Freelance work/ Work from home

rsheikh

Hi all. I want to do some freelance admin work from home for afew hours a week. Can anyone reccommend any websites to me please? I have briefly looked at Elance, Freelancers.net, Peopleperhour.com, Freelancer.co.uk. Are these sites any good and reliable?? Thanks )

gb12345

rsheikh wrote: »

Hi all. I want to do some freelance admin work from home for afew hours a week. Can anyone reccommend any websites to me please? I have briefly looked at Elance, Freelancers.net, Peopleperhour.com, Freelancer.co.uk. Are these sites any good and reliable?? Thanks )

The sites you mention are all legitimate and reliable (I regularly earn from Elance and Freelancer.co.uk). However, a lot of the admin type projects that are posted on them are scams so you have to be careful.

You will see Captcha entry and XXX cam work advertised as admin roles and it won't be until after you apply that you find out what the real role is.

As a general guideline - if the poster puts their email address in the project description or the initial PM to you (both against the sites T&Cs) then it is a scam, as they are trying to bypass the freelance site and deal direct with you.

caitieface

I've used Freelancer.com, Guru.com and Odesk.com. It's possible to find good, legitimate work but with all these kind of sites you are going to have to filter through a lot of spam and rubbish. There's also a lot of international competition, so you have to put yourself up against folk from India, Romania, wherever who are willing to work for a lot less than you or I would be. I've gotten some decent work from those sites, but it isn't always easy to find.

murphy306

I have never been unable to get work off those sites, they all seem to go to others. Perhaps I am not using it right???

gb12345

murphy306 wrote: »

I have never been unable to get work off those sites, they all seem to go to others. Perhaps I am not using it right???

The problem is that a lot of employers will go for the freelancer that the site recommends as they will appear top of the list of bids.

When I first started on Freelancer.com, I found a number of smallish projects that required the skills that I had and bid as low as I could on them and looked on them as loss leaders to get me some work and build up a reputation. It took some time, but now when I bid on a relevant project I am usually in the top 3 or 4 bidders.

On freelancer, you can also buy the top spot for a few $, which they claim increases the chances of being picked by over 400%.


Other things that you can do are -

• Make sure that your personal information page is fully completed together with a portfolio showing your skills.
• Do the assessment tests that the sites have to prove your skills.
• Make sure that your bid covers any special terms that the employer asks (some will ask you to put a certain phrase in your bid to weed out people who just bid without reading the project details) and also explain to the employer why he should pick you.
• Add a covering PM to your bid to give the employer any further details that supplement your bid.

murphy306

How can you see which ones are best to bid low on? Do they advertise a job for say one hour then you know you can afford to make a low bid as it will only be one hour?

gb12345

murphy306 wrote: »

How can you see which ones are best to bid low on? Do they advertise a job for say one hour then you know you can afford to make a low bid as it will only be one hour?

You get two types of jobs - hourly and fixed fee and for each one the employer will specify a budget range. The hourly ones are easy as you just consider what the minimum you would be prepared to accept per hour is and bid for that

So you may find a fixed price job with a range of $30 - $250. Hopefully in the project description you will get enough info to give you an idea of how long the job will take and you can then base your bid on the time and what the lowest you can stand to earn per hour is.

When I started out I decided that $15 per hour was a reasonable rate, but after spending a month or so of not being picked for any jobs, I decided to reduce my rate to $5 per hour and started getting picked and building my reputation, which enabled me to increase my rate.

I now usually bid around $20 - $30 per hour, depending on how much the job interests me and I've now got repeat clients who raise projects specifically for me and also get approached directly for new projects.

For example, last week someone approached me and offerd me about $65 to do some VBA work, which I estimated would take no more than a couple of hours, so I accepted the project and in the end took about 1.5 hours, so that worked out at over $40 per hour.

A lot also depends on what your skills are as to how much you can earn. If you're going to just be doing data entry then you'll not earn much as there are freelancers in India etc, who will happily work for $2 an hour, so you'll be competing with them.