Start your freelancing career with the right sites that suit You the best

Oscar Wilde once said, “The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one”. Imagine if you could imagine yourself without one while also enjoying all the benefits of money that a job brings. If this sounds unfamiliar, welcome to the world of freelancing!

There are a myriad advantages of working from home online by choosing the path of freelancing. You can earn as much or even more than your day-job. You have complete freedom, as a freelancer, to work whenever you want, how much ever you want. You can now work for no one but yourself and do it on your own terms. You can work on only those projects that appeal to you the most. Such freedom in work is unheard of as an office worker, but freelancing gives you much more than simply money – it helps you build a life around your family and work.

To understand the power and potential of freelance work, consider a small case study as presented below -

As a fair example, consider a programmer working at oDesk. Suppose you are working in programming in C#/.NET. Depending on where you are located and your skill set, you can command an appropriate hourly working rate for your skills. The average rate for a UK provider is, for example, $29.93/hr. Therefore if you are an average UK programmer in C#/.NET, you can expect about this hourly rate. Of course, depending on your skills and experience, this price may be more or less.

The average UK salary data can be found from the Office of National Statistics as about £12/hour. This means a programmer in the UK has a lot of freedom with respect to the time he can spend programming to earn the average hourly wage that is enough for a decent life in the UK. In addition, if the programmer is skilled, he can demand a much higher rate and therefore has an even higher amount of flexibility with respect to the work he does.

The above is true for almost all professions from all countries. In fact, in the developing world, there is an added advantage of very low cost of living, which means the worker can earn many times over the average hourly rate of that country.

For example, the average hourly rate for a developer of C#/.NET working through oDesk in India is $14.96/hr. The average hourly rate for a programmer or developer in India is about $10/hr.

From the above example it is clear that freelancing is not just for the workers of the developed world. In fact, the skilled workers in the developing world are able to raise their standard of living through freelancing rather than through their day-jobs! Ironical as it may sound, it is only a reflection of the globalization that we see around us today. Working online is the new mantra for businesses as the whole world gets smaller and smaller and better connected.

Doing your homework: Finding out the Right Freelance Sites for a Lifetime of Comfort

With all these advantages, the natural question to ask is – “Where do I start off?” This is one of the most important questions that need to be answered because your future freelance work life will depend on this. Therefore it is important that you select just the right sites that help you work from home depending on your skills.

The most famous sites around where you can find work from home and make money online depending on your skill set are –

• oDesk
• Elance
• Guru
• RentACoder
• GetAFreelancer

These are the most famous sites around and will help you get started. The important thing is, depending on the kind of work that you think you are best suited for, you should select the site that is just right for you. There is no one site that suits everyone. I would suggest visiting all these sites and getting the “feel” of how they work. Spend some time around and look for the kind of job postings the site attracts. Also compare your own skills with those of the other providers so that you can know where you stand in the competition.

In the beginning stage, it is advisable that you do not join all the sites. This can get very confusing and time taking. Ideally, select the one that attracts you the most. If you are confused, work on two sites simultaneously but not more.

The main reason for this narrowed down choice is to do with concentration. To get better jobs, you will need the best profile and experience. By spreading your experience across all the sites, you are diluting yourself. Instead, stick to one site and do your best, so that you can get good experience and positive feedback from the buyers. This way you will be able to establish yourself as an authority in that particular site and therefore be able to get more and better paying jobs.

In this post, I will mainly talk about the first three sites listed above. This is because they are the most diverse and biggest sites where you can get freelance jobs, and I would suggest starting off with one of these. As you mature, you may consider diversifying into other lesser known sites and more specialized ones so that you may end up earning more. However, as a beginner, I would recommend sticking to these three.

One final important point to note is that these sites don’t advertise jobs as such. Instead, they only facilitate the meeting of the buyers and providers. This is important to note, because when a conflict arises, you may need to resolve it with your buyer rather than the site. In addition, if you do good work, you may establish a long term working relationship with the particular buyer. There have been instances where the freelance worker had gotten an opportunity to work full time for the firm. Therefore establishing a long term working relationship will do wonders for your freelancing career and help you work from home more effectively.

oDesk vs Elance vs Guru

oDesk, Elance and Guru are the most popular freelance sites around and people new to the world of freelancing often are confronted with the dilemma of which one to choose. It is important to understand that all these sites have their own advantages and disadvantages and therefore it is not possible to give an absolute answer. All the three sites are good in their own ways. You should pick the one that best suits your needs.

Here I will discuss the various aspects of the three and give a comparison so that you can decide for yourself which one suits you the best.

Payment

I would expect this to be the top priority for all the freelance workers. Therefore it is important that the site has a good payment policy. This means if there is ever a conflict with the buyer, the site should have a fair policy to settle the issue. This is not uncommon in the world of freelancing, and therefore is more important that you might realize at first. You will find a few buyers show are looking for work to be done but have no intention of paying up. This is of course totally against the whole spirit of freelancing but you will need to deal with this problem. The last thing you would like is to work with your full dedication and not get paid for it.

In some cases, there is a genuine case of conflict in which the buyer may be completely unsatisfied with the work delivered. In such cases, the buyer might be justified to deny payment to the provider. However, it might be a thin line between what you think is a successful completion of the project and what the buyer thinks about the same. In such cases, the site should have a policy of arbitration to decide the case.

Different sites have different ways to solve these problems related to payment. Guru and Elance have a similar kind of a policy. Both these sites have the concept of an Escrow payment. What this essentially does is that it reduces the risk for both the buyer and the provider. In Escrow payments, the buyer deposits a certain amount of money with the site (Elance or Guru in this case) for the project. When the project is successfully completed, the money is then released to the provider.

The way it protects you as a freelance worker is that if you have done your work, the buyer cannot refuse to pay you, because he has already made the payment to the site. If the buyers calls for a dispute and you have done your work, there is no reason why the case will not be settled in your favor. Since the site already holds your money, they will release it to you.

An escrow payment is therefore a safe bet for you as a provider.

oDesk on the other hand adops something completely different to protect the providers. oDesk essentially has two types of projects – hourly assignments and fixed price assignments.

Fixed price assignments do not have a system of escrow and are therefore completely risky. This means if the buyer refuses to pay, oDesk will not force the buyer to pay you. Instead, you are left with submitting your work to the buyer and never get anything in return. To reduce the risk, you could ask for the a fixed upfront payment or periodic payments from the buyer. However, in majority of the cases, it is the provider that suffers should a dispute arise.

On the other hand, the hourly assignments at oDesk are extremely provider-friendly and therefore as a freelance worker, you will find these very beneficial to your case. oDesk requires you to install a small software that lets the buyer keep a tab on your activity by recording the number of mouse clicks and keystrokes. It also takes random screenshots of your computer screen to ensure that you are only working on the required assignment. When your activity is above a minimum threshold and the screenshots show that you are indeed working on the projects, the buyer cannot refuse you payment, even if he is not completely satisfied with the job. This means every hour work is every hour paid, guaranteed. This is a rare instance of provider empowerment that is a unique feature of oDesk.

Thus Elance and Guru have their own protection in the form of escrow payments whereas oDesk has a good protection system for its hourly assignments and a very loose protection for fixed price assignments.

Fees

Fees is another important aspect of freelancing because you don’t want to end up giving a lot of your money to the site. All sites charge you money for their services. Remember the saying “There is no free lunch”? Well, that is very true in this case!

oDesk has a simple fee structure. There is no membership required to join. For every job that you do and get paid for, oDesk will take a 10% fees from your pay. Thus if the buyer has paid you $1000 for an assignment, then oDesk will take its fees of 10% i.e. $100 and you will only receive $900 for the work.

Apart from this, there are small charges to withdraw money. ACH transfers are free; paypal transfers cost you $1 each time and wire transfers cost you $30 each time. Apart from this, oDesk is simple in its fee structure but 10% fees for each assignment is quite high.

On the other hand. Elance follows a more complicated fee structure as described here. Apart from the fees to cover the working of the site, Elance also charges a small percentage from the credit card company, which means you will effectively end up with a fee that is more than what the official charts describe. However, even in this case the fees is less than the 10% that oDesk charges. However, membership to Elance is highly recommended to get projects and is not free. Different types of memberships involve different fees. For a professional membership, the fees is $9.95/month.

Guru works in a somewhat similar manner as Elance, in that when you opt for membership, you are given additional features, a lower percentage fees per project. Thus the total fees of a Guru project comes to about 5% with additional credit card charges, which is still less than 10%. However, if you are a free member, this is 10%+additional charges, which comes out quite costly.

Size of the Job Market

The size of the job market is perhaps the single most important factor that you need to consider. This is because if the market size is more, there is a better probability of you landing the job. However, apart from the size, the number of people competing for a particular job is equally essential. For example if a site has on an average 20 people bidding on a project while another has 5, the second site will offer you a better chance of landing more jobs.

In our case of oDesk vs Elance vs Guru, all the three have similar number of people bidding for a given job. This means the competition is of almost the same amount in all these three sites.

However, Elance is the biggest job market and Guru is next. One main reason for this is that both Elance and Guru are much older than oDesk. Therefore going by the sheer number of jobs posted on the site, Elance beats Guru and Guru beats oDesk.

Apart from the number of jobs, the average size of job is also an important criterion. All Elance, Guru and oDesk attract some very big projects. However, the number of big projects and also the average size of the projects in terms of the payment is usually higher in Elance than Guru and higher in Guru than oDesk.

However, the competition on oDesk seems to be relatively lesser than Elance and Guru because of the scarcity of very well established providers. The simple reason for this is that oDesk is relatively newer compared to both Elance and Guru. Therefore you might find it easy to break into the circuit with oDesk when compared to Elance and Guru.

Customer Service

Customer service is an important aspect of any freelance site. This is because you need a support system to fall back upon when things are not going as planned. Also, whenever a dispute arises, the site should be approachable and prompt with dealing with the dispute.

All the three sites of oDesk, Guru and Elance have a dedicated customer service to help out providers. Elance also has a 800 telephone number for problems with the site or registration. However, oDesk has a very well developed forum and community where you can get much more than dispute solutions. If you have any feedback or suggestions, they are taken very seriously. In addition, you can discuss your freelance work and progress with other freelancers. The community is usually abuzz with topics each day.

Growth

Looking at how old the sites are, both Elance and Guru are well established long before oDesk came along. However, if you see at the growth of these sites, oDesk beats the others hands down. Within a short period of time, oDesk has crossed $100 million in its famous oConomy,the worth of jobs that it provides to freelancers.

The number of jobs in each section keeps increasing every month at oDesk while it tends to stabilize in both Elance and Guru or show much slower growth. However, in number of jobs posted and their worth, Elance and Guru beat oDesk.

Now a little about RentACoder. This is one site that is dedicated to programmers. If you are a programmer and want to work with some established names and on big projects, this site is worth a look. The projects are usually big and therefore pay well. The providers are usually very skilled, which means you might face some stiff competition from the other providers. If you think you are better than the competition and can genuinely bet on your programming and web development skills, then do check out RentACoder.

Freedom of Freelancing: Doing what You Love

One important aspect of freelancing is that you have the freedom to work on projects that genuinely interest you. This means you need to have the freedom to switch, irrespective of your previous career experiences. Therefore if the freelancing site that you choose to work from home has a number of different types of jobs, then it is better for you in terms of diversity. All of Elance, Guru and oDesk have some good variety of jobs to offer.

You should check out the job postings in the area that you are interested in and look at the type of projects being offered. You may find a lot of difference between the level and quality of works posted. If you are an amateur who wants to try out something new, oDesk might be ideal for you. If you are a seasoned professional looking for high quality jobs, Elance and Guru might be just right for you. Such subtle differences also need to be kept in mind while selecting your freelancing site.

Abraham Lincon famously said – “My father taught me to work. He did not teach me to love it”. If you find yourself in resonance with these lines, then you can try out freelancing from Elance, Guru and oDesk as a solution to do what you love instead of doing what you are good at doing but don’t enjoy working on.

You should enjoy the flexibility and freedom that freelancing brings with it. Whether you are a sit at home mom looking to supplement your family income or a recently laid off skilled worker, you can find something for yourself in the big and huge world of freelancing. Whether you are from the developed world like the US or from the developing world like India and Philippines you can get something to match your skills at Elance, Guru and oDesk.

“The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.”

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