Hey, First off, new here so if I post in the wrong place or anything, just let me know! I've been working on Odesk.com as a freelance writer for a while now. It was great, up until the last few months. I've not only seen a decline in good paying jobs, but an increase in scammers. I have been scammer 3 times this week! Not to mention, almost scammed 3 more times. Honestly, I'm a little discouraged to use Odesk now. I have tried Elance, Freelancer and Guru, but they lack the user friendly system Odesk has. I mostly like creating custom content as opposed to PLR articles. Is there an alternative site to the above mentioned? Any ideas?
I suggest you use freelancer .which is the best place and you can easily earn really money from there and if you need my help i am already here thanks
as someone who used to hire on odesk here is my take. Odesk was making things difficult for me. Randomly pulling my job (which used to be ok before). I suppose those scammers you speak of would report my job listing for some reason. odesk just blindly takes action. They also did not help me with a couple of issues i encountered. I stopped using odesk since then (about 2 years ago) I am now on elance.
Yes, I've been facing some problems too, but I'm still on them. I guess the problem goes both ways. There are a lot of dishonest freelancers too. For example, I've been scammed by freelancers with hourly paying jobs. I've stopped paying by the hour ever since. It reduces the number of contractors willing to work for you, but I'm not going to be paying someone who logs hours when he did nothing but copy 100% of the article from an online source. So yeah, the scamming goes both ways.
Op,since you say you write well, why don't you try something other than freelancing sites. You can apply for a number of writing companies. A good number of them are almost always looking for new writers. Also, you can sell your writing services here at the Digital point forum too. There are also a number of other forums where you can sell your services. Do a google search, you'll come up with a good number of them.
Don't waste your money in paying fees to freelance websites. Use professional networks like LinkedIn to get your work, and get paid directly from the customers.
the problem with most of these sites is that they only transact in US dollars so its not good for other countries. However if anyone party is not able to use paypal or you have lower trust factor you can go with these sites to help intermediate. Again odesk offers little help. Havent dealth with elance at t his level yet.
I suggest you use freelancer.com and get the customer to do escrow deposit prior to commencement of project and release on completion or split project to two halves and get partial payment half way through and the rest on completion. Freelancer has recently revamped their site. However I understand what you mean with regards to the interface but once you start using freelancer you get used to it.
Elance is great for high paying projects but has more work in web development sector rather than content creation.
Hello, I have tried several freelancing sites :Odesk, freelancer.com, elance, peopleperhour , guru. I first started with oDesk, what annoyed me is the lack of security to the freelancer so he could be scammed easily, another thing is the very big competition and clients wont pay much.What really worked for me is elance, it is much more secure and I really wont start except when the client was verified. Check my blog, I have summarized my experience and have added tips for this issue too: http://elancefreelancing.blogspot.com/
People per hour and fiverr are also great places to find extra work. Of course, you will have to put in a bit of effort to market your gig listings if you want to make some sales.