5 Businesses to Make a Side Income in Singapore

Everyone is seeking an extra means to make money. Besides, life is getting much more pricey as well as it feels like incomes are not catching up fast. With a little freelancing, it is currently feasible to earn a side income as you concentrate on your main source of cash.

1. Graphic Designer

Graphic design is the visual representation of a designer’s concepts, ideas, images and texts by use of media, electronic or print. For companies and organizations, graphic design imposes a directive and structure to the content in order to aid in the communication process.

A designer achieves this goal through the conscious manipulation of elements; a design may be philosophical, aesthetic, sensory, emotional or political in nature.

According to Jessica Halfand, “graphic design visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye”

Attributes Needed By Modern Graphic Designer.

• Cultural awareness. A designer is constantly be in the look for what goes on around him, both physically and socially.
• Maintaining a clear and polite communication with everyone is the backbone for a successful designing career.
• Despite being a salient feature, integrity provides your clients with satisfaction which is a vehicle to earning better income.

How to Find a Job as a Graphic Designer

Many people are to discover the awesome opportunities for graphic designers. For instance, you can work in a designer studio. Despite it being a lonely venture, working in a design studio is rewarding.

Another option is to work as an apprentice under a professional designer. This could be an opportunity to expand your ideas and establish yourself.

How to approach a design studio for a job; Becoming a graphic designer may be a slight challenge but getting hired may be a tricky. The quality of your approach will determine whether you get hired or fired so make the first impression count.

What to avoid during your job search. Don’t use extracted papers from spiral bound books to write your introduction letter, don’t send letters without letterheads, avoid simple spelling errors, and lastly never start your letter with dear sir/madam.

Instead, create your letterhead and target a design studio. Make sure you identify the hiring manager and recognize them with the first names. You are most likely to be served better if you keep your communication precise and polite, write a short literate and sharp letter saying who you are, what you do, request for an interview and better still, portfolio review. Remember to attach samples of your work and link to your website.

During the interview, report on time, be friendly and considerate, stick to the point while being witty, and let the interviewer see your work. When asked about salary, say you need enough to live and you are open to reasonable offers.

It is important to keep a personal portfolio to increase your chances of being hired.

Another awesome opportunity for graphic designers is to be self-employed.

According to reports, 50,000 designers are self-employed as a Freelancer you can be able to work as a Photoshop wizard, skilled topographer, After Effects specialist, or flash animator, the options are many.

Done right, freelance designer is rewarding and financially beneficial.

2. Writer / Copywriter

Why you should hit your keyboard more often.

The greatest benefit freelance writers enjoy is the independence. You can choose when to work, and where to work from and what you like.

According to Jason Steele, freelance writing is “a simple, predictable and diversified income stream”

First decide on the kind of writing you want to do. Besides copywriting, you can as well become a content writer, professional blogger, ghostwriter, or a journalist.

Questions to ask yourself when determining the type of professional writing best for you

• What is it I ultimately want to be?
• Who do I want my clients to be?
• How much money do I want to make?
• How much time do I want to spend working?
• Should I specialize or diversify my services?

Set reasonable expectations for timelines and revenue.

For a successful and enjoyable writing career, start out slowly. It’s critical that you have money to cover for six months. Alternatively focus on part time jobs to sustain you.

Read and practice also seek for training. It pays to be active on social forums and events.

Create a writers blog showcasing your portfolio. You need a blog for your writing services. You can as well do guest posting to increase your outreach.

Identify your clients. Identify clients you’ll work from the start. Before you settle for a long term client, check out on the size of marketing budgets, amount of profits, recession proof industries or ask for advice from colleagues

Get networking. As a writer, social media is one of the great avenues you can use for growing your network. Make valuable connections, keep in touch and stay accessible

Learn to sell. When it comes to selling your services, cold pitching is the master game. Ensure you have a quality query. Pitch should capture the key points of your story, including why you are an ideal value and credentials as a writer in one pitch.

Set value-based rates. You are free to choose either to price your services per an hour or per project. However, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the industry standards and set reasonable charges.

Provide massive value. Deliver high quality projects that actually solve your clients’ problems. Put in all efforts to establish yourself in the trusted expert in your sector.

Continually improve your productivity. As a freelance writer, you more and quicker you write the more projects you deliver and the better the pay.

3. User Experience and User Interface Designer

Basics of UX/UI Design

User Experience (UX) in my opinion is best to be thought of as the beginning of the design cycle. It’s where your mission is to understand in detail what problem you are trying to solve for your users. Every business at its core solves a problem and your customers or users come to you because you offer the best solution.

At the start of your project, simply research on techniques such as surveys, customer personas.

This all then leads into a conception phase where the UX designer will use this new knowledge to propose solutions to the problem. This could be illustrated as sketch, a storyboard like they use in the movies or some simple screen designs

A great trait to have as a UX designer is the ability to take in new information and listen to the opinions from colleagues.

The next phase is to take the chosen design and turn it into a really basic layout. At this stage the wireframe can be made interactive.

This design will then be tested with users and refined over and over again until the design meets the user’s expectations.

So in summary User Experience design at its core is all about solving problems for your users. It is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.

You want to put your audience at the center of your world and design a solution that meets their expectations. As a designer you will be working with others to propose solutions to these problems and testing them with actual people to see if they work

Getting Your First UXUI Design Job

Simple things like the terminology you use is important, 63% of hiring manager use the job title UX/UI Designer

First, look for an internship in a reputable firm as a magazine designer,

Create a portfolio. Most clients focus on your portfolio rather than your CV.

Let your imaginations free with a concept project, tell a story and really showcase your skills.

Use your portfolio to tell stories about your projects, explain your thought processes,

Keep both offline and hard copies.

Show understanding of use tools

• Sketch
• Adobe XD
• Linkedin profile
• Sign up for major job boards like indeed, Upwork

4. Social Media Manager

To establish a strong media presence, can be a tiring task. Ordinarily, many social media managers get entangled in managing diverse social networks only to hold back on their quest to deliver the best results.

Study your intended clients’ behavior and strategically work towards developing the best social media media relevant to its products and services. Focusing on the best social media network could be the door to getting more time and earn better income.

Brand Each of Your Social Media Pages

Identify yourself with a strong personality while maintaining the same identity throughout all your social networks. To stand out from the rest, you need to have a consistent description of your company, create a unique logo and tagline, and out of the box tone and voice in your communication.

Prioritize Quality over Quantity

I say it again; don’t sacrifice your quality with quantity. Check out for up to date, unique and high quality content in your subject and treat your readers to the best.

You can look at what your competitors are doing for more ideas. Use the available online tools like scrivener, Google docs, Hemingway editor for the best results.

Most of all, remember that it takes a while for your business to grow a loyal following, so work to gain trust and nurture your relationships. It pays off to create a strategy and make it a point to target the right customers. These best practices, in combination with consistency, can help your business experience great social media success.

5. Web Designer

Essentials of Web Design

As a web designer, most of your content will be text, so beautiful typography is a key element to a good looking website.

Images are getting more and more important in web design, so choosing great images and putting text on them is an essential part of your work.

Icons are also a good way of setting a friendly tone for your website, but use them carefully.

The adequate use of whitespace makes a website look professionally designed, so use it a lot, but in the correct way.

Build a layout by defining the visual hierarchy of your content. Whitespace is also important for this.

Your website should be designed in a way that ensures that both the user and the owner of the website achieve their goals. This is the user experience.

It is very important that you get inspired by studying well-designed websites from other designers.