If you are new to the world of freelancing, there is something about looking (and looking, and looking) for freelance work that may have you ready to throw your hands up in despair. If you are an experienced freelancer, you may be perusing the available projects and wondering whether it is even worth checking to see whether there are any projects currently up for grabs that you might be remotely interested in bidding on. In either case, the solution to your dilemma has two parts. The first part of the solution is to reassure yourself that interesting and challenging projects that pay good money do exist. The second part is to commit to bidding only on interesting and challenging projects that pay good money.
Every so often, I look through the jobs that are posted on Elance to see whether there are any projects that I may want to bid on. Since I do not have a lot of extra time available due to my regular, recurring work commitments, I am very picky about what I bid on. I am lucky to be in this position, and to have built solid business relationships with key clients. You can also be in this position, and you can get there by being choosy about what you bid on.
Since my experience with freelancing is as a writer, I can offer a few tips for people who are looking to bid on freelance writing jobs. Armed with these tips, you may feel like you pass by many, many more postings than you bid on. That is okay. The first tip that you should know is that there are jobs out there that pay pennies. The second tip is to avoid those jobs like the plague. The third tip is that bidding on jobs that pay a decent wage will likely mean that you will get to work for better clients. While there are some impossible – to – please clients that pay well, a more likely scenario is the one in which you take a low paying job and then the client demands endless rewrites or even tries to squirm out of paying your measly fee by claiming that the work does not meet their standards. A fourth tip is to look at the project posting itself. Do not submit a bid unless the expectations of the project are clearly laid out.
The toughest part of being a freelancer is finding the right projects and the right clients. If you can keep your chin up and wade through all of those subpar job postings until you find some good ones to bid on, you will be on your way to making freelancing work for you.
Photo by grietgriet on morguefile.com.