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.

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.

Developing a freelance writing job mindset quickly will have you earning money more quickly.

Every freelance writer has one thing in common: at some point, he or she had to complete her first freelance writing assignment. Landing that first job is at once a very heady experience and incredibly daunting, and I have found that the more money a job is worth, the more those butterflies in my stomach are likely to flutter.

I don’t know if this is true for every freelance writer, but I do know that the ones I have talked to had a very similar experience. My first few freelance writing jobs on the Internet were fairly (you should read that VERY) low paying, so I was not too worried about writing some kind of masterpiece. Shortly after I discovered bidding sites for finding jobs for freelance writers, however, I found that the jobs increased in value, as did my anxiety.

The first freelance writing job that I landed that really gave me pause, and highlighted the importance of a freelance writing mindset to me, was a contract to write a book about weddings. I got the job mainly because I had experience writing in the area previously (I used some of my low paid articles as samples), and it was a vast sum compared to what I usually made on a contract ($650 US).

After my initial feeling of ecstasy faded, the fear set in. Would I really be able to write a booklet that was worth $650? Were my research skills up to it? Where did I begin?

Over-analyzing the job soon proved paralyzing (actually this is a nice little kitsch phrase, and it’s common in many different businesses, check out this article), and I started to put the job off. Here’s what got me back on track.

Deadline consciousness

As this was my first big writing job, I knew that at some point I had to get writing it. There’s nothing for breaking a block like an approaching deadline, although with subsequent jobs I have found that this inspiration starts to work less well.

The realization that this could lead to more business

Perhaps the most important motivating factor in the mindset of the freelance writer is the knowledge that doing a good job for a client will almost always lead to more work. You may receive more than one freelance writing job from the same client, or you may gain a valuable referral that can get you another well paid freelance writing assignment, usually more than one.

Taking it head on

After a few weeks of procrastination and dread, I finally just sat down at my computer and started to type out what I knew about weddings. Eventually the form the book would take, including chapter organization, came to me and everything came together beautifully.

That last step is what has got me through many, many mental block situations when it comes to writing. You will be surprised at how many different things your brain can conjure up when it comes to avoiding the work you need to do to complete a freelance writing job; the trick is to sit down and just get started. Use everything you can think of as motivation, and once you find yourself starting to type you will generally be home free.

You have probably thought of being a freelance writer as a bit of a dream career, free of the mundane hassles that can plague the office worker. While it is true that as a writer you will have more variety in your life than at most jobs, you don’t always get to skip the less exciting aspects of a career.

And you certainly have to develop a specific mindset to succeed in the freelance writing job.

Most of the time you probably won’t make money writing about topics you particularly love or enjoy learning about, and many times a large part of your income won’t come from writing at all! And of course, there is always the money side of things; as a freelancer you are in charge of your own finances, from setting your budget month to month to calculating your own taxes.

For love AND money

In this section of the site, we are going to take a look at some areas you are going to have to concentrate on beyond writing in your career as a freelance writer. I have found a lot of these areas particularly troublesome.

I am not by any means a number cruncher, and I find that as I sit “filling out the books” I am not only calculating the money I’ve made and spent on the business, but also the hours I am using up making no money when I could be using the time finding more writing opportunities, checking out a new online writing contest, or just making money through writing. Still, it is a side of the business that has to get done.

Supplementing the writing side of the business

As my business has grown, I have realized that writing isn’t the only way to make money dealing with the written word on the Internet, even for a freelance writer. There are lots of different ways to add to your bottom line if you know what to look for, and some of them can be quite lucrative. We will be taking a look at finding proofreading jobs, editing jobs, and copywriting jobs on the Internet.

I have found that proofreading jobs and editing jobs in particular can be great for boosting up the end of the month money coming in for any writer, and you might even find you make more money per hour with this type of job than you do writing articles! Getting a few freelance editing jobs will not only get you some extra money, I have found that they usually lead to further writing opportunities as well.

Although writing is the defining part of a freelance writer’s life, writing careers are never about just writing. If you want to write for a living, particularly on the Internet, you need to be constantly on the lookout for supplemental income in the way of proofreading jobs, editing jobs, and copywriting jobs. You also need to understand the bookkeeping and mental side of the business, and we can help you out!

If you are one of the people who have dreamed about carving out a career in the world of freelance writing, you are certainly not alone.
In February 2005 I found myself at a bit of a cross roads in my life; my wife had a great job as a Registered Nurse and we had two children. I had just wrapped up a temporary job with a government agency, and had no idea what to do next.

I wanted to be my own boss

What I knew I certainly did not want to do was return to a five day a week job. I had had some very bad experiences at mills, restaurants, and so on, and was coming to a conclusion about myself that many people had told me before: it was very unlikely that I would ever be happy working under the direction of someone else (I prefer to think that is because I am brilliant and could do better and tell people so, but my wife says it has more to do with me being difficult).

My interest: writing

I did know that I was interested in writing for a living. Writing is something that I have always been skilled at, right from my days in elementary school. I had won a few cash prizes with some stories, and I definitely entertained thoughts of becoming a writer.

Feeling that it really was now or never, I began searching the Internet for writing opportunities and buying up any book I could find about how to start a freelance writing career.

The first month: figuring out how to start

Within the first month, I found out two things very quickly. The most important, and the reason why I feel that this site is important, is that those books did very little in the way of helping me understand how to start a freelance writer’s career.

Worse, there is an incredible dearth of information out there on how to make a career of freelance writing on the Internet. Imagine, millions and millions of web pages all over the world, and the only books to be found want to talk about breaking into the magazine and newspaper markets!

In addition, these books were pretty vague when it came to where to find jobs, or what one could expect to make. I assume this is because many writers are jealous of their revenue sources (and rightly so) and maybe even a little shy about disclosing what they actually make.

Getting the first writing jobs

The second thing I found out was that once you get on the right trail on the Internet, making money through freelance writing is a lot easier than any of those authors made it sound.

I entered my first bidding site very cautiously (and without telling my wife) because I did have to pay a fee for the rights to bid on jobs. I figured that if I at least broke even, then it would be justified. Well, I did more than break even, I actually made ten times what the initial fee was for the right to bid!

Being realistic

Now, before you go rushing off to reap the benefits of Internet writing, let me combine my two discoveries and my solution to them in order to put everything into perspective.
Writers, and particularly those who write for the Internet, don’t always make huge sums of money. I did make a lot more than I invested, but in the first month of my business on that particular site, that only amounted to $800 US. I made an additional $200 off another site I had found, but $1000 is hardly enough to feed a family and pay the mortgage for a month (fortunately my wife had a great job, did I mention that already?).

If you are looking for a site that promises you a surefire way to make millions, I should point out that today, a year and a half later, I am making a respectable $50,000 a year, with less than two years in business.

The key was in knowing where to look for jobs, how to pitch myself as the right choice for a writer, and retaining my good clients. I was also able to learn how to bid much more effectively in a competitive market place, and how to avoid jobs that ended up costing me money.

Honest sharing

The upshot is that I would like to share this information with other writers who are looking to start their own freelance writing careers. The pages on this site will be diverse, but my main strength and source of knowledge is in making money by writing for Internet sites, as well as proof reading for those sites and so on.

This site is not about hiding my secrets because I am scared of competition; there is more than enough work for every competent writer out there, and I am of the belief that if we all hold the same standards, it can only benefit us as a group.

Of course, you are probably wondering why this guy would share these secrets for free. Well, once you start writing for the Internet successfully, you will see the kind of revenue that can be made without having to charge site visitors a dime for reading.

This part remains a mystery for me, my partner Alexander (he’s the guy whose picture you don’t see, which is too bad because he is an Aussie and is no doubt much better looking than I am) handles that side of it.

You can succeed in your own writing career

What I am here to do is provide you with information on starting your own freelance writing career, right from your mindset and where to look for jobs to an outline of what most Internet clients are looking for.

In these pages you will find stories of what I’ve done wrong and what I’ve done right, and hopefully you will be able to avoid some of the mistakes I made and benefit from the times I’ve hit the target. You’ll find out where to look for work, how to come across in such a way that potential clients can’t say no, and how to protect yourself.

If you have always dreamed of becoming a freelance writer, the Internet Age beckons. There’s money to be made all from the comfort of your own home, and I would like to help you to succeed with your dream.