[jamaicabound]

(10-12-2015 03:14 PM)shameus_oreaaly Wrote:  

Has anyone tried selling services without a freelancer framework? I closed my peopleperhour account because I wanted to set my own delivery time and charge more for work-like editing and ghostwriting, which might take several weeks, and can't be offered through PPH, which limits me to five days max.
Obviously there are work-arounds but there's a limit to the amount of work I could deliver in five days, whatever I charge via PPH or Odesk or anywhere else.
Are there any solutions that would protect a customer as well as me, and let me set a contract for how long work would take to deliver?

I have had pretty good luck in getting people who watch my Youtube videos or read my blogs contacting me asking for assistance with various things. Both those platofrms allow you to establish yourself as an expert and share your knowledge and if people want personalized help they can always contact you.

I have also managed to get some Fiverr buyers off of Fiverr, not even with me pushing but just them suggesting. I had a popular coaching/consullting gig that I took down and another I stopped offering skype calls for as it was getting too time consuming. I had people contact me asking about it, I told them too time consuming not worth $4, they contacted me off Fiverr and wound up paying over $100 an hour but it's tough as most Fiverr buyers want deals.

On a side note if any of you are on Fiverr and want to do receiprical feedback PM me. Basically we each buy each others gig and leave a feedback, we both only lose $1.50 per review. I do a fair amount of sales on there but only 2 of my 7 gigs sell so I'd like to get some action on some of the others.

[CleanSlate]

I'm finally getting traction on elance/upwork because I have at least one good review under my belt, plus I've taken a few tests and scored at least in the top 30% for all of them, with some in the top 10%.

Getting that first job is the hardest, almost impossible to break into unless you're offering to work for free. Then it gets easier to get jobs after that.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

I am waiting and waiting for this invitation to migrate my Elance profile to Upwork, but it never comes. My account is prompting me to check the "My jobs" screen in order to find an alternative invite, but there is nothing there either. My ticket to Elance hasn't been answered for several days.

What am I missing? How do I finally migrate to that new platform?

[Thomas the Rhymer]

(10-14-2015 11:20 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

I am waiting and waiting for this invitation to migrate my Elance profile to Upwork, but it never comes. My account is prompting me to check the "My jobs" screen in order to find an alternative invite, but there is nothing there either. My ticket to Elance hasn't been answered for several days.

What am I missing? How do I finally migrate to that new platform?

I gave up waiting and started a new profile on Upwork.

[CleanSlate]

Question for other freelancers... is it worth upgrading your elance/upwork account to a paid account, about $10 monthly? One benefit of it is you could see how much other applicants are bidding for a job, plus you get more connects (which means you could apply for more jobs).

[Teekay]

I did upgrade my Elance account after having won my first few gigs. Knowing the competitors' pricing certainly helps, and the extra connects are fine, too, although I have never used them all.

Not so sure about Upwork. The system there looks different - my main worry is that you probably cannot post a "sponsored" proposal like you could on Elance. That was worth the extra connects in my opinion as it put you to the top of the pack, always visible to the buyer. I will have to look into Upwork more now that Elance is shutting down.

[Goldin Boy]

(10-14-2015 11:20 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

I am waiting and waiting for this invitation to migrate my Elance profile to Upwork, but it never comes. My account is prompting me to check the "My jobs" screen in order to find an alternative invite, but there is nothing there either. My ticket to Elance hasn't been answered for several days.

What am I missing? How do I finally migrate to that new platform?

That's weird, Eel. There's no need to make a new profile.

When you first log-in, you're taken to the "My Jobs" pages and there's a box on the right-hand side you click to port all your existing info/profile(I haven't done mine yet) to upwork. When you first log-in this is what I'm talking about:

[jamaicabound]

Did you guys hear about Amazon suing over 1000 Fiverr sellers for offering fake Amazon reviews? Curious to see what happens with that. I know recently when NY State Attourney did a FCC type sting even small guys were getting fined well over 300k, curious to see what Amazon has in store for these guys.

This isn't the first time Amazon has gone after review sellers but in the past it was people who setup full fledged sites like BuyAmazonReviews or something like that. I think most Fiverr sellers thought they were small or felt safe on the platform, apparently not. They have all the fiverr usernames being sued listed in the lawsuit you can find the PDF online, I'm sure Amazon will soepena their info. I imagine lots of people are in Pakistan or are smart enough to have fake profiles and use proxies but sure some people will wind up in hot water.

[tynamite]

Most freelance websites are shit because they only care about clients, not freelancers. It's a race to the bottom mentality where people from third world countries India and Pakistan undercut your prices to the point that there's no point in making bids. Who codes a website for $100 anyway? I did make $450 from Elance (now Upwork) though, and I only got those jobs as the clients were deliberately avoiding poor countries as those countries provide shoddy work that isn't made properly. Not everyone can code. Even British freelancers and web development companies are often terrible, I've seen three examples myself.

One of my freelance jobs was to use CSS to hide elements and change the presentation of certain elements for a juice website that charged hundreds of dollars for juice. He paid for an A/B testing tool that allows you to make changes to your website to get more money and test out which changes get you more money. Because the juice had antioxidants and other "health benefits", people spent hundreds of dollars for the juice bottles. I know he was making money because you don't A/B test a website unless you're already have new customers regularly. Damn I need to get in that industry that charges hundreds of dollars for juice and makes money.

One of my freelancing jobs was to make a Facebook game. I got £800 for three weeks of work as it was an agency that made the job listing on the freelance site as the agency didn't have enough people to do the work themselves. In the three weeks I was dossing about having so it wasn't like three weeks straight of hardcore coding.

One of my freelance jobs was to code two Magento shopping cart plugins. It was bloody hard and took me two months despite my programming experience at university and personal projects working with drawing and game algorithms and creating parsers. To give you an idea of how hard it is to code Magento plugins, here's a picture of their database structure.



I couldn't complete the second plugin as it wouldn't work. I would have got $850 instead of $450.

I use three British websites to find freelance work (pm me for links) as they only accept British people and only British people apply which means you make a fair or generous lot of money instead of a sweatshop wage. Using British websites I got to be the frequent coder of a hotel booking website. I got £400 to code the site and money to maintain it and add more features. I got £300 to setup a shopping cart instead of £400. The problem is that the British websites don't get much jobs as they're not mainstream, maximum of 10 a month.

When I'm older I'll create two freelance marketplace websites to fill a gap in the market once I've got my other websites established. The problem is that freelance marketplaces that get jobs frequently pay too little and the ones that pay too much or a fair amount hardly get any jobs. I saw a job that paid £6240 a year on Freelancers.net where the employer would teach you how to do the job, but I didn't get it as I put my skills and experience on my portfolio website instead of the job application which is another way of saying that too many qualified people applied and he can't employ everyone.

[CleanSlate]

I managed to make $200 from Upwork in the past month, but I agree, there are lot of Indians undercutting prices. My second Upwork job was to create a brochure (copywriting) and I should have made 5-10x times as much as I did for the time I spent on it.

How much traffic does Authentic Jobs and Freelancers.net get? Do they accept US folks?

[tynamite]

(10-21-2015 02:09 PM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

I managed to make $200 from Upwork in the past month, but I agree, there are lot of Indians undercutting prices. My second Upwork job was to create a brochure (copywriting) and I should have made 5-10x times as much as I did for the time I spent on it.

How much traffic does Authentic Jobs and Freelancers.net get? Do they accept US folks?

There's a third British freelance site I was on about in my post but you never saw it because I edited my post. PM me for the link, but they ask you verify your @ac.uk university email address for you to join.

You can use Alexa, Compete, Similarweb and Quantcast to find out how much traffic a website gets. The British freelance websites don't get lots of traffic which is evidenced by the small amount of jobs listed on the site. You can check the sites one week, and then check it the very next week and see that only zero jobs are added from the previous week, or even three if you're lucky. There's lots of plagiarism in university for programming coursework as lots of people on the course can't program well.

Due to the fact of most web developers and programmers being of poor quality, they only accept British people. I always lie. For every freelance job I've had, I lied about my experience.

Take a look at this.
http://blog.froont.com/brief-history-of-...designers/
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/web-design-history
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/evolution-of-web-design/

Web development is getting more complicated every day, I have over 1500 stack overflow points and I'm in the top 22% there because I joined the site 5 years ago. Now all the easy questions have already been answered. If you're not using your own grid for a website, there's over 50 different css frameworks to choose from. There's so many programming languages, frameworks, javascript frameworks/libraries, plugins, classes, and different javascript frameworks are for different things so they don't all compete with each other. You can't know everything because everything changes.

Every freelance job I ever got I got by lying about my experience and learning how to do the task on the job. Programming is so increasingly diverse nowadays that you have to lie about your experience to get hired. Lying is essential.

So yes I would lie about living in Britain, but they might ask for your phone number or sort code and bank account number (unlikely) or for you to meet them. Just keep the British websites to yourself as everyone knowing about a good deal spoils a good thing. Whoever told the masses that Amazon gives you money when you enter a negative quantity for an item in your basket or what javascript you insert into your address bar to see anyone's facebook pictures is an idiot.

Authentic Jobs has an international and a british version. /r/forhire is a good place too free of Indians. People Per Hour is the only British site I don't like as it has Indians on it but it's very good if you want to hire British writers at £50 an article.

[Beyond Borders]

Stop worrying about Indians "undercutting price." It didn't matter before; it doesn't matter now.

Rule #1: Never compete on price.

[CleanSlate]

(10-24-2015 01:27 AM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

Stop worrying about Indians "undercutting price." It didn't matter before; it doesn't matter now.

Rule #1: Never compete on price.

Maybe that applies only when you're established, and for clients who want native English speakers.

I didn't mean to imply that there's any undercutting going on for writing jobs, obviously Indians can't compete unless they have perfect English. I wasn't complaining about the brochure job that took me a while, it's my first brochure and the value of that goes beyond just what I made on it - it's also an addition to my portfolio that will help entice future clients to hire me.

What I said applies more to web development and coding jobs... there's a fair bit of undercutting and I know this because at least 3 clients said I was asking too much, and got someone who charged less.

[Beyond Borders]

CleanSlate, I wasn't trying to single you out specifically - more the overall direction of the conversation, which I admit I didn't take much time to read through because at first glance it seemed like the same old complaints I've heard forever.

But since you are talking about coding...I won't say I've never been wrong, and maybe I am wrong right now, but I don't believe you're doing enough to set yourself apart. Ignore those aholes - they're not your customers.

Trust me, people say the same thing about the writing markets. They always have and they do about these particular sites right here in this very thread. And even after all these years I still get that wtf sinking feeling when I go to do a run of bids...because, yes, it looks like a cesspool at first glance.

But every time I prove myself wrong by just taking action, and by using smart marketing principles. And as for being established, well, I helped one newbie with some bids recently and he went and landed articles for over $100 a pop even with ZERO previous feedback on his profile.

Back to coding, Hell, having hired many Filipinos and Indians myself over the years, I can already spot one very simple way to stand out without me even knowing an iota about coding.

Have you ever hired these people before?

Because I tell you it's no fucking picnic to work with them (no offense to any Filipino or Indian players on the board, but it's generally true from a Western perspective). Even with very well-educated ones, the cultural differences are THICK. And that gives you a HUGE edge for standing out.

Yes, you'll scare a lot of people off, but THEY ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMERS. it's like that book "Models," where he talks about how you have to be polarizing to attract women, and how everything that's attractive is also polarizing. Well, if you don't polarize enough to scare half these dipshits away, you won't be appealing enough to the big or even mid-range fish.

Because those with the budget WILL pay for better communication and less hassle. Do you really doubt that's true? And sure, you may have to make more bids to find them, and you may have to get rejected more. But the payout is bigger and the clients are longer-term and easier to deal with, so it all works out in the end.

There's one simple way to figure out if others are making cash coding on these sites though. Dig through your competitors - you can look through the profiles in different skills and see who is making the most money.

Are there ANY Westerners on there marketing themselves a different way and clearly getting higher rates? On some profiles, you can even see what they made last year.

What one man can do, you can do...

All that said, I don't want to sound too arrogant, and you're right...I don't have experience landing jobs in this particular area.

So email me and, assuming the research shows people are making money doing it, I'll help you try a different approach.

I'm not going to help you build your entire business, of course, but show me your bids and profile, and I'll see if we can't get a new angle going and try something different.

No charge for my time (offer just stands for these coding and web dev jobs, not writing - don't want to shit on my paying students).

Of course, there's always the chance that you're right and I'm wrong and coding is just a rates wasteland. I do still doubt it, but if it is the truth, man, do something else.

It's really that simple. If you're in a dying market, it's time to build a new skillset. And it's 100% your choice how you make money online.

Surely you can leverage those skills and combine them with something else to make yourself more valuable?

Or learn something else entirely (maybe that's what you're doing with the writing?)?

And I didn't want this to morph into a thread about just the freelance bidding sites, but there's still that common advice of just reexamining where you market your services. So you could always find a completely different way to get on the radar of those better clients.

No matter how you do it, you've got to figure out what people ARE paying for and go get it. Become that perfect fit.

Only you can take that initiative.

[CleanSlate]

Ok, lots of good points here... I'll address each below.

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

CleanSlate, I wasn't trying to single you out specifically - more the overall direction of the conversation, which I admit I didn't take much time to read through because at first glance it seemed like the same old complaints I've heard forever.

I get that, you've been at this a lot longer than I am. Again, I was only making observations on what I'm seeing myself.

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

But since you are talking about coding...I won't say I've never been wrong, and maybe I am wrong right now, but I don't believe you're doing enough to set yourself apart. Ignore those aholes - they're not your customers.

Oh, I know that I'm not doing enough to set myself apart. But I don't know HOW to do exactly that. I've been working on it, tweaking my profile and my cover letter, even going so far as to imply that I'd be better to work with than most of the bids they get, because I'm a native English speaker and that I'm reliable, etc.

But I feel it is not so much what you say in your cover letter as it is how much your portfolio sells.

Yes I'm a programmer, but ironically, I have been winning more writing bids than coding bids because I have a bigger writing portfolio.

I can talk about how I'm the best programmer in so-and-so language until I'm blue in the face, but if I have no work to back it up, then I got nothing.

I'm even going so far as to code my own programs on my own free time JUST to have something on my portfolio. It's hard work and takes a lot of time. I think I've said it before on this thread (or my lifestyle thread) that writing is easier to break into than coding, not only because of the time factor but also there are hundreds of different programming languages and new technologies appearing each year.

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

Trust me, people say the same thing about the writing markets. They always have and they do about these particular sites right here in this very thread. And even after all these years I still get that wtf sinking feeling when I go to do a run of bids...because, yes, it looks like a cesspool at first glance.

But every time I prove myself wrong by just taking action. And as for being established, well, I helped one newbie with some bids recently and he went and landed articles for over $100 a pop even with ZERO previous feedback on his profile.

With zero feedback on his profile? How did that happen?

I was bidding on 50+ different jobs (both writing and coding) with zero feedback on my profile, experimenting with cover letters till the cows came home, and I got nothing. I was about to quit on the site, when a friend found me on the site and gave me a job. When I finally got a five star feedback on my profile, the gates opened wide.

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

Back to coding, Hell, having hired many Filipinos and Indians myself over the years, I can already spot one very simple way to stand out without me even knowing an iota about coding.

Have you ever hired these people before?

Because I tell you it's no fucking picnic to work with them (no offense to any Filipino or Indian players on the board, but it's generally true from a Western perspective). And that gives you a HUGE edge for standing out.

I haven't hired them, but I'll take your word for it

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

Yes, you'll scare a lot of people off, but THEY ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMERS. it's like that book "Models," where he talks about how you have to be polarizing to attract women, and how everything that's attractive is also polarizing. Well, if you don't polarize enough to scare half these dipshits away, you won't be appealing enough to the big or even mid-range fish.

Because those with the budget WILL pay for better communication and less hassle. Do you really doubt that's true? And sure, you may have to make more bids to find them, and you may have to get rejected more. But the payout is bigger and the clients are longer-term and easier to deal with, so it all works out in the end.

There's one simple way to figure out if others are making cash coding on these sites though. Dig through your competitors - you can look through the profiles in different skills and see who is making the most money.

Are there ANY Westerners on there marketing themselves a different way and clearly getting higher rates? On some profiles, you can even see what they made last year.

No I don't doubt that's true, but I'm sure my way of finding clients is a little bit off. Is there a specific search criteria that you use to get the best clients? Like how many jobs they've hired, their hire rate, at least an X feedback score, how much they've spent, etc.

For me, I've been shooting for the $50-$250 fixed price jobs within the keyword I'm searching for. I do skip over jobs that ask for 10 x 1000 word articles for $50, that's fucking slave labor.

But I've got to start somewhere. I'm more convinced that once I have a full and deep profile of my work, I would be able to raise my rates and do less work for more money.

I'll take a closer look at my competitors. I've scanned them before for a few minutes... they charge a wide variety of rates, some have small number of feedback but excellent, others have large number of feedback varying between 3.5 to 4.9 stars. How much they charge probably depends on where they live, so it's hard to make a full assessment. I'm not a market intelligence expert by any means, though.

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

What one man can do, you can do...

All that said, I don't want to sound too arrogant, and you're right...I don't have experience landing jobs in this particular area.

So email me and I'll help you try a different approach.

I'm not going to help you build your entire business, of course, but show me your bids and profile, and I'll see if we can't get a new angle going and try something different.

No charge for my time (offer just stands for these coding and web dev jobs).

I appreciate that man, and I probably will take you up on it. Plus I'm not arguing with you, and I'm sure there are some things that I can do better.

But I think it comes down to how full and deep my portfolio is. The top coders and best web developers have hundreds of jobs in their portfolio, and I only have a few.

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

Of course, there's always the chance that you're right and I'm wrong and coding is just a rates wasteland. I do still doubt it, but if it is the truth, man, do something else.

To be honest, I am worried that some of the languages I know are dying markets, or commoditized. In fact, I've been spending time taking courses on languages that I don't know very well because I think there are high paying markets for those... like javascript, which won the entire internet. Almost every website uses javascript.

I'm also pinning my hopes on the new iOS programming language, which is only a year old, but is supposedly the wave of the future. I've been really delving into it these days, but again, I need to build a full portfolio on that. I have 3-4 apps in the pipeline for that, so I should have those on my portfolio by the end of the year.

(10-24-2015 01:02 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

And I didn't want this to morph into a thread about just the freelance bidding sites, but there's still that common advice of just reexamining where you market your services. So you could always find a completely different way to get on the radar of those better clients.

Exactly. I don't think I'm doing a very good job of marketing my coding services on Upwork. Oddly enough, I'm better at marketing my writing services on the freelance website, but I do better at marketing my coding to people OUTSIDE of Upwork.

I feel like I need to really niche down into a specific subset of coding / web dev. For example, I probably should market myself as a "front end web developer using Wordpress" or something. Or an app developer for iPhones, rather than just a "programmer".

Maybe I could shoot you a message so you can examine my own marketing efforts to see where I'm going wrong. Plus, I'm curious as to your thought process on specifically how to screen for the best clients, especially on a freelance bidding site.

[NovaVirtu]

(10-12-2015 04:37 PM)jamaicabound Wrote:  

On a side note if any of you are on Fiverr and want to do receiprical feedback PM me. Basically we each buy each others gig and leave a feedback, we both only lose $1.50 per review. I do a fair amount of sales on there but only 2 of my 7 gigs sell so I'd like to get some action on some of the others.

Sent you a PM

[ColSpanker]

I just wanted to say that I doubled my rates for freelance writing. I landed a client who is willing to pay me double what I have been charging. And the strangest thing? I'M STILL CHEAPER THAN THE OTHER PERSON HE WAS CONSIDERING. The money is out there boys and I have Double B to think for changing my life.

[CleanSlate]

(10-25-2015 02:48 PM)ColSpanker Wrote:  

I just wanted to say that I doubled my rates for freelance writing. I landed a client who is willing to pay me double what I have been charging. And the strangest thing? I'M STILL CHEAPER THAN THE OTHER PERSON HE WAS CONSIDERING. The money is out there boys and I have Double B to think for changing my life.

Congrats, man! You got this client on one of the freelance sites?

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

(10-17-2015 06:51 PM)Goldin Boy Wrote:  

(10-14-2015 11:20 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

I am waiting and waiting for this invitation to migrate my Elance profile to Upwork, but it never comes. My account is prompting me to check the "My jobs" screen in order to find an alternative invite, but there is nothing there either. My ticket to Elance hasn't been answered for several days.

What am I missing? How do I finally migrate to that new platform?

That's weird, Eel. There's no need to make a new profile.

When you first log-in, you're taken to the "My Jobs" pages and there's a box on the right-hand side you click to port all your existing info/profile(I haven't done mine yet) to upwork. When you first log-in this is what I'm talking about:

Yeah I don't have that - I have the notification to visit the "My Jobs" page in order to click on the one shown in your screenshot, but there is nothing for me there. See:

   

I got a reply from Elance saying that they're sending invites in phases and that I should be patient a bit more. Let's hope that's true...

[ColSpanker]

(10-25-2015 04:02 PM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

(10-25-2015 02:48 PM)ColSpanker Wrote:  

I just wanted to say that I doubled my rates for freelance writing. I landed a client who is willing to pay me double what I have been charging. And the strangest thing? I'M STILL CHEAPER THAN THE OTHER PERSON HE WAS CONSIDERING. The money is out there boys and I have Double B to think for changing my life.

Congrats, man! You got this client on one of the freelance sites?

Yes. He contacted me via UpWork.

[CleanSlate]

In the past two days alone, I got another writing job (landing page), and an invitation to apply for yet another writing job.

[jamaicabound]

I have a nice little hustle going. I do coaching on Amazon FBA, eBay selling, Amazon selling etc. Most of my clients want me to help them find products and most are just starting out so aren't really comfortable ordering from China, don't trust it, don't know how to have it shiped, etc. Because of this I steer most of them to AliExpress as they take cards and ship door to door. I recently signed up for their affiliate program so in the reports I put together for my clients I include my affiliate links so though I'm in a sense working for peanuts on my actual jobs, I'm able to get a little side income comming through in the way of affiliate payouts and seeing as wholesale is all about buying bulk potentially larger payouts.

[Kdog]

I have a possible job offer in Bangkok doing SEO. I am slightly knowledgeable about it (I know the basics), but no actual experience (which the employer knows and is willing to train).
Does anyone have links to a good source of info,videos or forums on this subject? Thanks.

[RichieP]

Totally agree with BB.

Commoditization is not about the market as much as it's about how you package your skills, position yourself, and what clients you aim for.

Are you wordpress/PHP coder number #44324? Or are you the guy who solves a business problem and makes life easier/more profitable for the client?

As for working your way up - it's true you've got to start somewhere, but why not start strong? You'll need to build portfolio/testimonials ANYWAY, it doesn't matter whether you're charging $5 an hour or $500. May as well pick the best clients, figure out how to deliver for them, and start getting THOSE portfolio pieces and testimonials from the start. It's the shortest path.

Positioning is a choice. As much as we think it's this linear thing where it's harder and harder to get higher and higher paying jobs... actually it's more just a DIFFERENT GAME, not necessarily harder in terms of technical skill required. So much of it is about positioning and branding yourself, and learning to sell and market yourself very well.

And if you aren't landing clients, it's not about your points on stackoverflow answers... it's your sales and marketing.

[Beyond Borders]

(11-01-2015 02:18 PM)Kdog Wrote:  

I have a possible job offer in Bangkok doing SEO. I am slightly knowledgeable about it (I know the basics), but no actual experience (which the employer knows and is willing to train).
Does anyone have links to a good source of info,videos or forums on this subject? Thanks.

http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-seo/