Hi! I recently held my first webinar to provide an introduction to my course Freelance with Elance. This webinar addresses some common questions (and misconceptions) that people have about freelancing in general and about Elance in particular. I’ve provided examples and screenshots in this presentation to show you how my course can benefit you. Its an approximately 40 min presentation, including audience questions. Watch here:

If you’re in Karachi, you can sign up to take the next course here: http://wordpl.net/index.php/freelance-with-elance/ Once you fill out the form, you will be emailed details about the date, time, venue and course outline.

Thank you!

I get a lot of questions everyday but one question that I get asked almost every single day is: How do I start working online? What’s the first step? How do I do what you’re doing? So today I’m going to attempt to answer that question.

For most people working online means earning a few bucks, or doing something for zero or little effort. That’s not what I’m about or what I teach. I can’t help you get started working online by clicking on ads, or by filling surveys and questionnaires, or by mailing envelopes, or whatever else kind of menial work is being advertised to make you millions.

When someone asks me how to start working online, I assume that they are asking me for a viable sustainable online business that they’d like to start. It could be a part time business, it could be weekends only, but you have to be serious about it. If you don’t ask me seriously then no matter what advice I give, you will not be able to earn money online.

So assuming that you are serious about making money online, here’s what I would say are the first few steps in this order:

Step 1: Know what kind of work you’d like to do online

Example #1: Perhaps you’re a musician with extensive knowledge about learning to play an instrument (or various instruments) – you could perhaps start a website that gives guitar tutorials. Or maybe you’re a singer songwriter who wants to compose music for international clients – you could become a music producer on a freelance website.

Example #2: Maybe you’re a graphic designer fresh out of school and looking for online work. Maybe you could advertise your design services online and start to get work through the internet.

Example #3: What if you’re a doctor. Can you work online? Well, yes, but that depends on what kind of work you want to do. There are many reputable publications in the health, nutrition and fitness fields that require content for their websites, newsletters, advice columns, etc and would maybe want to hire you as an expert. Alternative therapy and natural medicines is also a fast growing field with not a lot of qualified practitioners; you could maybe get work with them as a side income project.

Example #4: You have an existing t-shirt designing business and would like to find a market for your products online. Can you do that? Yes, and it will depend on finding international buyers ready to stock your products at agreed upon rates. You can do that through various online companies such as www.alibaba.com that specialize in providing physical products via an online medium.

Example #5: You are a journalist, looking for ways to earn some extra money. Perhaps you can start a blog, or write a book, or look for a gig writing for an international column.

These are just five examples; basically you can work online in just about any capacity that doesn’t require your physical presence and you’ll be surprised how few those are. Are you an engineer? You can find work online as a contract manufacturer. Are you a housewife? You can find work online leveraging your expertise in cooking, designing, parenting, etc. There’s online work awaiting you in almost every conceivable field from financial to legal to engineering to writing to design to web programming.

So do you know what you want to do? Figure that out first and then move to step 2.

Step 2: Find your market

The assumption here is that you have a skill or a product that you’d like to make money from. Once you have identified that skill or product, you must find a market that will buy your services/products.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. You can sell your existing products using affiliates. Affiliates are people that sell your product on your behalf for a small commission. You can join an affiliate network and get your product listed for sale. Examples of affiliate networks are www.clickbank.com, www.commissionjunction.com, www.amazon.com/associates and plenty more – just do a search for affiliate networks to get a more comprehensive list.
2. You can sell your services in a freelance marketplace such as www.elance.com, www.guru.com, www.odesk.com etc.
3. You can get your products sold globally through international vendors and drop-shippers such as www.alibaba.com, www.wordwidebrands.com, www.thomasnet.com, www.housewares.org, www.expoeast.com and www.expowest.com.
4. You can start your own WordPress website by registering a domain name through www.namecheap.com, buying hosting from www.godaddy.com and installing WordPress through www.wordpress.org. If you don’t feel confident you can do this on your own, you can start with a free www.WordPress.com account which just requires a username and password to use. Else, you can hire a company such as www.customsocialpages.com to set it up for you.
5. You can use social media to find prospective buyers and clients, although that is a less direct way and you will have to invest some time in it. It is recommended if you are not in a hurry and are good at having online conversations. Social sites that would be a good fit for finding leads include www.linkedin.com, www.twitter.com, niche forums (search for your niche + “forum” on google), and www.facebook.com (pages and ads).

Step 3: Determine how you’ll get paid

Once you have found your market, you need to sort out payment details. There’s a comprehensive list of payment processors that you can work with here, but only some of these are compatible with Pakistan. Those that work in Pakistan include www.payoneer.com, www.alertpay.com, www.2checkout.com, www.westernunion.com, www.moneybookers.com, and sites that pay you via direct deposits and through checks (such as most freelance sites do).

Payment processors help you determine how you will charge prospective customers and how the money will get transferred into your bank account.

So, I hope this list has given you a starting point. Essentially there’s just a few ways to run an online business, such as you can see in this online business info-graphic. You just need to find the tools and resources that will help you and chart a path that is unique to your skills, products and abilities.

Questions? Mail me at ask@wordpl.net with your very specific question or just write it out in the comments below so that your question and my answer benefits lots of people. Good luck!

p.s. For more in-depth information, check out my presentation How to Start an Online Business (from Pakistan).

This is the fifth post in a 6-part series on How to Write Winning Bids and Proposals. While I will be giving specific examples of bid writing techniques from Elance, the information in these posts is relevant and applicable to all freelance proposals in any online medium. I hope you’ll be able to use this information to bid smarter and significantly reduce your proposal writing time in the long term as well as attain a higher award ratio.

So you’ve decided what your hourly rate or fixed fee for this project ought to be and are all ready to place your bid. But wait a sec, did you know that on Elance a very high percentage of bids gets rejected because they fall out of the buyer’s budget? So how then are you going to ensure that (a) your bid price is competitive and (b) that you only bid on projects with a high chance of the buyer being able to pay your stated fee?

Even if you’ve followed the steps of bid writing to a tee, your bid can still go awry at the pricing stage. Therefore it’s extremely essential to not just determine what a fair price for the project would be, but to also have some level of confidence that a buyer will be able to pay your asking rate.

There can be huge disparities in pricing expectations. For example: a buyer posts up a project expecting to pay $.01 per word for 20, 250-word blog posts (ridiculous I know but bear with me for illustration purposes). Hence he prices the job as falling below $500, expecting to pay $50 for the entire project. You rate is $0.1 per word; hence you’d make the bid for (250 x0.1×20), i.e. $500 (not counting Elance fees and any other expenses). You can clearly see the disparity now, eh?

There’s no way you’d be able to convince somebody to shell out $500 when they’ve determined that $50 is the fair price offer. So ideally you want to skip projects like this because you’d just be wasting your time writing a bid for it since the project won’t come to you unless you drastically slash your rates.

There’s at least 4 ways (maybe more) to weed out the buyers who aren’t willing to pay your asking price:

1. Match the buyer’s stated budget with the buyer’s tone to gauge seriousness
2. Find out how much the buyer typically pays or has paid in the past for similar work
3. Gauge the buyer’s reputation for paying on time, paying bonuses, etc both on Elance and on the Net in general
4. Consider whether the buyer has larger sponsors backing him

Budget + Tone = Willingness to Pay

Conventional wisdom would state that you place bids within the stated budget range and while that’s probably the best technique 99% of the time, there are instances when you should bid higher or lower. These instances are when:

• The project’s scope (in your opinion) seems to be greater or lesser than stated in the description
• The value addition and effort on your part justifies the rate

For example, I placed a $1440 bid for a project whose stated budget was less than $500 and got the job – why? And more importantly, why didn’t the buyer just say their budget could go higher so they’d attract quality bids? Here’s what I think happened: I bid that price because the project entailed creative writing in another person’s voice and “tone” and required research of places I’d not personally visited. As to why the buyer started with a low budget, one theory is that often on Elance and other freelance job boards buyers are unsure of the budget themselves (they may not be the expert, you are!) and they may be wondering if there are any quality providers on these sites.

So I bid. But how did I know the buyer would be willing to pay my bid price? After all, it seems like such a gamble, right? I looked at the buyer’s tone. She used phrases like “show me what you’ve got” and “name your price”, indicating she was a serious buyer and not just a “proposal scout”. I went with my hunch and it worked, again proving how crucial researching the buyer is.

History of Payments

This is so easy and do-able; everyone should do it for every project before bidding. Go through a buyer’s feedback history watching for what they’ve paid in the past, both for similar work and for other work. Their willingness to get the best quality will shine through in each and every project they’ve commissioned.

Buyer’s Repute

Gauge the buyer’s performance in doling out bonuses and paying on time. Do more than 90% of providers recommend them for paying on time? Recently I worked with a buyer who promised a bonus for the addition of images. I added non-copyright images and provided them in the file format he’d asked only to never hear from him again – my fault since this milestone hadn’t been added nor escrow funded for it. Lesson learned. If a buyer promises bonuses, add it in as a milestone and have them fund escrow on completion of the bonus task. See how they’ve treated other providers on this issue and you’re less likely to get burned.

Who’s Pocket is the Money coming from?

Some buyers are actually scouting for providers to outsource jobs to from their current clients. Some are the end clients. Determine which is which because in the former case your buyer will be taking a commission cut and will want you to reduce your prices as much as possible. I prefer working with clients who are the end client since they’re much more likely to pay asking fees and want quality work.

So, in a nutshell…

You’ve determined your price. Now determine if the buyer will pay that price to the best of your ability and resources. If you don’t you’re just wasting time on making bids that won’t be accepted and then complaining about how your bids constantly get rejected. And then whose fault will it be?

Let me know in the comments section if you intend to use any of these approaches to determining whether a buyer is likely to pay your price. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!