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I was on the oDesk forums recently and came across a comment from a new provider who was worried by the ratio of working to registered providers.

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.

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Today’s guest post is by Nick Usborne of AskNickUsborne.com, originally part of his excellent newsletter and shared here with permission. Nick coaches freelance writers, and you’ll see that the article focuses on writing, but I think you’ll find it equally valuable regardless of your particular expertise. After all, every one of us needs to set ourselves apart to succeed at freelancing.

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.

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After getting paid, the most important thing for many freelance providers is their reputation.  It’s essential to maintain a good reputation if you want to keep working at decent rates.

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:

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I bet that title got your attention; I know it would get mine.

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 …

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I was writing a post about the oDesk community when I saw something that made me realize there was something more important I needed to focus on first:
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.

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When I worked in a Call Center I had a supervisor who always used to talk about the importance of “Being in Integrity.”

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.

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I was browsing the oDesk Community recently and I came across this thread on low wages.  Threads on low wages are nothing new, and normally I’d hesitate to bring another to your attention.  However this one got me thinking about the issue in a slightly different fashion, so I thought it would be worth exploring in a post.

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.

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I don’t do all my work through oDesk.  Like many freelancers I use other sites too, and while I was checking out one of those other sites I came across an interesting piece of advice:  Don’t put a bid in your original comment.

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.

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Lately we seem to have been blogging mostly about general freelancing, and today I want to get back to something directly related to oDesk.

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, …

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How well do you know yourself?

For example I’m a left-handed male in my mid-forties; I’m a Meyers-Briggs INTP, Astract-Sequential, Visual Learner who prefers compromise to conflict.

That all sounds really wonderful, but what does it mean?  To some people it doesn’t mean anything, and to others it means a lot.  I could also have thrown in that I’m a Libra, which would mean something to some people and not to others; or I could tell you I was born in the Year of the Rabbit.

All these descriptors have one thing in common:  me.

So what do all these things about me have to do with you?

Quite a lot actually.

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