Just got here? Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

In the morning, I got mail that I’d won two jobs on Elance. Yay! Then I went to the kiosk and came back to see that I’d won two more jobs on GAF. Oookkkaaaaaay. While I was fixing breakfast, a third GAF client sent me a ‘yes’ for my bid. Yikes! I now had five different gigs totalling $300 and just four days to get them done. This was a different kind of panic.

I managed to push two of the clients to give me some extra time. One was crabby about it, but he liked my work, so he said ok. The other seemed excited that he had to wait. Go figure. He actually gave me five exra days, which is awesome. I like Canadians.

So far, I’ve managed to finish three of the projects, but I still have two to complete before Tuesday, and they total 190 articles ranging between 350 and 600 words, for which I will be paid $140. Wow.

Sometimes I think it’s sad that people with talent and papers get stuck doing grunge work. On one job that I bid, a fellow freelancer explained that he had two Masters degrees and had edited a newspaper, yet his bid was lower than mine. Plus, he’s in the States, so I’m sure he needs to earn way more than I do. The cost of living there is higher. But I guess we do what we have to.

Elance is a touch more OCD than GAF is, which is why the clients there are willing to spend more. Once you win a job on Elance, you get a workroom where you have to issue status reports on the progress of your work. You have milestones, or targets, so that the client knows exactly how many articles you have written by a certain time. You can get jobs where you’re paid per hour, and there’s a stopwatch to calculate just how much time you’ve actually spent on the project. There’s a provision for having a freelance team, so you can bid on multiple projects and ‘outsource’ with more transparency.

I like Elance more than GAF because the jobs are at a higher level, so you’re more likely to work with professionals. Online professionals are generally nice. Sometimes the people I work with on GAF are bullies with zero customer care, and it’s enough to make you smash your monitor … on their heads! The things we do for love money.

So, between Elance and GAF, I’ve reached my August target of $500, which has me pretty excited. My target for next month is $2000. I’d eventually like to make $5000 dollars a month, so that I can own a penthouse by 2020. I still have clients offline who bring in another 10 to 20,000 Ksh some months, but they’re not consistent, so my online work does the bills. Any work from the ‘real world’ is an investment bonus.

I can’t withdraw my GAF money before 31st, but after that, I can access it through Moneybookers, and I hear Paypal finally styled up, so yay! My GAF debit card gets here in about a month, and it’s usable on Elance as well, so I can easily draw my money. But meanwhile, I’m paying my membership through Paypal via my KCB card, and now that it accepts cash receipts, I can divert my Elance cash there and figure out some other way to draw it.

I’m really liking this freelance gig. It’s virtually cost-free except for electricity, $30 for membership, and my Zuku subscription. There’s no market saturation because there’s enough work for all of us. And the best part is that unless the worldwide web collapses, I’ll never be  retrenched or fired. How cool is that?

Crystal Ading’ is a professional author, editor, rock lover and mother. Her work is available through www.threeceebee.com.

Just got here? Here’s Part 1.

Next, you set up your profile by adding education and employment info. You don’t have to, but it helps you get jobs, because the client can see what you can do. Papers [or lack of them] are not necessarily a disadvantage online. On the internet, most people don’t care if you’re a boy or girl, if you’re black or yellow, if you have three PhDs or a high school diploma. What they care about is your skill, and you can show that clearly in your bid.

Speaking of skills, Elance has lots of free tests that you can do to prove how good you are. All the tests are multiple choice and are timed at 20 to 40 minutes. Some of them are pretty hard. When I first joined, I was afraid to bid and fail, so I procrastinated by spending six hours doing tests. I told myself I was improving my chances of being hired, but I knew I was just stalling. I did about 12 tests and failed two of them. Four more tests were registered as incomplete because I chickened out after doing three or four questions. Incomplete grades you as auto-fail by the way.

Depending on the type of membership you have, your profile will show between 5 and 20 test skills. They’re important because when you bid on  job, the client will check to see if you have the right skills for it. Fortunately, you have an option to hide your failed tests, so phew. Also, if you fail a test [or if you want a higher score] you can resit the test after 14 days.

Let’s see, what else. Oh, you have a number of connects every month which allow you to bid jobs. Most jobs need just one connect to bid, but the higher the budget, the more connects you need. Free  membership gives you ten connects a month, which means you can’t bid on more than ten jobs, although you can buy more connects at any time. 10 extra connects cost $5. I have a paid membership, so I pay $10 per month and get 25 connects. I generally bid on one job per day. Combine this with GAF and I’m trying out for 6 jobs every day, though I don’t bid when I have clients waiting; I don’t want to be overwhelmed and end up breaking deadlines.

Being the Queen of Technobofia, I had a few issues registering on Elance. I somehow managed to book myself in as a programmer, so I couldn’t bid on any writing jobs. I tried to correct it but got nowhere, so I registered a new account, this time as a writer, but it wouldn’t acknowledge my membership so I couldn’t do any tests. Then, because I had two account on the same IP, both accounts were suspect and kept asking me to prove that I was really me. *russumfussumsecretquestions*

I asked Support for help, and this awesome lady named Sophie helped me out without so much as a giggle. She deleted one account, corrected the second account, and upgraded me to 25 connects. I’m amazed she was so patient, as it took 10 emails between us to fix everything. I’m clearly a Passenger D kind of girl, but you rock Sophie.

When I finally got over my fear [and ran out of tests to do] I bid on four jobs, then I went to sleep. Two bids were $100 each, one bid was for $250 and the fourth was for $300. I used up four of my 10 free connects. That day had been particularly rough, because I hadn’t won a bid for five days. I went into panic mode and bid on seven GAF jobs plus the four on Elance.

… to be continued …

Crystal Ading’ is a professional author, editor, rock lover and mother. Her work is available through www.threeceebee.com.