Are Bidding Sites Worth It?
November 1, 2007 by Deb Ng
Filed under Freelance Writing
Yesterday I typed up a long-winded post featuring my feelings regarding freelance bidding sites and I saved the piece and lost it when my cat decided to go for a walk on my keyboard. I didn’t have it in me to type it over last night, but I’m willing to give it another go this morning – and I will be saving.
I first began looking into bidding sites two summers ago when I accepted a contract to write a book about landing gigs on bidding sites. Mind you, I didn’t know a thing about bidding sites, but the client was paying me for the research and I felt any work I took on was extra money. Here’s what I learned:
Experience doesn’t matter.
You can be Stephen King, but if you bid higher than $2 or $3 a pop you’re not getting the gig, especially if you’re a first timer. My first bid was at my standard rate and I was told I had a lot of nerve bidding that much money when I wasn’t even rated among rent-a-coder clients. When I pointed out my experience I was told that had no bearing.
You’re going to lose money
All bidding sites want something. Some are subscription based while others take a percentage of your payment. So if your payment is for $2 per article, you’ll probably only receive $1.60 or $1.50 per. You pay the bidding site, not the client.
The work is horrible
Browse some of these sites and you’ll see what I mean. People who want 100 articles, all about the same thing, in two weeks and the lowest bid wins. I was bored to the teeth with bidding site work.
The competition is fierce
You’re competing with people all over the world. Many of these places have a much lower standard of living and bidding .50 cents per article is still a lucrative gig for them. Expect to have 20 to 50 others bidding with you on the same gig. Expect at least half of those gigs to be lower.
I only accepted a couple of gigs from the bidding site. My client decided to put the project on hold and I was happy to cease the research. I also believe these sites drive down the rates for the rest of them.
Now, I know of a few writers who claim they’ve had lots of luck with bidding sites. My experience was short lived and not very pleasant. How did you do?
I totally agree: I tried some of these sites when I was starting out as a freelancer, and quickly came to the conclusion that the employers were mostly people who weren’t interested in quality writing – just how much they could persuade people to churn out for as little cost as possible. Not a great experience.
I agree; my few and brief experiences with bidding sites was much the same as yours. I soon exited these sites and found better gigs elsewhere – including through your blog!
I use these sites and agree that a majority of the buyers are looking for the cheapest price and the quickest turnaround. However, I am signed up with three (Guru, Elance, and RAC) that have resulted in regular clients with interesting work that pays well. It has been my experience that you have to wade through the bad and have patience for a “good” opportunity. For someone just starting out, these sites are a great way to obtain writing experience and start a portfolio.
I agree, too. I could never really get into bidding sites. The thought of paying a monthly fee to bid for jobs that I may not get is not very appealing. Thanks to you, Deb, I have recently ventured into full-time freelancing after writing part-time for a few months. I’ve landed four steady contracts (and counting) as a result of your highly useful blog. I haven’t spent one red cent to land these gigs. I still have to give PayPal a percentage of each payment sent through them, but that’s a small price to pay for landing high quality gigs. Bidding sites may work for some. As for me, though, I’ll keep looking for jobs for free on your blog! The pay is certainly much better and the abundant jobs are varied enough to keep competition low.
While it isn’t a universal problem, I’ve run across a number of gigs up for bid where the client plans from the very beginning to stiff writers.
It’s just not worth the hassle, I think.
Wow, this is a timely discussion for me… for the past few weeks, I’ve been considering going the bidding site route to grab more work. Besides the possibility of low paying gigs and crazy competition, I’m stalled because I foresee myself spending way too long wading for potential opportunities, only to lose them to a lower bidder. I don’t have a lot of extra time to search for jobs — I come to this job listing and check a couple of blog job posting sites, and that’s about it. I’m looking forward to reading about other people’s experiences with bidding sites, but for me, I don’t think it’s an option.
AMEN! Those sites are interested in one thing – profit for themselves. When I wrote to Guru.com and complained that too many $4-per-article jobs were showing up and could they please do something about it, the response was “We don’t discriminate and cannot determine what is considered decent pay.” Translation – “They paid us, we don’t care, so shut up and go away.”
I did just that.
Most of my writing jobs have come through other sources, but I did once use a bidding service for a job. In the end I was really disappointed. I was a travel agent for four year years, so I specifically look for travel writing. There was an ad asking for articles about 300 words in length about small towns in Europe that included a history, attractions, and typical cuisine. To me, that was easy. After getting the winning bid, the website owner then changed the terms from 300 word articles to 1,000 word articles with hotels, driving directions, transportation, and industry added. They demanded the same amount of money and the articles had to be translated from foreign language sites, no sites used for research could be English/American. I emailed the freelance bidding company and explained the situation to them telling them there was no way I could do this work for that little money and asking for advice. The longer articles was one thing, but having to translate foreign sites – Russian, Spanish, and Bulgarian/Slavic, well I know nothing about these languages, so translating them took hours upon hours. The company refused to back me up and told me I’d won the bid and could have asked more questions about the research aspect in advance of placing a bid. I thought I’d asked everything necessary, but never asked them if their needs were going to change as they prepared their website. The bidding company’s final verdict was that I owed them their cut of the money and basically to suck it up and deal with the change of terms. In the end, I did the work and vowed never again would I use a bidding service.
I don’t like the idea of having to give someone else money for work that I do. While I can see it’s a tool for finding work, I can’t say that I’d have much confidence in it.
When I was first trying to break into freelance writing, I spent about two months on bidding sites trying to gain experience by consistently underbidding everyone else. After “winning” the chance to write 50 articles about alternative health, I wised up and realized that writing one or two articles for free an an up-and-coming website was a better alternative for my portfolio.
I signed up for Guru, but never did bid on anything. Lots of crazy cheap jobs came though and I unsubscribed to the notification emails. It was very annoying.
I’ve been down this same path and all it did for me was made me sick at my stomach. I couldn’t believe writers actually gave in to the bull. We are worth much more than that, and I, too, do not see paying a monthly fee to bid on jobs I may not get. Not to mention the fact that many of those jobs I may not even apply to, because they aren’t willing to give writers what their worth. Let’s see them call someone to fix their furnace and ask them to accept a few dollars to do the work. I’ll bet they end up fixing it themselves or forking out the money the furnace technician is worth. Moreover, would these people offering such low rates actually work that much? I don’t think so.
If someone is looking for the lowest price, I’m NEVER going to be that. I don’t consider myself the Wal-Mart of writers and think that many writers would be better off spending time marketing themselves to higher paying clients than taking work that pay lower than slave wages.
Like others, I’ve taken some low-paying work over the years to make ends meet, but nothing as low as what some of these bidding sites offer. It’s amazing they can find anyone. My high school kids wouldn’t work for those wages…they hardly work anyway, but that’s another issue.
I would think that anyone is better off spending the time the time to bid and complete the job in either marketing themselves, learning a new skill (like how to build a Web site) or mowing the lawn.
I’m signed up at Elance, and have found moderate success. It takes a lot of shuffling to find the jobs that are willing to pay more than $3 per article. That said, I’ve found quite a few that do so. My tactic is to be one of the first people to bid and blow them out of the water with my samples and pitch so that they end the project early instead of waiting for more bids.
Thank you so much for this post! I should have brought this topic sooner since from what I gather it’s a hot button in the freelance world. As a newbie, I’m quite enthusiastic about looking for work in all kinds of outlets and thought these bidding sites might benefit me. Evidently, these sites cater to people only with experience since it’s near impossible to win a bid if you don’t have feedback (and you can’t get feedback if you can’t win a bid), it’s a vicious cycle. Not to mention they take a portion of the fee you earn from your hard work!
Thanks a million for this informative post!
I’ve had a little luck with a elance and RAC. I paid for the Guru though based on the recommendations of a lot of people, and it was money wasted. People kept telling me that they made back their initial fee within a week, but no luck here. I keep getting outbidded by people taking $2-3 for 600+ articles. Oddly enough I’ve picked up a couple of jobs on the other sites, even when I was bidding higher, just because of my experience in that field.
Bidding sites helped me at the beginning of my freelance career. I used RAC and guru, the basic services, so I paid a portion of the payment. I finally got out after the low pay.
Anyone who has taken a basic course in economics is going to realize that bidding sites are losers. It is Adam Smith with a vengeance. When the only factor considered is the price bid, all the competition is going to bid the price down to virtually nothing.
Fortunately for those seeking workers on bidding sites (and unfortunately for those workers), most freelancers have not taken a course on economics.
I’ve also tried a number of these freelance sites and was just amazed by the ‘tude of some of the prospective employers just in the bidding process. And some of the writing you see in the bidding process is quite amusing (e.g., “I speak mother-tongue English and will write good for you.”)
I did have a good interaction on one site, but in general have a lot more success checking craigslist and Deb’s kind postings.
Re: The article writing mill, I guess I don’t get why you would ghostwrite articles for someone for $3 per article when you can usually get more under your own byline by writing for Associated Content.
Mark nailed it.
While I only took one course in econ, I’ve spent several years writing about businesses. One can learn via osmosis.
I have not found it to be a problem to find good paying work on bidding sites. I use RAC and Elance, and have never had to write a $3 article for either of them. There are tons of insultingly-low paying jobs on them, especially RAC, but I just don’t bid on those. Why would you do that when there are higher paid projects available?
Also, you are not in competition with third-world bidders. There are buyers that want the cheapest, and there are buyers who want high quality. you are competition for those projects. I could go to RAC any day of the week and bid against Indian writers for $2 an article, but I think a better use of my time would be to bid on the ones that specifically are requesting writers from mature economies and are open to any bid amount. I’ve gotten several projects as the highest bidder just because the client liked my samples the best.
Every bidding site is it’s own island- your experience on other sites doesn’t count. Other experience is good to use for samples, but you have to have a track record through that site in order to get the confidence of a client. You can point to any site on the web and say that you wrote it, but bidding site clients like to see your feedback and project history before they hire. That’s just the way it is.
Until a few weeks ago, I’d never used a real bidding site. Anticipating a holiday slowdown, I signed up for Elance a few weeks back. Ironically, right after I signed up I got a new rather time consuming ongoing gig, so I haven’t had time to properly explore Elance. Honestly, I may never use it. But I feel ok about having it as a backup in case my work slows down too much. To me a $30 monthly loss (especially when it can be written off) is no big deal. I’ve browsed enough ads at Elance to see that there are posters looking for quality work at a professional price. I browsed other bidding sites where the common goal clearly was getting the lowest possible rate, and I can’t compete with third world country writers. That’s why I chose Elance. Whether anything positive will come of it I don’t know.
In the past I’ve used Freelance Work Exchange (now Go Freelance) for my slow times, and I’ve gotten some decent gigs there. But they’re not a traditional bidding site. No one but the job poster sees your response. And they don’t use a feedback system or anything like that. It’s just a flat $30 monthly fee. The downfall there (for me anyhow) is that there aren’t enough new jobs posted — very few that interest me — which is why I’m giving Elance a shot this time around.
Wow. I must be a freak of nature. I set up an account on GetAFreelancer and got the first two jobs I applied to. One is a blogging job, 2 posts a day, 7 days a week, for $800 a month.
The other is a fulltime, long term gig, 5-7 articles a day, $2000 a month.
Guess I was seriously lucky.
PS, no, I don’t work for GAF.
At first I felt very similarly… I was writing for about $4.00 an article and bored out of my mind. But during that time I built up perfect reviews, so now at around 25 perfect 10’s I am receiving more of the higher paying interesting work. I still don’t make much more than $10.00 an article for 400 to 500 words, but I get the bigger jobs. The other day I did get a job for 300 articles at 300 words each for $1800 so I guess I’m not too unhappy about that. It is all about poker which is a subject I know back and forth and only takes me about 6 minutes to write a 300 word article. So at 10 articles an hour that is $60.00 an hour – not too shabby I think!
I just still don’t understand how some of you can write an article in 6 minutes. Are we talking proofing and editing too. A 300 word for me, start to finish, will usually take about an hour, less if I’m familiar with the topic. What am I doing wrong?
I too have used Elance and Guru – and while I found Guru to be pretty poor, I have gained a few good quality ongoing assignments from Elance – at decent rates.
My advice would be to find the jobs for which you can offer something extra – ideally genuine expertise or relevant experience. Make sure you sell yourself well and bid a fair but professional rate. There are some buyers who will go for this (although not many).
I’m so thankful you have posted this article, and the comments have given me a new lease on life. I thought my experiences on these sites was unique…hours and hours wading through amazingly low priced work only to be underbid (and knowing I would NOT be willing to produce at that price)! Good to know I’m not totally crazy or a complete loser… I am happy for Blair, but think she is the anomaly.
Thanks so much for this post, Deb, and thank you to each of the writers for sharing their experiences.
Bidding sites have some really odd jobs available. I’m on ifreelance and stay active just for the slick online portfolio they offer. It’s user-friendly, low-maintenance and gives me tracking stats on my page views. I prefer this and it’s worth the $78 annual fee because I’m not very tech-savvy and failed miserably at designing a GoDaddy site for my business. Also, I have stalled recently job-wise as a big project just wrapped up and it’s nice to have ifreelance to fall back on, among other things. Granted, I’ve only won five auctions and lost 31, but whatever…
Oh, and I don’t take poor-paying jobs off ifreelance, which may be why I haven’t won more auctions. Anyway, my bids aren’t the highest or lowest, but some clients are searching for that happy medium price. Some clients don’t want the lowest price because they fear that means the lowest quality.
I’ve never joined these sites since I have come to the realization that some of the bidders really do bid amazingly low at times. I thought, what’s the point, I’d be paying to join and then competing with writers who are willing to slog for peanuts. No thanks!
I have not had any luck with bidding sites, at all. The bid is low for too many articles and as you said Deb, boring!
>
For me, I can do a 300 word article in a few minutes, but there are reasons why. First, this only happens if the material is generic. Yesteday, I had to write a generic travel article about Vermont (400 words). First, I can type 80 wpm, which helps. I took a year of typing in high school and never stopped using it – at the time we learned on typewriters and switching to computer keyboards only helped me to become faster. Second, I live in Vermont, more particularly in the Burlington area, so I know the material without any research. So it takes me five minutes to type up an article and then a couple minutes to proofread it and make any changes.
Other articles that require research will take me longer. Right now, I’m working on a bunch of hotel articles that are 300 to 400 words and require information about wedding planning. Those are taking me twenty minutes on average to do from start to finish. My biggest downfall is that my newly divorced brother is online and generally I’ll flip on the IM to see if he’s doing okay and that slows me down because I get to chatting, but family comes first.
I have been using Elance and I guess I’m a freak of nature as well. I received the first two jobs I bid on and both of them turned into repeat work off of Elance. I’m newer, so I bid lower, but I did not bid sweatshop prices, either.
I don’t bid on the jobs that ask for 250 articles and make it very clear they are not willing to pay for more than $1 per article. It’s a frequent topic of discussion on their forums, also. If writers keep taking those offers, employers will keep offering low paying jobs.
I had another guy, new to Elance as an employer, ask for ONE article and say he could only pay $8 for it. The amount he wanted to pay wasn’t too bad for the article, considering I knew the topic, but I sent him a message and let him know that the problem with his ad was that Elance will charge a minimum of $10 in fees to the writer, thus, they’d pay to write his article. He immediately revised his ad. Some just don’t know…
We, as writers expecting to find quality work, do have an obligation, on some level, to educate the public as to what we expect on our end. Too many people think outsourcing work means they can outsource for pennies. It’s just not true.
The entire concept is based on writing as a commodity. There is no point at which quality is able to enter it. I tried one of these, and before I even finished I decided there was no way I’d get work from it.
These should be shunned, and I appreciate your article on bidding sites very much.
I looked at some of the bidding sites when I was first getting started (I don’t remember which ones) and felt I could sell those same articles on AC and make more. I don’t recall seeing any good paying ones.
I must admit though, I would be thrilled to find a couple of blogging jobs that pay $2000 a month. Maybe I should go take a look again.
This is a very great discussion and I’m glad Deb brought it up.
It is obvious that many things about bidding sites are bad – people looking to pay $1 per article, etc. But I don’t think we should write them off completely.
Like some people have said, they searched through the sludge and found some gems. If you’re just starting out as a freelance writer (which I am), these sites can be useful.
I just started using getafreelancer. I found someone willing to pay me $10 per blog post. (It’s not $800 per month, but it’s not bad, either.) Because of this good experience, I’m willing to try it out again.
I don’t plan to use bidding sites forever, but as a way to get started and get a few repeat clients, I think they can be a helpful tool for writers.
I’ve had a rough go with both Elance and Guru, and I’m glad to read I’m not the only one. I’m an editor, and I have a ton of experience. Some of the feedback from employers on the sites has been weird, and I don’t do the lowball bidding, either. I dig this site, though, and when I need work I do what’s been successful in the past: call people and send emails.
I’ve never used a bidding site, and never will. The workloads are ridiculously high, and the payback ridiculously low. I saw one listing for a total of 50,000 words — you’d get $300. Another wants its bidders to crank out 15,000 words for $90.
Hell, I have a local outlet that pays me $300 for 600 words!
These sites don’t want quality, they want quantity. And they want it as cheap as possible.
Stick with Deb’s site. It’s already helped me land a gig with a national trade publication.
I am astounded, Deb, that you’ve written a post that is one sided. Granted I guess it is your experience, so….I guess theres not many sides to it!
So here’s my experience: my main client that I got from elance pays me about 60 an hour! It’s daydream education charts and I basically edit curriculum materials so that they can intro them to an audience in the US (they are UK based). From them, since I got the job, I’ve made over 2 thousand. I can’t remember WHEN I got it, but it must have been after I got back from Mexico- so since August to now- a couple of months 2 thousand.
Today I proofread a business proposal in under 5 hours for 300 bucks.
Last week I proofread this mortgage brokers ebook – 10 pages for 200 bucks.
So, what’s the deal? Why so different. First of all, I spend less than a minute figuring out if this is one of “those” crappy $2 an hour jobs.
Seocnd, I target only very specific jobs in very specific niches (marketing and education). I get 90% of jobs I bid for on elance. But I don’t bid for a whole lot. I never bid on anything that bores me and I never deal with any project that’s under 200 bucks.
Another niche I mainly deal with editing and proofreading jobs on elance.
So maybe you have to stay in your niche (education, marketing). Also bypass the content crap. Also give it more than a week! I can go two weeks or sometimes more without seeing jobs I want.
Now, I’ve also got decent jobs and ongoing clients from Debs board. Also fron Sunoasis, Gawker, Journalism jobs, etc.
Today I was 500 dollars short of my monthly goal. That’s it. That’s because I don’t discount anything and spend about 2 hours a week trolling ALL the job sites, including elance.
If you prefer the idea of getting paid by the hour rather than getting paid by the article (which it seems like some in this discussion aren’t a huge fan of), you should check out oDesk (http://www.odesk.com), an online marketplace which guarantees payment for hourly work. Unlike other marketplace sites, there is no fee to join and you’ll never pay a fee to bid. It’s a particularly great option for technical writers, but other writing jobs have been popping up, too.
- Michelle, oDesk
I think I agree with all of those who are anti-bidding sites. I have to admit that early on I signed up for a few, and I intended to bid on such sites when I finally got rolling with the freelance thing, but they never seemed very beginner-friendly. I know it’s hard to break into freelance and everyone does it their own way, but I’ve found so many people advising you don’t sell yourself short early on.
I think those bidding sites are designed to gip the writer, and I’ll stick with alternative methods. Besides, it’s like you said: there’s soo many people competing on those bidding sites, that it’s almost like they are an easy out. I think you’re better off kicking butt searching for actual jobs.
Not being racist or anything but you tend to find the individuals that are willing to work for 2 cents per article are Indians.
And it really gets my goat.
There are some of us whose work is very good and we are trying to make a living out of it. Those people make it harder for us and basically degrade our work and the whole theory and reputation behind freelancing.
Wow. Lots of comments here and lots of feelings.
My experience with both RAC and Elance has been favorable. $1 an article is a thing of the very distant pass, and I’ve substantially increased my rates to earn a decent living. I’ve also earned repeat customers by proving quality work always pays off for the buyer.
One note: If you want to continue to support low freelance writing rates, by all means, continue to work at less than $15 an article (which still isn’t even in the recommended writer pay scale of either Canada or the U.S. By continuing to accept these rates, buyers know they can get writers to work at low cost.
If you’re going to write for a living, walk the walk and talk the talk. Be a professional with rates that are equal to that position. By putting your foot down and refusing low paying work, you actually help maintain higher rates for writers.
For more info, feel free to visit our writers rates category on our blog. There is plenty of advice to help with the situation for those struggling for better pay.
My name is Rod and I am from Rentacoder.com. I happened to come across your posting and wanted to provide some insight.
Regarding overseas vs. U.S. seller…there are sellers on the site from the U.S. who are competitive. As a matter of fact, the U.S. is always in the top 3 countries for sellers on the site…month after month (See http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/About/default.asp#LatestStatsOnRAC for current stats).
The top writer on the site is the #2 seller on RAC. The seller has completed over 1200 with prices varying and she is in the US.
http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/SoftwareCoders/showBioInfo.asp?lngAuthorId=1151754
Yes some buyers have unrealistic expectations of huge software/writing projects for almost nothing. However these expectations are quickly brought down to earth by the system. If a buyer is asking for too low a price, they receive no bidders and must raise their price on a re-bid. If they ask for too much, they get flooded and realize they can lower it. It is self-adjusting marketplace, resulting in a fair price on each transaction.
To get a job the most important thing to do is to demonstrate that you have the ability to do the job and you know what you are talking about. Buyers want to see that the seller took time to read the requirements as well.
So after reading the bid request, present your credentials, but also ask intelligent questions of the buyer pertaining to their project.
Nothing turns off a buyer more than a “canned” reply that looks like it was posted on 100 other projects…they want to know that you are interested and excited to work on their project.
Finally, many buyers are interested in quality and the assurance that the coder can get it done. So if you can convey that to a buyer then you have a better chance of getting a job.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact one of our facilitators.
Rod Smith
Rentacoder.com