Freelance Jobs that Pay $60 Per Hour or More Without a Degree

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Freelance Jobs That Pay $60/Hour

Long gone are the days when freelancing only provided supplemental income for your 9 to 5 job, allowing you to save a little extra money each month. Nowadays a hyper-specific skill can net you pay rates well above $60 per hour, even without a degree. The tricky part is knowing what skills to learn to make this kind of money. So to help you out, we’ve compiled a list of freelance jobs to kick your current day job to the curb.

As a bit of a disclaimer, none of these jobs require a college degree. (Yay, no student loan debt!) However, you will need to educate yourselves on these skills, gain some experience, and have at least a few solid case studies or reviews to land the highest-paying gigs. 

1. Pinterest Account Manager

The job of a Pinterest account manager is to help businesses grow their Pinterest accounts, and in some instances create and manage advertising campaigns on Pinterest. With high-quality pins, consistent posting, and pinpoint targeting with SEO, businesses can hope to reach a large audience of potential buyers and in turn drive a lot of traffic to their site. 

Because of this, businesses are willing to pay a lot of money to anyone who can bring them great results on Pinterest. If you take a look at freelancers on sites like Upwork who advertise their Pinterest management services, you’ll notice hourly rates range between $60 and $160 an hour. 

Although there are several ways to make money on Pinterest, offering account management services is one of the most lucrative and also offers an outstanding chance for success.

What You’ll Need to Succeed: 

  • Understand Pinterest best practices like competitor analysis, pin creation, styling, when to post, community boards and much more. 
  • Experience creating and managing Pinterest ad campaigns with past examples of positive ROI.
  • Understand Pinterest SEO and how to reach the most amount of people possible with pinning.

2. Content Writer

If you have an affinity for writing, you might fancy yourself becoming a freelance writer. Now, the job of a content writer can vary from business to business, but the core fundamentals are the same. Businesses will pay you incredibly well if you can produce well-written content for their website that promotes their product or service. It’s also common for businesses to want that content to be SEO-optimized to help rank their website in Google searches. 

Tasks could vary from blog writing to brochure creation. As long as you can produce engaging content in fluent English with very few grammatical errors, you should have no issues securing high-paying freelance writing gigs without a degree.

Hourly rates for content writers can vary widely. As you can imagine, if you have some kind of marketing background and SEO experience, your pay will be higher. I have seen many freelance writers earning anywhere from $60 to well over $100 an hour. 

What You’ll Need to Succeed: 

  • Fluent in English.
  • Experience writing long form content for websites that engages the readers. 
  • Portfolio of work showcasing writing style and your understanding of certain topics to give to clients.
  • A good typing speed and work turnaround time.
  • Strong grammatical skills.
  • (Optional) A good understanding of on-page SEO with experience ranking web pages on Google.

3. Website Designer

Before you freak out and think you’ll need years of experience with CSS and Javascript let me explain why that’s not necessary here. Thanks to the dozens of “drag and drop” website builders like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, and others, few manually written lines of code are even necessary to produce a stunning website.  

As a freelance website designer, you’ll be focusing on basic websites for small businesses and organizations. These sites can be fully constructed in those website builders (or WordPress page builders). 

No coding experience or degree is necessary. However, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the right platforms, understand what makes a website good, and build up a small portfolio of website examples to help sell future clients. This could all be done in under 3 months, which will allow you to secure $70 to $125 an hour as a website designer. To see a real-world example, read our article How to Make Money as a Web Designer.

What You’ll Need to Succeed: 

  • Experience building websites in these platforms (the more the better): Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and Shopify.
  • Understanding key components to website design like hero images, call to actions, headings/bodies, menu navigation, etc.
  • Good communication skills to help with client revisions.
  • Have the ability to work under a strict deadline.

4. Link Building

The term “link building” might be something you’ve never heard of before, but you’re about to see why it should gain your attention. Good link builders can make well over $100/hour in their first year, and like all other jobs on this list, won’t require you to have a degree. 

Link building is somewhat of a sub-genre of an SEO specialist. Their job is simple in concept but quite hard to pull off. As a link builder, your responsibility will be to contact other website owners, build relationships and get them to link back to your website. This can come in many forms including interviews, podcast appearances, and guest posting to name a few. 

Businesses are willing to pay top dollar for a service like this because link building is the most heavily weighted component when it comes to ranking higher in Google searches. And as you might know already, ranking higher on Google can result in large amounts of revenue for a business. There are no “link building 101” classes in college and instead is a completely self-taught skill.

Use free and paid resources to learn the art of link building and you could be off to the races in no time, making upwards of $150 an hour as a professional link builder. 

What You’ll Need to Succeed: 

  • Great organizational skills as you’ll often be working inside massive spreadsheets and need to keep track of hundreds for email responses. 
  • Good rapport and relationship building. This is necessary for successful networking.
  • Understand off-page SEO and anchor text ratios for backlink building.
  • (Optional) Paid services to help with workflow: Ahrefs, SEOJet and email scrappers.

5. TikTok Content Creator

To wrap up this list of freelance jobs that pay over $60 without a degree, we have a TikTok content creator. This kind of job is still relatively new but bolsters amazing pay and has great growth potential. TikTok allows brands to reach massive targeted audiences with viral posts. And with TikTok’s addition of advertising, businesses are jumping at the chance to promote their products on this beloved platform. 

Your clients will most likely want to see what experience you have with the platform and any kind of social media management you’ve done in the past. If you can demonstrate a good understanding of how TikTok works and how you can help businesses get their message in front of millions of potential buyers, you should have no issues securing a job like this. Freelance TikTok Content Creators right now can make anywhere from $50 to $80 an hour. 

What You’ll Need to Succeed: 

  • Deep understanding of the TikTok platform.
  • Experience creating and managing TikTok ad campaigns with good results to show.
  • Proper equipment like lighting and a high resolution camera or iPhone.

Things to Consider Before Becoming a Freelancer

Now, before you quickly make an Upwork account and build up your freelance portfolio it’s important you take into consideration a few things. This list should help prepare you for your journey to becoming a full-time freelancer. 

Related: Upwork vs. Fiverr

Solo Career Path

As a freelancer, you’ll be spending a lot of time on your own. This might seem obvious but it often goes overlooked. There are no more lunch rooms full of fellow coworkers and because of this, it can feel quite lonely at times. 

Large work environments often foster new friendships which you can miss out on if you decide to freelance. This is why it’s very important to schedule some kind of social activity twice a week at a minimum. This could include a coffee date, diner, movie, or a simple bike ride. 

Money Inconsistency 

Until you build up a group of long-term clients, the money you make each month can vary drastically. As a freelancer, you’re making the trade-off of higher pay for less consistent workloads compared to someone who works in-house. 

Because of the wild swings in your income from month to month, you need to be very financially responsible. Do your best to limit expenses, have an emergency fund saved up in advance and if possible have another source of income until you become more established as a freelancer. Following these frugal living tips can allow you to stretch your money further and make your first few months as a freelancer much easier. 

Legality

As a freelancer, you are considered to be self-employed. You’re going to be responsible for paying taxes on your earnings and abiding by both state and federal laws. To protect yourself, it’s advised you form a limited liability company (LLC). 

Creating your own LLC will separate your personal belongings from your business. In turn, protecting your personal funds in case your company falls victim to financial turmoil or a client sues. 

Your income will also be taxed differently than a normal job. No longer will you be receiving paychecks bi-weekly with taxes already being accounted for. Educating yourself on pre-tax and post-tax income will allow for easier budget planning and help you avoid issues with the IRS down the road. 

Independent and Organized

Deadlines. Client information. Invoices. Emails. The list goes on. 

As a freelancer, you must have great organization. Not only will you be responsible for a plethora of tasks, you likely won’t have anyone to help you out or keep you on track. This can be one of the downsides of being your own boss. 

Oftentimes you’ll be working on multiple jobs at the same time while doing your best to keep up with emails and secure new contracts. This can become a bit overwhelming at times if you don’t organize properly. 

Conclusion

Finding a freelance job that can completely replace your income might be easier than you imagined. People specializing in one specific skill that solves a company’s glaring issues easily can make six figures a year without having to step foot in a university. 

READ NEXT: 20 Ideas to Help You Land Your First Freelance Client


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  • Commission-free trades of stocks and ETFs
  • Buy and sell 25+ different cryptocurrencies
  • Fractional shares
  • Access alternative investments
  • High-yield treasuries accounts
  • Social community of investors
  • User-friendly interface
  • Commission-free trades of stocks, ETFs, options, and ADRs
  • Powerful screening and charting tools
  • Free real-time level 2 data
  • User-friendly mobile app
  • AI monitoring
  • AI-powered price forecasts
  • Free investing courses
  • Commission-free trades of stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrency
  • Buy fractional shares for any amount
  • Extended trading hours
  • Advanced reporting tools
  • Schedule recurring investments
  • IRAs now available
  • 24/7 customer service

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