As a general direction to move away from the majority of the clients that inhabit DP/WF, you MUST have your own website. Sure, you can try out your luck at Elance.. but I never had any luck there, I always got outbid by people who were willing to go lower than the minimum budget suggested. Point Being: If you don't want to work with penny chasers, then you need to have your own website. A lot of those higher paying clients have never even heard of this forum. From the perspective of business owners who I used to do website work for and write for locally, most of them just searched in Google or asked around when it came to having content done. Anyways, I'm looking for a theme but I'm not sure which one to go with. I'll be going with Wordpress of course because it's where I have the most positive results SEO wise. Here was a theme I was checking out: http://www.olevmedia.com/themes/preview/?item=metro It's responsive, all CSS and looks pretty solid. I'm going with a WP Blog because I'm going to start a general blog on Making Money Online and I'll be offering my services on the side of the website. I'll also have a referral link and section for those cheap clients who want "quality" at a cheap price as well Pretty much just a referral link to iWriter, but oh well, it's better to refer them to somewhere than try to educate them. What themes do you use or have you used? I'd prefer one that comes SEO ready such an efficient and optimized H1 and H2 tag. However I don't want something that looks horrid and god awfully designed, AKA: Almost every website in the WF (seriously.. go look at some of the websites in their signatures.. they're just bad).
thesis theme http://diythemes.com/ use by some of the biggest marketers out there. it answers all of your questions above. All the best.
You said rightly, if you get work from freelance sites then the earning would be lower than normal, if you have a website and you have optimized it for search engines then you would get good pay. But freelancing sites work at the time when you don't have work, or your website is penalized, at the time when you are optimizing your website, you would be getting works from freelance sites to balance your expenses.
thats right you can setup your own site , your earning will be 10 times more than freelancer job and less burden after setup