Why ‘Cookie Cutter’ Responses Can Hurt Your Elance Success

Are you using so-called ‘cookie cutter’ responses to bid on Elance projects? They may save you time…ergo…money. But they will not help you win more projects or bid more successfully.

Why? The buyers are on to the game. They can smell a canned response miles away, and many of them are refusing to even consider responses that are not unique to their project posting.

Cookie cutter responses tell the buyer you don’t really care about his project or his needs. It says you only care about yourself and getting as much work as quickly as possible. Conversely, taking the time to craft a well-thought-out, personal and targeted response catches the buyer’s attention. Since so few Elance providers actually bother to craft original responses, your fresh approach will win the buyer’s attention and, if you can deliver to the buyer’s specifications, you’ll win the project too.

The Elance Crash Course: Your Super Personal Elance Coaching Program tells you exactly how to create a unique response to each bid without recreating the wheel and spending hours bidding. Interested? Write to me at victoriaaipri@yahoo.com and I’ll give you all the great details.

In less than one hour a day, spent consistently, you can build a strong freelancing business based on leads from Elance only that can bring you as much money as you want to make, part time or full time. I know it can be done, because I’ve done it! I look forward to helping you do it too.

What’s Wrong with Elance?

For freelance writers, the holy grail is that one plum job that makes them a lot of money in a short amount of time with minimal effort. Multiplying that scenario over and over makes for the perfect lifestyle most freelancers spend their careers striving for. While www.craigslist.com , big job boards like www.monster.com, and other freelance job boards like www.sologig.com, www.guru.com, www.ifreelance.com and other lesser known boards seem to never run out of jobs from which freelancers can choose, no one does a better job in my opinion than Elance.

I understand Elance has some detractors. And I understand why. It’s gotten more expensive to win less jobs for less money. Competition is fierce, much of it from foreign countries where $1 an article might be an acceptable deal. The fees to join and continue on in a higher level membership can seem exorbitant.

ButI still believe Elance is one if the best deals going. Let’s compare for a sec with how my day used to go. I logged on to craigslist, checked the Writing Gigs and Writing categories for every majoy city, maybe found 2 decent ads worth responding to. Sometimes, by time I found them , they were a few hours old and the person posting the job ad already had a mailbox full of inadequate responses from which to choose. There was no point even writing.

Honestly, I got a couple of decent jobs out of craigslist, though, and for a while it was the only way I found work. I tried monster.com and some of the big job boards, but, since some companies think of freelancers as on-site temporary workers, not all freelancing jobs on those boards were also work-at-home. So that was pretty much a waste of time. I signed up for www.guru.com and www.sologig.com, but they were mostly techie jobs with some low-paying, ‘give-me-your-cheapest-bid’ buyers for writing. I tried www.ifreelance.com as well. Not thrilled. When I found Elance, I thought I’d finally found the secret to what other writers were doing. And, truthfully, with all the changes they’ve gone through in the last few  years, I still think they’re the best. They’re professional. The jobs generally are higher quality (of course, you still get the low-ballers in there). They’re more responsive now than in the past. And their system overall works very well. Yes, it’s not cheap. But taking into account all the time I spent for very little return using other methods, it’s worth it to me to log on to one place, spend as much time as I want, scroll through the bids, place my bid, and check out my competition while I’m at it. Elance is safe, and although I hate to admit I have been screwed out of money owed me from craigslist and other companies, I’ve never had that problem on Elance.

I could go on. I may do that in another post. Suffice to say that, for my money, and my time (which I think is truly worth something) Elance still gets my vote. I’m fortunate that I have a great group of clients who keep me busy. So I don’t have to troll for work on Elance like I used to. But if you’re new to freelancing and you want to get started somewhere where there’s a support net to catch you when you fall, I’d give it a shot.

Hey. No one said you have to stay there forever, and if you play your cards right, you won’t.

By the way, if you’d like some help navigating Elance, bidding better or more effectively, or setting up your Profile or Portfolio, drop me a line. I’ve got some great strategies for you. Until then, Happy Bidding! 

A Short Deadline is Better Than A Long Breadline

So much has been written about niche marketing, the topic itself is almost a niche. What does this have to do with freelance writing? Give me a second and I’ll get there.

You see, when most people think of niche marketing, they think it means conjuring up a completely new concept. Ummm…reality check. There’s not much new under the sun these days, so that goal may be a bit elusive…and one of the main reasons people fear finding a niche to promote in the 1st place.

The truth is, you can become a successful niche marketer selling a product or service many others are already selling…if the market remains hungry enough. As long as there is an audience, you’ll make money.

Take the topic of ‘making money online’. You would think the market would be saturated on this topic by now. But no. Apparently, it’s just beginning, as more and more people leave the 9-to-5 drag of the corporate world for a virtual lifestyle.  New ‘make millions online’ products arrive daily, all cleverly designed to make us believe that if we only plunk down $47.99 for this latest “Internet marketing guru secret”, we can get rich tomorrow.  No doubt it works for some, which is what keeps the industry going.

For most, though, it takes a set of skills that must first be slowly learned, then doggedly implemented and precisely tracked…no matter how much the program promises to put your new, staggering earnings on ‘autopilot.’

I promised I would correlate this to freelance writing, so here it is:

If you’re working as a freelance writer, or hope to begin, you’ve already found your niche. Think about that for a sec. And you don’t have to pay for anything to get started. Why? Well, using nothing but your computer (with Internet connection), your own God-given brain, and your well-honed writing skills, you can make money as a freelance writer starting tomorrow. Not just money, but a decent living! Can you make a million dollars? Doubtful. $100,000? Some certainly have. More realistically, though, you can make $20,000-$40,000 per year working in your bunny slippers and setting your kind of schedule…with plenty of time for little Johnny’s hockey game, little Susie’s dance recital, or to pursue hobbies, goals and dreams that have nothing to do with work. Even better, you can work at 10 o’clock at night, 2 in the morning, or every Sunday, as long as you meet your deadlines. And you can get paid as often or as infrequently as you wish if you play your cards right.

Let’s say it like it is: There is no niche more profitable than the one that comes naturally to you…the one you are already passionate about. Freelance writing is the most personally and financially rewarding way to make a living in today’s virtual world for those lucky few who have the skills to do so.

The Internet is overflowing with opportunities to make money. Every single person alive can pay money to buy someone’s program and learn how to make money online. But very few, comparatively, have what it takes to be successful as a freelance writer. The ‘program’  is already in your head. The ’software’ is already in your brain. Use what you’ve got to create your best life now.

If you’ve got questions about freelance writing, I’d be happy to help. Drop me a line and let’s chat.