Thursday Tip Triad #4

So it's been brought to my attention by a number of folks that Elance is a bit hard to get the hang of, and to be quite honest, I agree completely! While it is a great way to find legitimate work from home jobs, it can also be really difficult to get the hang of. After two months I still find myself getting confused from time to time so here are a few tips for getting started with Elance.

1. Choose your category very carefully. One mistake that a lot of people make is that they pick a job category without really thinking about what it will contain and if it's the best option for them.

December Goal Review

With the closing of December comes my monthly "Goal Review" where I take a look at the month and decide whether or not I have done the things I set out to do. This month, overall I am pretty thrilled with my results. I still need to do a bit of tweaking, but considering this is my 3rd month back in the working from home world and my second month really trying to do freelance work, I am really happy.

1. Earn $400 this month. Check! This was completely blown out of the water. While I don't have the breakdown created yet, I do have pending total for the month. I am still waiting on one payment that should come through today and this doesn't count the checks I received, but right now my earnings stand at $1,154.31 for December! So much for it being a slow month!

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.

Proof of Payment Update

All right, I've had a lot of payments come through recently so bear with me while I get you all caught up!

Pinecone Research is a survey company that I haven't talked about here yet. They don't openly recruit, however p0ptart happened to have saved a registration link she'd gotten in her spam box from them! I'll include it on my side bar when I make my next update and add Pinecone, until then you can use the link here to sign up.

Either way, if you see their banner, sign up immediately! They pay $3 per survey or product review that they give you. The money is sent automatically upon completion by check. I did my first survey on 11/5 and received my check on 11/9! I'm expecting my second $3 any day now. (Proof of Payment)

Special thanks to p0ptart for the registration link!

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I also finally received my SurveyHead payment, $25.50 to my Pay Pal account. I had requested it on 10/21 and I got the payment on 11/11 so it took about 3 weeks. It definitely feels like it was a lot longer though lol As it happens, by the time it arrived I was practically ready to cash out again! I'm actually going to request another $20 cash out right now, which will leave me with $8.20 towards my next request. (Proof of Payment)

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I got my weekly $10 from Wanelo on Friday, right on time as usual. I'm up to $125 with them now I think. This is really a great program, if you haven't gotten involved yet you should do it. You can earn $40 a month off of reviews, and there are bonuses available as well. (Proof of Payment)

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I also got paid for the interactive survey I did with Greenfield Online on 10/20. I requested the pay out on Friday and got it today! I had also done a couple of $1 surveys so the total payout was $32 taking me up to $62 total with them. (Proof of Payment)

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My second gift card came in from SwagBucks today as well so now I've received $10 in Amazon cards from them total. I also have enough SwagBucks saved up to have requested two more, but I'm holding off in case a good card goes on sale during the end of the year sales. Even if they don't, no harm done, I'll just buy a bunch of them at once haha (Proof of Payment)

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Last but not least, is a peek at my eLance account. Naturally right after I finished editing the picture, I received an additional payment but since I'm stretched for time I didn't redo it. My total there is about $10 higher now than what it actually shows. (Proof of Payment)

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I've also had some deposits to my PayPal from my private clients this month on top of all that. Overall I'm really thrilled right now. If I can do it, you can do it too! Get out there and start earning!

Update

Hey guys! It's been another one of those types of weekends. My little one seems to have come down with a cold so I haven't been around as much this weekend as usual to update.

Tomorrow you can expect to see a proof of payment update that will include a previously unmentioned survey company, Wanelo and finally SurveyHead as well. I may also include a peek at my Elance profile and earnings page for the folks who are interested in checking out the freelance sites.

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.