oDesk Insider - Freelancing is more fun with oDesk

Sep7

Time… The Moving Finger Writes

3 comments Posted by Dave Robinson in Doing the work, Increase your productivity, Keeping it together

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Time is one of those things you just can’t get away from. It just keeps going at one second per second and never stops. Many of us don’t even think about it until we have a massive project due the next day and we haven’t even started. It’s not a problem for people with traditional jobs, they have bosses to schedule their work, but for a freelancer things don’t work the same way.

With Labor Day safely behind me, it’s time to start ramping up my freelancing again. I’ve been working all year, but with the kids home from school I didn’t have as much time to work and so my income dropped off. But they’re back in school now so I have my time back.

The teens leave for school at about 8:10 in the morning, and my six-year old gets home around 2:45, which gives me about six and a half hours a day to focus on working. I figure there’s no reason at all why I can’t be productive for at least four or five of those hours.

The only catch is that I’m going to have to do a better job of time management than I’ve been used to over the summer. The advantage of my light workload was that it was easy to find time to fit my jobs in around things like playing chauffer and listening to the stories my daughter made up. Once I get busier, it won’t be quite as easy, though I will have to factor in time for kid-based emergencies.

That means I’m going to have to bite the bullet and use time-management software.

Right now I’m looking at using Mozilla Sunbird because I like its standalone nature.

The key is going to be getting started on work bright and early (shortly after the kids leave for school) and also making sure I have time to look for new projects. Luckily I can probably do a lot of the searching in the afternoon after the kids get home as that doesn’t need the same kind of sustained concentration as paying work.

If any of you have any specific tricks you use, let me know and maybe we can all take advantage of them.

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Sep2

What If You Don’t Get the Job?

3 comments Posted by Dave Robinson in Applying for jobs, Doing the work, Finding work, Keeping it together, What not to do

It’s happened to me, it’s happened to you, it’s happened to all of us. You apply for a job opening, get the interview and then after what feels like some good solid communication you discover the job went to someone else.

Well, you could do some yelling and screaming and run about the house tearing your hair out. I don’t recommend it, but you could. You could also send off a nasty email cursing the buyer and all their family to the seventh generation.

Guess what? I don’t recommend that either.

If they were nice enough to inform you they were going with someone else then I recommend a polite thank-you note and move on.

Nothing you can do is going to get you this job so there’s no reason to worry about it. However, the fact that they put the time into the original discussion means that they are perfectly willing to consider working with you in the future.

So don’t do anything to mess that up.

One of the most common reasons that this happens is that the client found someone else who was better for this job.

It doesn’t mean they found someone who was better overall, just better for this job. It may be that when their next opening comes up they’ll immediately think of you and fire off an email.

In the meantime, pick yourself up and work on something else.

Networking and patience are two of the keys to a successful freelance career.

Here’s an example of what I mean by patience. As many of you know I don’t just work on oDesk, but I use other freelance sites as well. I recently got my first job at one of those other sites: after only five months of trying.

I admit I wasn’t spending all day every day looking for work on that site: there were times I had more than enough work and stopped looking on new sites. However I was looking fairly frequently and while there weren’t a lot of jobs that caught my eye, there were some that I would have liked to have done that I didn’t get.

So I spent time polishing my profile and figuring out the ins and outs of the site. I tried a few different methods of bidding and finally won a job.

Yes it took a while, and more than I would have liked, but since I wasn’t depending purely on that site I had the time to spend getting it right and not ranting and raving about the injustice that meant I didn’t get a job there until now.

It would have been just as pointless as any of the other rants I mentioned at the beginning of the post.

You need to look forward not backward.

As Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam goes:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Freelancers need to live by that dictum. You can’t change the past, only the future.

In other news: I’m now writing for another blog as well as this one. If you’re interested in technology why not come over and see what’s going on at Gizmotechnet. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

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Aug27

A Cold, Hard Truth

4 comments Posted by Nelson Manning in Finding work, What not to do

It’s not easy to be a freelancer. That’s just the way it is. It takes a certain kind of bravery.

Lately, a lot of my friends have seen what I’ve been doing, and they want “in on the action.” Of course, I’m perfectly willing to oblige by pointing them in the right direction. I say, “Well, actually, I work on a blog which explains the ropes of oDesk, and there’s a great book about freelancing on oDesk there. Check that out, sign up for an account, and just go for it.”

When I first started out, everything was so new to me, and I was excited about every aspect of freelance writing. I have friends who are writers, so I was excited to show them what is possible. However, I found that it’s a huge mistake to hold another’s hand while they’re getting started. It goes from simply helping them navigate around the website (which is fine) to bleeding off your own work to them to doing work that they’ve found even though they’re the one who gets paid.

If there ever was one, this is the proverbial “slippery slope.” Chances are, the person you’re introducing oDesk to is your friend. You want this person to succeed. However, the irony is that by using your skills and reputation to help this person succeed, you’re setting them up for ultimate failure. You’re also hurting yourself in the process. After I’ve pointed someone to resources, I tell them that’s as far as I’ll go.

When you’re helping them to succeed, you’re taking time away from your own career building. When you’ve finally given all you have and need some time to recover, that person will be unable to cope with the rough life of freelancing. Their success depends on you holding their hand the entire way. You let go, they flop.

That’s the cold, hard truth of freelancing. For people who are serious about it, it’s not about sitting on your porch with a cup of coffee and pecking at the keyboard with leisure. It’s a business, and if you’re not breaking a sweat by thinking hard, you’re not trying hard enough.

In a way, freelancers can be seen in the same light as movie stars. They see the money, the people you know, the freedom, the fact that your schedule is flexible. They see the product of your work. However, very few have seen the hours upon hours of work behind the scenes: applying for jobs, being rejected from jobs, cutting deals with clients, working until your eyes feel like they’re bleeding just to finish a project on time. There’s a lot we do which never sees the light of day, and for a lot of that work, we don’t get paid for it. It’s all about putting ourselves into a position where we can have those things people envy.

This type of career is a very solitary pursuit. Some people are simply not cut out for it. If you’re hanging on to someone else, or if someone else is hanging on to you, (politely) cut them loose. It will be better for both of you now and in the long run. There’s no other way you’ll know whether or not this career choice is right for you.

If you’re still trying to get your first job, don’t worry. It will come if you work for it. Take more tests, get better scores, and add pieces to your portfolio. It makes a huge difference.

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Aug21

Burned Out and Busted

5 comments Posted by Nelson Manning in Keeping it together, Philosophy of freelancing, Psychology, What not to do

I haven’t posted here in a while. A long while. There’s one reason why: I went into full shutdown from freelance writer burn-out. I couldn’t even log into oDesk without getting a sick feeling in my stomach. The danger of destroying yourself from overworking is very real, and as part of my personal therapy in recovering from burn-out, I’d like to share my personal experience with you in the hopes that you will have a better time at avoiding it.

It’s not quite like hitting a brick wall

It was very gradual. I didn’t know I was burned out until it was far too late to do anything about it. In addition, knowing that I was made me even worse. If it had been sudden, it would have been much easier to cope with, but that wasn’t the case.

It all started with having a ton of work. In a professional/career sense, I was doing great. However, I kept piling up more and more work. Then, life interfered with my working schedule. That’s okay because there’s no way to avoid that. The result, though, was that I wasn’t constantly working. I enjoyed having some time off, but I took that time off too far. I never had any time on.

It wasn’t a sudden dropoff, though. I kept working on the projects I had open, finished them up. The bad part was that I stopped applying for new jobs. As a result, I ran out of work. Should that have been a wakeup call? Yes. Did I wake up? No.

Kept going on my merry way. Tried to force the thought of work completely out of my head. I had been under the gun for a long time, and I suppose I was subconsciously trying to keep myself from getting back into that situation.

Pace yourself

I’m recovering now. Taking baby steps. Trying to dispel my irrational fear for all things writing-related. Just seeing an ink pen makes me want to curl up in a ball and wet myself.

How do you keep yourself from crashing like I did? At the risk of sounding like every self-help book to ever hit a shelf, I’ll say this: schedule yourself some “you time.” As corny as it sounds, it actually helps. Treat it like you would treat any project you do on oDesk. If you tell a buyer you’re going to work two hours on something today, it wouldn’t be very smart to go back on that.

Pick a couple hours and stick to them. Turn off the computer. Turn off the phone. Don’t check your E-Mail every 15 minutes. Instead, read a book or watch a movie. Do something you enjoy which has nothing to do with work. The world isn’t suddenly going to crash to the ground if you don’t check your messages. You’ll crash to the ground if you get stuck in work-eat-sleep mode.

Give it a shot. It probably won’t be like you flipped a magic switch which makes life better, but it’s one of many ways to keep you from going crazy.

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Aug19

A Niche I Didn’t See Coming

1 comment Posted by William Morrison in Doing the work, Increase your productivity

Here’s a writing niche I hope takes off: Spoofs.

A spoof is an article or webpage you write as a satire, mimicking some otherwise serious subject. I didn’t even know there was a demand for this until someone asked if I could write ‘humor’. Turns out I can.

My first effort, Math Kills was a great deal of fun to write and it gave me some sorely needed training with pictures and charts. I’m weak on graphics and HTML in general, but I believe this is where the online writing game is headed…

The itch to niche

So, now that I’m all nichey, I’ve got to sell this puppy. First go will be contacting web warriors I’ve worked for in the past to see if they might want a little ’spice’. And meanwhile, I’ll sit spider-like and cruise the job postings looking for my niche to come up. But not just that, I’m looking for content requests that I might be able to nichify with examples and clever suggestions.

This gives me 3 current niches. And that’s the overall strategy: keep adding oddball assignments I like to do (which translates into ‘pretty good at doing’) and use these as my fishing lures.

This, for me, is where the fun is in online freelancing. I get to try new things and see how they work out. It’s the oddest sort of synchronicity when an assignment blossoms, and it always comes as a nice surprise. The beauty part is that when you find a job to your liking, you’ve just completed a sample you can show to get your next job.

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Aug18

Chance Only Matters When it’s Random

2 comments Posted by Dave Robinson in Applying for jobs, Cover letters, Finding work, Philosophy of freelancing, Pricing, What not to do, Your profile, odesk

I was on the oDesk forums recently and came across a comment from a new provider who was worried by the ratio of working to registered providers.

She couldn’t find the page, which was probably the main oConomy page here which currently shows 248 providers working and 95,545 registered int the system. I admit that those numbers weren’t calculated to put a new provider in her happy place, but they don’t tell the whole story either.

It isn’t showing how many providers on the network have jobs, but how many people were actively logging time on the oDesk client at the time the numbers were generated. Given that oDesk is a 24 hour global marketplace those numbers will fluctuate throughout the day and really aren’t anything to worry about. They certainly don’t reflect the number of providers who are currently employed. (I expect they’re short by at least one or two orders of magnitude).

Now let’s look at some other numbers from the same page. There are almost 100,000 providers, and together they’ve earned just under 40 million dollars, which works out to an average of almost U$400/per provider to date. Since not every provider on oDesk has worked, and that some profiles are so incomplete that the providers are never going to work, the numbers have nowhere to go but up.

When it comes to getting a job, none of those numbers matter.

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Aug14

Integrity Matters

1 comment Posted by Dave Robinson in Philosophy of freelancing, What not to do, odesk

This is just a quick post to mention something I saw recently online that I didn’t like.

I was on another site and someone was hiring members to take and pass the oDesk Readiness Test for them. Don’t do it.

Just don’t.

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Aug14

Pay to Play: Job Sites and Paid Memberships

4 comments Posted by Dave Robinson in Finding work, Philosophy of freelancing, odesk

Job sites need to make money too.

oDesk wouldn’t exist if it didn’t make money, and neither would its competitors. The business model is simple, connect buyers and providers and take a cut off the top. There’s more to it, but that’s fundamentally how they all work.

It’s much like an agency relationship and it works very well. Most sites take between ten and fifteen percent and provide various services ranging from escrow and payment through oDesk’s time management software. The benefit to this method of payment is that it’s performance based and so sites make more money by getting more work for providers.

Some sites have a second revenue stream–

Paid Memberships

Providers pay the site a monthly fee in return for additional benefits over the standard free membership.

On the surface it doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but in practice it does have one major drawback. It’s a significant change to the business model. It’s often easier to get a new provider to pay $10-15 per month than to get a buyer to pay $100-150 for a project. It also extends the site’s revenue stream to include funds form unsuccessful providers as well as successful ones.

Businesses reinforce success. This means that if they’re getting more money from subscription fees than project fees that’s where they will focus their money-making efforts.

There’s nothing wrong with this from a business perspective, but from a provider’s perspective there is a problem here: it dilutes the focus on getting new jobs.

Before we go further, let’s look at some examples of membership systems: eLance and GetaFreelancer both use paid subscriptions, but they take very different approaches.

A free member on eLance gets three bid points per month, and depending on the size of the project it can require anything up to four bid points to put in a bid. An individual membership is $9.95/month and gives the user 20 bid points and a lower commission percentage rate in addition to other benefits such as a greater number of keywords and more contact options.

A free member on GetAFreelancer has more bid points (I have 25) and pays a 10% commission on all jobs. The paid membership costs $12 a month, and not only provides more bid points, but also eliminates the commission. I’ve also never seen a job on GetAFreelancer that required more than one bid point.

Here’s where I see the difference: GetAFreelancer is rewarding paid members, while eLance is penalizing free members.

I’ve had a paid membership on GetAFreelancer, and only let it lapse because I haven’t been working there lately as my oDesk clients are taking up the majority of my work time. Should I shift focus back toward GetAFreelancer I will definitely restart my membership.

I haven’t gone for a paid membership on eLance, and part of that is because the free one is so restricting. My preference is to bootstrap my first job on a site to getting a membership, and with the restrictions on free members, I don’t spend much if any time applying for work on eLance.

That’s the real pitfall of paid memberships, they often make it hard for new providers to get started on a site.

Some might argue that it separates the serious providers from the frivolous but I’m not so sure. There are other ways to limit bids that don’t involve paid memberships and they seem to prevent frivolous and spam bids just as well as the memberships do.

Alternatives

oDesk uses a combination of skill tests and buyer feedback to limit the number of bid points available to a provider allotting anywhere from five to twenty points a week. The big benefit of this is that it’s possible to get to the maximum number of bid points right from the start just by taking skill tests, which helps new providers get started. Once a provider builds up a history it’s all based on feedback, but the skill system really helps get people in the door.

Rentacoder allows people as many bids as they can reasonably make. I don’t have a lot of experience at the site but I haven’t seen any complaints about spam bidders there.
Personally, I prefer the oDesk approach, but I don’t have a problem with the idea of paid memberships that reward paid members.

Just remember, it’s your time and your money, so be careful.

And for writers remember Yog’s Law.

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Aug8

Freelance niches, positioning and differentiation

1 comment Posted by Sarah Lewis in Philosophy of freelancing, Your profile

Today’s guest post is by Nick Usborne of AskNickUsborne.com, originally part of his excellent newsletter and shared here with permission. Nick coaches freelance writers, and you’ll see that the article focuses on writing, but I think you’ll find it equally valuable regardless of your particular expertise. After all, every one of us needs to set ourselves apart to succeed at freelancing.

I often receive questions from freelance copywriters asking me to help them find the “right niche”.

That’s a reasonable request.

Finding the right niche for your freelance copywriting or writing business will help bring some focus to your marketing, and will help your prospects identify you as an expert in that area.

For instance, if you choose to become a specialist in the insurance industry, prospective clients within that industry will be reassured that you know their business and speak their language.

However, there are more ways to “niche” yourself than simply by choosing a particular industry or industry sector as your area of specialty. Continue reading »

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Aug7

Community and You

1 comment Posted by Dave Robinson in Finding work, odesk

How much attention do you pay to the oDesk Community? Do you ignore it unless you have a problem? Freelancing is generally a solitary occupation, so I imagine many of you just like to focus on your own projects and ignore the community.

For some of you it probably works. Every minute you spend surfing the boards is a minute you aren’t searching for work or actively earning money, and there are some providers who just can’t spare the time.

If you’ve been reading this blog regularly you’ve probably noticed that I am an active member of the oDesk Community. I not only read the message boards but I also try to post fairly often too.

What I’m going to try to do in this post is explain why I spend my time on the boards.

The first reason is simple: Most new features are announced and explained on the community boards and by reading them regularly I can keep up with the changes. That becomes particularly important since I try to post those same changes here too so that those of you who don’t read the community boards can also stay in the loop. Besides, it gives me something to write about.

For example I discovered the new Message Center by checking the Community Forum.

It provides a single place to view all of your oDesk related communications so you don’t have to go digging through your email. I have to admit that I’m torn on this one. I can see definite benefits to it, but at the same time, I already have my email open so do I really want to keep the message center up too?

I’m really not sure.

At least for the moment I think I’m going to use the Message Center as a supplement to email, not a replacement. It might be different if I could reach it from any tab on the site, but we’ll have to see.

Speaking of email, oDesk has recently stopped sending out job application confirmation emails. They have also stopped notifiying people they have applied for jobs in the message center. As of July 15, 2008 if you apply for a job the only confirmation you will receive is that it will show up under “My Candidacies.”

I think it’s a good idea. You don’t need an email to tell you you just applied for a job. I don’t know about the rest of you but I generally remember my job applications.

Both of these changes are things I would not have been aware of had I not put some time in on the message boards. They can be a very good place to go for both assistance and information.

The only thing I would watch out for is the negativity. Some days you see a lot of it on the boards, and it can really get you down. The truth is that the people complaining the most are usually, not always but usually, the ones who have not yet figured out the best way to make oDesk work for them.

Many of them don’t know the economics of the site either, and think all jobs pay the very low rates that someone is always complaining about.

In the meantime I recommend you use the boards, but don’t let them use you.

One last bit of news before I close.

Things are always changing, and one of the things that’s changing is the oDesk Insider. One result of these changes is that you may start seeing fewer updates that you’ve been getting of late. It’s not a bad thing, but other things are forcing us to put this blog on the back burner for a while.

Anyway until next time (and it won’t be that long) I wish you all happy and profitable freelancing.

You can always reach me at dave(at)odeskinsider(dot)com

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