Strange Things You Can Freelance

When most people think of freelancing, they think of writers, graphic designers, accountants and photographers. Yet you don’t have to be skilled at any of those traditional disciplines to bring value to the table as a freelance professional. You only need passion, a desire to please the clients you work for and, most importantly, you need to have a skill that is desired by other businesses or individuals, preferably those with large bank accounts and deep pockets. Here are a few off-the-wall business ideas you can use to get your freelance ambitions off the ground. They’re by no means traditional, but if you’re reading this there’s a very good chance that you’re not very traditionally-minded yourself.

Freelancing Ideas – Think Differently

Standing out as a freelancing professional will always get you hired, but first you must identify a need for the services you hope to deliver to your target market. It would help to have a target market in mind. For example, if you want to become a Freelance Mobile Device Repair Professional, your target market would be quite extensive; considering that most adults have at least one mobile device that they use daily. Once you have an idea, or at least a group of customers in mind, such as those who are chubby, computer-illiterate or depressed, start thinking about how you could possibly make their lives better. That will help you come up with a strange-but-lucrative freelance business that is sure to make you the living you hope to make. Take these freelancing businesses, for example.

In Real Life

The following freelance businesses should be advertised via flyers, social media, Craigslist and other local means for gaining attention. They involve your neighbors, co-workers, family members and friends; and of course all the other strangers around you that make up your local target market. These include:

Laundry: Offer to pick up people’s laundry, whereby you will take them to a real laundry and charge a premium for doing so. Or, you can start a laundry service out of your house where you do all the work.
Computer/Mobile Device Repair: Put your tech-savviness to good use with a business that helps others navigate the ever-increasingly difficult world of computers. Install drives, build computers or focus solely on software. With the latter, you could invent a freelancing business where you help others exclusively with an online connection.
Fitness/Martial Arts Instruction: Convert your garage into a hot yoga studio or a Brazilian Jujitsu dojo, or offer to teach Taekwondo. Your clients will get the self-esteem-boosting benefits and you will be able to further your freelance business goals.
Driver/Escort: People are always looking for drivers, especially around prom time. Or maybe you want to donate your time to those who can’t find a date with your new freelance business. You never know.

Online Freelance Ideas

These are the freelancing business ideas that you should put into place when you want to tackle the online world of the freelance business.

Online PR Person: In Hollywood, Public Relations professionals are in charge of presenting celebrities in the very best light in front of the camera, online and on the street. They pick out the celebs’ clothes, choose their hair styles and they ensure that the celebrities are only seen with the right people. You can take this idea and create a freelance business that helps everyone, not just celebrities, show the very best of themselves online. This might include removing or forcing webmasters to take down negative PR material from elsewhere on the web. More on this in a moment.
Dating Profile Creator/Help: Online dating is taking off and many people would shell out a healthy amount of money for freelance help on Plenty of Fish, EHarmony, Match or even Tinder. You could write profiles, provide help to daters with their IM communications or anything else the freelancing-side of your brain thinks up.
Profile Image Touch-Ups: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest; with so many social networks out there, someone, somewhere is praying for a Freelance Image Optimizer to step forward. Advertise that you will make profile images truly stand out, or any images for that matter. You may even decide to specialize your freelancing business in online dating images only.
NSFW Scrubber: For those people who have posed in front of the camera who now regret it, you may decide to help them out by seeking out and then scrubbing the net of any image or video sites they may be found at. You may be hired to remove DWI mug shots or social media posts that may be a little bit too racy. You’d better believe that people will pay a lot of money for a service like that.

Get started and find out where your passion guides you, but most of all, go where the source of the money takes you. For many freelancers, their businesses have gone wherever clients have dictated their businesses to go. The lesson is not to be too rigid with the ideas you have in mind. Take these ideas and let them propel you. Do that and you will reach your freelancing goals, no matter how strange they may seem when you’re first getting started.

Image Source: Daniele Zanni on Flickr