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So in looking for ways to augment my income on my spare time at nights and weekends I decided to join Freelancer.com the other week and list myself in the system. I was willing to do some article writing, WordPress administration/setup and some minor SEO and Theme customization on an as needed basis.
First off, I was surprised at how many job opportunities there are on Freelancer.com and in those categories alone there are 25-30 new jobs opened per day for content writers, WordPress folks, PHP coders and more.
- The concept is simple:
An employer posts a job and has a set budget (min/max range), he lists details about the job (but high level) and providers bid on the job with how much they will do the job for and how many days it will take to get the job done.
In many cases the lowest bidder with the best track record will win (in theory) but you can find that some bidders who win had charged higher amounts but had better credentials or specialty for the project.
Anyone can join as a provider for free on Freelancer.com but you are limited to 30 bids per month with a free account and Freelancer.com takes 10% of your earnings per job as commission which is paid upon the job being accepted (not after you have been paid by the employer). This means you will have to make sure you front some money to Freelancer.com to cover your commission fee’s when you take on a job and if you accept a $500 job, you will have to pay Freelancer.com $50 up front upon accepting the job. I didn’t so much like this part of it and think that commission should be taken upon the job being completed and paid out.
- Honest Impressions So Far
Seriously folks, I have been looking at the content writing jobs and so many people are accepting offers to write 500+ word articles for $1 or $1.50 per article. I found this to be far too low to be worth investing my time in and would not consider writing an article for less than $5 per article and that is low by many peoples standards. With AssociatedContent willing to pay you the potential for $1 – $3 up front per article and you earn on pageviews, you could probably make 2x as much just writing all that content for A/C and keeping it under your own profile than writing for some of these jobs.
That being said, there are tons of jobs and I have seen employers want 100 articles in 30 days and willing to pay $300-$400 for said articles. So if you have the time to write and write constantly, you could make some decent side income from doing writing for Freelancer.com jobs. I just don’t have that much spare time to do anything but a few small jobs here and there. I would commit to a 3-5 article gig, but I don’t have time to commit to large projects.
I really should learn PHP coding and have seen lots of jobs with decent payouts for people who know PHP real well and especially those who know how to custom code a WordPress plugin or Theme.
Winning a Bid
I won my first project to create some guest posts for an employer but after winning the contract and paying my 10% to Freelancer.com the employer has never responded to any of my emails, private messages or anything. So I am currently out the 10% that I paid into Freelancer and haven’t heard from the employer whose bid I won in almost two weeks. I don’t know how long an employer has to respond or contact you, but I feel a bit disappointed. I checked and this particular employer has a dozen positive reviews and appeared to be a reputable employer.
Bottom line
If you find yourself having lots of down time at nights/weekends or even unemployed but have writing and some coding skills in various languages like ASP, C#, PHP, PERL…etc you probably can find some decent contracts and jobs on Freelancer.com to help augment your income. Content writers do get paid a lower amount than on paid blogging sites, but you don’t need to own your own blog and can write and submit content for others. You may or may not be able to earn more with Helium and AssociatedContent, but those are just "maybe" and the potential to get a guaranteed $200 for 100 posts may be worth it for some people ( I just think its too much content writing for too little payout myself).
There were a few content writings for $5 – $10 per article but these are fewer and there is more competition for them.
-Justin Germino
WPX Support
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