Hey Freelance Friends!

This week’s feature is written for the freelancer who doesn’t want another shiny tool to admire from a distance.

You want work. You want invoices sent. You want clients who actually pay.

So let’s talk about how to use DeepSeek as a quiet income engine, not a party trick.

DeepSeek is not something you “sell”. It is something you quietly use to deliver work faster, better and cheaper than the next freelancer.

That’s it.

Now here’s how I would turn it into money if I were freelancing in South Africa right now. The fastest win is offering micro-services that businesses already understand. Most small companies don’t need strategy decks. They need emails written, product descriptions cleaned up, WhatsApp messages rewritten, support replies improved and website copy fixed.

Open DeepSeek and use it as your drafting engine, not your final writer.

Feed it real client material:

– their website
– their existing emails
– their tone
– their product info

Ask it to rewrite, shorten, localise and simplify.

Then you edit.

You sell:

“Email clean-up and rewrite”
“Website copy refresh”
“Product description optimisation”

Not “AI writing”.

A realistic package looks like this:

5 marketing emails rewritten and formatted

R750 to R1,500

Delivered in 48 hours

DeepSeek saves you time. Your brain protects quality. Your client only sees results.

The second way is positioning yourself as the person who fixes messy internal work.

Every small business has:

– notes scattered in Google Docs
– old SOPs
– half-written training material
– onboarding documents that make no sense

DeepSeek is extremely good at restructuring information. You upload the chaos. You ask it to turn it into clean step-by-step processes. You review. You adjust to how the business actually works.

Then you sell:

“Operations documentation and process clean-up”

This works beautifully for:

– remote teams
– ecommerce stores
– agencies
– VA teams
– call centres

It’s boring work. It pays well. It keeps clients longer than design or social media ever will.

The third play is content support for founders who don’t write. Not content strategy. Not branding workshops. Execution.

You take their voice notes, messy drafts and bullet points and use DeepSeek to:

– turn them into LinkedIn posts
– turn one article into five short posts
– turn a webinar into a blog article

Then you lightly edit for tone and local context. You sell consistency.

A very simple retainer looks like:

8 LinkedIn posts per month

2 short blog articles

R2,000 to R4,000

The tool never appears in the proposal. Only your delivery does.

The fourth angle is niche support. DeepSeek is strong when you feed it context.

That means if you specialise in:

– legal admin
– HR admin
– finance support
– property admin
– ecommerce operations

you can train it on:

– contracts
– policies
– product data
– internal procedures

You then become the freelancer who works faster than everyone else in that niche.

Your edge is not creativity. It’s turnaround time and accuracy. This is how you justify better rates without fighting price-shoppers.

The fifth and most underused opportunity is helping businesses build internal prompts and workflows. Not automation. Not fancy systems.

Simple documents like:

– how to draft client replies
– how to summarise support tickets
– how to generate internal reports
– how to prepare meeting notes

You build short prompt templates using DeepSeek. You test them. You deliver them as a small internal toolkit.

This is extremely attractive to small teams who are tired of guessing how to use these tools.

You sell:

“AI work templates for your team”

Once off. Clean. No long-term tech support.

The real income comes when you combine two or three of these into one offer.

For example:

Operations clean-up

Suddenly you’re no longer a task freelancer. You’re embedded. And embedded freelancers survive slow months.

One important warning before you rush off and build offers. Do not outsource your judgement. DeepSeek will confidently give you answers that look correct and sometimes aren’t. Your value is still your checking, your context and your experience. If you remove yourself from the work, you remove your business. Use it like a very fast junior assistant. Not like a decision-maker. That is how you protect your reputation and your clients.

— The Profreelance Crew