Nowadays students studying in high school and colleges are keen to learn more about starting a freelancing career at a very early age. They have become aware that freelancing as a career can be highly rewarding and can give them endless opportunity to grow online. If you are also one of them and planning or thinking of doing something similar along with your studies then this blog is for you.
Here I will be discussing about how you can start freelancing as a student with either no experience or with minimum skills. This blog may change your thought process and help you choose a passion following career goal. Lets get started.
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What is Freelancing?
Freelancing is a type of service you can offer to clients from anywhere in the world. It can be done either part-time or full-time, making it an excellent option for students who want to kickstart their careers and grow online. To begin your freelancing journey, the first step is identifying at least one skill that aligns with your interests and passions.
This step is crucial because it lays the foundation for your future freelancing career. If you’re a beginner without any experience, don’t worry—you can start by learning a skill. Platforms like YouTube, Udemy, Coursera etc. offer countless free tutorials, or you can seek guidance from friends or acquaintances who can help you discover skills that match your interests, personality, and goals.
Before diving into the freelancing world, take a moment to reflect and validate whether freelancing suits you as a career path. It requires patience, dedication, and consistent effort to achieve success. Remember, freelancing is a journey that demands time and persistence, but it can be incredibly rewarding if you’re willing to put in the work.
To begin freelancing, you just need a good internet speed, basic online credentials such Gmail account, phone number, address, bank details, Valid ID card etc.
There are many freelancing portals such as Fiverr, Upwork, where you can register yourself and apply for freelance tasks. This skills helps you to become expert in whatever you do from the comfort of your home. But remember, do not register unless you have done some work and showcase it as your Portfolio. You will get projects only when you have a portfolio to show to your clients looking to hire freelancers. You can use your local contacts to get some relevant projects related to your skills and showcase it as your sample work.
Top 5 Ways That Can Help you Start Freelancing as a Student with No Experience
1. Virtual Assistant
Freelancers can sometimes become Virtual Assistants (VA) to famous influencers or Social Media Agencies or any Business Organizations. Being a freelance virtual assistant you may offer a wide range of services depending on your skills and client’s requirement. Some of the most popular projects you may take as a Virtual assistant are:
Social Media Management: This includes creating high quality posts, scheduling posts in all the social media platforms related to the Client’s business or service, replying to posts, query handling and keeping the audience engaged.
Email Management: Organizing, drafting and responding Emails on behalf of the client. Maintaining a well-organized mail box and schedule for client’s smooth business functions.
Data Entry: Sometimes the client has requirement to convert the data in different formats for which they look out for Data Entry Virtual Assistants who can help them entering data into Spreadsheets or CRMS systems. This is a very basic entry level job that students can start with. You should be very careful from the fraudsters or scammers who ask for money to offer such jobs. You need to look for genuine clients who need a Data entry VA.
Scheduling: Clients who are frequent travelers often look out for virtual assistants who can manage calendar, schedule meetings, and organize appointments and events for them.
Customer Support: As a Virtual Assistant you can handle customer inquiries, via email, phone or chat. This freelance service revolves around solving customer grievances, customer feedback, product or service information and sometimes processing orders.
Administrative Tasks: General administrative work can also be some times overwhelming for Clients. Hence they look out for part time freelancers who can help them manage admin tasks like document preparation, creating or editing presentations, handling invoices, research business topics, or manage files.
Content Creation: This is one of the highest demanded freelance task you can get as a Virtual Assistant. You need create or write high quality SEO friendly blog posts for client’s business or services, manage website content, graphic designing, or creating social media posts using various graphic design tools such as Canva, Adobe Illustrator.
Video Editing: Today there are thousands of content creators on YouTube and other social media platform. Every one intend to upload an exceptionally edited & high quality Video content. Content creators do a lot of research, write script and work very hard to make just one quality content. They are always in a constant search of perfectionist video editors who can take their video content to the next level.
If you believe you have exceptional video editing skills or you can learn and implement it to get freelance projects then you can approach creators, youtubers, businesses and influencers who need polished, engaging videos with clear audio and transition effects. Such video editing effects scales the content to a professional level. Every brand and individual want professional high quality content without spending much on full time editors. You can fill in this gap and get great deals.
With the rise of video content platforms like YouTube, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, etc, there is a growing demand of Video editing freelancers. Most brands now a days prefer promoting their products or services through video content and you as a student with basic editing knowledge can easily offer services using tools like, Canva, Filmora, Camtasia, and other premium tools. You can charge Rs.400 to Rs.500 for a 5 minutes video editing.
As a beginner Virtual Assistant, you can expect to earn about ₹200 – ₹500 per hour depending on the type of projects you take.
Following are the skills you may require to start freelancing as a Student:
- Communication Skills
- Time Management
- Creativity and Unique Style
- Attention to Detail
- Tech Savvy
- Social Media Skills
- Competitive Research
- Knowledge of AI tools
- Organization
2. Content Writing or Blogging
If you love writing and sharing about something you enjoy in your daily life, then Content writing can be a very good freelancing skill that can help you grow in the online world. You can either do it as a Virtual Assistant as mentioned above or you can do it as an independent Freelance Content Writer.
You can start your own blog and write content on a particular Niche you enjoy studying, watching or doing. Remember, your blogs should be informative, qualitative and add value to your reader’s life.
You can also write blogs or articles for any specific product or service based company who generally pay you either hourly or based on number of article projects in a month. Being a fresher in blogging industry you may start earning 20-30k INR per month and this can go up to 4 to 5L per month. If your writing skills are loved by the organization you are working for, you get hired on a permanent basis with a very good 6 or 7 figure salary.
Blogging also gives you an opportunity to open other sources of income such as Affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, or from ads.
I know a student from Gujarat, studying in Class 11. He started his blogging journey from writing about career guidance where he helped students to choose relevant career after their schooling. He is currently earning 10-15k per month by sponsored ads and affiliate links.
3. Video Creator for YouTube & Instagram
Students always look for options to start freelancing without investment or with very minimal investment, as they have only one source of to spend money and that is their pocket money which they get from their parents either weekly or monthly. In today’s era, students love to live an independent life right from a very early age and hence seek online freelancing options by utilizing their skills. YouTube and Meta (Facebook or Instagram) can be an excellent platform for students to grow as a freelancer. Follow the below steps:
- Identify in which genre you are more passionate and interested about
- Research few topics from that Genre or Niche that is already trending on YouTube and other social media channels (To understand more about Niche, read my previous blog)
- Use very basic equipment like a smartphone, Wi-Fi or mobile data and good sound mic or earphones. Always try to start with a minimum or no investment and then gradually if you see yourself growing, you can have a professional set up
- You can create content on topics you are passionate about, like Gaming, Vlogging, Education, Tech Gadgets, User Generated Content (UGC promoting niche based products from different brands), Dancing and Singing (If you have any unique style which may be liked by your viewers), Stock Market, Friendships, DIY, Gardening, or on any other hobby that you believe will be unique and valuable to your audience. For more detail on content on Instagram and YouTube, read this blog.
- When you grow your subscribers and views per content, you gradually become eligible to monetize your page or channel. You can start generating a good source of revenue from these platforms.
I know many students generating a good source of passive income by creating videos on DIY and gaming tips. Each one of them has more than 50,000 subscribers and they get a monthly revenue of 20-25k INR clubbed with sponsorships and collaborations.
4. Become an Influencer
In today’s digital era a student can also become an influencer and easily generate revenue from paid collaborations and brand deals. Companies prefer spending on collaborations with influencers rather than doing paid marketing to minimize the cost on advertisement and promotion.
You will have to identify your interest or passion which can be any one of these – gaming, fashion, fitness, singing, dancing, education, technology, cars, bikes, vlogs, social media etc. and create high quality content on a regular basis. Posting contents on platforms like YouTube, Instagram or Thread can help you engage with a specific niche based audience and build a community around it.
Once you have gained a good number of followers, you get sponsorship offers, paid collaboration offers from brands. You may also earn by affiliate marketing (will make a separate detailed blog on this) and paid promotions for any product or service based business. Many students are monetizing their hobbies, passion and interest by becoming influencers, while managing their studies and aiming for a higher career goal.
5. Launch Online Courses and Training on AI Tools
Learning and sharing knowledge is an evergreen path to start your journey as a freelancer. But here I will not be talking about Academic Knowledge. If you are tech savvy and enjoy spending time learning new things, try to gain expertise in AI tools and their usage. 2020 to 2050 will be a golden period for Artificial Intelligence (AI). New AI tools are emerging every day and 99% of the people are not aware about relevant AI tools, their pricing structure or detail usage process.
Consider picking up 10 to 20 AI tools and gain knowledge and skills by working with those AI tools yourself. Try building a course around it or start an online tutoring people about AI and its benefits. Today is AI era, everyone wants to work smarter and faster. Your classes or courses will make people’s life easy and comfortable. It will help you gain traction from different parts of the world and you may land up having multiple sources of income. Who may know, you can take it as a full time career in future.
Conclusion
These are some of the ways which can help you start freelancing as a student without compromising your academics or professional goal. You just need to identify your skills and interest and work consistently to build a successful freelancing portfolio.
In today’s scenario Internet has brought many opportunities for you to learn skills from the comfort of your home. Remember balancing work and studies at the same time is very important as Academics give you knowledge to dive deep into your ideas and grow more as a professional.
Hope you loved reading my article? If yes, please do share it with your friends.
Disclaimer: Please note, Students are never advised to compromise their studies. This article is for those students, who are working hard to build their academic and professional career and are also interested to learn freelancing so that they either become independent, or help their parents financially or sponsor themselves for higher studies. You are advised to perform all the above mentioned tips under the guidance or an expert or after getting a training from a professional who has already worked in the field you are interested in. This will help you identify and validate your goal easily.
There are various opportunities like:
- Data Entry
- Ghost Writing
- Reviewing a Book
- Reviewing Music
- Proof Reading
- Translation
- Social Media Management
- Content Writing
- Virtual Assistant
- Customer Care
- Online Surveys
There are various ways a 17 year old can practice freelancing. You can try freelancing in areas where you have skills and interests such as blogging, social media management, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, graphic designing and many more.
Yes, you can do freelancing with or without any prior experience. But to play a longer game in the freelancing world, it is always advised to master atleast one skill that can get you good projects as a freelancer. Clients usually prefer to work with freelancers who has some proven skills and have a portfolio to show based on the skills they have learned. You can start your freelancing journey and start developing skills simultaneously.