How did I start making money online?

It's a question I'm asked a lot, usually because my friends and family see me travelling around and just wonder why I seem to have endless amounts of money. I don't... I'm not rich, I make enough money to live and try to spend my time enjoying myself. I make it as I go, in the evenings, the mornings, or when I'm not posting annoying pictures of myself sipping fine wines in Italy, or munching on some fresh pretzels in Germany (didn't buy those either, and my friends let me stay with them for free).

I've been freelancing full time for 5 years now, straight out of university. I jumped in whilst I had little responsibilities and it paid off.

The full answer is kind of boring. I started learning how to design websites what feels like a long time ago, probably around 2004. Geocities, Freewebs, the good days. Time goes on, I make some free websites for people, I made some cheap websites for people, I went to university to get a degree and I realised I still wasn't very good... By some standards, I'm still not very good.

One day, I found what I really enjoyed doing - being free. It really matters to me. I love freedom. I like to wake up without an alarm clock, I like to spend days on end laying around doing nothing, then all of a sudden I'll go on a big adventure rock climbing through Europe, partying in Thailand or just visiting my parents back in England.

To get such freedom, I needed to be a freelancer. I was already doing some side gigs at university and over time that had brought in some cash, like $10,000 of cash. In 2012 I wisely invested that cash in to partying my way through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos for 7 months, during which time I was supposed to be building my business. Anyway, money ran out, I returned to England, hated it. Flew back to Thailand with $1500 and stayed with my now ex-girlfriend in her room underneath a pub on a tropical island known as Koh Chang.

Pressure really gets me going... I had to share a shower with around 6 other rooms, lots of locals, and Cambodians. The room cost around $20 per month, but I didn't even pay for that. Sometimes when her family came to stay, there would be 4 of us, plus a child sleeping in a 20SQM room without air conditioning (Thailand is hot). To say the least, it pushed me to sit in a coffee shop, conveniently located on the beach almost every single day until almost mid night, designing, designing, coding, posting to Dribbble and looking for clients. I found some... I found some of the best clients I could of hoped for. The bad ones go away but I work with some of those people/businesses now, 5 years later.

I quickly learned that location doesn't really matter. They just want someone to deliver on time, and they wanted a good designer. A lot of clients have had bad experiences picking bad designers or people who just couldn't communicate (that's what they said).

I think there are two parts to being a successful freelancer. Having a skill to provide (value to give), and being persistent enough to put yourself out there. People LOVE recommending others. When people recommend a good service to someone else, they feel like a boss. They're someone in the know. This is where most of my solid work comes from - repeat business and word of mouth. Second to that, Dribbble has done quite well bringing new leads - or at least it was, I've been slacking.

So now, most of my income is from Photoshop work - people needing mockups for their startups, landing pages, iOS designs. Sometimes they want the front-end done too, so that's HTML/JS/CSS, etc.

Well, that's how I got started. Where next? I am not quite sure... I'm looking to do more work with my drone, and I'd like to get involved with front-end and design work for crypto startups and other tech companies.

Maybe I could get started by redesigning Steem?