Elance: The Bidding Procedure

There are many freelance sites on the internet, most of them reputable. I will deal with the reputable ones in this blog.

First, let's talk about Elance.

When you join Elance, you pay a certain monthly fee for each Category you wish to be able to bid in:

• IT & Programming
• Design & Multimedia
• Writing & Translation
• Sales & Marketing
• Admin Support
• Engineering & Manufacturing
• Finance & Management
• Legal

You can belong to one category for free. (It used to be that Admin Support was the de facto free category, but now you can choose whichever one you want. I choose the Writing & Translation category. So - I am not paying any fees to Elance at all to belong - they get their fees as commission each time I complete a job).

Whatever the Membership level you choose, you get a certain number of "Connects," which you use to bid on jobs.

Because I don't pay for any categories, and belong just belong to the Writing & Translation category, I get 40 connects a month.

When you bid on a job, most of them take 1 connect. If the person offering the job is willing to pay over five hundred dollars, it costs you more connects to make a bid.

If you run out of Connects, you can buy more for a dollar a connect, so they are in essence money.

And that's what makes this so damn annoying - you will find that 90% of the people who put out jobs on which you can bid - never select anyone. They are basically just checking for price.

But - you've got to bid without worrying about that. And it doesn't seem to matter if the person offering the job has a good reputation - offering many jobs and actually awarding a percentage of them, and people who are brand new and have never awarded a job before.

So just bid without worrying about that.

You can also spend 4 extra connects if you want your bid to be "pinned" to the top of  the bid list, but I wouldn't bother to do this - it's just a waste of connects since, again, 90% of the time the potential client doesn't choose anyone!

I'll talk more about how to bid and win in future posts.