I have done much freelancing over the years, at one time doubling my 'real work' income, doing various consulting gigs from networking to web programming and the best advice I can give you is to put yourself on the market and start taking jobs.....any job you can accomplish.

Over time, provided you do quality work, as you gain word of mouth advertising from satisfied customers you will eventually end up with more work than you can take.

As for a good place to start, every city I have lived in has a local PC users group....these are a great opportunity to network and perhaps even advertise your services as other members often are looking for assistance. They are also a good resource of 'what the other guy is doing' so you can often find out what the going rate for work is but in the long run, your services are valued by agreement between you and your client.

At one point (long-long-ago) I was volunteering with the OKC PC Users Group leading their web development efforts for their site...this produced many contacts as customers came looking to the user group for a 'developer'...so you might look for some 'free work' for a non-profit organization to get yourself noticed. You can also work within your existing network of friends, neighbors, and associates to see if anybody needs work done.

In short, go ahead and jump in the water is fine....the only piece of advice I leave you with is to be honest with your clients, seek outside help when you need it, and don't over-represent your abilities..we already have far too many of those out there

Good Luck!

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.