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Right now I like my 9-5 job: it pays well, good people around me and I have a lot of friends in the workplace but I’m not feeling too challenged anymore / not learning anything new.

I’m not quite ready to move on but I’ve been thinking of trying to find a few side projects to work on evenings & weekends, hopefully I’d get some different experience and make a bit of money at the same time.

Just wondering how others out there find their clients. Is craigslist worth a try or are there other places you go to find new jobs? There must be small/med size businesses out there that need some IT work done occasionally but don’t keep their own tech person on staff.

Thanks for any advice

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Most of what I’ve seen from CL with the Computer Gigs has been garbage. It might be worth your time to give it a look and see what’s available in your area, but here in Houston it sucks. I’ve also been looking at possible nighttime/weekend projects to bring in a little extra cash and learn a few new and exciting things (challenge myself), but it hasn’t panned out well for me so far. 90-95% of the ads are bogus. Good luck and I hope you find something.

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Craigslist up until a couple of years ago was fairly good. Most of what ones there were came from recruiters that somehow got a hold of my contact information.

In my area 95% of whatever gigs there are and a fair amount of the posted jobs are bogus or not worth the effort for what is being offered.

I do things for myself such some Ebay and CL peddling and stock photo and video submissions.

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Yep. Craigslist is garbage. People paying bottom dollar. Lots of bottom feeders on there too.

Your best bet is to get a few referrals going. Word of mouth is almost guaranteed work. At least it was in my case. If I would get a call for side work cause of a referral it was about 98% guaranteed landing the job. Good luck dude.

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Require something up front if you do side gigs. I’ve gotten people changing their minds in the middle of a project, deciding they wanted to buy a new machine instead of getting their old one fixed. Never do free estimates if that estimate requires you to do more than 5 minutes worth of work. EX: Disassembling a poorly engineered laptop to get to a dead HDD through the keyboard to see what size it is. And once someone screws you, never do business with them again. Ever again. People do not change.

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I have provided services to small business for many years. I’ve never advertised or even promoted my web site. Heck, I don’t even think I have a phone number or email address on my site.

I work off referrals only. If a client is good, the referring person gets a discount for the contact. If they are a pain I hold the referrer responsible. Saves me the time of weeding through PITA clients and ones that don’t like to pay.

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Evening and weekend work is going to be really low end stuff, not likely to teach you anything.

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Sounds like a good policy, it’s just getting those first few clients to start having some referrals generated could be tough. General consensus is stay away from CL so I guess that just leaves people I know first hand.

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I have a small handful of clients, and in every case I got them from word-of-mouth. I have a few possible customers amongst my users - people who have asked me to solve an issue (and who I’ve quoted my rate), but have never brought in their machines. I don’t bother reminding them - if they want it fixed, they’ll bring it in.

I am currently paying for a website and hosting that I have yet to set up…maybe someday haha. I plan to get some business cards made once my website is done just for networking.

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The problem with things like Craig’s List is you have bottom feeders and liars on there. I see people all the time that say they’ll travel to any part of town and fix your computer for $29 or some such silly price. I know as well as most computer people do that this simply isn’t possible. These are the people that end up trying to sell you a new system or hardware you don’t even need. These people promise on thing and deliver another and give all of us a bad name. It’s not new, I’ve seen people doing this for 20+ years.

It’s difficult to work on a referral system, like you say those first couple of accounts are hard to get. In my case it was a matter of doing the entry level of stuff for several years, repairing home users computers. Spending hours upon hours on end and getting little pay.

Those people I took care of on a regular basis spread my name to their friends and family. Over time I ended up doing work for people that had companies or were in a place to recommend me to the companies they worked for. Not all of those contacts turned out well, most were bad experiences actually. Maybe one in ten companies I did a job or two for were worth the time.

It took time and dedication to get things going full time, but it was worth the effort.

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The majority of freelance work I get is through networking on Twitter. Twitter is a great resource for business opportunities, follow the people who want to work with or for, send them a message and see if they have opportunities or if they know someone who has opportunities.

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I’ve noticed this recently on Amazon but haven’t checked into it.

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There is On-force. I did some for them during my self employed time and have no complaints.

Everything was generally very straight forward and no games and a few gigs paid very well. More than I can say for others in a similar vein.

I’m inactive these days since I work full time.

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I found this out the hard way.

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