That’s why I like oDesk and their new manifesto. Really, to be honest, there’s nothing new in it. It’s the same policies which they’ve always expressed throughout the terms, conditions, and guidelines. However, I’m happy to see that they’re elevating those guidelines to the status of rights. I can be a little paranoid about whether or not I’m going to be paid for a job, whether or not my rating is going to get knocked down for a silly reason, and many other things, but I’m very happy to see that oDesk is taking the stance of a mediator between the two parties to ensure that both are protected in a transaction.

It may not be new news, but it’s good news.

When Bill said discipline, the first thing that came to mind is what another friend said to me, “Put ink to wood. Every day.” I think that’s an important step for any professional. You should write, code, or draw every single day whether you’re being paid to do it or not. Why? Because it’s especially important to use the unpaid, free time you have to improve your skills and build your portfolio. Also, if you don’t practice your skills every day, they will begin to dull. It’s surprisingly fast, too. You could stop writing for a week, come back, and you will feel like you’re lost. It sucks pretty hard.

Ink to wood. Every day. When you get a job on oDesk, you’re being paid to write for someone else. That’s not the time you should be improving your skills–you should be using them to your best ability to produce the product your client wants as quickly as you can. However, when you’re off the clock, you’re free to play and try new things. Explore different solutions to common errors you encounter. Make yourself worth more money to future clients who want to hire you.

That’s why Bill says discipline is so important. You have to have discipline to sit down every day and work at it. You can’t stop and wonder if you’re doing a good job. You can’t second-guess yourself. You just have to put ink to wood like nobody’s business, and charge at it full force.

If you don’t believe us, try it. You’ll see for yourself.

Well, here it goes. Like chum to the hungry sharks you are, I offer up that one thing which will turn you from an aspiring freelancer into a competent professional.

Are you ready?

Determination.

lol wut?

It’s becoming a throw-away word anymore, its meaning lost in a sea of motivational posters depicting various animals in precarious situations. However, true determination is the key to being successful in any pursuit.

I’ve said it many ways, but it still doesn’t seem to sink in. I’m asked to babysit people while they apply for jobs or let them look over my shoulder while I work. I don’t have time for that.

Here’s what I do

I follow the advice in this blog, I sharpen my skills every day by reading and practicing, and I apply to jobs. The only difference between me and someone who doesn’t get work is that I do it ten times more. I firebomb the market with my resume, inquiries, and everything else I think may help me find work. I do it for hours on end.

A lot of people think they should succeed because they really WANT to succeed. However, it doesn’t work that way. Just because you really want something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. You can actively work towards your goal and still not reach it. Many beginning fiction writers give up because they wrote a story they think is awesome yet never is published. They don’t edit that story, they don’t read omnivorously to improve their skills, and they don’t write new stories. To be a successful fiction writer, you have to work. It’s not a hobby.

The way to guarantee success is to work harder than everyone else on every application on oDesk and make sacrifices. Instead of going out with your friends, work on your oDesk profile and portfolio samples. Instead of watching another movie, spend two hours working on your career. Instead of (insert mindless activity here), work on finding work.

You don’t have to drive yourself insane by becoming a workaholic. However, you should definitely “feel the burn” when you’re flexing your freelancer muscle. Otherwise, it’s just a casual hobby, and buyers will treat you like a hobbyist.

That’s the one thing you need to find success. It’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the factor that changes everything.

P.S. Feel free (and please do) throw out any topics you’re interested in us covering by posting a comment here or on any post. We’ll be glad to give our opinion, and we’d love to hear yours on whatever topic.

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.

 

Lately, a lot of my friends have seen what I’ve been doing, and they want “in on the action.” Of course, I’m perfectly willing to oblige by pointing them in the right direction. I say, “Well, actually, I work on a blog which explains the ropes of oDesk, and there’s a great book about freelancing on oDesk there. Check that out, sign up for an account, and just go for it.”

When I first started out, everything was so new to me, and I was excited about every aspect of freelance writing. I have friends who are writers, so I was excited to show them what is possible. However, I found that it’s a huge mistake to hold another’s hand while they’re getting started. It goes from simply helping them navigate around the website (which is fine) to bleeding off your own work to them to doing work that they’ve found even though they’re the one who gets paid.

If there ever was one, this is the proverbial “slippery slope.” Chances are, the person you’re introducing oDesk to is your friend. You want this person to succeed. However, the irony is that by using your skills and reputation to help this person succeed, you’re setting them up for ultimate failure. You’re also hurting yourself in the process. After I’ve pointed someone to resources, I tell them that’s as far as I’ll go.

When you’re helping them to succeed, you’re taking time away from your own career building. When you’ve finally given all you have and need some time to recover, that person will be unable to cope with the rough life of freelancing. Their success depends on you holding their hand the entire way. You let go, they flop.

That’s the cold, hard truth of freelancing. For people who are serious about it, it’s not about sitting on your porch with a cup of coffee and pecking at the keyboard with leisure. It’s a business, and if you’re not breaking a sweat by thinking hard, you’re not trying hard enough.

In a way, freelancers can be seen in the same light as movie stars. They see the money, the people you know, the freedom, the fact that your schedule is flexible. They see the product of your work. However, very few have seen the hours upon hours of work behind the scenes: applying for jobs, being rejected from jobs, cutting deals with clients, working until your eyes feel like they’re bleeding just to finish a project on time. There’s a lot we do which never sees the light of day, and for a lot of that work, we don’t get paid for it. It’s all about putting ourselves into a position where we can have those things people envy.

This type of career is a very solitary pursuit. Some people are simply not cut out for it. If you’re hanging on to someone else, or if someone else is hanging on to you, (politely) cut them loose. It will be better for both of you now and in the long run. There’s no other way you’ll know whether or not this career choice is right for you.

If you’re still trying to get your first job, don’t worry. It will come if you work for it. Take more tests, get better scores, and add pieces to your portfolio. It makes a huge difference.

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.

oDesk wouldn’t exist if it didn’t make money, and neither would its competitors.  The business model is simple, connect buyers and providers and take a cut off the top.  There’s more to it, but that’s fundamentally how they all work.

It’s much like an agency relationship and it works very well.   Most sites take between ten and fifteen percent and provide various services ranging from escrow and payment through oDesk’s time management software.  The benefit to this method of payment is that it’s performance based and so sites make more money by getting more work for providers.

Some sites have a second revenue stream–

Paid Memberships

Providers pay the site a monthly fee in return for additional benefits over the standard free membership.

On the surface it doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but in practice it does have one major drawback.  It’s a significant change to the business model.  It’s often easier to get a new provider to pay $10-15 per month than to get a buyer to pay $100-150 for a project.  It also extends the site’s revenue stream to include funds form unsuccessful providers as well as successful ones.

Businesses reinforce success.  This means that if they’re getting more money from subscription fees than project fees that’s where they will focus their money-making efforts.

There’s nothing wrong with this from a business perspective, but from a provider’s perspective there is a problem here:  it dilutes the focus on getting new jobs.

Before we go further, let’s look at some examples of membership systems:  eLance and GetaFreelancer both use paid subscriptions, but they take very different approaches.

A free member on eLance gets three bid points per month, and depending on the size of the project it can require anything up to four bid points to put in a bid.  An individual membership is $9.95/month and gives the user 20 bid points and a lower commission percentage rate in addition to other benefits such as a greater number of keywords and more contact options.

A free member on GetAFreelancer has more bid points (I have 25) and pays a 10% commission on all jobs.  The paid membership costs $12 a month, and not only provides more bid points, but also eliminates the commission.  I’ve also never seen a job on GetAFreelancer that required more than one bid point.

Here’s where I see the difference:  GetAFreelancer is rewarding paid members, while eLance is penalizing free members.

I’ve had a paid membership on GetAFreelancer, and only let it lapse because I haven’t been working there lately as my oDesk clients are taking up the majority of my work time.  Should I shift focus back toward GetAFreelancer I will definitely restart my membership.

I haven’t gone for a paid membership on eLance, and part of that is because the free one is so restricting.  My preference is to bootstrap my first job on a site to getting a membership, and with the restrictions on free members, I don’t spend much if any time applying for work on eLance.

That’s the real pitfall of paid memberships, they often make it hard for new providers to get started on a site.

Some might argue that it separates the serious providers from the frivolous but I’m not so sure.  There are other ways to limit bids that don’t involve paid memberships and they seem to prevent frivolous and spam bids just as well as the memberships do.

Alternatives

oDesk uses a combination of skill tests and buyer feedback to limit the number of bid points available to a provider allotting anywhere from five to twenty points a week.  The big benefit of this is that it’s possible to get to the maximum number of bid points right from the start just by taking skill tests, which helps new providers get started.  Once a provider builds up a history it’s all based on feedback, but the skill system really helps get people in the door.

Rentacoder allows people as many bids as they can reasonably make.  I don’t have a lot of experience at the site but I haven’t seen any complaints about spam bidders there.
Personally, I prefer the oDesk approach, but I don’t have a problem with the idea of paid memberships that reward paid members.

Just remember, it’s your time and your money, so be careful.

And for writers remember Yog’s Law.

For some of you it probably works.  Every minute you spend surfing the boards is a minute you aren’t searching for work or actively earning money, and there are some providers who just can’t spare the time.

If you’ve been reading this blog regularly you’ve probably noticed that I am an active member of the oDesk Community.  I not only read the message boards but I also try to post fairly often too.

What I’m going to try to do in this post is explain why I spend my time on the boards.

The first reason is simple:  Most new features are announced and explained on the community boards and by reading them regularly I can keep up with the changes.  That becomes particularly important since I try to post those same changes here too so that those of you who don’t read the community boards can also stay in the loop.  Besides, it gives me something to write about.

For example I discovered the new Message Center by checking the Community Forum.

It provides a single place to view all of your oDesk related communications so you don’t have to go digging through your email.  I have to admit that I’m torn on this one.  I can see definite benefits to it, but at the same time, I already have my email open so do I really want to keep the message center up too?

I’m really not sure.

At least for the moment I think I’m going to use the Message Center as a supplement to email, not a replacement.  It might be different if I could reach it from any tab on the site, but we’ll have to see.

Speaking of email, oDesk has recently stopped sending out job application confirmation emails.  They have also stopped notifiying people they have applied for jobs in the message center.  As of July 15, 2008 if you apply for a job the only confirmation you will receive is that it will show up under “My Candidacies.”

I think it’s a good idea.  You don’t need an email to tell you you just applied for a job.  I don’t know about the rest of you but I generally remember my job applications.

Both of these changes are things I would not have been aware of had I not put some time in on the message boards.  They can be a very good place to go for both assistance and information.

The only thing I would watch out for is the negativity.  Some days you see a lot of it on the boards, and it can really get you down.  The truth is that the people complaining the most are usually, not always but usually, the ones who have not yet figured out the best way to make oDesk work for them.

Many of them don’t know the economics of the site either, and think all jobs pay the very low rates that someone is always complaining about.

In the meantime I recommend you use the boards, but don’t let them use you.

One last bit of news before I close.

Things are always changing, and one of the things that’s changing is the oDesk Insider.  One result of these changes is that you may start seeing fewer updates that you’ve been getting of late.  It’s not a bad thing, but other things are forcing us to put this blog on the back burner for a while.

Anyway until next time (and it won’t be that long) I wish you all happy and profitable freelancing.

You can always reach me at dave(at)odeskinsider(dot)com

Let’s start with what I consider the three most important factors:

oDesk is a free market

oDesk costs money to run

oDesk only makes money when providers make money.

Understanding those three points is vital if you want to understand how oDesk works.  Yes the oDesk Readiness Test is important, as is knowing how to work the oDesk Team, but there’s nothing really all that hard about either.

So, join me on the other side of the fold and we’ll discuss our three factors:

Glad you made it across safely.

Now, where were we?  That’s right, we were discussing how oDesk works, and to start at the beginning let’s talk about a free market.

When I call oDesk a free market I mean that it is free of artificial constraints on the cost of services.  Every provider is free to set their price and every buyer is free to set their budget.  Providers are not required to take a job if they don’t think the pay is worth it and buyers are not required to select a provider if they think they are too expensive.

I’ve seen people work for $0.50/hr and I’ve seen people work for more than $100.00/hr.  I’m not talking about posted pay rates, but about amounts that people have actually been paid for jobs they have done.

That’s a huge range, and the free market is why it’s so large.

We all know that data entry rates are the lowest on oDesk.  There are a number of reasons why that’s the case.  One reason is numbers, there are just under 33,000 providers who list data entry as a specialty.  That’s second only to web programming with just under 34,000.

At first glance you might think that would put the pay rate for web programmers into the same ballpark, but if you do you’re forgetting the other half of the equation:  Job availability.  According to the most recent oConomy figures, there were 4725 web programming jobs, and only 1035 data entry jobs listed.  That means there are seven web programmers for every job, while it’s close to 32 providers for every job in data entry.

Another reason why it’s low-paying is that for the most part any two data entry professionals are pretty much interchangeable.  Yes there are differences in speed and accuracy, but the final product from two top-ranked data-entry people should be identical.

This means that the only things a data entry professional can use to distinguish themselves from the crowd are quantitative factors, not qualitative ones.

If you combine the fierce competition for a limited number of positions with the interchangeability of providers on a qualitative level you have a recipe for low rates.  That’s how the market works.

It may just be a coincidence, but the average rate for web programmers is about five times that for data entry, and they have one fifth as many providers for each opening.  Data entry is very much a buyer’s market.

The above should show why data entry in particular has such low average rates, but what about other fields?

Providers in other fields have something else to distinguish themselves:  Quality.

Some coders are better than others, so are web designers and writers.  This level of ability gives them something else to distinguish themselves.  They can say that the reason they are worth more than their competitors is because they provide a better product.  That gives them something else to set themselves apart and another way to justify higher rates.

Again, it’s the free market at work, this time in the other direction.  Good providers who are in demand can charge more because people want those providers specifically, and they only have a finite number of hours.

The next thing to remember is that oDesk has expenses.  oDesk Team cost money to write, and the servers cost money to keep up.  Then there are other expenses such as paying the staff and interest on financing.  The details and the amount are unimportant for our purposes, all we care about is that they exist.

Finally, we come to to the point that oDesk takes a proportion of what each provider bills.  Their earnings go up at the same proportional rate as each provider’s do.

These last two give oDesk the strongest incentive possible to drive provider rates up rather than down.  They’re in business to make money.

If you’ve followed the community for any length of time you know that people are always complaining about pay rates.  This is usually followed by a request for a minimum wage.  Unfortunately what seems to be forgotten is that this would simply be the first constraint on an otherwise free market.

Constraining a market is never a step to take lightly.

The first problem is that oDesk doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  If oDesk constrains its market, then people looking for a free market will simply go elsewhere.

The second is that it’s impossible to constrain the bottom of the market without constraining the top of the market as well.  Setting a wage floor makes it harder for people to rise above it.  They can still do it, but neither as quickly nor as easily.

Many of the arguments for a minimum wage on oDesk have to do with questions of social justice, saying that people are worth more than some arbitrary minimum.  Other arguments have to do with people saying it’s uneconomical for them to work for less than said minimum.

In the latter case the answer is simple, don’t apply for jobs you cannot afford to do.  Buyers are not responsible for your financial health.

The first case is a little more difficult:  Questions of social justice tend to move the argument outside the boundaries of pure economics.  Most countries do have minimum wage laws in place, and many of them invoke either basic human rights or the social contract to do it.

Let’s start by making one thing clear:

A minimum wage is irrelevant because we are talking prices not wages.  oDesk providers are contractors selling services, not employees earning wages.  So what people are really discussing are price controls, not minimum wages.

Remember that.

Once people accept that the discussion is about price controls rather than minimum wages, it becomes easier to understand why the various issues of social justice don’t apply to oDesk.

People don’t live on oDesk.  They live in cities, towns, states, provinces, and countries.  All of those places have their own jurisdictions and the right to set minimum wages for people working there.  They also collect taxes to pay for services and implement programs of social justice.

Don’t conflate a marketplace with an employer.

You can make money on oDesk.  If you’re good at what you do and know how to sell your services you can make quite a lot of money.

If you understand how it works you’ll make more.

Nominalization

What is it? Nominalization is the process of making abstract nouns from verbs and adjectives. Some examples:

verb -> nominalization

discover -> discovery

oppose -> opposition

believe -> belief

adjective -> nominalization

hopeless -> hopelessness

careless -> carelessness

different -> difference

Take a look at this pair of sentences-

The opposition found among many voters to coal-fueled power plants is based on a belief of the threat to the atmosphere.

Many voters oppose coal-fueled power plants because they believe these plants threaten the atmosphere.

The abstract nouns become verbs, subjects get pinned directly to their verbs, and clarity increases.

Exceptions

Nominalization isn’t always bad. Here are some exceptions:

• When it replaces ‘the fact that’. The fact that he decided quickly impressed us. Is worse than: His quick decision impressed us.
• When if refers to the subject of the previous sentence. This opposition must cease.
• When a concept as a concept is so familiar to readers that it seems concrete- Taxation without representation.

Clarity comes from the basics.

Subject, verb, object. If you don’t have these in your sentences, and visible, your writing is going to be less clear than it could be. Count out the seven or so words after your introductory clause (if there is one). Is there a subject and verb pair there? Readers need these.

Too often, we write as if our readers know as much about a subject as we do. When we read our material, it seems clear. It seems clear because we already know what we are trying to say and we fill in the gaps. But the gaps remain. And when they remain unfilled, readers get lost and confused.

Subject and verb. Character and action. These are the necessary elements that drive communication.

I am not advocating Dick and Jane prose. But pay attention. Add the flowery and the perfumed and the ‘man I need a breath, I’m gonna die before this sentence ends’ judiciously and with purpose.

Oh, and have fun too.

]]> http://odeskinsider.com/blog/lets-be-clear/feed/ 1