a $50 gig on eLance and was dissapointed with the communication. I only received ONE email response per 24 hours (even after staying up late until day time in India). They surely hustle for pocket change.

(01-02-2012 06:22 PM)Andy_B Wrote:  

I get my business through elance, odesk, and warriorforum. My business is fully online and I work mostly at night anyway.

What's your experience with that?

I can't apply for the $100+ jobs because they usually require feedback. And the under $50 jobs have 100 applicants from India.

So frustrating!!!

Also, how did you learn copywriting Andy? I took a short online course and read the book "Cashvertising"