I am only 18 years old. I usually find myself in the need of some extra cash. Thanks to photoshop and sometimes to illustrator also, I fill up that need easily. How? Well that's the topic that I'd like to talk about today.

Take 5 minutes to see read what I have to say. You won't be disappointed, I promise.

Have you ever heard about freelancing? Yes you have! Everybody knows about it, many freelance, few get good results. Wondering why? I'll tell you why. It's because the all go the the most popular places on the net and hope to win competitions there, hope the be the best in the first month or so.

That's bullshit! You need to start easy. First know yourself and how good you are. Let's say you know Photoshop quite well ( I assume you have already read some of my tutorials ). Try to make a banner, or a nice button, or a navigation bar, and see how others made similar designs. Are your better or worse?

That's the secret. Look for places where the designs are at most at your experience level. It's not an easy task, but I surly makes it easy on the long run.

Now let's talk about "getting to work". Usually it's best to enter in competitions, and make a few designs just like that, having fun in the process, because it's most likely to lose all of them at the begging.

How will this help you? Well it's really simple! You will build a portfolio which will help you to show off and attract people to hire you. When someone hires you, you're on the right track. Most likely they will pay you for your design. And like this, in less than 1 week you can make some serious extra cash with Photoshop and Illustrator!

Now to tell you how I do it. I am a webmaster. I have other websites and try to generate income from them as well. But because I take care of a lot of websites I visit webmasters forums a lot. Most of them have design sections where other webmasters buy designs for their websites. Those are the places where I go. I work for other webmasters, and get easy cash by doing that, since their expectations are not as high as the ones who start the competitions on 99designs.com for example ;).

Hope this helps you. Good luck in making some cash with Photoshop and Illustrator.

Labels: Ideas, Webdesign