Introduction To The Freelancing Business Model

Freelancing is available to just about anyone with an Internet connection. Just about anyone can do some form of freelancing. I am going to explain exactly what I mean in this article. Over the last several years, a wide variety of opportunities have popped up for just about anyone to be able to do short term or mini tasks online.

There are websites like Fiverr where you can get things done for $5. There are websites like Upwork, Freelancer and Toptal, which are more traditional freelancing type websites where you can put a project up and then freelancers will bid on that project. Likewise, if you're a freelancer, you have almost an endless supply of potential jobs or gigs that are available to you and you simply bid on those gigs and if you are selected, you get the job.

Then there are sites like people per hour where you can get paid hourly to do just about any kind of task. And then there is a site called Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is by Amazon.com and it's a very interesting freelancing site because It really opens up freelancing to just about anyone in the world that wants to do some kind of freelancing work.

Let's look at Amazon Mechanical Turk. The tasks that are available on Amazon Mechanical Turk can be very simple tasks.

Following are actual gigs that are available on Mechanical Turk.

1. Select the correct spelling for these search terms.
2. Is this website suitable for a general audience?

(So you might receive a list of websites and then you're being asked to determine if it's suitable for the general audience.)

3. Find the item number for the product in this image.

These are tasks that only humans can do and so that's why you're able to do these tasks. Sometimes they offer a small amount of money, sometimes a large amount of money, but they are basically commensurate with the amount of time that it's going to take.

Some of these tasks might take 10 minutes to do and you might get paid $3 or whatever. So these are for what we might call micro tasks that you're given and you could do a whole bunch of micro tasks in an hour.

1. Rate the search results for these keywords.
2. Are these 2 products the same?
3. Choose the appropriate category for the product.

So in this case they might give you a list of products and a list of categories and your job would be to take each product and put it in the correct category.

Notice that Amazon has Millions of these micro tasks available. That makes it very easy and it makes it very doable for just about anyone to be able to do these micro tasks.

Presently employed with itechscripts, world leader in clone script, eCommerce and WordPress development. ItechScripts is a front-line full spectrum web and mobile development company.