by Jane Rutherford

Created on: January 02, 2011

Freelancing career can offer a great amount of freedom, but it’s also extremely demanding. Freelancers need to know where to find work and how to proceed to land the best paying jobs. The beauty of freelancing is that you don’t need to have experience, as long as you know how to find freelance work. Here are some tips to help you find the best kind of jobs.

- Set up a website with a blog

While it might seem like an obvious tip, assuring you have an online presence is crucial in finding any kind of freelance work. On the website you can put all the contact information, as well as samples of your work for clients to see.

If you incorporate a blog into your website and keep regular updates, it will help to get your website noticed. If you blog on subjects connected to your area of expertise and structure blog posts using SEO (search engine optimization), your website will appear high in Google search results every time a potential client searches for your keywords.

Blog posts and pages in your website can also serve as your writing samples if you’re just beginning your freelancing career. They show your expertise in your field.

- Network and market yourself

Networking and marketing are closely related to each other. By commenting to other people’s blogs, updating your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; you’re putting your name out there. Networking and meeting new people in your niche can help you in the long run, because if you develop good relationships, your friends can refer you to clients.

Marketing yourself means using social bookmarking tools, guest blogging etc. All marketing efforts should result in greater exposure of yourself and your website and should lead to new clients and more work. You can market with your networking tools; using your Twitter and Facebook updates to promote your products, services and work in general.

- Join online marketplaces

Sites like oDesk, Guru, eLance or Freelancer.com offer access to a great number of job postings that can lead to a lot of work. While each of those sites usually charge a fee for each contract, it definitely saves time and effort that can be spent furthering your freelancing career.

Bidding for jobs at online marketplaces helps freelancers work on their pitching skills since they have to compete against other freelancers for the jobs.

- Ask your clients to refer you

If you already have paying clients you can always ask them whether or not they have other work you could do. If

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