The next three folks are great. I’m not making a lot and Freelancer.com does take their 5 bucks out when I win a bid. I wouldn’t pay 30 per month and hope I got something to do. I don’t feel that good at my skills to not be able to make up that kind of money.

What I want here, is to get some great feedback and then move on. If you are careful and watch what to bid on, I think you can gain a good start. I don’t recommend it for long term. I’m glad I found this site to look at the different areas writers can check out. Makes a difference. Thanks!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

These should be shunned, and I appreciate your article on bidding sites very much.

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.

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.

Thanks so much for this post, Deb, and thank you to each of the writers for sharing their experiences.

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).

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.

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.