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.