Member-only story

Don’t rely on marketplaces if you want to become a freelance

Marketplaces may not be the best choice for a freelance

Gianluca Malato
5 min readFeb 23, 2022
Photo by Per Lööv on Unsplash

There are several ways an aspiring freelance can use to earn money. The simplest one is using marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork or Freelancer. Although their ease of use, maybe there are other possible solutions that can be applied.

The main problems of a freelance

If you are a freelance, your main problem is to gain customers that buy your services. So, you have to increase your visibility. Then, you have to keep a high reputation to keep your existing customers and encourage other people to contact you.

Marketplaces allow you to create your own space, with your portfolio of skills and projects and the rating from your previous customers. The internal algorithms of these websites will increase or decrease your visibility according to customer satisfaction and the price of your services. Such websites usually take a percentage of each work you accept, so they get paid if you get paid.

It seems wonderful, right? Just create a free account with these websites and start selling your services.

Well, it’s not so fine as it may appear.

Biased visibility

--

--

Gianluca Malato
Gianluca Malato

Written by Gianluca Malato

Theoretical Physicists, Data Scientist and fiction author. I teach Data Science, statistics and SQL on YourDataTeacher.com. E-mail: gianluca@gianlucamalato.it

No responses yet