I know that bidding sites are not for everyone. However, if you decide to give it a go, you need to be aware of some things:

Get the First Rating

It will be much easier to gain further work, once you have received some ratings from clients. That is why it is not useful to worry too much about what you earn in your first few projects when you bid. Completing them and getting a rating (which are positive in most cases anyway) is far more important.

That is why our freelance writing job feed includes all bidding sites. Bid on every jobs that comes up, bid low so that you get some ratings.

Concentrate Your Ratings

Once you have a few ratings on one or two bidding sites, it might be best to concentrate on that one site (or maybe two). That way, you concentrate you ratings.

Many sites show the providers with more rating higher up in the results for the client.

Carve Out a Niche

Once you have completed a few projects, concentrate on specific topics. Why?

• Clients will trust your expertise when they see that you have done similar things before.
• You will be able to write a lot quicker with less research. That increases your hourly rate.

Marshall wrote a post that outlines why niching reduces your writing opportunities. However, there are two main approaches to making a living through writing: quantity and quality.

Think about who earns more money, the factory worker who produces widgets (quantity) or the highly specialized professor who researches atomic physics (quality).

Being a specialist will draw quality clients to you. Being a generalist makes you have to compete with low wage countries. That competition cannot be won.

I think I admit on the site somewhere that Elance.com is where I have been finding freelance writing job opportunities for the better part of my (short) career. I say “admit” because as I look around at other sites for writers, a lot of them seem to have a problem with the Elance site. In fact it was through one author’s(Sharon Hurley Hall) complaining about Elance that I found my way over to the site.

I will be the first to admit that this is one bidding site that does have its flaws, but I have to temper that with the fact that it has definitely helped me springboard into full time writing for a living.

There seems to be some confusion among writers and those who offer writers advice on the changes that Elance first put through their system (check out webwritinginfo.com). I’d like to offer my take on this subject; as usual I see a few different angles to what Elance is doing.

The Good

Well there’s one thing I certainly can’t complain about, and that is the fact that Elance has changed their pay structure so that individual writers, like myself, are on a more even footing with the big companies.

My monthly fees are half what they used to be because I can’t keep up with companies who use ten writers to produce content, and I don’t need the full allotment of bids.

The Mixed

One grey area for me is the new Premium Provider program. It used to be that you paid a fee and got a Premium membership that let you bid on certain freelance writing job opportunities.

Now Elance has changed the process so that providers have to have over 90% positive bids over a period of six months, have had to have at least two original clients in the past six months, and have to keep their membership fees updated.

The last requirement I have no problem with, nor do I have any problem with the idea behind the first requirement.

Still, I think Elance needs to do a lot of work in clarifying their feedback system and making it a little bit more fair for providers if they truly want to reflect the merit of companies (currently what any client says goes, no matter how demonstrably outrageous the claims and feedback scores).

The Bad

When it comes to finding more than two original clients each month, though, as an individual writer I take exception. Just as with the feedback, this seems to be tailored to give the writing mills an advantage over the individuals on the site. Easy enough to get new clients every week when you are willing to bid $5 for a 500 worder!

The Confusing

For reasons that are not very clear, Elance has decided to call bids “connects”. It sounds nice but still, what really is the point?

Also, the new sponsored bid program is a bit of a joke. Under his program, you can use two of your “connects” to get top placement in the bid section. Only two sponsors per posting though; I don’t really see how this idea works for anyone but Elance, who of course want providers to purchase additional connects as often as possible.

Conclusion

So the changes that Elance has made are not all bad, in fact the price change in particular is great for individual writers.

Still, Elance really has to take a look at their feedback process if they really want to be fair both to buyers and providers, and this still has not been addressed. In fact, it is a problem that may be exacerbated under the new rules.

Even though, I still use Elance to find freelance writing job opportunities.

Time to face an important truth: in order to continue doing what you love, you need to earn money from freelance writing. When I first started out in this field, I was hoping that I would be writing a lot of articles on political events, humorous stories about my kids, opinion pieces, the really fun and interesting stuff. At this point in my career, I have realized that having opportunities to write about these things are few and far between. In order to earn money from freelance writing, I have to (often!) write on topics that don’t exactly stimulate my brain or bring joy to my heart.

Don’t give up your dream - and don’t work for slave wages

There are a couple of things that freelance writers, especially those in the beginning stages of their careers, are prone to. The first is to hang on to their pretension, believing that their art is far more important than making a living. What they don’t realize is that they can retain the parts of writing that they love without writing off, so to speak, the mundane tasks that put food on the table for the kids. You don’t have to give up your dream, you just have to realize that if you ever are going to “make it” in the way that you want, you are going to have to pay your dues.

The second mistake that freelance writers make is to devalue their services, to the point where they are basically working for slave wages. This is a chronic problem for writers both online and off, but I think that it is really exacerbated when someone starts a career by writing online. The amount of competition can make it very difficult to compete, and the temptation to earn money from freelance writing by being the lowest bid on the board can be hard to overcome.

How I started out

Before I go much further, I would like to say that in the beginning stages of my career, I took the lowball approach. I did this for a couple of reasons.

1. I knew I could still make a decent wage, comparatively speaking. I type fast, I process fast, and three 400 word, $5 pieces an hour meant $15 an hour, not a bad wage particularly from home.
2. I wanted to bulk up my feedback. In order to get the higher paying jobs, I needed to get some street cred, and in order to do that I needed some feedback. At the same time I could earn money from freelance writing.

I am not ashamed of taking this approach because it worked very well, but sometimes I wonder if I might have been able to bid at the prices I do now even though I was just starting out. If any of you are gutsy enough to try it, let me know because I would love to write about that.

Higher prices lead to more work

Even with this lowball approach, though, I found that I was able to raise my prices without too much time passing by. It was at that point that I made the conscious decision to make my proposals and bids based on quality, rather than the knowledge that if pressed I could pump out three to six articles in an hour. To my surprise and relief, business didn’t fall off at all; in fact, it increased! Not only was I making more money per article, but I was landing more jobs than I had previously.

The best example I can equate this to is in the world of real estate. Years ago, the parents of my best friend were trying to sell their house within a certain price bracket, and getting very few visits. Their natural reaction was to lower the asking price, but a friend suggested raising it instead. They took the advice somewhat skeptically, and put their house in the next price bracket up. To their surprise, the house had serious offers within a week and had sold within two. The buyers had been out there all the time, but obviously there was the perception that a low price meant low quality.

I get the impression from a few of the clients that I have talked to that it is much the same way in the world of freelance writing. Some pass over cheap bids because of the belief that a low price is hiding poor quality.

That’s good news for anyone who wants to earn money from freelance writing, because it means that if you deliver a quality product, people are willing to compensate you well for it.

Higher prices bring better clients

In addition, I have found that the clients who are willing to pay more for better quality work also tend to send more work my way. A year or so ago, I decided to try raising my prices yet again, just to see if I could make $20 for an article.

I was delighted when selected. And even more so when he sent me 10 more articles to do.

Since that time, I handle ten articles each week for that buyer; he is not interested in looking for someone who offers a lower price, he wants to stay with the writer who charges fairly and offers quality work in return.

If you want to earn money from freelance writing, you can’t be timid when it comes to charging what you are worth. The mentality of buyers and your own work will both support your decision to charge fairly, and you will probably find that your yearly earnings are equal to that of the average magazine and newspaper freelance writer in no time.

I have posted a range of projects for freelance writing work on bidding sites and worked with a few different writers. I often received great proposals with excellent samples from native English speakers. I was really excited to work with them. But their work was often below my expectations, because the topic was only researched and not filled with personal knowledge and first hand experience.

Now I only work with writers who live and breathe a particular topic. Research is useful for including the latest trends, but not to learn about a topic that you did not have any knowledge before. Whenever I see a profile of a writer that lists more than 10 topics that they feel well-versed in, I exclude them from any further consideration. And naturally even more so if they say that they will write on anything.

That is purely from a buyer’s perspective. Naturally you have to make sure that your chosen niche has enough demand to pay the bills. If there is enough demand, you have the advantage that little research is necessary, so you can produce more freelance writing work in less time. The result: a higher hourly rate.

Quick, pick a topic that could be a piece of freelance writing work. Now go to a search engine and perform a query on that topic, and visit the first few pages that come up. I will bet that at least half of the time, you come across pages that have obviously been written by someone who either does not speak English as a first language, or who really can’t write at all. In these cases, the web site developers have decided to put up with poor freelance writing work, usually in order to lower the cost of getting the site up and running.

International competition

If you are looking for freelance writing work on the Internet, and in particular if you are using a bidding site or even just a classified style site where you respond to job postings, the odds are better than excellent that you will run into competition in the form of non-English speaking writers. Now, let’s make one thing clear: most of these writers speak English much better than I could ever speak another language, no matter where they are located, and I give them credit for that. Still, that does not mean that they can write good, convincing web site copy that is meant for the consumption of English speaking (and reading) audiences.

This regular occurrence is a big point in favor of any person who happens to be fluent in writing English. You will notice that I didn’t say speaking in English; many of these outsourced writers are quite capable in the language. The differences that stand out are only highlighted in their freelance writing work, but when that happens, it really does stand out.

You might wonder why it is that these writers pose serious competition to writers based in the UK, Canada, the US, Australia, or any other country where English is a “native” tongue. The reason is price. The cost of living in many countries is much lower than in the countries listed above, and as a result writers with access to the Internet can charge prices that are one third to one fifth of the average rate needed for another business or writer to survive. That’s quite a difference, and for many cost conscientious web site developers it’s too great to be passed up.

Side-stepping the price war

There are a couple of things that you can do to overcome this kind of competition. The first is to suffer in indignant silence, in the knowledge that the site developers will have a lot of proofreading on their hands in order to make those pieces readable, let alone convincing, to the average reader.

The second way to deal with this kind of competition for freelance writing work is to tackle it head on. This might not seem very nice or very politically correct, and really, it isn’t! One thing that comforts me is that in the majority of cases, the countries where these writers hail from don’t even translate the term politically correct. Another comfort is that this is business, and I need these jobs.

What this amounts to is a hard nosed campaign that flat out states why a buyer should use my freelance writing work instead of those offered by someone who just can’t write using proper English. I actually came to this point about a year ago, when I grew tired of watching the jobs I was bidding handed to a person who couldn’t even put a coherent proposal together, the project awarded on the basis of price alone.

To battle the competition, I rewrote my profile both on the sites I used and on my introductory letters and clearly stated that most of what we find on the Internet as far as “information” is just a bunch of words that when strung together, make no real sense. I now tell potential clients straight out that they can go for a much lower price if they want, but I can guarantee them that 80% of the time, they will end up paying at least double the cost they agreed to due to editing, or else lose time performing this vital task themselves.

I have also come across several situations where I have been hired as a proofreader, and after going through a confused jumble of words I point out to my client that what they essentially have on their hands is just a pile of junk, and no amount of proofreading can help it to make sense; the whole piece needs to be re-written. I have gained two of my steadiest clients in this way; frustrated with a continuous cycle of proofreading, they have decided to dump the extra costs and get it done right the first time.

Be bold about your skills

The world of freelance writing work is a competitive one, particularly on the Internet, but if you are willing to be bold about your skills and the weaknesses of the competition, you will be the one walking away with the jobs. It isn’t always nice, but in the end both you and your clients will be better off for it.

I should state in closing that one of my clients recently remarked to me that it wasn’t just writers who didn’t speak English as a first language who had problems writing copy. She figured that out of twenty different writers she had used since starting her online business, all but three just couldn’t get a piece together that made sense, and that included at least two university-educated freelance writers. If you have the skills to get the job done right, market them aggressively!

While I have gained the bulk of my freelance writing jobs through bidding, there are more avenues for writing projects out there, beyond just bidding sites. In fact, the whole purpose of this site is to help you to see the potential in that underused and under publicized marketplace.

If you are uncomfortable with the idea of bidding for jobs for whatever reason, then it’s useful to know about alternative freelance writing markets. In this section, we will take a look at other places where you can look for a freelance writing assignment; I break them down below to give you a brief overview of what other opportunities you can expect in the writers market.

Offline writing opportunities

The most well publicized, and therefore the most competitive, jobs in the freelance writing market are those in the print media. Trade magazines and newspapers are the places where most aspiring writers go to get their start, and this can be deadly competitive, and often the wages are not too great either! Still, there are a huge number of potential markets for your writing, and you do have the ability to apply for positions that cater to your strengths.

The person to get into contact with for these freelance writing jobs is the editor of the newspaper or magazine you want to write for. This is usually done by way of a query letter; we will go into those a bit more in a further article. The most important part of the process is patience; you will often hear nothing at all, and it might be some time before you can get your shot!

Becoming a web content writer

Wait a second; I bet you are thinking I said that we wouldn’t be talking about online writing jobs in this section, right? Well, not exactly. What we aren’t talking about is gaining a freelance job through a bidding site, but there are a lot more ways to get a job as a web content writer other than through winning a bid, and I have made some good money doing them.

The web content writer’s market is not yet so saturated that everyone who has developed a website can easily find a good writer. There are plenty of people out there who can’t write at all, and then there are those who prefer to cut and paste, who just disappear, and who can’t seem to keep a deadline.

For this reason, most web site developers are constantly watching for opportunities to hire web content writers in the freelance writing market, and in this section I will point out some ways you can get them to approach you without having to go through a bidding process.

The primary way in which I find online writing jobs has been until recently through bidding sites. These sites are a good way to start out, but they do have some significant shortcomings, not the least of which is the competition that you will find.

In this article we will take a look at Guru.com, a site I have used a couple of times. As always if you have had experience on this site, whether similar to my own or different, we would love to hear from you!

Usability

Guru is by far one of the most complicated bidding sites I have come across, although in most cases it is hard to see how the extra work helps one land more clients.

I mean, how many profiles does one person or company really need? And they should be a lot easier to start up as well; in one case the onsite help described clicking on a link to upload samples, and the link itself was dead. Contacting the Guru.com staff was no help, but that was par for the course as we will see in a bit.

Fees

The fees that Guru.com charges are a little bit ridiculous, probably because for the most part the resources of the site are concentrated on the tech jobs and not on the writing end of things (this is actually a big problem with Guru.com’s main competitor, Elance.com, as well).

While Guru.com does say that they provide bidding on some jobs for free, the reality is that these jobs are incredibly hard to find in fact, I have never seen one!

Client Potential and Competition

Guru.com also tends to attract online writing jobs that pay less than anywhere else. I don’t know if it is because their marketing campaign is done less enthusiastically than Elance’s, but the average price paid per article on Guru is about one third that of Elance.

In addition, many of the lower end buyers that are found on Elance will also post projects on Guru, and many of the same writing companies can be found on both sites to boot.

Feedback fairness and comprehension

As on Elance.com, Guru does not provide a very clear feedback process for buyers, and that means fairly subjective feedback for your business. What’s worse, Guru staff takes no interest in determining the fairness of feedback left for their paying providers, which means that one bad review can lead to a lot of lost business, most of the time very undeserved.

All in all, I would recommend avoiding Guru.com as a source of work. The site has all the failings of Elance, but without any kind of free service and higher prices to boot (now that Elance.com has reduced theirs).

In addition, the high paying jobs that you hope for as a beginner just aren’t there, and when they are landing them is much more difficult.

When I started looking for writing jobs online, I could not find any solid information about what to expect and how to go about it.

I have since had a lot of success using bidding sites to find writing jobs online. In under two years I have managed to grow a business to around $50,000 per year. Most sources I have seen state that as the high end of the average freelance writer’s pay scale. (Now I am happy with that, but you might think it seems like small change. There are freelancers who earn yearly wages in the six figure range, but hey, it hasn’t even been two years yet and I am still hopeful).

I wasn’t really optimistic about making even this amount back when I started. A lot of the writing jobs online were incredibly low paying, many through individuals who were unreliable. It was a lot of work for not much in exchange. That all changed the day I discovered www.Elance.com. Now I know that that line sounds like the start of a glowing testimonial trying to convince you to use the site, but it isn’t. I assure you I have many issues with Elance (which will be apparent shortly), but in the end it works for what I need to do, which is make money from home by writing for a living.

For organization’s sake, I have decided to break the reviews I write on different online bidding sites down into different categories. I am going to avoid assigning a “value” to sections on a site, simply because I think that the words should be able to determine what is good about a site and what you need to watch out for. So let’s get started!

What you can expect to pay

Elance is a site where you must pay in order to get a “Select” membership. Ostensibly the Select membership allows you to bid on jobs that are of higher value than the others, and I have found that in most cases this happens to be true.

I have paid for the Select Membership. My most lucrative contracts (and best clients too) have come in the Select category. You don’t have to be a Select member to bid on other jobs, though, so if the idea of paying rankles you, then you can go for the other jobs, although you won’t have a feedback section, which allows you to gain credence in your bids.

Aside from that monthly fee, Elance deducts a percentage of the fee paid to you on every project by a client. This part of the pay structure is pretty annoying, because you end up coughing up close to 8% of the money you make on every project. If it’s a smaller project, you can end up paying even more, because Elance demands at least $10 off of every single project.

What you can expect in return

We have already kind of touched on what you can expect in return for signing up on the Elance site: access to a lot of writing jobs online. There are plenty of buyers who use Elance, with dozens of writing projects being posted every day.

Where Elance really fails is in their service to the people who are paying their fees. The site is free for people posting projects, thus it is only bidders who are contributing to the site’s financial well being. Elance seems to think that the opportunity to make money is thanks enough, and are very neglectful or downright rude when a bidder needs help with a client. Their negotiation process is so convoluted as to be useless, and as we will see in the next part of this article the feedback program is a bit of a mess.

Feedback program

Elance states that feedback is the backbone of their system, and this could not be stating the truth more clearly. Writing jobs online, landing them and continuing to get more, depend on good feedback from past clients. Most of the time if you do a good job, there is no issue with this, but all the feedback is opinion, and although Elance provides guidelines as to what the feedback categories mean, buyers usually don’t take the time to read it.

A good example of this is in the “Project Cost” section. Clients rate a provider on a scale of 1-5 according to criteria set out by Elance. The Cost section states that this feedback is based on “the client’s ability to complete the project within the stated cost of the bid”. I have not once asked a client for more money than I bid for, even when the project turned out to be more time consuming than I had thought. Still, several clients seem to think that this section refers to cost, period. If they think I charged too much, they will deduct points. I have brought this up with Elance, but they say that it really doesn’t matter what the criteria states, feedback is the opinion of the buyer.

The upshot is, you can end up with a score that doesn’t always give an accurate reflection of the job. Elance will not remove feedback unless ordered to by a court, and my guess is that they are fully cognizant of the fact that not a lot of freelancers can afford to retain a lawyer and foot the bill even when they are justified in their complaints. It’s a big weakness in the Elance system, because everyone runs into a client at some point that just cannot be pleased within reason.

The quality of the clients

You will find a great range of projects and topics on the Elance site when it comes to freelance writing jobs online, from books to press releases to reviews, articles, and everything in between. Moreover, these are on virtually every topic under the sun, so if you like to learn and earn you’re in luck, and the more diverse your knowledge base, the better.

Of course, the range of buyers runs from those with ridiculously low expectations in the area of pay to the more reasonable. Whenever freelancers are competing for writing jobs online, it will be hard to really command the prices that the jobs are truly worth, and that is in evidence on Elance. Still if you like working in bulk, there is good money to be made.

The competition

We kind of touched on this above, but it bears repeating: when you have a bunch of writers, or writing companies, competing for work, you are going to find a situation where the pay may not be as good as it should be. Elance, like other bidding sites, will take money from anywhere, no matter how well that individual or company does as a writer.

In addition, there is international competition on the Elance site. Keep in mind that when it comes to outsourcing, you have to compete with people living in countries where the average cost of living is much lower than the UK, Canada, the US, Australia, and so on (a bottle of Coke in India costs 15 cents. Justify that one!). As a result, they can afford to bid a third or less of what you need to earn on a given job. We talk about how to deal with competition in the form of poor or international writes in another section; the point here is to demonstrate that you will encounter this on Elance.

The upshot of it all

If there were a lot of options out there, I think that Elance would end up sinking. They charge very high prices for services that are not all that great and when it comes to dealing with issues their bidders have, they might as well be non existent; they are more or less just a processing company.

That being said, I certainly have no complaints about the number of writing jobs online that can be found on the site. If you are discerning in your bidding, and in your choice of clients, then your problems with Elance should be few. Sooner or later, though, everyone runs into a client who just can’t be satisfied, and it’s in these situations that the flaws of Elance are made very apparent.

Do you want to progress from writing to building a writing career? The purpose of this site is to help you to leave the every day grind of an office job and exercise your writing skills.

I want to guide you through the process of setting up your freelance business to make sure you succeed. Of course, one of the most important parts of making a writing career work is in finding jobs.

There are a lot of jobs for freelance writers out there, in fact with the Internet there are probably more freelance writing opportunities out there than ever before.

Using Bidding Sites

In this section, we are going to narrow the search for online freelance writing jobs right down to the area where I have had the most success, financially speaking: Internet sites where you bid to land certain jobs.

Most of the time the freelance writing job opportunities that you will find on these sites will involve writing for different web developers, and that actually takes an entirely different skill set than a traditional freelance writing job opportunity would call for (we cover a lot of the specifics in another section of the site).

It took me a while to really get the hang of Internet bidding sites; in order to land jobs and have a viable career with online freelance writing jobs you really have to know the ins and outs of the various bidding sites.

Some of the bidding sites attract online writing jobs that are much higher paying, with much better clients, than others. Even smaller sites (such as ifreelance.com or getafreelancer.com) can offer a surprising wealth of online freelance writing jobs, though, so I am going to try to use and review the best sites for you.

Which one to choose?

What I have found is that no site where you can find freelance writing job opportunities is perfect. In fact the two biggest sites that I have come across, Elance.com (see my Elance review) and Guru.com (see my Guru review), have some glaring weaknesses, particularly when it comes to mediation and the protection of the people who pay to bid on jobs. You’ll see what I mean when we get into the specifics about these sites a little bit more.

In the meantime, you should start out this section by reading the article entitled “Find Freelance Writing Jobs Online”. It gives a good overview of what you will need to do to start bringing in clients on bidding sites and what most of these sites have in common.

Once you know where to find these sites and what to look for, you will find that the money you have always wanted to make writing comes in fairly quickly. And if you know what you are doing, you will be making enough money to consider online writing a viable career in no time.

Ifreelance.com is another option where clients are posting freelance writing opportunities for bidding. This site which uses the same approach as bigger competitors such as Elance.com and Guru.com but is not quite as large as those two giants.

Price

Just like Elance and Guru, ifreeance.com has a structure wherein freelance writers can bid on freelance writing opportunities for free or within a certain pay structure. Unfortunately, just like Elance and Guru, the opportunities are a little bit thin on the ground in the free category in particular. You also have to suffer the lack of a feedback section or a good profile.

Fortunately, unlike the two big bullies on the block, ifreelance does not ask for nearly as much money from their providers. In fact the top membership cost is only $60 (US) a year, making it more than competitive in this aspect.

Clients and competition

Because ifreelance is not as big as some of the other bidding sites, it stands to reason that there are less jobs posted for individuals and writing companies. Moreover, there seems to be a lot of the same competition for jobs on this site as there is on other bidding sites.

You can also expect the average project on ifreelance.com to bid around $6 per 500 word article; definitely much lower than the average on Elance or Guru. Still, the fact that ifreelance charges less fees on a regular basis and takes no cut at all out of the fee of a project decreases the gap quite a bit.

Feedback and clarity

When it comes to setting up a profile, ifreeance.com really gets it right. You don’t have to go through a lot of steps, unlike Guru, for your profile to appear attractive and to get attention. Better still, everything is very user friendly and you won’t have to spend valuable writing time puzzling through the ins and outs of the site.

When it comes to feedback opportunities, ifreelance falls into the common trap of all three of the bidding sites I have reviewed here; there really is no balance and no appeal between the client feedback and the provider feedback.

Writers do get stiffed on this site (although it does not happen frequently) and when that happens not only is there no appeal process, but you are not allowed to warn your fellow writers via your feedback input on a client.

All in all, ifreeance.com is a pretty good site for writers who are looking to make a side income without a lot of hassle. The rates for membership are very reasonable, and it sure is nice not to have to write the first three articles in a project in order to pay additional site fees as you have to on Elance and Guru.