A Guide to Making Money as a Freelancer by Selling Your Hours for Dollars (HFD)

Pay attention to the drawbacks of this time-honored way to make a buck online

Who doesn’t like to make money? We all love it. It’s one of the true universals of human life on this planet earth. It’s a must for survival. But more than that, it’s also one way to keep score of what we accomplish in life.

Plus, for some, making money is therapy as well. I know a number of people who would’ve done great harm to themselves and others if they weren’t busy making money.

Since the early 90s, the Internet has been where fortunes are made and lost. Making Money Online (MMO) has been the new “Gold Rush” where everyone tries to discover their own California and stake out their own digital real estate. It’s an obsession that won’t go away anytime soon. The rush is still on.

Selling your Hours for Dollars (HFD) as a freelancer is a time-honored way to make a buck online. This is what probably a sizable percentage of talented people out there are doing either full-time or as a side gig.

There are more than 56 million freelancers in the United States alone, according to QZ.com. The U.S. workforce has reached 164 million in February 2020. So almost one-third of people working in the United States right now are freelancers! An amazing number, isn't it? The number of U.S. freelancers is expected to reach 86 million in 2027.

Freelancers make almost one-third of the U.S. workforce

Since this is a critical look at the opportunities as well as difficulties that freelancing presents, I’d like to start with two major issues with HFD.

Problems: Scaling and Competition

One major shortcoming of Hours For Dollars (HFD) model is that it’s not scalable since there are only 24 hours in a day.

The number of hours you can sell is limited.

And the competition is fierce.

If you signed on to any HFD platform lately (see the list below) you’ll discover that it’s usually a “race to the bottom” of hourly earnings. If you say you’ll reformat an Excel sheet for $10, there will be someone from India willing to do it for $8, who will be beaten by someone from the Philippines or Indonesia willing to do it for $5 or even $3! Heck, I’ve seen people who even propose to do it for free just to build up their portfolios and collect testimonials.

In this age of international reach and connectivity, it’s hard to justify an hourly wage good enough to help you earn a living but it’s not impossible.

I invite you to read my article below on the perils of quoting an hourly rate if you’re working as a freelancer.

Solution 1: Branding

One way to solve the scaling and competition problem is branding yourself; becoming a go-to name, an authority, an expert instead of remaining a technician and a front-line practitioner.

But here is the built-in contradiction: an attempt to become a brand, if successful, makes you look out of place on sites like Fiverr where nameless experts toil for a few bucks but not renowned experts. All of a sudden your positioning looks off (“if he is as good as he says he is, then what the heck is he doing here?” syndrome). Would you still want to be a member of a HFD job site if you have a recognizable brand? Debatable. The old self-deprecating Groucho Max joke comes to mind: “I won’t belong to any organization that would have me as a member.”

If you become a brand, you suddenly become too good to look for “a gig” on many of these platforms. Thus it becomes a different game. Then you need your own web site, broadcasts, perhaps webinars, etc. All of a sudden you are not on the HFD platform anymore.

Solution 2: Local Captive Audience

If you can build your “local captive audience” (through an in-house email list, for example, which is a must no matter what you do on the Internet) then you can probably continue to practice HFD while also charging your own rates.

Tutoring local high school students come to mind as an example of high-hourly-rate HFD practice that can be maintained over the long run.

My wife, for example, did that for years teaching math and physics to local HS students while charging top dollars for her hours. The parents were glad to pay her rather than hire someone on Skype from across the world for ten dollars an hour since the quality and reliability of such one-on-one skill transfer was too critical for the future of their children to be left to the “Internet roulette.” (And I’m proud to say many of her students were admitted to prestigious schools like Harvard and Penn State, which only solidified her local reputation and re-justified her high hourly rate.)

Other than such “captive audience” opportunities closed by definition to Internet competition, it’s though to remain a relatively faceless/nameless freelancer and earn a good income through HFD model. And when you do become “a face,” a brand, then you find yourself in a totally different game altogether, as I tried to explain above.

Responsibilities of Working as an Independent Contractor

When you trade hours for dollars as a freelancer, you legally become what in the United States called an “independent contractor.”

What does this mean?

It means you have to provide your own bookkeeping and accounting, pay your own taxes, answer your own calls, provide for your own medical and perhaps malpractice insurance, pay your Social Security premiums, pay for your utilities and transportation, and provide all the administrative and secretarial services that a paid professional staff provide in a traditional corporate environment.

That’s why offering HFD means becoming your own Jack of All Trades since all of a sudden you become not only a technician providing a valuable service but also a business owner with a number of obligations.

If you think that’s too much to handle or contrary to your leanings and nature, you might want to consider another money-making model on the Internet. If you don’t have the discipline to take care of such administrative items religiously, HFD may not be the ideal income channel for you.

Selected HFD Platforms

Yet, in case you’d like to try it, here are some well-established HFD platforms for you to try your luck.

* Fiverr

The mother of all HFD freelancing sites. Fiverr is alive with web design, voice-over, writing, translation, programming, SEO, online marketing, and graphic design opportunities. Perfect for single mothers and all others working from home. You get paid by not bidding against other freelancers but according to what you charge for your services. For all new freelancers that starts with the obligatory $5 per gig.

Yes, it starts with paying $5 per gig but don't let that figure fool you as a vendor. If you keep your nose to the grinding wheel, Fiverr will eventually allow you to escalate your fees in various ways (for “24-hour delivery,” for example).

I’ve seen seasoned freelancers charging $100 or more for their services on Fiverr. Here is a great discussion thread about how you can charge more on Fiverr. Here is another helpful forum thread on the same topic.

You pay Fiverr a processing fee of $1 for purchases up to $20 and 5% of the total for orders more than $20. You may find this “13 steps to starting an online business” guide useful if you’d like to offer HFD on Fiverr.

*** Guru

Similar to Fiverr but without that “all-for-five-bucks” marketing slogan. The site offers good HFD opportunities for programmers, translators, writers, designers, online tool experts, lawyers, and personal service providers of all kinds. You get a job by bidding for it against other freelancers.

On Guru, you can get paid in four different ways:

• A fixed price per project according to a project timeline (the more steps you finish the more you get paid).
• An hourly rate (where you submit a breakdown of your hours per task finished).
• Task-based payment (you invoice for each individual task finished).
• Recurring payment (by every week, every other week, every month, or every quarter).

Here is a Guru guide you may find useful on how to “Connect with Potential Employers with a Video.”

*** Upwork

A great site to find a high-tech HFD job for software and App programmers, web designers, writers, salespeople and marketers, customer service pros, VAs, data science and analytics professionals, engineers and architects. You get a job by bidding for it against other freelancers.

There are plenty of jobs for low-tech gigs as well like copywriting, logo design, resume writing, and bookkeeping. But the best-paying jobs on Upwork are decidedly high tech including blockchain development, game and mobile app development, Python/Javascript programming, data scientist, etc.

On Upwork you can work for short-term projects or sign-up a contract for long-term projects.

Upwork offers a great ebook and article library which you may find helpful as a freelancer.

*** Freelancer

Another good site for those freelancers providing web design, mobile app development, virtual assistant, product manufacturing, and graphic design services. The top HFD categories are mostly in hi-tech, software/web design, and programming fields. You get a job by bidding for it against other freelancers. It offers free chatting for the job owner and freelancer to compare notes and discuss the progress.

Here are some sample job offers and how much it pays on Freelancer:

• Website development — $300
• Graphic Design — $100
• Logo Design — $50
• Mobile App — $50 an hour
• Box design for a male grooming product — $400
• Blueberry app design — $1,000
• 3D Photorealistic Architectural Visualization — $500

Offers a “Preferred Freelancer” program to help you stand out from the competition. The site claims “Preferred Freelancers earn an average of $1000 extra over their first 6 months in the Program, and have exclusive access to bid on over 100 projects every day.”

*** Toptal

This is a web site that boasts to offer “Top 3% of Freelance Talent.” Toptal focuses to hire professional developers, designers, finance experts, project managers, product managers, and specialized talent for “Toptal Projects.” This is not an easy platform for newbie freelancers since all applicants are vetted and tested in their areas of expertise. The site offers bio profiles of Toptal freelancers who previously used to work for companies like Google, Shopify, Exxon Mobile. Toptal offers the chance to work remotely with flexible time off. To apply to work for Toptal, click here.

*** Amazon.jobs

Probably it did not occur to you but do you know that Amazon is one of the largest employers in the United States? And what’s more, Amazon is constantly looking for freelancers to fill all kinds of temp or part-time positions some of which may become permanent in the long run. If you want to sell your hours for dollars, Amazon might be another option.

Click here to browse through the category of jobs that Amazon advertises for.

The “Editorial, Writing, & Content Management” category, for example, is (at this writing) looking for Technical Writers, Copywriters, Marketing/Business Writers, Publishers, German Swedish and Polish translators, Digital Editors, Creative Materials Coordinators, Content Developers, Content Quality Associates, Content Strategists, and Content Managers.

*** Translation

You may want to check out these freelance opportunities if you are a translator:

• Gengo.com Offers translation services in over 70 language pairs. As a freelancer, you can translate such e-commerce text as product descriptions, user reviews, marketing advertising and branding materials, website copy. Gengo offers many other translation job opportunities in the following sectors: Travel leisure hospitality, media publishing entertainment, mobile and video games, SEO and online marketing, technology and software, business and finance, and legal. Pays twice a month through PayPal only. To apply to become a freelance translator, click here.
• OneHourTranslation.com Offers translation services in 120 languages and employs 25,000 translators worldwide. As the company name suggests, it offers a quick turnaround on translation services. So you need absolute mastery of your second (or third) language in order to translate quickly for this company. It specializes in translations in the following sectors: Legal, financial, manufacturing, engineering, IT and software, government, media and publishing, mobile and video games, marketing, advertising, retail and e-commerce, tourism, online gambling (how about that!), blockchain and crypto. Pays through PayPal and Payoneer Mastercard. To apply to become a freelance translator, click here.
• WeLocalize This is a comparatively smaller translation house from Frederick, Maryland that is open to freelance translators. They specialize in digital marketing, translation and localization (for over 500 language combinations), multimedia and e-learning, interpretation, and language automation niches. Their focus is on “localization” which at times may require more than linguistic skills and an expert knowledge of cultural differences and idiosyncrasies as well. To apply to become a freelance translator, click here.

*** Proofreading

Freelance proofreading is another HFD model to make money online that can bring up to $100 an hour. It’s a great job for stay-at-home freelancers and does not require any qualifications other than a good command of English (or other) and a keen eye for typos and grammar mistakes. Thus if you are an English major you might excel in this HFD niche. Search any of the job sites above with keyword “proofreading” and “proofreader.”

*** Voice Overs

Working as a voice actor is a great HFD freelancing job if you’ve got the right voice for the right project. Your voice may not be a deep bass-baritone like that of James Earl Jones. But remember cartoons and commercials need all kinds of squeaky and oddball voices as well. Some projects need an authentic non-English accent (like Chinese, Iranian, Irish, etc.). So don’t count yourself out before applying for a voice over project. Here are some companies that offer jobs for freelancing voice over artists:

• Fiverr (see above)
• Voices One of the larger voice over platforms employed by the likes of History Channel, Microsoft, Hulu, Los Angeles Times, etc. Offers VO opportunities in animation, business, educational, internet video, and video game categories. Top VO styles preferred at this writing is approachable, authentic, conversational, friendly, and believable in 5 languages: English (North American), French, Chinese (Mandarin), German, and Spanish. A 750 word or less non-broadcasting VO job costs $100-to-$249 to the customer. On the other end of the price scale, a 9,000+ word job costs $1,250 or more. Broadcasting VO jobs are priced separately. The company offers two great guides for those who are thinking to enter the field: The Professional’s Guide to Voice Acting and Beginner’s Guide to Voice Acting. Click here to apply to work as a freelance VO actor.
• Voice Jungle Charges the end customer 30 cents a word. They pride themselves on being fast and take on short-notice projects. Offers 2-hour rush delivery. Click here to apply to work as a freelance VO actor.
• Bunny Studio VO in 50+ languages. They work with an auditioning system. Up to three VO actors audit for one job and the winner gets the gig. Even though this means 33% chance to win any offer, it also means 3 times as many opportunities to apply for a gig. Opportunity to do VO for advertising, audiobook, podcast, video games, and phone system projects. Click here to apply to work as a freelance VO actor.
• People Per Hour Click here to apply.