Well, you could do some yelling and screaming and run about the house tearing your hair out.  I don’t recommend it, but you could.  You could also send off a nasty email cursing the buyer and all their family to the seventh generation.

Guess what?  I don’t recommend that either.

If they were nice enough to inform you they were going with someone else then I recommend a polite thank-you note and move on.

Nothing you can do is going to get you this job so there’s no reason to worry about it.  However, the fact that they put the time into the original discussion means that they are perfectly willing to consider working with you in the future.

So don’t do anything to mess that up.

One of the most common reasons that this happens is that the client found someone else who was better for this job.

It doesn’t mean they found someone who was better overall, just better for this job.  It may be that when their next opening comes up they’ll immediately think of you and fire off an email.

In the meantime, pick yourself up and work on something else.

Networking and patience are two of the keys to a successful freelance career.

Here’s an example of what I mean by patience.  As many of you know I don’t just work on oDesk, but I use other freelance sites as well.   I recently got my first job at one of those other sites:  after only five months of trying.

I admit I wasn’t spending all day every day looking for work on that site:  there were times I had more than enough work and stopped looking on new sites.  However I was looking fairly frequently and while there weren’t a lot of jobs that caught my eye, there were some that I would have liked to have done that I didn’t get.

So I spent time polishing my profile and figuring out the ins and outs of the site.  I tried a few different methods of bidding and finally won a job.

Yes it took a while, and more than I would have liked, but since I wasn’t depending purely on that site I had the time to spend getting it right and not ranting and raving about the injustice that meant I didn’t get a job there  until now.

It would have been just as pointless as any of the other rants I mentioned at the beginning of the post.

You need to look forward not backward.

As Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam goes:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
     Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Freelancers need to live by that dictum.  You can’t change the past, only the future.

In other news:  I’m now writing for another blog as well as this one.  If you’re interested in technology why not come over and see what’s going on at Gizmotechnet.   Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

 

She couldn’t find the page, which was probably the main oConomy page here which currently shows 248 providers working and 95,545 registered int the system.  I admit that those numbers weren’t calculated to put a new provider in her happy place, but they don’t tell the whole story either.

It isn’t showing how many providers on the network have jobs, but how many people were actively logging time on the oDesk client at the time the numbers were generated.   Given that oDesk is a 24 hour global marketplace those numbers will fluctuate throughout the day and really aren’t anything to worry about.  They certainly don’t reflect the number of providers who are currently employed.  (I expect they’re short by at least one or two orders of magnitude).

Now let’s look at some other numbers from the same page.  There are almost 100,000 providers, and together they’ve earned just under 40 million dollars, which works out to an average of almost U$400/per provider to date.   Since not every provider on oDesk has worked, and that some profiles are so incomplete that the providers are never going to work, the numbers have nowhere to go but up.

When it comes to getting a job, none of those numbers matter.

As I said in the headline:  Chance only matters when it’s random.  oDesk buyers do not select providers by rolling dice. (Well Nelson might, but he’s a special case.)

Buyers select the provider they think is at the intersection of highest quality and lowest price. They go for the most value for money within their budget.

It’s not random at all.  Never has been, never will be.  This is business, not gambling and buyers don’t want to throw their money away.

The end result is that you’re not competing with all 95,544 other providers on the network for any given job.  In fact you’re rarely competing against as many as 10 serious competitors for any given position.  Those still don’t sound like good odds, but that’s just chopped four orders of magnitude off the ratio.

It gets better because they aren’t odds.

It’s not random.

It’s deterministic, and some of the factors are ones you know about and can control and the others are unknowable and uncontrollable.  However even the ones you don’t know and can’t control aren’t random chance.

If you write a great cover letter and your skills fit the job you are very likely to get it.  If you can demonstrate that your skills match your rates you’re even closer.

I’ll go so far as to say that any competent provider with a decent profile (including a picture) and portfolio is guaranteed to be able to find work at or slightly above their category average if they put the time in.  The work is there, and the buyers want it done more than they want their money.

Let me leave you with one other thought about statistics:

While statistics may say only one in ten people can succeed at something, they never tell you whether you’re the one or one of the nine.

I often receive questions from freelance copywriters asking me to help them find the “right niche”.

That’s a reasonable request.

Finding the right niche for your freelance copywriting or writing business will help bring some focus to your marketing, and will help your prospects identify you as an expert in that area.

For instance, if you choose to become a specialist in the insurance industry, prospective clients within that industry will be reassured that you know their business and speak their language.

However, there are more ways to “niche” yourself than simply by choosing a particular industry or industry sector as your area of specialty.

You can also create a name for yourself as being the specialist in a particular medium. You can focus just on print, or just on web writing for instance.

Choosing a niche either by industry or medium is often as far as freelancers will go in terms of separating themselves from their competition.

But you can go further than that.

Instead of just thinking about a “niche” to focus on, sit back and ask yourself a broader question…

“What is the best way to position my skills and services in a way that differentiates me from other writers or copywriters?”

Here are a few examples of ways in which you might position yourself:

• The 24-Hour Copywriter (For those super urgent jobs)
• Multilingual Copywriting (English, Spanish and French, for instance)
• Y-Gen Copywriting (We know the 16-24 age group)
• Web-Ready-Copy (Copy plus design plus code)
• Fixed-Price Copy (We stand by our price list. No surprises.)
• Fast Content Writing (Fast content creation for web sites)

The list is potentially endless.

Think about it a little, particularly if your own freelance website simply presents you as a “freelance copywriter” or “freelance writer”.

Unless you’re some kind of celebrity in the industry, it’s not enough just to describe your baseline skill…writing or copywriting.

You have to work harder than that.

Maybe find yourself a niche, by industry or medium.

Or find some other way to position yourself and your services.

But whatever you do, be sure to find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

oDesk indicates your reputation in a few ways.  Everyone should know how the feedback system works, and if you don’t just drop me a line or put in a comment and I’ll be happy to expand on it here.  The other aspect of your reputation is how well you rank when buyers do a search.

The basic system works pretty well, it sorts by whatever criteria you specify, and uses the number of oDesk as a weighting factor.  So if you are searching for providers with a perfect feedback rating, you’ll see all the 5.00 rated providers with the one with the most hours listed first.

I like that as someone with a very large amount of hours has demonstrated their reliability.

If you need to you can also filter providers by anything from pay rates to hours worked or even whether they’re affiliated with a provider company.   In all cases your results will show up based on your primary search criteria weighted by oDesk hours.

It’s a good system, but it does have flaws:

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

I recently raised my rates and so I wanted to see where I was sitting among the writers working on oDesk.   I think I’m one of the better writers in the system and wanted to make sure my rates were in the same range as my peers.  So I went to the provider search, set my filters to exclude anyone with zero hours and did a search for writers based on hourly rate, highest first.

The first four pages were all programmers.

That’s right, none of the top forty providers that come up when you do a search for writers by pay rate are actually writers.

If you search by feedback it appears to get a little better, the fourth ranked candidate has writer listed in their job description.  However, this person is primarily a programmer and has not taken any writing tests or done any writing work on oDesk.  Going over their feedback you can see that the person is a very good communicator with excellent English skills, however that does not matter if someone is looking for a candidate for a writing job since this person doesn’t do those kind of jobs.

It’s not until number eight that we see anyone who has actually done writing work, and even then it’s only a fraction of their work history, which is mostly administrative support.

The next two entries in my search are people who are primarily working jobs from oDesk’s writing category.  One’s primarily a transcriptionist and the other’s doing editing work.  At least they’re on the first page.

The sad thing is that this is the best result I’ve ever seen for writers when searching the writing category.

If you search by portfolio items there is only one writer who comes up on the first page, and that’s only because the person in question spent an entire afternoon doing nothing but add items to her portfolio.  That got her 78 items, and second place.  It also gives her the distinction of being the only one on the first page with any writing samples in her portfolio.

I don’t know what the other categories are like, but from my perspective, and that of many other writers this is a serious problem.  If a buyer is searching for a writer, they should be able to find them without wading through dozens of providers in other categories.

The problem is that complaining alone doesn’t do any good, we need to find a way to fix the problem.

I think part of the problem may lie in the fact that many providers may list multiple job categories on their profile and primarily only work in one of them.   One possibility could be to get providers to list one category as their primary, and others as secondary and then provide the ability to filter providers by primary or all categories.

That way if you filter by primary category only you should be able to get providers who focus in that field, whereas if you don’t filter at all you could get the present results.

It’s a tough question, but that’s the best idea I’ve been able to come up with.

It’s not really changing the basic algorithm, which appears to work fairly well, just allowing for better filtering for relevant providers.  Having said that I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, but I think it might go a long way toward resolving this issue.

I’ve been writing about money a lot lately, and not just because it’s one of my favorite things.   Today’s topic is a grab-bag of tips that can help you make more money for your work on oDesk.

Let’s start with one obvious fact that doesn’t always seem obvious to some of the posters in the Community:

oDesk wants you to bill high

That’s right, it’s in oDesk’s best interest for you to have as high a billing rate as you can manage to pull in.  They don’t want you to get jobs by underbidding everyone else, they want you to get jobs by proving you’re worth more to the buyer than everyone else.  oDesk gets paid by the buyers just like you do.  They want you to make more money because the more you make the more they make.

They have an even greater incentive for providers to raise rates than most providers do because they only get ten percent of the bill rate.  So if I make ninety dollars they make ten.   If I’m working at a charge rate of $1.00/hr they only get $0.10/hr and that’s not really worth it for either of us.

So if someone tells you there’s a conspiracy to keep rates low just laugh at them.  oDesk isn’t going to have anything to do with a conspiracy to make oDesk less money.

Okay, now that we have that squared away, on to the tips:

Tip 1) Don’t Do Data Entry

Lots of people put data entry down as one of their skills, and in some ways it makes sense.  for the most part it’s a job anyone can do if they just take care and pay attention to what they’re doing.

It’s also the lowest paying job category on oDesk

One reason it’s low paying is that it’s essentially commodity work.  There’s no way to put your own unique stamp on data entry so you cannot build a reputation as being the best person for it the way you can with some other fields.

It also doesn’t require any special training or even skill at the English language.

I don’t mean to disparage the job, but if you want to make a lot of money on oDesk it’s one category you should avoid.  The money isn’t there.

Tip 2) Don’t Lower Your Rate On An Invitation

Here’s an example of how lowering your rate can come back to bite you.  A provider with a very high rate (twice the category average and it’s a high average rate category) received an invitation to a position.  When they accepted the invitation, they offered to do the job for about a quarter of their billing rate.

What happened?

They were turned down because they charged too much.

Personally, I never lower my rate on an invitation and here’s why:  Anyone who invites me to do a job has already seen my rate before making the offer.  They wouldn’t have offered if the rate wasn’t acceptable, so why should I drop it?

Also, if I do drop my rate, I’m sending at least one of two messages:  a) I’m desperate; b) I have no confidence in the value of my work.

I don’t want to send either message.  The other thing that might happen is that if I do drop it the buyer may push to see how low I am willing to go.  If I drop my rate by seventy-five percent, maybe I’ll drop it by eighty percent, or possibly even more.  I don’t want to get caught in that trap.

The other problem is that the amount you were paid stays on your profile.  If you quote $50.00/hr and all your jobs are at $15.00/hr there’s no reason any buyer will ever pay you $50.00/hr.   You’ve sent the message that your real rate is $15.00/hr.

Lower rates on past jobs don’t hurt you if they show a steady pattern of increasing rates.  There’s nothing wrong with showing a few jobs at $5.00/hr, then $10.00/hr, $15.00/hr and so on.  That shows a normal upwards progression and doesn’t make the buyer think you’ve been undercharging all along, but rather that your rate has been increasing with time.

Tip 3) Let Your Profile Fit Your Description

Provider profiles are a huge subject, and I could go on for hours about them.  Right now though, I just want to focus on one aspect.

Make sure your skills reflect your area.  If you’re a writer who dabbles in programming, list your writing skills first, not your skills coding Flash or debugging HTML.  Further to that, if you have multiple areas of expertise, list the one you most want to work with first.  That’s the one you should be focusing on.

This doesn’t apply if your preferred skill is data entry and your other is voice-over, since those have the lowest and highest average pay rates respectively.  If one skill is going to pay you much more, focus on that one.

Okay, I’ve started you off.  If anyone has other tips for raising their average rate feel free to send them along.  Everyone wants to make more money and as long as your work is worth it there’s no reason you shouldn’t be working at the top of your category.

Money.

I bet that got your attention; it gets mine.

We’ve talked about rates before, but what I want to discuss today is setting them.  One of the best tools for setting your rate on oDesk is the oConomy.  It lets you see just how much people in your field are getting paid so that you can see what the market can actually bear.

I’m a writer, so let’s look at the writing category:

This graph shows how provider’s hourly rates break down against the number of jobs.  I got this information from the very useful Rate Distributions by Job Category section of the oConomy.   If you haven’t looked at it already you really need to.

As you can see, while the majority of jobs cluster around the lower end of the pay scale, there are noticeable spikes that correspond to pay rates of $5.00/hr, $10.00/hr, $15.00/hr, $20.00/hr and $25.00/hr.  The numbers are skewed a little high because the graph shows billing rates, but the message is clear:  If you’re currently making $10.00/hr and want to increase your rate you may as well jump straight to $15.00/hr, or if you’re at $15.00/hr you should go to $20.00/hr without bothering with any of the intermediate rates.

However, also note that the vast majority of jobs pay $10.00/hr or less so you may want to take that into consideration too.

Further down they list breakdowns by sub-category so you can see that the average rate for technical writing is $12.75/hr while for blog and article writing it’s $8.03/hr.

While it’s not exactly writing, many writers may consider data entry– but be warned it has the lowest average pay of any sub-category, drawing just $3.13/hr.  I don’t know about you, but that rate’s enough to scare me off.

Before we go any further I want to throw out one more set of numbers.  This is a more general chart, showing the average hourly rate for job hires over the last year.  You can find this information on the Rate Statistics page of the oConomy.

If you look closely you’ll see that the majority of oDesk jobs come between $13.00/hr and $15.00/hr and that the rate has stayed pretty constant over the course of the last year.  It’s important to note that these numbers reflect the pay rates at which people were actually hired, not the rates they would like to be paid.

Now that we’ve got the numbers down we can talk about what triggered this post.

Most of you probably know there have been a lot of posts on the oDesk Community about wages lately.  I discussed one of those threads in a previous post here.  Well, the discussion hasn’t stopped, and the minimum wage adherents are out in full force.

Looking at the numbers I don’t see any reason why oDesk should implement a minimum wage.  The most common suggestion is $5.00/hr and the numbers clearly show that the average hourly rate on oDesk is over twice that amount.

In fact, according to the rate distribution chart there are only two sub-categories that average below $5.00/hr:  Personal Assistant at $4.88/hr and Data Entry at $3.13/hr.   Both are under Administrative Support and personally I would consder $4.88/hr close enough to $5.00/hr that it doesn’t matter.  So with the glaring exception of Data Entry, almost any average job on oDesk should be paying more than $5.00/hr.

Yes there will always be buyers who want the world for nothing, but the numbers clearly show that they aren’t getting it, and that $1.00/hr jobs are very much the exception not the rule.  Going back to writing for a moment; if you’re an average writer there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be making an average of at least $8.00/hr, especially since the average billing rate for working writers on oDesk is $9.53/hr.

Remember that number:  We’ll come back to it.

Now that we know the average, we have somewhere to base our rates.  If you want to charge significantly more than the going rate you need to be able to provide your buyer with a benefit for that additional cost.  If you cannot convince your buyer that you’re worth more than the average rate for your category you won’t get any jobs.

I tend to read peoples’ profiles as well as the threads they post in.   It’s often very interesting reading, especially when it’s someone complaining about the low wages on oDesk, because it tells me what kind of experience they have had on the site.

Here’s an example:  I checked the profile of one person who had been taking part in the discussion of low wages and discovered that they had only taken two relevant tests, with an average score around the 55th percentile, and was looking for $25.00/hr to start.  This was a writer with an error in the first sentence of their profile overview.

As it stands that person is not going to get work on oDesk.

To begin with they’re charging almost three times the average rate for the category.  Remember, your average writing job bills at $9.53/hr which means the provider earns $8.57/hr.   Regardless of their background, without feedback and given their test scores they’re currently sitting squarely in the middle of the pack, if not a little below.

This isn’t an isolated case.

I’ve seen several people complaining about wages lately who have profiles that show no oDesk experience and a billing rate that’s two or three times the category average.  Unless you have an amazing profile and a fantastic portfolio that’s just not going to cut it.

You can work steadily for more than your category average on oDesk.  Nelson, Bill and I all do, and so do a number of others.  You just have to prove to the buyers that you’re worth it.

Buyers can and will pay you what you’re worth.

The catch is they’re going to base what you’re worth on what they see on oDesk and the oDesk marketplace, not your own opinion.

I recommend that every new provider start by setting their rate near the category average and then moving up in rate as they build hours and earn feedback.  Show the community what you’re worth.  Once you have good feedback and enough hours to build a real history you will find you can raise your rates.  Test scores matter less then too.

So next time you see one of those threads complaining about low rates on oDesk take a look at the oConomy.  What you see might surprise you.

I didn’t always agree with his English, but it’s hard to fault the sentiment.

If you’re a long-term reader of the blog, and I hope you are, some of this may sound familiar.  That’s because I’ve posted on a similar subject before.  The reason I’m posting again is that it’s a topic that keeps coming up in the oDesk Community and I wanted to bring it to people’s attention one more time.

Let me put it another way:

Don’t lie in your profile

Don’t lie to your buyer.

Integrity comes from having your actions match your words.  If you’re not sure about something, say so.  Yes you may not get the job, but not getting a job you can’t do is going to hurt you a lot less than getting one you can’t do and possibly having to pay back the money and lose the time.

The biggest offense against integrity that I see on oDesk comes in provider self-assessments.  People will say they have a 5/5 skill in English, and their profile doesn’t reflect it.  Or they may show a brainbench score in the mid-sixties for one certification, and give themselves a self-assessed skill level of 5/5 in the same field.

That kind of disconnect is a big red flag to a buyer.

Think about it for a moment, really think about it.  If you say you have a much better score than the tests show the most likely reaction a buyer will have is that either you’re deluding yourself or you’re lying.

I don’t want to hire someone who’s delusional about their skills; and I definitely don’t want to hire someone who is lying to me.

Even if your test results are not the greatest, you can use your portfolio and your cover letter to show the buyer why you are the best person for their job.  Remember, the buyer’s concern is more can you do the job within their budget than anything else.

If you are concerned your test scores are too low don’t show them.

Most buyers are going to penalize you least for not showing scores, and most for showing contradictory scores, so remember that when you are building your profile.

As a professional freelancer your integrity is vital.  Don’t squander it on a contradictory profile.

One of the contributors posted a well-thought argument, complete with supporting figures that showed how low rates on freelance sites tend to drive out high rates.  The basic point was that if buyers see the same kind of job being done for $0.50/hr they are not going to pay $15.00 or even $5.00/hr.  It doesn’t make economic sense.

That’s a great description of how a commodity market works.

oDesk is not a commodity market.

All of our regular contributors work on oDesk.  None of us work for $0.50/hr and all of us get invitations from buyers.  If this was a pure commodity market that wouldn’t happen.  It isn’t, so it does.

Before I go any further, I’d better explain what I mean by a commodity market.  To me a commodity market is one where all products are essentially the same and they primarily compete on price.  Oil is a commodity, as is wheat and a number of other products.  The thing to remember is that when you are dealing with commodities no one source will give you a better product than any other.  A barrel of oil is a barrel of oil.  It will convert into the same number of gallons of gas whether it comes from the North Sea, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Kuwait.

The closest thing to a commodity on oDesk are the various article mills that post jobs where they offer to pay $2.00 or less per article for a dozen or more 500 word articles a day.  They may say they want excellent writers and perfect writing, but what they really want is merely competent writing and a serviceable product.  That’s a commodity:  any moderately skilled writer can produce those sorts of articles without much trouble.

Those are the kind of fixed price jobs that have driven down prices on a number of sites.

There is a way out of that trap though:  Don’t market your work as a commodity.

I get jobs because people want me.  So do Nelson and Bill.  While any one of the three of us could do a very good job for you on just about any writing project no two of us will do exactly the same job on any project.  We aren’t the same person, and we aren’t marketing ourselves as the same person.  We all market ourselves differently and we all work differently.

We aren’t selling commodities.

One common reaction to low rates is to suggest a minimum wage on oDesk.   It comes up regularly in the community and just as regularly gets squashed back down.  Personally I don’t support a minimum wage on oDesk for a number of reasons.

My first reason is simple.  A minimum wage acts to commoditize work and I don’t want to work in a commodity market.  The very idea of a minimum wage is that all work is the same and so it should be valued the same.  When it comes to writing and creating, that’s simply not true.  While I hate very low rates I have seen work and profiles on various sites where the work really wasn’t worth more than $0.50/hr.   Putting a minimum wage makes the argument my work is worth the same as poor work and I won’t accept that.

My second reason has to do with the nature of the online marketplace and how it differs from the offline world most people are used to.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say I have a fast food restaurant at the corner of 1st and Pine in Dogston and they introduce a minimum wage.   Meanwhile, there’s no minimum wage in Catsville over in the next county, but that doesn’t matter, I’m in Dogston so I’ll have to pay it.  My store has a fixed location and so do my workers, and that means I have no choice but to pay the minimum and they have no choice but to accept it.

It’s either that or take my business elsewhere, but there are costs involved in closing one business down, moving to another county and starting up there.  I probably can’t make the difference back in the labor savings so I have to accept the minimum wage.

It doesn’t work that way online.

If oDesk institutes a minimum wage, all the buyers who post jobs below that rate will go to other sites, and the providers who can only get those jobs will follow them.  After all, how much does it take to type otherjobsite(dot)com into a browser and go through the account setup process?

In the long run it will make no difference to most of these buyers and providers.

Now some people may argue that oDesk is better off without those buyers, but this is the real world where things are often buried in shades of gray.  Some of those buyers may be paying very low rates for article mill work and much higher rates for web design or other content work.   Some of the low rate providers may develop reputations that will move them up into the higher rate brackets.

The reason some of those buyers may pay different rates to different providers is simple:  They pay more when they value work higher.   So even if they are paying commodity rates for one job they may not pay it for another.

So remember, if you want to make more money on oDesk, you don’t need a minimum wage, you need to escape the commodity trap.

This was on Rent-a-Coder which uses  a different system than oDesk, but it got me thinking.

Before I go too much further I’ll give you a quick breakdown of how their process works.  Essentially the bidding process on RAC works like a private message board.  If you are interested in a project, you make a comment on it.  There is a place where you can put in a bid with your initial comment, or you can leave it blank.  If the buyer likes your comment they can reply, starting a dialog.  You can put in a monetary bid at any time, so if you end up deciding the project isn’t for you, you don’t ever have to commit to a price until you know what the job entails and whether you really want to do it.

There are some definite advantages to this system, especially when dealing with fixed-price rather than hourly jobs, and while oDesk doesn’t do things the same way, there are aspects of this that you can take to any site.

The simple fact that a buyer has posted a job on any site already tells you one important thing about them:

The project matters more to them than the money.

Remember, they’re willing to give up money in return for the project, so it’s the project that matters.

But what does this mean to me?  You may ask.

Simple, it means you’ll have a better chance of getting this or any job if you focus on the project before the payment.

Your buyer is completely uninterested in your finances.  The only thing they really want to know about you and money is whether giving you money will help them with their project.  If they feel you will give them the best value for their money then you’ll probably get the job.

The other thing to remember is that if you don’t get the job the money doesn’t matter.  You can be not paid any amount for a job you don’t do and you won’t get any richer.

Now I’m not saying that money isn’t important or that you should work for less than you are worth.  I’m saying that you need to focus on the job first.  There are some jobs I wouldn’t do for any money, and it makes complete sense to find out whether a job falls into that category before discussing money.

By focusing on the project rather than the money and communicating that to the buyer you will not only increase your chances of getting the job if you want it, but also of making it a good freelancing experience for both of you.  The discussion will let you know what’s really expected, not just the basics that are in the initial posting.  Once you know the details, you’ll have a much better idea of how much time and effort it will take to do the project.

This is a huge benefit when you’re considering taking on a fixed-price job.  There’s nothing worse than bidding low because you thought a job was going to be quick and easy, only to find out there was much more to it than you expected, and that you’re now working for pennies on the dollar.

That’s just one pitfall you could have avoided by focusing on the job rather than the payment.

One thing I like about oDesk is the test system.  They’re freely available to all, and provide a common ground to measure providers against each other.  However, the question that always comes up is do they do any good?

Read on to find out:

If you’ve taken any tests on oDesk you’ve probably seen the bit where they say that people who score in the top ten or twenty percent have their scores highlighted, and those in the top three receive a badge.

If you’re anything like me, you probably wondered if those badges really do mean anything.  Is it really worth the time and effort to get a higher score on a test you have already passed?

At least in my experience, the answer is yes!

As a writer, I’ve focused on the writing tests, but the principle holds for any field.

When I first joined oDesk I took some tests and earned fairly good scores.  Most of them were at least in the top twenty percent if not the top ten percent.   I was generally satisfied with my scores until I worked on the oDesk Insider book and started paying more attention to things like the fact a provider can retake some tests.

Being the bright lad that I am, I took the English Skills (Sentence Structure) test again.  I figured that was a good choice because it’s the foundational test for any writer.   My new score was not merely in the top ten percent, but the highest on oDesk.

I had earned one of the coveted First Place Badges.

One thing I immediately noticed was that the number of invitations to interview I received went way up.  I’ve been receiving invitations for a while now, but since I got the first place badge they have gone way up.

It’s great for me, now I have more ability to pick and choose what jobs I want and the knowledge that more people are looking at my profile gives me more confidence about raising my rates.

Putting the time and effort in to make sure I stood out through good test scores has worked for me, and it can work for you.  It’s no substitute for great feedback, but test scores can be a great tie-breaker when you have two candidates with equal feedback scores.

Improving my test scores has directly translated into money for me.  It can do the same for you.