Freelance Writing Jobs: Bidding Sites
Over the past ten days or so I’ve run into a couple more people who are looking to the world of freelance writing to earn a crust. Now, I’m no expert on the world of online work, since I only started back in November, but I thought I’d put up a list of the places I go to find jobs and my thoughts on each. Your mileage may vary, as they say.
GetAFreelancer is the first place I signed up. It’s a busy forum for freelance work, but the pay rates tend towards the lower end of the scale. Offers on a standard original article of 400 words range from $1-$3, depending on speciality. Rewrites and spinning generally earn less and most employers are looking for bulk work, produced quickly. In other words, quantity over quality.
There are, however, some good offers if you keep your eyes open and it can be a decent place to pick up some simple, quick work. Prepare to be outbid by overseas writing groups with less-than-perfect English.
Elance, the second place I tried, remains my favourite. The clientele has a wider range, from basic and cheap right up to specialist needs that pay very well indeed. There’s a lot more ghost-writing work on here as well, if that’s your bag, plus a huge amount of web article creation.
Consequently, the competition is tough. Some of the people I’ve bid against on here have had media jobs, worked at the White House, been VPs in Fortune 500 companies and stuff. The nice thing is that the employers are generally less rushed and thus more willing to look at everyone’s bid – not just the cheap or impressive.
oDesk is the oddest site I’ve signed with. The work here ranges wildly from massive, incredibly responsible tasks demanding thousands of dollars to ridiculously low bids for bulk work. On the same day, I’ve seen an offer of up to $5,000 for a single job, just before an offer of $14 for 8 original, 400-word articles!
Without wishing to sound cruel, the employers on oDesk seem less competent than on the other sites. The job descriptions are often haphazard and incomplete, with little information and a lot of vague demands. I keep an eye on this one, but don’t stress if I don’t get every job description in my RSS feed.
Guru is the final site I signed with in my initial setup. They seem to have a good range of jobs and some very interesting work. Unfortunately the site sucks. Horribly.
There’s no email subscription (well, there is, but it just says “New jobs have been posted” – gosh, really?). There’s no RSS feed. There’s no way of separating new jobs from old. This means I’d have to go back to the site every hour or so and manually check through the job listings to see what’s new. Umm, no.
And there you have it. Hopefully this will help some folks out with a few starting places. Anyone have any others they use? Let me know!
Trackbacks
- Shack’s Comings and Goings » Sunday Wash-Up
- Freelance Writing: Ways To Work « ScrawlBug
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- Wash Your Mouth Out « ScrawlBug
- 10 Myths Of Freelance Writing « ScrawlBug
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- » 10 Myths Of Freelance Writing
As a representative of Guru.com, we highly respect each user’s right to their own opinions about the different freelance marketplace options available today. However, the information provided regarding Project Notification emails on Guru.com is inaccurate.
Guru.com currently sends our registered Freelancers an email with Project Notification details twice a day, every day – provided that the user has opted into receiving these communications. (Perhaps you had accidentally opted-out?)
The Project Notification emails contain details regarding all newly posted projects that match the skill category of the Freelancer’s primary profile. New projects are added to the top of the list on the email and on the search pages. Also, on the search pages, a “days left” indicator helps the user track how long a project has been open for bidding. Previously viewed projects are even marked as “viewed” on the right hand side.
We are actively working now on additions to the Project Notification emails that should improve skill match relevancy of the Project Notification emails. Your suggestion for RSS feeds has been noted. If you feel increasing the frequency of email distribution would be beneficial, please let us know!
Feedback is always welcome and seriously considered. If you have additional suggestions or did not receive any Project Notification emails as described above, please email me so that we can look into it on your behalf.
Best regards,
Kristen Sabol
Communications Specialist at Guru.com
I’ve replied to Guru.com, of course. Here is the text – I don’t want anything hidden. We’re all adults and their comment was reasonable, justified and polite.
Kristen,
Firstly, thank you for dropping in and taking the time to comment. I find that not only incredibly efficient but also unexpectedly customer-focussed. Full marks for that and for all the detail. As you can see from my original post, I was not impressed with the site’s notification options and I’m pleased that the devs are working on this. I had, I hasten to add, already sent feedback – I don’t just rant wantonly.
As far as the email notification goes, I stand by what I said. You remark that “The Project Notification emails contain details regarding all newly posted projects that match the skill category of the Freelancer’s primary profile”. Here’s the appropriate part of the text in the last notification I received:
“Within the last 24 hours, employers posted one or more projects that match your profile(s).
How to find the below project(s):
—Sign in to your professional account: http://www.guru.com/pro/login.cfm —On the My Admin page, click the “Project Notifications” link.
—————————————————
Profile ID: 1127512 matches…
Title: Article Writers Get paid Instantly Project ID: xxxxxx”
This was followed by one project description and some other useful, general tips.
My “Project Notifications” on the site has two – count them, two – entries. My ID matches 1,127,512 jobs. There is no RSS feed. There is no “new projects added since the last email” list. The email shows a single item and adds it to my notifications.
That’s what I mean when I say the system is unusable – for me, personally – in its current form. I cannot spend hours every day performing manual searches on a list of a million active projects, trying to find ones appropriate for me. I could use that time to work.
Compare it to the other sites’ emails/feeds and you’ll see what I mean: they have a list of the highest offers, the most recent projects or provide an RSS feed which does those things. I have a folder in Outlook that regular has 50+ items in it from those feeds. It’s a lot, but it only takes a few minutes to skim through them one by one and I know I’m up to date on three different freelance sites.
I really hope – honestly, truthfully – that Guru can fix this one problem. It’s such a shame that a site with visibly so much to offer is cutting its own throat (in my case) by making itself unusable.
Again, thank you for taking the time to visit and for commenting.
Spike, at ScrawlBug.com
Thanks for the round-up. I’m just getting started again freelancing and hacking through the jungle of sites and incredibly bad offers is daunting. I did some freelancing about five years ago, but the landscape has significantly changed.
God! You guys are so civilized :- )
You should wiki this conversation under the title – ‘Genuine Customer Service’.
It epitomises what companies, dare I say it, ‘should’ be doing when it comes to addressing customer opinion and turning a seeming ‘negative’ into a ‘positive’.
Guru.com has ‘actually’ done what most others only ‘say’ they do…and done it exceedingly well.
Spike, in 2 deft and economical communications, you have beautifully demonstrated that professionals are people too; not to mention your great capacity to be both (separately and concurrently), whilst remaining respectful and without abandoning your professional writer’s art of juggling professional etiquette, journalistic integrity and controversy.
Hat’s off to both of you…
Cheers
Stephen G
Mary: I’ll bet things look really weird five years on – how it must have changed, especially with the current, massive influx of new writers.
Stephen: Thanks for dropping in. I followed your suggestion and put this one on Digg. Don’t know if anyone will see it, but hey!
I had a reply from Kristen today, who kindly avoided posting it directly. Here’s the text:
Hi, Spike -
This is great feedback and has actually fast-tracked some of the shorter-term changes to our Project Notification emails.
I’m not sure if Stacy Norman, our Manager of User Support contacted you separately or not, but it does appear that the issues you’ve noted are a result of poor matching – this is exactly the problem we have recently been working on with respect to the Notifications. You can expect this issue will be corrected over the next few months and in parallel with some additional site improvements that we hope make it easier for freelancers to target their unique niche. I’ll make a note to let you know when the changes have gone live so you can check it out if you want.
I did want to correct one other misunderstanding for your personal benefit, should you choose to come back to the site in the future. In the email text, where it starts:
“Profile ID: 1127512 matches…”
The number following the Profile ID is your personal user profile number and not the number of projects available that match your skills. We will look into rewriting this text to avoid future misunderstandings; so, thank you for pointing it out to us! It is likely that when you received this email, the 1 new project available that matched your skills was the only new one posted. In contrast, the My Admin page retains all matches historically – so it looks like there have only been 2 that were an exact fit with the skills of this profile.
Guru.com is a bit different in focus from the other sites in that we do try to focus on freelance specialism more. We never recommend that a freelancer send out canned proposals to a high quantity of projects; rather, we encourage our users to find and bid on only those smaller number of opportunities that are very precise matches to unique skills or experience. Generally, we’ve found that this keeps both the employers and the freelancers much happier while setting the stage for more positive and meaningful long-term relationships that result in repeat business. This is perhaps one reason why you’ve only been pointed to a limited number of opps in our Project Notifications.
I hope this info is helpful. You may post this to the blog comments if you feel it would be helpful to your readers – I didn’t want to become a nuisance of a talking head there but I did want to ensure you had an understanding of what went wrong.
If there’s anything else we can do to help you out, just let us know! Thanks again!
Kristen
Hey Spike (& Kristen),
Just wanted to pop in a reiterate Mary’s first comment re: thanks for the ’round-up’.
Also to let you know that I have forwarded this excellent article to a good friend who is exploring, in a ‘sea change’ kind of way, a more ‘liquid’ lifestyle, having spent many years as a professional tech writer for large corporations, government departments & projects (well, large for ‘Osstraalya’ :- ).
This is a great article and extremely useful.
I look forward to what other chewy & nutritional ‘bugs’ scrawl their way into the ‘Lobster-Pot’…
Cheers
Stephen G
Didn’t have time to read all of the back and forth between Spike and Kristin, but as a long-time user of Guru, I am very familiar with its good and bad aspects.
Good
The business model. I also use Elance and Guru’s business model makes them the better site despite lacking Elance’s functionality.
I spend about $20 a month to subscribe to both sites in the writing and marketing categories. That investment buys me 100 bid credits on Guru but only 40 on Elance. Also, because Elance job posts can cost up to 4 bid credits each, depending on the employer’s stated budget, I get fewer than 40 chances to win work. In fact, I suggest that the better paying jobs on Elance are more often those with higher budgets, thus more bid credits required. Elance employers can also choose to Feature their project, which adds another credit to the bid cost (I don’t get this strategy at all).
Both sites have high drop-out rates by employers. I never mind when another vendor outbids me for a project, but when they cancel the project after you’ve paid to bid on it is very frustrating. Because I get fewer opportunities per dollar spent on Elance, those cancelling employers are more irritating.
Which leads to the major problem with Elance. Because those bids are so much more expensive, you have to be more careful about which projects you choose to bid on. Elance helps in this regard by providing a lot of information on the buyer’s history and your competitor’s bids, but the bottom line is that it just takes too much of my time to research all these projects to choose which gets my precious bids.
On Guru, I bid on anything I want. I rarely use all of my 100 bids, but I’m usually close.
And I don’t get Spike’s description of the job lists, they seem opposite than my experience.
Both Elance and Guru provide a list of all the jobs in my categories that is continually updating with new jobs. The difference is that with Guru I work from that list to filter out all the jobs I don’t want, leaving only the ones I want to look at. Starting at the last page of jobs, I use the Check All function to select every job on the page, then just scroll down unchecking the ones that have potential. when I get to the bottom of that page, I hit delete and never see the jobs I don’t care about again. Basically Guru gives you all the jobs and you just delete the ones you don’t want.
Elance makes you move the jobs you want from that list to another Watch List. Each move takes two steps to happen and you can move jobs in bulk, Worse, when you come back to the list to look for new updates, all of those old projects you’ve already reviewed are still there. I invariably end up reviewing the same projects multiple times until I finally recognized that I’ve been that far down the list before.
So, imagine Guru giving you a bag of apples which you sort through once, throwing out the rotten ones and leaving only good ones in your hands. Elance gives you the same bag of apples, but makes you hold all the rotten ones in one hand and the good ones in another, and they keep throwing new apples – some rotten, some good – into your pile of rotten apples where you have to sort through the same apples over and over to find the new good ones.
Combined with the research required to make the most of their high-priced bid credits, it, again, just takes too much time. I can zip through the Guru bids once a day, but I end up delaying my work on Elance because it’s a pain.
Which causes a new problem. Because I want to get the best use of my Elance bids, I’ll often hold off bidding on a reasonable job in hopes that a better one comes along. Invariably, I come up to the end of the month with a bunch of bid credits left that i use up on any job I can before they expire.
Which is crappy – they shouldn’t expire. Guru’s program seems fairer. Each bid credit can be used once every 30 days – you use it and 30 days later you can use it again. If I ever run out of bids, it’s usually just a few days until some renew.
Finally, I like that Guru lets you store multiple proposal templates that I can quickly choose to match the project. I have to open a txt file I’ve saved when I’m working on Elance, and copy/paste proposal boilerplate into their bid form. It’s not a big deal, but that’s the point – they should just add it.
I also want to point out an even bigger issue that, unfortunately, does not fall in Guru’s favor. It is the all-important issue of mediation – the only thing protecting us freelancers from bad employers.
Guru’s mediation process, for lack of a better word, sucks big time. It is inherently biased in favor of employers and Guru’s profitability. It does not use lawyers to decide the case on its legal merits. They use anonymous internal staff to decide cases, who apparently have no legal training. They do not document their rationale for the decisions rendered. They have a very GOD-like attitude – you just have to accept their irrational, anonymous verdicts or quit the site – there is no compromise.
Elance, on the other hand, uses an impartial 3rd party to mediate. The company employs trained lawyers who, from my experience, decide based on legal principles.
For the record, I’ve only had the need to use each site’s mediation services once. While the subjective points I make could change, the objective facts I state are exactly true.
The net effect is that I no longer accept work that is the least bit risky on Guru because there is no assurance that you will be paid. In my mediation case, I suspected the employer was flaky and wrote a very specific contract that required my full payment if I started the project. The employer accepted that project and then flaked out as I was afraid of, after I had done all the work. Admittedly, I became a little testy at that point, but nothing over the top, and certainly nothing that should overwhelm the sanctity of our contract.
With only a vague allusion to my testy attitude, and a refusal to state specifically anything I had done wrong, the let the employer keep my money. It was literally theft by the employer – they had all my work – enabled and supported by Guru. I’ll never trust them again.
ron lewis
Wow. Thanks, Ron – that was incredibly useful!
My contention with Guru was their lack of a decent email/RSS feed. It’s a personal thing: I don’t actually go to the sites to keep an eye on work – I do it all through feeds and emails, as I find that easier. It’s also because my connection can be sucky sometimes and all the page loading takes a LOT longer than flicking through a pre-downloaded feed.
On the other hand, your excellent, analytical comment has encouraged me to try again at Guru and get into the habit of actually visiting…
Looking back, I think I probably didn’t invest enough time in learning the systems. Consequently, I ended up on the one that’s easiest to use and gives the best return on that ease. A bit more time invested in understanding Guru would be in order, apparently.
Again, thanks TONS for that feedback. Wonderful, helpful stuff!
I should add a few things.
Guru bids cost less, but the percentage they take from the project fee is higher. Elance might claim that makes the two programs about the same cost – and it does if you only look at percentages. But I win way more projects on Guru, because I get many more chances to bid. And I don’t care so much about the project percentage because I’ve built that into the bid.
I do see your point about preferring email/RSS vs visiting the site, but you have to go to the site to manage projects and escrows anyway. I guess if you aren’t winning enough bids that you’re on the site frequently, you may prefer to just scroll a good RSS feed. I’ve turned off those email notifications.
Elance also clogs up the process with extra steps and unneeded notifications. And you mention page-loading – I don’t know what the deal is with Elance, but their pages take forever to load. I use Firefox and it inserts my username and password on login pages. I can open both Guru and Elance and by the time Elance finally loads and my username password appears, I’ve logged into Guru and am into my Projects. I also like to open different pages in multiple tabs and Elance will hang up at times. It might be something with my computer, but Guru never does that. My guess is that the problems are because Elance site is Flash-based, but I’m not a techy.
Bottom line: both sites have major problems.
Guru lacks some functionality I’d like, but it has everything I need. It is more cost effective, I win more jobs, and it takes less time to manage. However, I just don’t trust them.
Elance looks better and has all kinds of neat functionality – but it has to because its business model requires that you spend hours using that functionality. Fewer bids, fewer wins, less income, more time to manage. But I trust them. And their executives have been very responsive to my comments.
So the sad result: the people I’d rather do business with, just make it harder to do business. Instead, I have to deal with Guru, and I’m basically satisfied with their service, but I get tired of looking over my shoulder, waiting for their knife in my back.
Which brings up another subject that, to me, is the huge elephant in the room of both of these sites.
How does anyone know that the jobs posted are legit? At least 50% of the jobs posted never award. How do we know that the site owners are not just posting fake jobs? It’d be an easy way to increase revenue as vendors burn up bid credits on projects. The site owner then simply cancels the project and pockets the money.
Yes, I understand that the site makes more money from its percentage of the awarded project fee, but every penny counts. And adding projects makes the site look better, like there are a lot more projects on it than on other sites.
Their entire business model represents a huge conflict of interest and potential scam.
Thanks to both of you…Ron & Spike.
Not being a Freelance Writer as such, I can’t profess to have an ‘industrial strength’ awareness of the range & quality of resources available for the profession. But I reckon I know quality information when I see it…
If this isn’t a draft for a top quality collaborative eBook I don’t know what is?…or at least a regular blog item that revisits & re-reviews these and other sites every few months.
Damn good of you Ron…much appreciated : )
And Spike! Well, as usual mate, words fail me….though ‘prodigious’ comes to mind :- )
Great stuff!
Cheers
Stephen G
Ron: a couple of points with regards to your comments on Elance. I also use Firefox, and have never had any trouble loading the site, or experienced long load times.
In terms of bids – If you want to make more bids on Elance, you can easily acquire more ‘bid credits’ or ‘connects’ as the site calls them for a small fee. It works well for me when I run out. Never do I not bid on a project I want to bid on because I am out of connects. It is the cost of doing business, same as paying for my internet and phone service. If I need more, I buy more.
With regards to this comment:
“How does anyone know that the jobs posted are legit? At least 50% of the jobs posted never award. How do we know that the site owners are not just posting fake jobs?”
On Elance, job posters are required to maintain a percentage of jobs awarded or they are not allowed to continue to post. Think about it this way, however – in the world of query letters and job posts, what is the percentage of jobs that are actually awarded? At least Elance allows you to check the job poster’s profile beforehand in order to see whether they have a history of awarding or not. In the ‘real world’ we have no such metrics.
I find it important to avoid generalizing personal experiences with job sites. If I believed everything I heard about job sites, then I would never use them instead of enjoying the excellent experiences I have had with them.
Hi Benjamin,
Regarding your comments:
“I also use Firefox, and have never had any trouble loading the site, or experienced long load times.”
Cool, it may be my PC, as I stated, I just thought it significant that it doesn’t happen on Guru. I guess readers will just have to judge for themselves.
“on Elance, you can easily acquire more ‘bid credits’ or ‘connects’ as the site calls them for a small fee.”
Duh. Yes, both sites will gladly sell you more bid credits, but that’s irrelevant to my post. The fact is that it costs a lot more to bid on a project on Elance:
Guru costs $25 for 100 bids, each project is one bid. Elance charges $10 for 20 bids, and some projects require up to 4 bid credits. Do you understand now?
You said:
On Elance, job posters are required to maintain a percentage of jobs awarded or they are not allowed to continue to post. Think about it this way, however – in the world of query letters and job posts, what is the percentage of jobs that are actually awarded? At least Elance allows you to check the job poster’s profile beforehand in order to see whether they have a history of awarding or not. In the ‘real world’ we have no such metrics.
WOW, you must not have understood my post. First, the “world of query letters and job posts” are two different worlds. The major difference being that the job boards we are talking about CHARGE you to bid. Sending query letters is free.
And yes, you can research an employer’s buying history on Elance — more of that wasted time I talked about that you’re obligated to do because a project can cost you as much as $2 to bid on Elance (always only 40 cents on Guru). But many, many of the jobs are posted by relatively new employers – it is the exact nature of freelancing and these job boards that people with one-time projects use them to find a provider. If you restricted your bids to only employers with at least, say, 75% award rate, you’d probably never use all of your Elance bids. Even employers with 50% award rates are rare.
Do you know what that award percentage has to be?
But, I know better examples. For instance, there has been an “employer” who kept posting the same job – on both Guru and Elance. Over and over, sometimes twice a day, and never awarding it. Most providers figured it out and quit bidding, but still, every job post conned a few newbies out of their hard-earned money. The job boards could not stop him because he kept re-registering as a new user.
Obviously, he was a con artist and not the site management. But think about it. Why can’t the site do the same thing, except change the project description so it isn’t so obvious. I guarantee that Elancers and Gurus will bid whether the “employer” has a good buying history or not.
Naive writers deserve protection just as much as us astute people.
Look at the numbers:
It is not unusual for an Elance project to attract 30 or more bids. One bogus project could produce up to $60 in revenue for doing basically nothing. According to the site’s marketing, they post around 25,000 projects a month. If only 5% were bogus, I doubt anyone would ever notice. But if each of those made only $30, the company would get about $38,000 of free revenue each month.
I think you’d have to be naive to think that they don’t do that – especially when you consider that it’s also great marketing to pump up their project numbers – it makes it look like there is more opportunity and more on their site than the competition, so more freelancers sign up.
Bottom line: Both sites could be doing this, but Elance’s business model – higher per bid cost + multiple credits requred for some projects – makes it more likely that they are. Since I rarely even use up the 100 Guru bids each month, and I suspect others don’t either, it obviously doesn’t matter to me if some projects are bogus.
As for this:
“I find it important to avoid generalizing personal experiences with job sites.”
It seems that your effort to generalize away the specific and factual issues I raised is full of holes. Do you, by chance, work for Elance? At least the Guru shill admitted her bias.
r
No, I do not work for Elance. I respect the fact that you disagree with my opinions. I would ask that you extend me the same respect and don’t automatically assume that I have some kind of “bias” or that I work for the company I am discussing simply because my opinions differ from yours. I am a full time freelance writer who has had a great deal of success incorporating Elance clients as a portion of my total client base.
As to whether my opinons are “full of holes,” I leave that up to those that read them to decide. I merely offer a different perspective than the one you have posted.
Hi Benjamin,
I’m sorry you were a bit miffed at my post; I was at yours as well – basically because you referred to my post but, except for the page load issue, your points were irrelevant to what I posted. The net effect was that you appeared to “disagree” with me, as you state now in this post, and implied that something you said disproved my points. But you didn’t — we were talking apples and oranges.
And that’s why I ASKED (not assumed) whether you worked for Elance. It was a perfectly logical question. Maybe an analogy will help you understand:
Say we’re hanging at a bar, and I say, “Dang, that girl has a huge butt.” Now, imagine my confusion, if you replied, “Well, I have to disagree with you, Ron. That other girl over there has a huge butt, and girls can pay for liposuction to remove extra fat. Also, that’s my sister, and she’s a real nice girl.”
I’d assume you were biased, and I could understand you being upset that I talked about your sister, but nothing you said was relevant to whether your sister had a big butt.
The fact is, I haven’t “disagreed” with anything you said. Yes, you can pay even more for extra bid credits, duh. Yes, a prudent Elance bidder would waste hours researching buyer history before using a precious bid; I implied as much. Whatever.
And you haven’t disagreed with anything I said. Our different bandwidth experiences aren’t disagreements; they’re just different experiences. Yet, for some reason (I assumed bias from way you seemed to intentionally re-frame the discussion in a more favorable light for Elance), you seem to think we’re disageeing.
Bottom line regarding my opinion of the two sites: Elance is better in many ways than Guru, but none, except mediation, that put any more money in my pocket. I make more money on Guru. Elance has lots of neat bells and whistles, but it has to because the business model sucks. Not only does it provide less than 40% of the opportunities to win business that Guru does, but the high value placed on Elance bid credits creates an ugly potential for conflict of interest.
So, rather than agreeing to disagree, let’s just agree we’re talking about different subjects and not frame irrelevant arguments as, somehow, overwhelming the other person’s points. I will, if you will.
r