Like Chapaa » Online Jobs

Elance, oDesk, and Making Money Online

Crystal — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 04:46:50 +0000

The last time you heard from me, I had made almost half a million freelancing, and was hanging up my keyboard in exchange for a little honest work. The work was fulfilling and fun, but I’ve always been bad at marketting, and referrals will only get you so far. When I gave up the online work, I was lucky. I got a job at a digital ad agency, doing pretty much the same stuff as freelancing, except I had to sit in an office, and I get medical benefits. They still let me wear jeans every day, and they have sparkly red floors and attic-style roofing, so it’s a really cool deal.

The past few months have been tricky though. Between the dollar falling and the baby growing, finances just aren’t stretching as far as they should, so I reconsidered finding a side hustle. I didn’t want it to be writing work, since I already write during my 9 to 5 [or whatever time the briefs are complete, which sometimes means 9.00 a.m. three days later.] I toyed with the idea of farming, since we kept commercial chicken when we were little. I bumped into some farming info in the days after, and I figured it must be a sign. But to be a farmer, you need, you know, a farm, and that needs money.

What followed was a few days of daydreaming and restlessness. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I decided to log on to Elance and see what was going on. I wanted to check my password and see if my account was still active. Well … it was … and everything was right the way I left it, so yay! I looked up some of my old Elance clients, and was glad to see they still wanted to work with me. One even recommended me to his wife, who has become one more happy client. She gives me work via oDesk, though it took me a while to remember that password and figure out how it worked. I opened my oDesk account in 2008, but I haven’t used it since.

So what has changed since I last worked freelance? Not much. The dollar went up and down again, and Paypal still doesn’t allow withdrawals in Kenya, except for The Kenya Red Cross Society. There are still a lot of middle-men trying to offer that service, but I prefer to get my payments via Payoneer or have a wire transfer straight to my bank. There’s a charge for it, but it’s also a convenient way to keep track of all the money coming in from side work. The gigs are still pretty small, paying between $1 and $5 per article, and I spend 3 or 4 hours a day working on them, which means I’m retraining my body to function on four hours asleep. Anyone who knows me appreciates what a mammoth task that is, but sometimes you do what you have to.

I was very hesitant about getting into freelancing again. I get home from my day job at 8 or 9 p.m. and after a day that long, it seemed unreasonable to sit at a computer for anything but pleasure. But I’ve been having conversations with my friends, the kind where they want a change in their lives but they’re not willing to make any effort, and I realized I was doing the same thing myself. I am where I am because I’m not pushing myself hard enough, and I needed to change that, so I did.

I get a lot of emails asking how to succeed in online work, how to get jobs, how to get paid. In the two or so years that I’ve worked online, I’ve made $1,400, and I know of Kenyans who have made a lot more using the very same avenues that I do. There’s no secret behind it. You just log on and keep trying till you get it right. It’s not as easy as it looks, but it’s definitely worth it.

Put in the same effort in your work, whether you’re working for $1 or $500. That’s how you build a name for yourself, that’s how you get recommended to others, and that’s how every time you walk away, you come back and find work waiting for you. That, and effective marketting, which I’m yet to figure out, but I’ll get there, someday

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

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Are You Becoming Cheap Labour?

Kelvin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:50:16 +0000

I bet you have heard about websites like Freelancer.com, Fiverr and GigBucks. These are websites in which anyone can sign up and start making money online almost instantly. Basically, on these websites you can sell your services for a small fee. The good thing about them is that they are very popular and as long as you are skilled in something it is very difficult NOT to make money online on these sites.

Indeed, there are literally millions of people who are trying to make money using these websites (and other similar ones). Of all these millions of people, many actually do make money! Sounds nice, eh? You want to go try it out? Go ahead. But before you do, please take a moment to think it through. These websites are loved by people by me because I can get really talented people to offer their services to me really cheap. The people doing jobs on these sites are certainly happy to take my money. And I’m certainly happy to pay them… you know why? Because it is crazy cheap labour!! I can literally hire a graphic designer for $5 (Kshs 450) to create a logo for me then go ahead and sell that logo to someone else for Kshs 5,000/- Pesa taslimu.

Do you get my point? Sites like Freelancer.com and Fiverr represent hundreds of thousands of people willing and able to work for you at the cheapest rates imaginable. Is the smartest thing you can do to join these hundreds of thousands of people and to compete with them? Really?

WAKE up!! Find a way to make some money off this insanely cheap labour. Do not BECOME the cheap labour.

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How to Get An Online Job

Kelvin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 07:29:48 +0000

We get so many emails about online jobs that we decided to do somethign about it and try to solve this problem permanently!

We’re pleased to announce that today we’re releasing our newest, and only, book: Dummies Guide to Getting an Online Job.

Have you ever thought about getting an online job? Imagine a job which you can do from your own bedroom, in your pyjamas. Imagine a job which you can do at your own time (you can wake up late everyday and spend the afternoons on Thursday playing tennis). Could this lifestyle be for you?

Have you looked long and hard and struggled to find legitimate online jobs? We wrote this book for you. Many people go out looking for online jobs without doing the basic preparations. They end up as an online scam statistic. Do not let this be your story. Our book guides you through the things that a beginners should know and we suggest several places where you can find well paying legitimate online jobs. We even go as far as guiding you through the use of one very popular online jobs website/service.

Buy this. Now.Similar Posts:

Teenage Girls Making Thousands of Dollars Online

Kelvin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 05:16:00 +0000

Like most 16-year-olds, Renee’s world is in her bedroom. She hangs out here with her friends, and spends hours on her computer. But Renee isn’t just sending e-mails or surfing the web aimlessly. She’s running a highly profitable Internet business from here, one she says has earned her as much as $2,000 a month. But what’s she’s doing in her bedroom would make a lot of mothers blush. Renee is a “Cam Girl” – just one of hundreds of young girls who compete for attention on the Web by putting webcam photos and videos of themselves online. – Odd Line

This is the true story of girls, teenage girls who make much more money than many people in Kenya to do “teen modelling”. Basically, you have young pretty girls whose pictures and videos of themselves in various places and in various outfits (sometimes near pornographic) can be found on some website. Then, people pay $15 – $25 per month for access to these pictures and videos. Interesting?

Click here to read all about it. Can you imagine a teenage girl making Kshs 180,000/- a month for just ‘teen modelling’?? Keep in mind that there is nothing explicitly pornographic. How much money do you make a month?

If American and European girls can do this. can Kenyan girls achieve the same success? More importantly, is this kind of work ethically correct? What do you think, dear readers?

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The Coming Disruption: Teen Knowledge Work

Kelvin — Mon, 23 May 2011 05:27:57 +0000

Dale Stephens is 19. If you or your business would like to consult with him for a day, his published rate on his website is $5,000. Imagine that, a 19 year old who is confident enough to charge Kshs 400,000/- a day for his consulting services.

Dale’s story is from an interesting articles titled The Coming Disruption: Teen Knowledge Work (click to read it).

The article describes the phenomenon that is young people (mostly barely out of their teens) are no longer getting employed but choose to try their hand at starting businesses. This is a very major change from just a generation ago when our parents would seek and hold on to jobs for most of their lives.

What do you think of this new trend? I’m all for it – instead of adding onto the high unemployment numbers, young people should instead try to create jobs – ama?

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On Online Jobs…

wham — Thu, 19 May 2011 06:21:01 +0000

So recently we’ve been getting a whole lot of emails from people wanting us to “hook them up” with online jobs. The emails usually sound like they were written by very sincere very qualified people who just want to make money online.

It seems the question on every one of these people’s mind is “How exactly do you get an online job?”

The sad truth is that this is an area that is very much a target of scammers i.e. it is very easy to get cheated while trying to ‘find an online job’. Why is it so? Because most of the time the people looking for online jobs have little knowledge on how to go about it and most of them are too desperate to get an online job therefore they believe anything and quickly jump at the thought of joining up yet another juicy online program that promises easy riches.

What no one tells you is that working online is hard. Extremely hard. It is just as hard, if not harder, than working offline, or anywhere else. Look, no one is going to give you free money – sawa? So if you see someone promising easy overnight riches then you should be wary of two things:

That person is probably going to steal from you in some way
The ‘job’ is going to be nothing like he described it (if it exists) and certainly in no way easy

Now, this is not meant to scare you. Legitimate online jobs do exist. In fact, most of the people who write for Like Chapaa earn a significant portion of their money online.

The important thing is to be prepared to work incredibly hard. When you start working online, you will quickly realise that your competition is Indians, Pakistanis, people from Eastern Europe and people from many other countries in the hundreds. The people with jobs are far fewer than the people who want jobs so you will have to work that much harder to be seen and considered from amongst the crowd.

The fruits of your labour, however, are very sweet. I would argue that money made online ni tamu kushinda zote zingine!

We’re preapring some more articles on this topic due to public demand so stay tuned to Like Chapaa. In the meantime, have a look at these classics:

See you soon.

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The 3 Easiest Ways To Make More Money

Kelvin — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 08:09:22 +0000

1. Freelancing
This is simple – take your skills and find someone who will pay you to do something for them.

Advantages of Freelancing

It is extremely easy to get started
It is extremely easy to set a price for your work – there are lots of example to copy.
The relationship between work and income is very clear – if you work, you get paid certainly.

Disadvantages of Freelancing

Freelancing is hard work and freelancers often get stuck in a “rat race” i.e. you need to work to eat
It is hard to raise your fees and there may be an upper limit to how much you can charge
It is sometimes difficult to know if your skill set can earn you money. For example, not many people may care about how fast you can read a book.

How do you get paid?

Per hour
Per project
‘Subscription’-based – for example, “you have access to my expertise for 3 months”

Examples: web designer, marketing consultant, babysitter, freelance writer, programmer, etc

2. Productizing
This is related to freelancing – instead of, for example, offering yourself as a freelance marketing consultant, you could write a book on marketing and sell it. When you make your knowledge into a product, you can generate revenue even when you are sleeping. However, while this method can generate higher revenues, it is also higher risk as you are not sure if anyone will buy your products.

Advantages

You can make money even when you are sleeping, or sick, or…
It is easier to make more money than in freelancing – you can sell your book to hundreds of thousands of people but you cannot write for that many people as a freelancer in a short period of time
You get more freedom

Disadvantages

The logistics of selling products include specialist software like shopping carts, payment processors, email marketing software etc
You need to know how to market your product online – this may include blogging, SEO, social networks, etc
It is difficult to know who will buy your product, at how much, and how to price it
The Internet is a sea of horribly crappy products and so it is difficult to convince people that yours is any different

How to earn money

Freemium model where you give something for free and then charge for upgrades e.g. DukaPress
Charge for single products like books or ebooks e.g. Kiosk 3CB
Create a product where you can charge recurring fees e.g online courses e.g. Membership Site Masterplan
Create valuable content and then market affiliate products. Here’s how to do this.

Examples: OBS, Kiosk 3CB, DukaPress, WooThemes etc

3. Getting a Higher Salary
Truth is, the vast majority of us are employed so this is an obvious strategy. Yet, very few of us think about it in this way. To get a higher salary, you need to improve your skills at work and demonstrate this to your boss. Hopefully, this will translate into increased responsibilities at work and a higher salary. Simple enough for you?

Advantages

You already know what to do! Just make your boss happy with the quality of your work.
Salary increases tend to follow you through to the end of your career and they are cumulative. If you get a 10% salary increase, it will likely continue like this for the rest of your career and often can only go upwards.

Disadvantages

It is hard to know exactly what kind of behaviour will get you a raise
Everything is out of your control and depends on your boss’ discretion and your company’s budget

Which road will you take?Similar Posts:

Enter Elance – Part 3

Crystal — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:21:21 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

Enter Elance – Part 2

Crystal — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:10:57 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

Enter Elance – Part 1

Crystal — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:04:17 +0000

I’ve been a GAF member for just over two months, but I’ve only been active since the 1st of August. So far, I’ve earned $ 180, which is not a bad start. It’s hard, because some days I have work from three different clients and I’m afraid to sleep, then after that I get four days where I win no bids at all.

The best strategy is to make as many bids as you can. I try to do a minimum of five bids a day, and some days I do as many as ten. The down side of this system is that I may end up with more work than I can handle. Luckily, the clients I’ve worked with are happy and patient, and some are willing to wait a few days before I start on their projects. In a way, you seem more talented when you have a waiting list, so the clients are more convinced you’re worth their money.

Once you get to the level of having too much work, you might want to do what Wham called working smart. You could gather your own team and outsource some projects to them. That way, you work less and earn more.

It’s a system that wouldn’t work for me because as much as I enjoy making money, I enjoy the writing more. Unless I’m really broke, I only bid on jobs that look like fun, so having someone else do the work would take the pleasure away. For me. Fortunately for capitalism, very few people think like I do. *cheeky grin*

Being a one-woman operation seriously drops your earning potential though, because no matter how good you are and how much coffee you drink, you can only work so many hours in a day. Besides, coffee makes me hyper.

There are two ways to fix this problem. Not the coffee problem – that one is beyond salvaging, so I just stick with black lemon tea. The only way you can boost your income – without becoming an employer – is to bid on bigger jobs. On sites like GAF that’s not quite possible, because the average gig pays $30. The site was started as a way for employers to get their work done on the cheap, so the low cost is part of their strategy. I thought about finding another site, so I tried Elance.

Elance is a slightly high-end provider compared to GAF. The lowest you can legally bid on a job is $50, and they have projects with a budget of up to $100,000. Per job.

Of course, Elance is harder to get into than GAF. I opened my account in July, then ignored it for a few weeks because I had to take a test to enter. *Groan* Eventually, I gathered the guts to do the test. It’s multiple choice, and it’s open book. Each question gives you a link where you can find answers, but since the test is only 40 minutes long, you may not have time to use the links.

There’s a resource called Elance University that gives you all the material for the test, and it’s a good idea to browse the campus before you sit to answer questions. EU gives information on where to get jobs, making successful bids, how to get paid and things like that. You can either read the material or watch a video. It’s pretty basic stuff, but there’s a lot of volume. I had to hang out there all day before I felt ready, and I still scored just 80%.

After you pass the test, you have to verify your phone number so they know you’re legit. It’s a pretty straightforward thing. When you click ‘verify’, you get an alert that asks you what time you want to be called. You can choose ‘right now’ or ‘in two minutes’ or whatever. The autovoice thingie gives you a call and while your phone is ringing, a code appears on your screen, which you read out when the autovoice tells you to. Voilà, you’re legit.

… to be continued …

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

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