Any tips for getting work on Elance and Odesk?

[Hanvi]

Thanks LaurenBT. You and the others gave me a lot to think about. By the way, I looked at your writing website, and I noticed how you chose a basic white background. Meanwhile, mine (located at hanvinguyen.wordpress.com/) is quite colorful in comparison. So I’ve got to ask, does a colorful background give off an unprofessional vibe?

[mmfh]

Here you will find an excellent color guide.

[Hanvi]

Thanks for the color guide mmfh. I’m going with the color blue for now.

[mmfh]

Excellent choice

[mwldream]

Well I am not on Odesk anymore but I used to be a top earner on there for a long time. What you need to do is to make sure you stand out with a perfect profile, lots of samples and use up your job quota so that at any one time you have 15-20 live applications in the system.

By showing your writing skill in the profile people will see that with you it is about quality not quantity or bad English.

Also make sure you do lots of odesk tests especially the spelling ones and grammar ones. These will get you noticed more. Some people invite those to jobs that have just a high score on these tests so this can mean that instead of you having 15 jobs a week to apply for you can have 45.

And good luck

oh and FYI my job rate when I was on Odesk was $47 an hour and I had no problems getting jobs. And there are a lot of high paying clients on Odesk if you are patient and give it a decent go!

[Lori786]

You do need to spend some time creating a profile that stands out from the rest. You got to be patient as well, as it may take some time before you start getting noticed - again this leads back to having a good profile. It just can take some time for some to start seeing results over there and I typically find people giving up on it far too soon, so be patient and work on getting noticed would be my advice, really!

[Hanvi]

Thank you for posting more tips! I have two more questions about Elance and Odesk:

1) How long did it take you to start seeing results from the efforts put into the bidding sites?

2) Will getting a good review from a client for a non-writing job help me to eventually get hired for writing jobs on the same site?

[Robin Bull]

Just don't take those gigs. Set your rate and stick to it. Create a portfolio if you don't already have one. I have mine on Wix for free. I take nothing less than .02 cents per word. That might not seem like much to some, but I can knock out 500 words with great quality in less than 30 minutes. Look for hourly rate projects and give a reasonable amount. You can look on CL and indeed for writing gigs. Clearly with CL you need to be careful, but that's how I landed one of my biggest writing clients. I'm on odesk and I do okay there. Don't be afraid to say no. You have bills to pay and a family to feed. You're not in a country where you can do that for $5 per day or $1.33 an hour. Just hang in there. It will get better.

[Robin Bull]

Originally Posted by Emilykf

I agree with Dana, I get private clients through my website and also through marketing myself locally and nationally.

I do work through Elance, and I'd suggest making sure your profile and portfolio are awesome, and not falling into the trap of working for peanuts just to get your first job. I did, ha ha! My real world rates for private clients are £75 an hour (about $125?) but my first job on Elance was nothing like that, it was shockingly low! Maybe go for the small jobs, rather than low paid jobs, first to 'get your foot in the door'.

Ha ha! I think we all do that at least once...but not everyone will admit it!

[Robin Bull]

Originally Posted by Hanvi

Thanks LaurenBT. You and the others gave me a lot to think about. By the way, I looked at your writing website, and I noticed how you chose a basic white background. Meanwhile, mine (located at hanvinguyen.wordpress.com/) is quite colorful in comparison. So I’ve got to ask, does a colorful background give off an unprofessional vibe?

Mine is black and red...rather goth looking, really. My clients love it.