Freelancers – here are some tips for bidding on jobs

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The best freelance job board I have found is elance. It’s where I found my first clients, and many great ongoing clients. If I ever need to increase my client load it’s one of the first places that I look.

Here are some tips for bidding on projects at elance that I published in the FreelanceMom News awhile back:

1. Before bidding, research the client. See what other jobs they have posted in the past. Get a feel for which providers they choose. They may only choose lowballers. If that is the case, you might not want to bid. Or, you might want to lowball simply to get your first gig and get feedback.

2. Check what the client has left for feedback. If they have given low feedback, check out the provider they gave it to. If that provider has great feedback in general – you might want to think twice about working with this buyer.

3. Make sure your bid is original. Don’t copy paste the same text into different bids. That means, REALLY read the project description and address it in your bid. The more familiar you seem with their project, the more your bid will stand out from the rest.

4. If they have a website, visit it and try to casually comment on it if it seems applicable.

5. The tone of your bid should be somewhere between friendly and professional. You don’t want to be too casual, but you don’t want to be too uptight.

6. Don’t sound desperate :) Do sound confident.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa Stein owns FreelanceMom.com, is a college business professor and a mom to Gabriela. Lisa is dedicated to playing a part in helping women and moms run a business they love, help support themselves and their family and create a flexible lifestyle. You can find her online on Facebook and Twitter or at home burning something in the kitchen.

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  • http://www.casualfridayeveryday.com Nell Taliercio

    Lori,

    These are great tips. It’s encouraging to know that people do get jobs off the freelance websites.

    I often promote the idea of freelance websites for those who want to get started working at home, but many people tell me they never get any work from these boards.

    Maybe they just need to give your tips a try ;)

  • freelancemom

    Hey Nell :)

    General rule of thumb is hang in there until you get your first project (and feedback). Once you gain a reputation there it becomes much easier to get work.

    Also long ago they didn’t have the fee structure they have in place now (elance). A lot of people were upset that they had to subscribe to the service.

    I’m of a different mindset… it really knocked out a lot of the low balling bidders. Now providers have an investment and they bid more appropriately. Not everyone, of course… but it’s much better.

  • Erica

    Does anybody have any other advise for somebody that doesn’t have any experience in freelancing?? I have a resume but I am young stay at home mom and don’t really have much experience to put on my resume that would help me with freelancing.

  • http://www.workathometruth.com Mr. Work At Home

    Over the past couple of years there’s been an interesting trend towards more work for serious freelancers while giving the less experienced people like Erica a chance to produce content and still generate income with sites like AssociatedContent, ReviewStream, etc.

    The more general content producers certaintly aren’t likely to earn as much up front money as the serious freelancers, but the nice thing is that most of the sites that take content paying the contributors on a residual basis for life.