Am i kidding? No. I swear i started from $0. And I consider my current position pretty good! Many people don’t realize the potential that freelancing business has. When i started 14 months ago, i just surfed the Internet to find out what everyone needed. Gradually I started visiting webmaster forums like DigitalPoint.com and took up odd jobs like forum posting, blog posting, article rewriting, etc. Currently i have several jobs (which equals several revenue streams) from which to plan my day around. And if I find I am too busy, I just say no to new work!
Starting at $0 :
If you really want to be successful online, you have to apply yourself. You can visit webmaster forums and start with any skills you have like flash development, programming, blog writing, article writing, etc. There are several job boards you can look through like of Problogger’s, FreelanceSwitch’s, Copyblogger’s, Rentacoder, and Elance. I won’t recommend you gigaom or Techcrunch job board because there you wouldn’t find any article writing type jobs, only serious full time positions with bigger companies.
This how you earn - If you are serious about working as freelancer, you will make at least get $15000 per year, part time. You can make quite a bit more if you work at it!
How?
Suppose you can make $50 everyday.
$50 x 30 days/month = $1500
$1500 x 10 month = $15000 !
I am not considering two months because you may want to get a bit of a break during the summer months or have a bit of down time. After all, freelancing is about working when you want, doing what you want! But once you get into the groove of things and start to brand yourself, you will make more money doing something you love. Year by year, your income will rise and you will start having to turn away job offers.
One very important tip is to try and maintain a blog in your niche. For example, if you are a tech writer, have a tech blog were you write quality articles and these can be shown as examples to recruiters.
I bet if you even some of the things that we talked about above, you will be able to leave your 9-5 job in few years! Unfortunately, you want to make sure you’re established before you give up your regular paycheck. After you start getting jobs, you want to have a bit of money (and clients) set aside if anything goes wrong. That way, you don’t have to sacrifice anything if work slows down a bit!