As a freelancer, your next job can come from a variety of sources. Ideally, you have plenty of work coming in from past clients and referrals, but this isn’t always the case. Proactively updating yourself on the best sites for freelance opportunities is always important to stay on top. The goal of this list is to feature everything from household names to the smallest sites just starting out, giving you as a freelancer a wide-range of networks to search. Bookmark this list, reference it whenever you’re looking for additional work, and let us know if we missed anyone so we can grow the resources for future articles!
Behance
Behance is the world’s leading platform for creative professionals across all industries. Members create multi-media portfolios that showcase their work within the Network, as well as throughout partner sites and organizations, and the industry-specific Served Sites. Millions of visitors — including top creative companies, recruiters, editors, and more — come to the Network to see the incredible work and find talent to hire. Behance offers efficient promotion of work, ready access to a global pool of top talent, and a constant stream of the best creative work from around the world.
College Recruiter
College Recruiter believes that every student and recent grad deserves a great career. They believe in creating a great candidate and recruiter experience. Their clients are primarily colleges, universities, and employers who want to recruit dozens, hundreds, or thousands of students and recent graduates per year.
https://www.collegerecruiter.com/
FlexJobs
FlexJobs is an innovative job service that specializes in providing professional job listings that also include some type of work flexibility, such as telecommuting, part-time or alternative schedules, and freelance contracts. FlexJobs has over 50 career categories, with jobs ranging from entry-level to executive and part-time to full-time. Every single job on the FlexJobs site is hand-screened for legitimacy so that there are absolutely no ads, scams, or too-good-to-be-true junk.
Freelance Writing Jobs
A writing community featuring daily freelance job leads, informative tips, articles, and plenty of commiseration and camaraderie. This site consolidates writing job posts from Craigslist boards all across the country and from sites like Indeed, Journalism Jobs, Media Bistro and more, allowing you to locate online writing gigs you might never see if you were only browsing your local Craigslist site.
http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/
Freelancer
The world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by the total number of users and projects posted. 18 million registered users have posted over 8.2 million freelance jobs to date in over 900 areas as diverse as website development, logo design, marketing, copywriting, astrophysics, aerospace engineering, and manufacturing.
Guru
Guru helps businesses connect and work with freelance professionals efficiently and safely. Guru ranks freelancers using objective performance data—helping businesses identify the highest-quality freelancers for their projects. Businesses are ensured guaranteed payment protection with SafePay.
Freelancers use Guru.com to market their skills to a global audience and compete for project work at minimal cost. The new Guru profiles give them a platform they can customize and make their own. Freelancers can ensure they get paid for their work under the protection of SafePay.
iFreelance
iFreelance is a membership site for freelance professionals from around the world. From artists and photographers to programmers and writers. iFreelance provides two primary ways to find freelance opportunities. You can advertise your freelance services directly to interested employers, or you can search their project database and submit bids for the projects on which you would like to work. iFreelance also provides you with online portfolio hosting, personalized marketing tools, a suite of performance tools and many other features designed to help you maximize your opportunities as a freelancer.
The big thing people don’t understand is that LinkedIn is a search engine just like Google. As a freelancer, you want to optimize your LinkedIn profile so the search component of LinkedIn makes it easy for people to find you. Then, once they find your profile, you can have samples of your work nestled in your profile.
Another thing most freelancers are unaware of is that LinkedIn’s Advanced Search lets you search by a variety of criteria which can be found on people’s profiles. You can search by job title, company size, geographical location, and many more. Plus, you can set these up as automated searches once you know who your ideal referral partner is. LinkedIn runs these automated searches continuously week by week and delivers leads to your inbox of potential people you should connect with.
99designs
99designs is the world’s largest online marketplace for graphic design. They’re passionate about making quality design accessible to everyone. 99designs is a vibrant online community that connects people who need something designed — like a logo or t-shirt — with talented creatives around the world. They’ve helped thousands of small businesses and startups get designs they love and have paid out over $82 million to their designers.
PeoplePerHour
PeoplePerHour is a purpose-driven business… everything they do comes back to their purpose, which is to help people start and build their own businesses and live their dream of being independent. Focusing on freelancing for web projects. If you’re a designer, web developer or SEO specialist this is a website well worth your time.
Project4hire
A freelance marketplace that connects hiring clients to freelance professionals and contractors all over the world. Clients post jobs or their project scope along with their requirements or skill set they are looking for. Freelancers or contractors give quotations or bids for the amount that they would charge to do the job or service. Clients can select the freelancers of their choice at any time and from there begin working with them.
SimplyHired
SimplyHired is a search engine that collects job listings from all over the web, including company career pages, job boards, and niche hiring websites. Then, similar to major search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, SimplyHired matches and displays relevant freelance jobs to job seekers on the SimplyHired website, mobile app, and many partner sites. SimplyHired lists job openings from 700,000 unique employers. The company operates job search engines in 24 countries and 12 languages. For the past 3 years, SimplyHired has been named a ‘Top job search website’ by Forbes and PC Magazine.
StackExchange
Stack Exchange is a fast-growing network of over 100 question and answer sites on diverse topics, from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming. It’s an expert knowledge exchange: a place where physics researchers can ask each other about quantum entanglement, computer programmers can ask about JavaScript date formats, and photographers can share knowledge about taking great pictures.
The site is free and open to everyone. You collect reputation points when people vote up your answers, which will appear next to your name.
Staff.com
A global employment company that connects companies with talented remote staff. They help connect talented people with great companies all over the world, especially in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the UK. They cater to full-time telecommuting jobs only. There is no fee to sign-up and apply.
Toptal
Toptal is an elite network of freelancers that enables businesses to connect with the top 3% of software engineers and designers in the world. Toptal works with clients to understand their project/team needs and custom matches them with pre-screened designers and developers who join their teams on a full-time, part-time, or hourly basis.
The Toptal network includes thousands of designers and developers in over 93 countries. To be accepted into the network, all Toptal freelancers must pass a screening process that includes tests for English and communication skills and a variety of technical exams that are specific to the applicant’s area of expertise– for example, timed algorithm tests, live coding exercises, and test projects.
Upwork
Upwork is the world’s largest freelance talent marketplace. As an increasingly connected and independent workforce goes online, knowledge work (like software before it) is shifting online as well. This shift is making it faster and easier for clients to connect and work with talent near real-time, and it’s freeing professionals everywhere from having to work at a set time and place. Upwork’s vision is to connect businesses with great talent faster than ever (within minutes). Businesses find, hire, collaborate with, and pay freelancers around the world via Upwork. Freelancers earn more than $1 billion annually via Upwork.
