Blogging Lists: Hiring Sites for Jobs for Freelancers

In my continuing saga, making a living freelancing, my journey leads me to finding a site for jobs where employers post freelancing jobs and freelancers bid on them. These sites either add a commission to the price bid by contractors and/or charge a monthly fee for presenting this service. Besides providing a place where freelancers flock—and I do mean flock, ---to bid on freelancing work, their service includes handling the exchange of payment and in some instances, a guarantee that you will be paid.

My first experience writing for money on this type of site was and still is with O’desk.com. O’desk is very popular since it is free to both contractors and employers. They do add a 10% commission on top of the final bid that the employer pays. There are two types of freelancing jobs: fixed price and pay per hour. O’desk guarantees the pay per hour jobs if you log into their software that tracks your work by taking screenshots as proof to employers you are working on their project. Writing for money paid by the hour jobs work out pretty well but are the harder jobs to get. Most employers want to know going in the total cost for each project and do not want to have to pay per hour for slow workers. For this reason, they prefer fixed price jobs with a price per article or project. For the contractor, however, these can be the most misleading jobs to bid. For example, employers may post a job for a fixed price of $500 which sounds good until you find out the $500 is for 500—500 word articles! I kid you not. The good thing is you have the option of accepting or declining the offer, even if you mistakenly bid too low.

However, bidding low is the name of the game sometimes since there are many freelancers vying for jobs for as little as $2 and $3 per hour. Most of these low pay article writing jobs are targeting English speakers from other countries (read not from spoiled American workers, lol) where the cost of living is not as high. The pay for data entry and other computer skills are so low I do not bother with them anymore. However, there are also jobs posted just for native English speakers from US, UK, Canada and Australia or even US only.

Another trick some employers use is to offer a good price for an article but require the writing of a “trial” article when applying. This is after you have submitted a sample of your work and they have had a chance to peruse the samples in your portfolio. Now, let me say I have had legitimate employers ask for this who have ended up giving me a job. However, I have also had several who have received 35 applicants and I assume 35 articles who never hired anyone. Why should they when they could get their articles free?

This makes me a little suspicious now of anyone asking me to write a “trial.” One good thing about O’desk is it keeps track of an employer’s job postings versus how many hires so you have some idea of their hiring history. In addition, employees rank their employers just as employers rank their employees.

Getting my first ranking and my first job, I found to be tough and found myself bidding ridiculous prices just to get my foot in the door. Since new writers are always trying to get their first jobs, this also makes it tough to get a good price on O’desk. Finally, I bid on a fixed price job of $5 giving feedback on a website and spent more than an hour writing my evaluation. However, I did receive five stars, the highest rating possible and my career on O’desk began! Since then I have had two hourly pay jobs, both of which I am still working on for a grand total of 10 hours at $10---a whole $100! I have just recently changed my per hour rate to $15 but have not received any “bites” since then, lol!

For O’desk and any other of these sites I recommend being prepared with a resume of your writing experience, portfolio, list of skills, and hopefully, a list of links where you have either been published or you have, as I ended up doing, set up a free blog to show your work. When I first started O’desk, I did not have any of these. Although I did have writing experience, none of it was online. That is where writing for the upfront sites helped and even the “trial” articles I submitted for jobs I did not get came in handy.

As I was accepted by the low paying upfront sites, I started using these sites in my resume to get better freelance work saying I was a writer for ghostbloggers.com, textbroker.com etc. I also took the tests O’desk provides to show my expertise for the skills I advertised on my profile. In short---I have put a lot of time in on O’desk getting my profile up to speed. I do not have as many jobs or O’desk hours on my profile as others and many of the better paying, jobs rule out anyone who does not have at least 100 hours.

Still, I am not happy with the pay that most of these jobs are offering so I keep thinking I am going to start searching for jobs on other sites. After all, it is not as if I am new here anymore—I have been here almost a month! ;-)

In my effort to break my dependence on O’desk, I signed up for Elance.com. Elance does require a monthly fee for complete access but for my free membership, I can choose one category to which I can send 10 proposals per month. Just like O’desk, you must setup a profile and portfolio with samples.

The prices at Elance look a whole lot better and there does not seem to be as many of the “I will pay .50 per article for perfect writer,” postings. Finally, I bid on one of the newest jobs in my category before anyone else could and to my surprise, the bidder accepted! It turned out to be a job for $250 and I was delighted! I got my first ranking on Elance—five stars and $250! Like O’desk, jobs at Elance can either be fixed price or by the hour. However, with Elance the pay for fixed jobs is put in an escrow account before the job begins and then when the job is completed, you get the money quickly! I was quite impressed so I am now looking at Elance a little harder.

That is my experience freelancing so far. Whereas, it may seem like a simple thing to sign up to every site, in order to bid it takes quite a bit of time setting up a profile, skills sets, portfolio, education and so forth which will make a difference in whether your bids are accepted or not.

I have compiled quite a list of these sites, but as I said I do not have first hand experience in all of them and would welcome anyone who knows more about them to give us the benefit of their first hand experience. However, just like all of my blogging lists, I will be updating my list as I learn more about them, so stay tuned!

Allforfreelancers.com PR1

allforfreelancers.com/
Find freelancing work from the most popular site for jobs for freelancers in one place. Has article writing jobs. No fee; no registration required.

Bidhire PR 4

www.bidhire.com/
Site for jobs for freelancers. No fee for buyers or freelancers

Contracted Work PR 5
www.contractedwork.com/
Basic Membership $14.95 per mth $100 per year
One week trial membership $4.95
Freelance jobs

Crowd Spring PR6

www.crowdspring.com/help/faq/what-will-it-cost-you-to-be-a-creative-on-crowd/
My Experience: Registered, need portfolio . Free to “Creatives” who compete with each other by submitting their finished work to employer who picks the winner. Pay is high; competition is fierce. Has some article writing jobs but is mostly for graphic and web designers.

Elance PR6

www.elance.com
Adds service fee of 8.75% onto quotes
Free 10 proposals per mth in one category such as Writers Wanted
Memberships, $10, $20 $40 gives you
Connects of 25, 40 & 60
More categories cost $5 per mth plus $10 per mth individual membership

Freelancer.com PR6
www.freelancer.com/
Free registration; given 32 bids; job types 25
Gold members can pick up to 50 job types for $24.95 per mth
$5 or 10% of contract added to proposals that employer pays.
Is beginning to have crowd sourcing competitions ala Crowd Spring.

Freelance Job Search No PR

www.freelancejobsearch.com/
Aggregate of site for jobs for Freelancing work.
Hiring writers jobs included

Freelance-Projects PR3

www.freelance-projects.info/jobs/blog-and-article-writing/page/2/
Look for freelancing work site for jobs like Freelancer, O’desk, Scriptlance, vWorker, Elance and EU FR
No fee or registration

Freelancerpro.net No PR
freelancerpro.net/
Could not get information without registering. Could not find How this works page only FAQ that did not bring up results
About us pages says: This is about us.
Must be brand new

Freelancers.net PR 5
www.freelancers.net/
UK based site for jobs for freelancing
Free to sign up and free to search

iFreelance.com
www.ifreelance.com/
Site for jobs is apparently free to employers but not to freelancers.
Fees packages for freelancing work start at $6.25 and go up to $12 per month.
Do not think I will be bidding here any time soon.

GetACoder PR4

www.getacoder.com/
For programming, designers, but also has article writer needed jobs.
Five portfolio samples free
40 portfolio samples with premium membership (7.95 per mth)
“The typically rates are about seven times lower than the ones in the US or Europe.”
(These words—including the misspelling of typically--- were copied from website; does not sound like the rates are too high here) Signed up; no profile

GreatLance.com PR2

www.greatlance.com/
Basic membership free, Premium member is $10 per mth
10% commission on Basic membership, none on premium
Seems to be good paying writers wanted jobs but not sure of country of origin
Many writers from India; website sentence structure not English speaking native

Guru PR6
www.guru.com
Basic membership is free
Bid on one category with free membership
Signed up; profile completed

Mac Freelancer PR4

macfreelancer.com/main.php
Some Hiring writers jobs

Mistersoft Freelancing PR 2

www.mistersoft.org/freelancing/
Aggregate for freelancing work from other sites
Article writing jobs available
No fee or registration

Odesk.com PR6
www.odesk.com
Free to bid on freelancing, free to post jobs
Adds 10% to bid of contractors that employers pay

People per Hour PR 5

www.peopleperhour.com/howitworks/freelancers
My Experience: Signed up; no portfolio
Free gets 10 bids in 2 categories commission is 10%
Maximum skills listed in profile 10
Sends out emailed job announcement if you sign up for it.
Bidding in pounds! Headquartered in London

Project4hire PR 4

www.project4hire.com/index.php?a=viewallcats
Some article writing jobs

Vworker.com PR 4
www.vworker.com/
Commission of 6.75 -15%