Photo by taiyofj.

I was recently involved with a web magazine that used the Freelance Switch job board to advertise for a few positions. The quality of applicants was fantastic, compared with those some other sources referred.

The positions were ideal for freelancers who wanted some of their work to be regular, without having a ‘job’ and losing the benefits of a freelance career. They involved doing some writing and self-editing two or three times a week, taking up maybe an hour at a time.

We got far more submissions than we had jobs to fill, of course, and I spent most of the week going through applications and sorting the best from the rest.

It wasn’t a particularly fun experience—writing and editing is what I do best—but I did learn a lot about why some freelancers aren’t getting the jobs they apply for. Here are some tips on landing them—a list based on the things that applicants at our magazine impressed us with and annoyed us with. Consider this practical feedback!

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About 9 months ago, we launched our paid freelance job board here at the ‘Switch. As you may know it’s an unusual job board because we actually charge the freelancers a subscription fee. At the time we caught a bit of flak for it but proceeded anyway believing in the idea.

$7 a Month for 5 Jobs a Day

9 months on and I’m happy to report the job board is still going strong and recently the number of jobs has been increasing slowly but steadily to the point where we have about 150 jobs coming in a month – or in other words 5 new jobs a day. Continue Reading

Image by quemas.

Most freelancers are working on a variety of different projects at any given time and are constantly facing a decision between different options, and choosing which projects to take and which ones to pass up can be a daunting challenge.

Most of us typically make these decisions based on factors like the amount of money that can be made, the time the job will require, and our current availability. Obviously, these decisions aren’t always easy.

While the factors of money, time and availability will be major influences on any decision that you make, they don’t always tell the whole story. If you were to pass on a particular job, what would you be able to do with your time, and how would it affect your overall situation? Opportunity cost allows us to see the complete picture. Continue Reading

Image by patty_colmer.

Looking to make some more money, I checked out a bunch of the more popular freelance bidding sites a few weeks back and subscribed to the RSS feeds to see who was looking for a writer.

Now, I’ve known a few designers and coders who’ve found work through these sites but for me, I haven’t even seen a single project I wanted to bid on, let alone gotten any work.

It’s not that none of the work seemed interesting. The problem is that the majority of the postings I read were flat out horrifying!

One example:

I need someone to write 100 articles for a web site. I can only afford to pay $1 per article but this may lead to more work later. Also, all articles you submit will be checked through Copyscape.

I’m not sure I even need to say anything about the rate being offered, but “may lead to more work later”? Continue Reading

Image by Seeding-Chaos.

This post is part 5 of 5 in our four-author series on perfect pricing and rates.

Most freelancers hate dealing with pricing. We would rather focus on what we do best, and as a result, pricing sometimes doesn’t get enough thought and attention.

Pricing obviously has a huge impact on how much money we make, but what about its affect on potential clients?

Ways that Pricing Impacts Clients

While these items are not absolutes, they certainly should be examined and taken into consideration as you are developing a pricing structure for your services.

1. Their Level of Expectation

When clients see a high price tag they’re going to expect a high quality of work. Of course, it’s possible that the client will not have an accurate idea of what price is high and what is not, but most will also look at the prices of some other freelancers and compare.

If clients expect a higher level of quality with a high price, is it safe to assume that they will expect a lower quality of work with services that are lower priced? Not always. Continue Reading

You get cranky when you’re hungry, so it’s no wonder that freelancers can feel starved when they’re lacking projects. After all, freelancing is all about feast (having too much work) and famine (not having enough). And as someone who’s regularly gone through these ups and downs, I can tell you that it’s normal to experience, or feel like you’re experiencing, a famine.

It’s not a comfortable thing, either. Mainly because it makes you doubt what you’re doing. Beginning freelancers that I’ve spoken to all report extreme doubt in the beginning. Get through a few famines, though, and you’ll build a tougher skin (or hunger resistance!)

Whether you feel like you’re in a rut, or you’re actually digging through the couch for spare change, it can bring up some huge fears about job security. And even though you dread going back to your 9-to-5 job, you may think of heading straight back to the comfort of a steady gig when you feel a famine coming on. For me, I always get myself into a panic thinking that there are no more opportunities out there, and I will be forced to go back to the corporate world, driving over an hour a day to some boring cubicle job that I despise. That’s always my biggest fear. But on the flip side, that scenario doesn’t sound so bad when I think about the prospect of having to constantly hunt down the bacon. Continue Reading

Skimming through the comments on the recent FSW poll about freelance job bidding sites, there’s not a lot of love out there for the freelance bidding sites like Elance, Get-A-Freelancer, Guru, Rent-A-Coder and the like – and it’s no wonder when you see projects offering to pay you $1 per custom designed t-shirt image!

The general consensus seems to be that in the following circumstances they can be of some value…

• If you’re a student looking to get some extra cash and experience
• If you’re a freelancer living somewhere with a lower cost of living that allows you to take advantage of being paid lower rates for jobs
• If you’re just getting started and your main focus is on building up your portfolio
• If you want to hone your skills in a new area
• If you’re looking for quick turn-around jobs

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Each week I get two or three requests for design work. They come sometimes from contacts, but more often than not they come from random people. Sometimes they even come from web-famous people or well-known companies. What is interesting about this though is that I no longer freelance, advertise for work or even have a portfolio.

Actually it can be pretty hard to contact me, though I did finally put up a little website for myself two weeks ago.

Although these days I turn away all this work, for some years I did in fact work as a freelance designer and happily always had more work than I could do – despite being inclined to overwork.

So how do you get web design jobs? Or any other type of job? Here are some things that have worked for me. Continue Reading

Can you believe the calendar is about to tick over to June? Months seem to be getting faster, as if time is in a hurry to get somewhere. Well with another month gone it’s nice to know that FreelanceSwitch is still growing with every passing week. After doing a little Google search, I think we can safely say that you’ve helped make the ‘Switch the biggest freelancing blog around! So thank you to all our authors, our visitors and most importantly our readers – you! So on with some FreelanceSwitch news:

Text Link Adverts
First of all in my efforts to look after the business-side of the site, we have now added Text-Link-Ads to the site. What you probably already know about TLA is that if you sign up you can get yourself a $100 worth of free ads with their starter kit – here’s our listing. What you probably don’t know and certainly I didn’t know until I got an email this morning is that one of our readers designed the TLA banners! Long live freelancers!

Job Postings Free for 31 More Days
For anyone wanting to post freelance job ads, don’t forget our board is still free but only for 31 more days, so get in there now! Having said that I can promise the job board is going to stay pretty cheap (though admittedly not free), as we realise that for most people looking for a freelancer the idea of paying what might amount to a significant portion of the job just to find someone to do the job doesn’t make much sense.

New Characters
Much as we love the little guys here on FreelanceSwitch, they are being replaced with new custom illustrations. The current set have been based on stock illustrations from the always useful iStockPhoto and have brought us a long way, but unfortunately are open to other people leveraging our brand. Fortunately this means we get to hire a very talented freelancer named Scotty who has already crafted our first FSw character and is now busy making up the team!

So in any case, thanks for helping us make May such a big month. As always we have plenty on our plate for next month including those forums and resource directory that I’m yet to finish (yikes!), more mini sites like the rate calculator we recently put up, lots of product reviews from our new product reviewer Dickie, and wallpapers featuring our new characters. And because I think we’re going to hit 10,000 subscribers this month, we can launch the freelancer survey which I’m very excited about but which will probably be way more work than I’m imagining

We now have one more job resource for you to bookmark: The FreelanceSwitch Job Board!

Now you can take advantage of the fastest growing freelance hub on the net and list your freelance gig to thousands of freelance writers, programmers, designers and just about every other profession under the sun! And because we’d like this job board to go off, we’re giving you a full two months to use the job board completely free of charge. That’s right, post a job before July 1st and you won’t pay a cent!

So take a look, let us know if you have any feedback, and good luck with your job hunting and candidate searching.

Update 2: In 2009 we updated this post. With the web changing every day, the best list of job sites changes all the time. Go and read The Monster List of Freelancing Job Sites 2009 Update.

Update: Have added 48 extra resources + New Non-English section, keep those suggestions coming! This post has been translated into Spanish by Alfonso at cultura, comunicación y diseño. Thanks Alfonso!

Image from iStockPhoto

When it comes to freelancing, one of the biggest challenges can be finding work. Even the most successful of freelancers will experience a lean month here and there, so it pays to have as many sources of potential work as possible. That’s why we’ve compiled a monster list of job sites from around the net. There is sure to be a site in here that is listing a job tailor made for you!

Before we get to the list though I would like to mention that as FreelanceSwitch is fast becoming the destination of choice for freelancers we will be adding our own job board for listing freelance gigs. It’s arriving in a fortnight and for the first three months job listings will be totally free of charge to help get the board running.

As with all our lists if we’ve missed a crucial resource, please do send it in, or add it to the comments. We go through these lists every week or so and add in new resources to keep them up to date. Also you will find that we have tagged each site by the types of freelancers who will find it useful as well as the locations it may be applicable for. And now without further ado, here they are:

Traditional Job Listings

These are your bread’n'butter job classifieds, sites from around the web… Continue Reading

JobPile – now that is a lot of jobs in one spot…

If you look up to the top right corner of this site you will see that we in fact are planning on introducing a job board right here on FSw – a natural thing to do if you have so many freelancers in the one spot!

Until we do however there are plenty of other job boards to visit like Krop, 37Signals’ Gigboard, AuthenticJobs and well plenty of other sites. But what if you can’t be bothered to keep an eye on them all? Well thankfully the nice people at ArtyPapers have put together a site called JobPile that aggregates a dozen or so of the best job boards all in one place.

So good luck finding those jobs, and if you know of any freelance job sites let us know as we are compiling a one-stop resource of all the best places to get those gigs…