How You Can Start Freelancing In Bangladesh as a Student | Complete Guide

Thinking about getting started in freelancing from Bangladesh but don’t know where to start?

Then this guide is for you.

I created this as an ultimate guide on how to start freelancing in Bangladesh for beginners like a college student.

Whether you want to start freelancing in Bangladesh as a writer, web designer, or developer, this guide will help you start your journey in 12 simple steps.

Before you move any further, I need to clarify a few things.

Freelancing is a lot more complicated than you might think. Some people believe anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can earn money online. But, it’s not true.

Continue reading only if you’re willing to work hard to achieve your goal of becoming a freelancer and finding financial freedom.

Also, be sure to read the recommended links to learn more about each section.

Now, let’s dive in.

Note: Please bear in mind that this guide only covers the basics. It will help you get started the right way. But if you want to take it to the next level and learn some of my secrets of earning $5,000 a month, you can grab my another post written in Bangla কিভাবে শুরু করব ফ্রিল্যান্সিং ক্যারিয়ার.

Set your mind before starting freelance career in Bangladesh

Freelancing requires dedication, commitment, hard work, and determination. An individual must know of the different ways in which he/she can gain freelancing projects. Here is a simple guide to help you kickstart your freelance career in the right manner and make the journey smooth.

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How to Become a Freelancer in Bangladesh?

1. Define your Goals

It is important to have clearly defined goals with measurable milestones. In the absence of goals, it is challenging to reach where you want to. So, first and foremost, understand why you are freelancing? Is it to earn an additional income? Or do you want to enjoy the lifestyle benefits of being a freelancer?

Irrespective of what the goal is, it is essential that you have clarity on the same. Some of the leading entrepreneurs agree that the journey becomes easier if the goals are defined right at the beginning.

2. Identify a Profitable Niche

Let’s say you are an amazing cook and your entire family loves the meals you cook. You are always complimented for the food you prepare for dinners and get-togethers.

Undoubtedly, the market is full of vendors providing various types of cuisines, at affordable rates. Their dishes are delicious and their price competitive. However, there’s no point competing with the pricing of other freelance chefs.

You need to take out the time to identify a profitable niche to do your business. This, for instance, would mean identifying the right cuisine based on demand or the right dishes that require skill and quality. You need to find clients who value quality. You must target to compete on value and not the price.

Just like cooking, there are several other home-based business ideas to earn money. You can start one focusing on your skills, and take it to the top by identifying where the profit lies.

3. Determine your target market

For any freelance business, the target market is as vital as the niche. As you start, you can take a more shotgun approach to crack the first few clients. For instance, you can plan out who you want to work with and reach out to them. Once you work with these identified clients, you’ll know whether this is the type you need. If yes, you can continue to pursue similar clients. If no, you can identify a different set of target clients.

The reason you should narrow down your target market is that you get a chance to fine-tune your skills in a particular niche. If you start with content writing services and write content for tech-startups and business influencers, you’ll gain expertise in the field. Moreover, you’ll frequently get referrals to build your reputation in the domain.

4. Charge The Right Price

Figuring out the right price for your services can be challenging. Because if you ask for the wrong price, clients will never even consider hiring you.

In the beginning, the best way to figure out the right price is to go look at popular freelance marketplaces and see what other freelancers in your niche or industry are charging.

Since you’re new, it’s not fair to charge those same prices as experienced freelancers.

Instead, you should try to figure out a middle-ground where you can offer a competitive price than those experienced freelancers without making yourself seem cheap.

On the other hand, if you are targeting established companies and your service speaks of returns, you can charge higher prices. It all depends on how well you do your homework in identifying the clients you wish to pitch to. If you do your homework well, you will sell what your clients require at a price that you can justify.

5. Make a Portfolio

When you think about how to become a freelancer in Bangladesh, you need to also think about how you will showcase your work to the target audience. You can start with a website, a Facebook page, an Instagram handle, or a blog. This will depend on the nature of your business.

The purpose of a portfolio is to showcase your skillset in the best possible manner. And you must ensure that you do so to get noticed.

6. Select a Path

Now, you have set your goals, identified the target market, set a price, and built a portfolio. Next, you need to start pitching to clients. However, before you send out the communication, you need to devise an execution plan. This involves consideration of the following aspects:

• how many days in a week and hours in a day can you commit for freelance projects?
• how many clients can you handle at a given time?
• what mode of communication will you use for clients?

Having an execution plan ensures that you are not over-burdened and you never compromise on quality.

7. Client Pitching

The next step is to start pitching. You can find potential clients using different sources, such as social media or freelancing websites like Fiverr, Upwork, etc. Depending on the services you provide, reach out to as many prospective clients as possible. However, remember to maintain quality and not start spamming.

8. Communication Structure

When you start on the journey for how to become a freelancer in Bangladesh, you need to prepare a pre-communication structure. This means that when a client responds to your pitch, you must have information concerning the service terms ready. These terms include payment terms, timelines, mutual rights and responsibilities, and copyright for the completed work.

9. Be confident

Being a freelancer is like running a business independently. In other words, it is like sole entrepreneurship. You need to have all seriousness if you don’t want an untimely collapse of the venture. Besides, you must be ready to face ups and downs with criticism and failure. For instance, not all your pitch emails will have a response. Continue striving till your industry begins to trust your work and provide referrals, helping you gain credibility and reputation.

An essential thing to know and understand here is that freelancing does not mean freedom from bosses. In the field of freelancing, clients are the bosses. Therefore, you must choose your clients wisely. Nonetheless, once you earn trust and respect for your work, freelancing will seem like the best career option.

10. Find The Right Freelance Platform

This step plays a crucial part in how easily you’ll land jobs and the quality of the clients you’ll be able to work with.

A mistake most beginning freelancers make is search for the most popular freelance marketplace and join to get started. Like UpWork or Freelancer.com.

These sites are already filled with millions of freelancers from around the world. And due to the competition, they engage in bidding wars to win jobs. They will constantly lower their prices in order to land the job. And it will get you nowhere.

So the best approach, and the approach that worked wonders for me, is to pick a marketplace that’s fairly new and join it. It’ll have fewer freelancers so you’ll have low competition. And it will increase your chances of landing jobs.

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11. Send Your First Proposal

Writing a proposal to a client needs to be done in a careful manner.

It’s not like writing a regular email or writing a social media post. You need to put serious thought into it and figure out how to persuade your client to give you the job instead of all the other freelancers.

There are some tips and hacks you can use to your advantage when writing a winning proposal. I can’t go into all the details here, so please check out the links below for more info on the topic.

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12. Deliver Extra Service that Makes Client Hippier

Once you land a job, the next step is to make sure that you deliver the project just as the client has asked.

Or, in this case, I want you to overdeliver the job by going above and beyond the client’s expectations.

I’ll give you an example. In the early days of my freelancing career, I used to get jobs for writing blog articles with a fixed word count like 1000 words. What I did was write the article to be about 1100-1200 and also include a unique header image for the blog post when delivering it. Without charging extra for it.

The clients were always happy with my work. And gave 5-star ratings.

So find a way to do work that goes beyond expectations. And learn to stand out from the crowd. That’s the only way to build a lasting career as a freelancer.

That’s All, We have Done

So, if you are aspiring to become a freelancer in Bangladesh, it is time for you to start!

Liked reading this? Check out some more by Edureka BD :

FAQs:

Q. How much do freelancers earn in Bangladesh?

It depends totally on your skills. You can make $0 to $10,000 working alone per month even living in Bangladesh. You know that $1000 is considered to be a decent income here. So there’s a huge opportunity in freelancing in Bangladesh.

When I started freelancing, I would make $200 – $300 per month. But after a few months of working, it reached around $1000. And then, the income was gradually increasing day by day.

I also started blogging which was another great decision in my life. Want to know how i am making dollar with my blog? Here is the post.

Q.Should you take freelancing training in Bangladesh?

A.Please don’t go to any freelancing training center without knowing anything about freelancing well. First, learn the basic things which i've shared with you above.

After that, when you’ll need to learn specific skills, you should find out professional freelancers in those fields that you’re intending to take. I can also give you a better idea about that once you complete the basic learning from me.

Q. What are the major challenges that freelancers face in Bangladesh?

A. Freelancing is a comparably tough job in Bangladesh. From coming up with a brand name in the market to getting timely payouts, freelancers face a number of challenges in Bangladesh.

Q. What are some of the top freelancing portals in Bangladesh?

A. Fiverr, Freelancers, Upwork, Toptal, 99Designs, are some of the best Freelancing portals in Bangladesh.

Let me tell extra tips to start freelancing in Bangladesh

Fields of freelancing

In freelancing, there’s a wide variety of choices for working. Tons of fields are ready where employers are wanting talented people to work for them.

Have a look at the freelancing job categories –

• Designing

1. Logo design
2. Graphic design
3. Animation
4. Presentations
5. Illustration
6. Photography etc

• Audio & video production
• Writing

1. Article & blog post writing
2. Website content writing
3. Academic writing
4. Creative writing
5. Copywriting
6. Resume (CV) & cover letter writing
7. grant writing
8. Technical writing
9. Business plan writing

Read: How to become a freelance writer?

• Admin jobs

1. Data entry
2. Virtual assistance
3. Web research
4. Transcription
5. Project management etc

Read: How to become a virtual assistant?

• Web designing & software ( for mobile & desktop) development
• IT & networking
• Engineering & architecture
• Data science & analytics
• Customer service
• Translation
• Consultation & accounting.
• Sales & marketing

So you see that there’s a big working scope here in freelancing profession. You just have to pick the perfectly suited one for you & then work well on that.

Popular freelancing jobs in Bangladesh

Not all the freelancing jobs are suitable for Bangladeshi freelancers. So you should see the trend of most likely freelancing jobs here in Bangladesh.

Some of the popular freelancing jobs in Bangladesh are the following –

• Graphic designing
• Content writing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Online data entry
• Web designing etc

Once upon a time, data entry online jobs in Bangladesh were the most popular. But due to low payment & huge competition of this type of job, many freelancers are choosing graphics designing or writing as their profession. So now the online data entry jobs in Bangladesh are getting less popular over time.

Many people are moving towards SEO & graphic designing jobs nowadays. SEO Jobs in Bangladesh have a great opportunity for getting not only outside clients but also inside employers.

Another current trend of freelancing work is working for WordPress theme & plugin development. Many freelancers are working in these fields.

Freelancing Course in Bangladesh

Many people call me to teach them freelancing. They’re very much interested in starting freelancing. But they don’t know how to do it. They want to pay me.

But I don’t have much time to teach people even though they wanna pay me well. So I wanted to do something for the interested learners. And here’s the thing that I do for those people who wanna do freelancing.

Yes, I offer a free freelancing course, most probably I’m the only one who does this for free. By the way, I think that if people can learn about freelancing from me & earn with it, then this will be the best pleasure to me which I couldn’t buy anything.

So, register for your free freelancing course right now.

Do you wanna take freelancing as a profession or passion?

I’ve seen that many good freelancers have left their freelancing & started working for some other jobs. The only reason is treating freelancing as a hobby, not a profession.

So try to identify it. Profession & passion are two different things. If you take freelancing as your profession, then you must be serious about it. If it’s your passion, then you won’t mind leaving it when it’s necessary.

So why not treat freelancing both as your profession & passion. You can’t believe that I got many of my initial clients’ attention by spreading this message that freelancing is my passion & profession. So I could pitch them well that I’d be very serious and at the same time passionate about my work.

Will freelancing be your part-time or full-time job?

Many people, mostly students, tend to take freelancing as their part-time job. The reason is that they wanna make some bucks to carry on their studentship.

They become happy just by taking some pocket money from their clients. It’s good that you’re carrying on your life by taking some penny, but why are you destroying other professional freelancers who do it for their serious living?

So, I advise you that you must take freelancing as a full-time profession.

What’s Next?

You are now ready to tackle the world of freelancing as a Bangladeshi. With a lot of dedication and hard work, you’ll be able to create a profitable and prosperous career as a freelancer. That’s a guarantee.