Thursday Tip Triad #13: Variety is the Spice of Life

As I've mentioned recently, I probably won't meet my income goals for the month again... Why?  Well, for one thing I'm not giving it my all, and two, a lot of my private clients have gone MIA over the past couple of months or have made severe cut backs.  I've also made some cut backs on the time that I'm willing to work for lower paying clients as well.  This is all fine and dandy, part of being a freelancer and part of pruning - however I've been so focused on private clients for the last five months that I haven't gathered up any high quality back up eggs!

My realization of this is what has brought about the creation of today's TTT topic on variety.  Private clients are great, content sites are great, survey and gpts are great - but to get the most security and the most money in the bank, you need to maintain variety!

Thursday Tip Triad #12: Fighting Off Distractions

One of the biggest pitfalls of legitimate work from home jobs is the fact that there is no easy way to avoid distractions.  Between family matters, household chores and the temptations of the internet, it's incredibly easy to get side tracked.  The good news is that there are a few things that you can do help fend off these distractions.

Thursday Tip Triad #11: The Three Steps to Freelancing

When it comes to freelancing and legitimate work from home jobs, you have to look at your work like it's a garden, or more specifically a rose bush.  To find jobs and succeed at them you have to possess several skills that are similar to those that you need to employ when taking care of your flowers, veggie gardens or fruit trees.  Today, for the Thursday Tip Triad, I am going to break freelancing down for you into three sections from start to finish, planting, nurturing and pruning.

What. A. Day.

Today has been "something else" to put it mildly.  I have had nothing but complication, after complication, after complication for absolutely no reason.

From misinterpretations and miss communication to invoices getting over looked, it has just been non stop issues today - and none of them SHOULD exist is what makes it worse.  I feel like banging my head against a wall right now, but I guess that's one of the risks of any job, let alone where you deal with people solely over the internet.

Thursday Tip Triad #10: Keeping Your Sanity

As we all know, everyone needs a break sometime, and those of us in the legitimate work from home jobs world are no different from those who have brick and mortar occupations.  Sometimes you have to ease up or take a complete "vacation" to keep from going off the deep end.  Here are a few tips to keep in mind when you get close to the breaking point:

1.  Keep doing your easy and quick tasks if possible.  Unless you need a complete and total vacation from your work at home obligations, try to keep your simplest and quickest tasks going while easing up on the more stressful projects.  While a 100% work free week might completely refresh you, it also might put you in a situation where you find it hard to get started back up again when the work comes rolling in, especially if you haven't been working from home very long and enjoyed a long period of unemployment before that.

Thursday Tip Triad #9: Simple Organization Tips

After you get started in the legitimate work from home world one of the hardest things to master is organization.  I for one, have never been very organized... My desk is usually a pile of papers, notepads, writing utensils and so much more.  Luckily, there are a few simple things that can be done to help you keep organized and on top of your game without really requiring any sort of heavy time commitment or any sort of investment either.

1.  Make a special Gmail account.  I know this sounds annoying and silly, but honestly it's one of the best things you can do.  There have been one or two times where I've lost responses from legitimate work from home sites because they've gotten lost in the shuffle of my primary inbox.  Just last week I was trying to find my letter from a web site rating company that invited me to test with them, and couldn't.

Thursday Tip Triad #8: The More the Merrier

When it comes to freelancing and finding legitimate work from home jobs, the only way to get them, is to throw yourselves at them mercilessly.  A lot of people still want to believe that work from home jobs should fall out of the sky into their lap immediately, but that is not the case.  Finding a job that is legit, and can be done from home around your own schedule, takes time, patience and dedication.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you're looking for legitimate work from home jobs...

1. Jump at every opportunity.  The more jobs you apply to and inquire about, the more chances you will have to be accepted... of course the opposite applies as well so you need to keep up a tough shell and remember that you won't always get hired.  If you do get offered the position and it turns out that the job isn't something you are interested in, or the pay is less than you want, you can always turn it down.

Thursday Tip Triad #7: Formatting Your Bid

So you've taken the plunge and jumped into the legitimate work from home jobs world and are now starting to search for private clients on sites like Elance, Guru or Odesk... So far we've talked about how to get past the bidding jitters, how to weed out some of the jobs that won't get awarded and how to form your proposal.  This week we're going to talk about how to actually format your bid.

1.  Break your pricing down.  Just like I said last week, you want to be as detailed as possible.  Don't just tell them "I'll do this project for $300" get elbow deep in your break down to make sure they understand exactly what you are doing for them.

I will provide you with 10 articles of approximately 300 words each for $30 each, or $300 total, which equates to about 10¢ per word within 10 days of accepting the project.

Thursday Tip Triad #6: How to Price Your Proposal

Here we are again, another Thursday means another set of tips for how to successfully find and land legitimate work from home jobs and freelance gigs.  Last week we discussed how to form the bulk of your proposal on freelance projects like those featured on Elance, but this week we'll be talking about the part that everyone cares about - the Bid.

Coming up with competitive pricing and knowing how to best present your offer is a key part of landing freelance jobs.  I am not claiming to be an expert, but here is what I do and it seems to work well for me.

1.  Don't be afraid to ask for what you are worth.  I do not

Thursday Tip Triad #5: Forming Proposals When Bidding

When it comes to finding legitimate work from home jobs, freelancing really seems to be a great option.  Unfortunately, it can take a while to get a grasp on what to do and what not to do.  Once you've signed up for a site (whether it's Elance, Guru, oDesk or something else) you have to start creating proposals and bidding, but that process can be intimidating.

Several people have asked me for tips on how to write a good proposal, so here are a few tips!

1.  Provide a brief introduction.  Use the prospective client's name (or user name if their name is unknown) and comment on the fact that you would like to be considered for (insert project name).

"Hello JohnnyRox451,
I'm incredibly interested in your Content writing about Valentine's Day project and would love to work with you...."

The Thursday Tip Triad

Installment two in the new Thursday Tip column is a bit late again, in hindsight it also might have been better to dub it Freelance Friday - but I've already committed to making it a Thursday post!

Today's freelance job hunting tips will revolve around finding clients. I briefly touched on how to build a client base last week but this time I will focus fully on providing you with a few pieces of information that will help you build a freelance client base without any investment.

Freelance Work

Freelance work might sound like something you are incapable of, but I promise you that it's not. If I had known how simple it was I would have started doing it much sooner than I did. It has really been a great source of income for my family and I'm only getting started. There's not a day that goes by where I don't regret how long it took me to take the plunge and seriously start hunting down freelance work.
I had a bit of an ordeal today (accidentally locked myself out of the apartment!) so this is up later than I'd intended but I wanted to get this post up before I go to sleep.

Tips for Freelancing (The new Thursday tradition!)

Finding Clients

I have had a lot of people ask me who my clients are and where they came from. I can't actually answer the first half of that question (privacy issues) but I can answer the second half...

I'll have a post up later today or tomorrow giving everyone a few pointers and I'll expand on my experiences some!

Friday the 13th

What a day! I don't know about you, but I've been experiencing issues all over the place today. I'm blaming it on the date even though I'm not superstitious... I can say though that the WAHM forums must be because they are definitely in hideout mode today!

I've been busily chugging along for all of my private clients this week which is taking up a pretty fair chunk of my time, but I don't mind because they pay is adding up decently. I've already accumulated about $82 in my Elance account this past week from two clients. I'm also finishing up another $50 worth of content work tonight that I'll be submitting. In total I've done $100 worth of work for one client in 4 days. I'll be sad to see this project end, whenever that day may come.

If you haven't checked out any of the many freelance sites available, I really do think that it's worth it. Sign up for a free account, fill out your profile information and add a picture (if possible) so they will think of you as a real person. Find something you really think you have a shot at and go for it! The worst that will happen is that you won't get it and will be out a bid for the month.

If you sign up for multiple freelance sites you can just start bidding on a new one when you run out of free bids on one for the month ;)

Don't get discouraged if you don't get selected. You'll have a lot of competition including some outsourced that works for well under standard prices, but with some dedication and effort there's a good chance that you'll find something and once you get a little good feed back under your belt everything will get easier.

I personally have also learned a lot from this client about SEO and content writing in general from this client which is giving me a boost in confidence overall. I'm pretty sure that with what he's shown me on this project I can start writing for Associated Content or any other free topic residual income site and do decent in terms of keywording.

My next step will be to find a higher paying content writing gig. This one is decent but it could be better. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of pay for a boatload of experience though!

Clients

I know that if I were reading my blog I'd be wondering where all those freelance clients came from. The answer is simple, freelance message boards and posting sites.

There are oodles of both out there and they are well worth sifting through on a regular basis.

Forums
I'm currently pretty cut and dry. I stick to Wahm, and that's more or less it. I do plan to branch off to other forums as well eventually - but I've been part of Wahm for a while now and no matter what some folks may say or think, I think it's a pretty top notch community.

Freelance Sites
This is a whole other world... I've signed up for so many that I don't even remember them all at this point. Most of them will offer a free version with a very limited number of bids available for jobs on a monthly basis. They also offer the ability to upgrade your account so that you can apply for more jobs, add more info to your profile, etc.

I honestly recommend sticking with the free versions of all of them until you feel like you absolutely must upgrade. Of course this means that you'll have to be very careful when bidding on jobs since your bids will be limited.

Here a few I'm fond of:
LiveWork - You've all seen me mention this site before, and it does fit into the Freelance posting category so I figured I'd add it here as well. The great thing about LiveWork is that there is no paid account option here and there is no limit to how many jobs you can apply for. However, there aren't many active jobs on this site at the moment either.

Guru - I signed up with them a week or so ago and went through several of their job pages. They seem like a decently set up site but I haven't really utilized them yet. None of the jobs really caught my eye the couple times I checked, but I plan to revisit them regularly anyways to see if I can dig up any good gems there.

ELance - This has proven to be my favorite so far. The site is really well designed and there is a certain degree of quality mandated from the moment you sign up. They actually test you on your comprehension of the site before you can begin bidding on jobs.

Their free version is significantly limited and only gives you 3 bidding credits (some high end jobs require more than 1 credit to bid) but if you're really careful with those three they can serve you well.

I will admit that I already upgraded my account with them... That was actually brought on by a job I was offered elsewhere that offered to pay me through paypal or Elance. I was interested in gaining the experience and feedback on Elance so I upgraded my account so that I could bid into multiple job categories. They do take a cut of the money you make (6.75-8.75%) but I'm generally all right with that at the moment.

Bukisa

I just signed up with Bukisa. I've heard a lot of positive things about them lately, and they seem like they could be a decent residual income source...

They don't offer any upfront payments which is a bit of a draw back, but they do pay your for page views and also for your referrals page views as well which is an interesting twist. They also don't require original content, you can use content you have posted on other sites with them as well. (Meaning you can republish your blog content there if you wanted to. I'm not sure if I'll do that, but it's an interesting idea.)

I'm planning to give it a good looking over in the morning, for now I'm just wrapping up a few of my night time projects!

November Goals

Phew, what a day! I haven't even made my goals post yet, and I've already accomplished some of them - that's what I call a good start to the month. This month my goals are more multifaceted than they were for October since I was just starting out at the time. I'm still taking baby steps though to make sure I don't bite off more than I can chew.

So here they are, my goals for the month of November:

1. This is the obvious one, predetermined at the birth of this blog - to earn $300 worth of spendable cash by the end of the month. That means that only money that makes it to my bank account or PayPal account will be included in the tally.

2. Create (and consistently utilize) a daily schedule. I've taken on a lot of little eggs, and now it's time for me to focus more on nurturing them while still adding a couple to the stash. Each egg requires a certain amount of attention and it's time to find out how much so I can maximize my earnings.

3. Sign up with a freelance writing site and write at least 4 articles during the month to start getting my feet wet. Technically I've already started working on this one with Textbroker - I signed up and was accepted yesterday and I submitted my first article. I'm waiting to see if it makes the cut or not. I'm toying with the idea of setting up with a residual income sight like Associated Content as well though.

(Oh! They accepted my article - the acceptance email mentioned something about revising and rating the article in 2-7 days, but they seem much quicker than the estimates they give from what I've seen. Regardless, I've gotten $4 in my account for my 400 word article, which is great since they allow you to request payouts at as little as $10.)

4. Find a new private contract freelance gig. Technically I've accomplished this as well and am doing a trial run today, but I don't think I want to count it for this goal because even though it was already on my mental goal list, the job came into existence before I officially made this post.

All right, I think that was all of my goals for the month, or at least I hope it was! Time to get busy working on that schedule - too bad I'm better at making them than I am at sticking to them hehe

What are your goals for November?

TextBroker

TextBroker is one of the sites that I've seen that comes highly recommended to new writers. As part of my goals for the month (coming later) I decided to go ahead and apply with them yesterday to see what would happen.

I applied in the late afternoon, was accepted and told to write a sample for them. I did that and figured it would take 3-4 days to hear back but I actually heard back from them within a few hours which was a nice surprise.

Their pay varies by the ranking they give you as follows:
2 Stars = .7¢ per word (yes .7¢ which means less than 1¢)
3 Stars = 1¢ per word (this is where I got rated)
4 Stars = 1.4¢ per word
5 Stars = 5¢ per word

Clearly, unless you're ranked at 5 stars, the money is minimal, but I'm ok with starting out at 1¢ a word to get some experience under my belt.

I will warn anyone who is considering signing up now though, that there really don't seem to be a lot of 3 or 5 star articles. As a matter of fact I'm going to have to stalk the page to even find a subject that I'm comfortable writing on at the 3 star level. (Right now the only articles up are about rifles!)

I was really excited but now I'm a little iffy.

More feedback coming as I have it!