Pakistanis, earn money – do free lancing
By working from home and at their own pace and skills, freelancers offer services in a variety of sectors. With computers and smart phone freelancing online has become possible, practical, viable and within reach of almost everyone.
Let’s face it. In today’s world when everything is becoming expensive every day, making ends meet is becoming extremely difficult, if not impossible. In this situation all hands should be on the deck. To help bring food to the table everyone should work whatever they can and contribute, even by a small bit. By gone are the days when one person worked and the whole family ate. Now for everyone to eat, everyone needs to work. And if one is working already and they have some spare time they should look for opportunities to work more.
That’s where the idea of free lancing comes from.
Freelancing has grown in popularity both in Pakistan and around the world as a means of generating income. By working from home and at their own pace and skills, freelancers offer services in a variety of sectors. With computers and smart phone freelancing online has become possible, practical, viable and within reach of almost everyone.
How to freelance
- Locate Free lancing websites.
- Plan what service you can offer as a freelancer.
- Register yourself as a freelancer on the target websites.
- Design your sales pitch for the services you are offering.
- Wait for the orders to come.
- Process/complete the orders.
- Review, evaluate and improve.
- Don’t lose heart, continue trying.
Let’s go thru each step in detail.
Locate Free lancing websites.
In today’s world searching for something is extremely easy. Just google it. After googling and after applying some basic filters I was able to locate some of more common and popular websites where freelancing services can be offered:
https://talent.hubstaff.com/work
- Plan what service you can offer as a freelancer.
It is correct that computer, software and/or internet related services are more commonly offered as freelancers. It is also true that technology related services may be priced higher. However please be aware that in addition to technology related services, tons of other services are also offered on free lancing basis and get paid reasonably. Some of these services that are offered on a freelancing basis are so simple that even old or very less formally educated people can perform the same. At times you may not even realize that some of the daily tasks that one performs at home on a routine basis people are willing to pay even for those. So DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE yourself.
The best way to know what services can be offered is to see what services are being offered by others on the free-lancing websites. On doing the above exercise on a less expansive but very popular website called Fiverr, I found the following major groups of services being offered by various freelancers:
- Graphics & Design
- Art & Illustration
- Web & App Design
- Product & Gaming
- Print Design
- Visual Design
- Marketing Design
- Packaging & Covers
- Architecture & Building Design
- Fashion & Merchandise
- 3D Design
- Digital Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Methods & Techniques
- Analytics & Strategy
- Industry & Purpose-Specific
- Miscellaneous
- Writing & Translation
- Video & Animation
- Music & Audio
- Programming & Tech
- Website Platforms
- Application Development
- Support & Cybersecurity
- Miscellaneous
- Photography
- Modeling & Acting
- Business
- Legal Services
- General & Administrative
- Sales & Customer Care
- Accounting & Finance
- Miscellaneous
- AI Services
Go ahead and look at sub-categories and the description of each offered by other free lancers and you can be sure to find something that you recognize, know and are confident of doing better than others. That’s what you should start with. Also don’t limit yourself to Fiverr only, look at other similar websites as well.
Note: Unless you are a little bit established and have built some profile supported by enough orders and positive feedback/comments, try to stay away from websites/portals that ask for money upfront.
- Register yourself as a freelancer on the target websites.
Each freelancing website may have a different registration process. Also, the websites provide simple and clear instructions on how to register or some means of reaching out to them in case you have any questions. In most cases registration process is very straight forward. You need an email address, your phone number and information on your bank account for receiving payments.
- Design your sales pitch for the services you are offering.
This is a very important area where you define the service you plan to offer and a description of why one should get these services from you among tons of other service providers.
There are several ways of designing your sales pitch. The best way is to get the services of some professional, maybe from the same free-lancing platform/website. However, starters may not have the luxury of enough funds at their disposal to hire someone else, so they can use the sales pitch from other successful service providers as a template and customize the same to align it with their individual strong and/or week points. Please be careful, the writer is not encouraging to steal someone else’s sales pitch by copying and pasting their offer. What the writer is suggesting is just getting an idea from someone else ad to understand what contents to use and how. Even to your own benefit your ad/sales pitch should be unique and offer its own merits so your potential clients can differentiate you from others.
On such platforms/websites buyers generally gauge service providers from their profiles and experience. So please ensure to provide all relevant information in your profile that may help them select you over others. Also, initially as you may not have enough experience, which gets measured by the number of orders completed and delivered on the website, to show, you may have to offer extra work at less price so some price conscience clients can consider you.
- Wait for the orders to come
The heading is self-explanatory that after creating a good profile and after creating a strong ad/sales pitch you just need to wait for someone to approach you with an inquiry or order. In a lot of cases, before placing orders buyers reach out to service providers with some questions, seeking some clarity or to explain their unique requirement. This is an extremely important phase and communication should be handled very carefully. This communication may turn the buyer away if not handled professionally. Most important things to consider when communicating with your clients before, during or after an order are:
- Act business like, professional
- Be polite and respectful, even if they are not.
- Read their questions 3 times to understand before responding.
- Respond fully, answering each question separately.
- If you can’t respond right away, please let them know when you can reply.
- Be honest with your capabilities and/or experience.
- Never ever lie or commit something you can’t deliver.
- Always provide good customer service
- Always close the chapter on a positive note even if the interaction was not.
- Process/complete Order
Once you get lucky and start getting orders, please keep in mind that on such platforms each and every customer, order, their experience and their feedback increases or decreases your value. So, each and every customer, their ordered work/service should be performed/executed to the best of your abilities, so not only the customer is happy to give you positive feedback but also comes back and can give his/her positive references to others.
Putting in a few extra minutes to over deliver goes a long way. Your objective should always be to get more satisfied and happy customers and their good feedback and recommendations, money will automatically follow.
Success begets success. As you receive more orders and your profile shows more positive feedback from satisfied clients, it becomes stronger, and you gain more authenticity which in turn attracts more customers.
- Review, evaluate and improve.
Nothing is perfect the first time and things improve over a period of time. You must follow a continuous improvement process by regularly reviewing your offered services and prices with other service providers offering the same and adjust your offer accordingly.
Similarly based on your experience of communication with clients, completing orders and poon their feedback you should periodically make amendments to your services, process and delivery time favorably.
Once the above process is followed even if your ad/sales pitch, price, delivery period was not ideal the first time, it will get better and your chances of success hence more revenue will improve.
- Don’t lose heart, continue trying.
Registering yourself, creating your profile and posting your ad on one freelancing website/platform is not enough. Go ahead, register at more places and keep on trying. As happens in all others new things, getting first few orders and gaining trust of potential buyers initially, is tough and may take longer but once the process starts, you get few orders and positive feedback/comments added to your profile you will see that things start getting better. Just don’t lose heart and keep trying. It would eventually work.
Conclusion:
Pakistanis are talented, hardworking and have brilliant work and mind skills, they just need avenues to demonstrate and prove the same and freelancing websites/platforms are one such set of avenues that can be utilized.
Note: If you like what you just read you can help more by:
- Subscribing – this way you will be notified anytime a new post gets made.
- Sharing posts – this way you will spread the good words to more people.
- Sharing ideas – this way you can give us your ideas/solutions for new blog.
- Writing blog – this way you can actually contribute to this website and participate in the good work.
Feel free to reach out to us for any questions, suggestions and/or areas for improvements.
Babar Saeed
May 01, 2023

The writer is a professional marketer and engineer with good work exposure to governments, and businesses and industries in the private sector in several countries. Idea is to take the first step in adding value to anything that one gets exposed to instead of just complaining about the same.