Many people try to make money online by joining paid surveys, affiliates, mystery shopper or day trader. They all have their own characteristics. Paid surveys and mystery shopper are easy jobs, but they definitely won't make you rich since their fees are low. Affiliates and day trader can make you rich, but they are very difficult to maintain and also very risky. If you look for something that is safer, not too difficult and can make you rich, you should try to work as a freelancer.

What is a freelance job?

Basically, working freelance is the same as doing fulltime job. The differences are just that you can work at home, manage your own deadline, and free to choose which jobs you like. There are hundreds of freelance jobs you can find online. Some of them, such as IT programmer, web developer, web designer, product designer, label designer, medical transcriptor and copywriter require special skills. But some other such as data entry, data converter, book reviewer and bulk emailer are very simple to do!

How to get a freelance job?

Nowadays, there are so many websites that act as marketplaces (places where buyer/ project owner meet the freelancer). They usually charge 5%10% transaction fees. Three biggest marketplaces are elance, guru and rentacoder. Elance as the biggest marketplace has hundreds of new projects every month, their project price is the highest, but its membership fee is also the most expensive ($11$199/ month). Guru and rentacoder charge lower membership fees (rentacoder is even free), but their project price are much lower than elance. There is one similarity between these marketplaces; they indeed have thousands of projects but just 40% of them that are eventually awarded.

How much can I make from a freelance job?

How much you can earn from freelance jobs depends on many factors. A small project such as web development costs $100$300 per project and can be finished within 12 weeks. Book reviewing project costs $100$200 per books (if your client is satisfied you can get this kind of project every week). Data conversion, such as converting PDF to HTML files, costs $3$5 per file. This type of project usually is given in a bulk (about 100200 files per project). So you still get huge income. But remember, you can also earn $0 if you do not do any efforts to win a project (by bidding too high) or violating the agreements (can not meet the deadlines, the completed software is full of bugs, charging additional fees, etc).

Risks

Every business has its own risks. Working as a freelancer also has no difference. Here are some of those risks:

• Buyer disappears soon after you completed his project. Not every buyer is trustworthy. So please be careful if you meet a client who likes to change his project scopes, ask for the lowest price (but demanding the best service) and keep delaying to pay (even after you have completed the project). It's better if you ask them to pay 20%30% soon after you have completed 75%80% of the total project.
• Buyer cancels his project. This is a very common case. Usually it's because the buyer doesn't trust his freelancer anymore. Almost all of the buyers ask his freelancer to give progress report every week or every three days. If they are unsatisfied with these reports, they can suddenly cancel their project. So please be careful.
• You never won any single projects. For freelancers who're joining "free service" websites such as Guru and Rentacoder, this is not a big problem. But not for them who're joining "paid service" websites such as elance. You must understand that it's not easy to win a project. There is bloody competition out there, especially from the third world freelancer who likes to bid very low price.