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.

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.