When I first started freelancing I was thrilled to find all the freelance job boards online. I was excited to see that there were so many jobs posted each and every day for me to bid on and I knew I was going to make a ton of money. What I learned was completely different.
When I first started bidding on jobs, I had no problem bidding a bit low because I was new and I needed to build up my reputation. I figured the best way to do this was to bid a bit lower than the rest of the people, get the bid, do my best work, and get a good review. It worked. I was loaded with work. I ended up working around 16 hours per day. Yes I was bringing in money and yes I was able to find a lot of work.
Then something changed. I found that clients were not willing to pay what they used to pay anymore. They were paying pennies for hours’ worth of work. I could no longer make even 10 dollars per hour while working on a freelance job site. So what was the problem? One of the main problems is there are hundreds of people from third world countries that can work for pennies. They don’t have to deal with the cost of living that we in the US have to deal with. If they make 2 dollars per day than they are doing great. Clients accept these freelancers to do the work, then when the work is not up to par they get mad and no longer hire any freelancers.
The next problem that I found that there were very few clients from the US. This posed the problem that the clients were demanding an amount of work in a time period that was not possible. They are very demanding and rude. Isn’t that why we decided to become freelancers in the first place? Didn’t we decide to do this so that we didn’t have to work for those kind of people anymore? Wasn’t it so that we could work at our own pace and do work that we enjoyed? It is not like that on freelance job boards anymore.
Finally, I found that if a client does not pay you, there is absolutely nothing you can do. You can submit a complaint but you are told that it is not the websites problem that you were not paid. Even though they have already taken their share of your earnings out of your account they do not care if you get paid. This is how people end up losing money on freelance job boards. You accept the work, then the company takes their cut out of your account, this can put you in the negative or take away from what you have already made. Then you do the work, turn it in, and the client disappears.
Freelance job boards used to be a great place to find freelance work, now they are a great place to waste your time. If the owners of the job boards would put some work into them, regulate the payments, and ensure that the people who keep these sites going are actually paid than they could get back to being a great place for freelancers. For now they should be avoided and you should find other ways to work at home.
