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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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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One thing I’ve noticed with a lot of new freelancers is that they don’t quite know how to close a deal effectively. They know how to apply for a job, but anyone can do that. They can get an interview, but a lot of people do that. There’s only one …

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You probably can’t help but notice that we’re now selling an eBook.  It’s right there on the front page and even in the upper right corner of the page where you’re reading this.  Before I go any further I should mention that while I did not write the eBook I did edit it.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about how wonderful an editor I am, or any of the other ways in which I’m wonderful.  Instead I want to talk about the eBook.

When I accepted the job of editing the eBook, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.  I knew the subject, but I wasn’t familiar with the text.   So the first thing I did was sit down and read the manuscript before starting to edit.  I was already familiar with most of what was in the book, but I found I was looking at it in a different way than I had before.

One thing the book focuses on is your profile, and as I was working I started thinking about my profile on oDesk, and on some of the other freelance sites.
That’s when I decided to do something:

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Clean the wax out of your ears! Yes, I said, “Upload feature.”

Like any busy yuppie–wait, I live in the suburbs. I guess that makes me a y’suppie. Anyway, like other y’suppies, I like to unwind. One of the things I do to unwind is to find a nice, quiet spot outside to sit and contemplate the philosophical implications of dental floss. However, the neighbor’s dog had dug under the fence once again, and it was yapping away while shooting me that evil eye with the clear intention of disrupting my zen-like state. Seriously, I don’t know how many times I’ve gone over there to tell my neighbor to keep his poofy house-mutt in the house. Clearly, he needed to be reminded in a manner that would make it stick in his memory.

So, as I was taping a lighter to a can of WD-40, I thought to myself, “Hey, my other neighbors have dogs as well. How can I make this problem a non-issue without having to run through cans and cans of aerosol spray?” I knew that I needed to plan ahead. You can melt one neighbor’s face off, but what if he doesn’t know the other neighbors well enough for them to be invited to the funeral?

That’s where I decided to become proactive. Instead of unleashing a torrent of Canned Death ™ every time I am interrupted, I could rain fire and brimstone on the immediate problem while using my free hand to document the ordeal via camcorder. Then, all I have to do is send a copy of that video to each of my neighbors with a letter explaining the virtues of keeping Fido quiet.

As a freelancer,  you can take a lesson from this story.

What? You want me to tell you what it all means? Okay. Well, fair enough. This article is actually about being lazy to achieve better results, so I guess that’s the point. Here’s how you can use that uploading feature (AKA that Attachment box you pass by every time you click the I agree to oDesk’s blah blah blah box on an application) to give yourself an edge over the competition.

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When I go on oDesk I often look at other providers’ profiles. It not only helps me get a better picture of the competition, but also lets me see where my profile can be improved.

One thing I can’t help but notice is that almost every provider rates their English skills at 5/5; I don’t think I have ever seen a lower rating on any provider’s profile. That’s good isn’t it? Besides, I’m mostly looking at writers’ profiles so they should be good at English: That’s their bread and butter.

Unfortunately, some of these profiles didn’t seem to reflect a 5/5 level of English. Many were rife with spelling and grammar errors; some would alternate between ‘I’ and ‘i’ as a personal profile. I was seeing some of the same errors I see in my daughter’s writing — and she’s in kindergarten.

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So, I was leaping from rooftop to rooftop with my trusty ninja-sword at my side, and I noticed a fellow ninja was already covered in blood from his last kill. Naturally, since it was only 12am and we had only been under the cover of darkness (the only time ninjas …

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You just got an interview for a position. If it’s your first interview, you’re probably bouncing off of the walls with excitement. If not, you realize that getting an interview is not a guarantee that you have the job.

So, what do you do when you have an interview?

First off, you’ll receive an E-Mail alerting you that someone wants to interview you. If they searched for you and invited you to the job, then you’ll just follow the link in the E-Mail and accept the interview request. If you applied for the job, then you don’t have to “accept the interview” because it’s assumed both parties want to communicate.

The first thing you want to do is to read the message that the buyer sent to you. It should be somewhere in the middle of the E-Mail, and it will contain the information you need to start the interview. Sometimes, a buyer will ask for more examples of your work or to complete a small test-project to see if you’re able to complete the project at hand. If they ask you to do any significant portion of the project they are hiring you for, then you should be very wary! At times, shady buyers will try to get you and the other applicants to do all of the project in sections for free. If they want you to work on the actual project before hiring, then that’s probably the case.

If they just want some samples or other simple information like that, reply to their E-Mail address (or contact them via IM if they have it listed and want you to do so) to state a few times that you will be available for interview.

Here are the three main types of interview you will encounter and the best practices for each:

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One thing buyers like to see is that providers have a good knowledge of whichever language the buyer requires for communication and/or the project at hand. If the provider doesn’t know the necessary language well enough, then the project’s details will be misunderstood.

Most of the time, the language they want …

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Recently, I was working with another freelancing service, and I’d just signed up. Therefore, I had no credentials and a rather pathetic profile, so I had to depend on my cover letter to do the talking for me as well as some negotiation skills with the buyer.

Normally, when people think about negotiation, they think about dropping their price to make up for their lack of credentials. That’s just not my style. I see myself as a business providing a valuable, high quality service that customers need, and if they want to purchase that service, they pay the price for it. The reason this system works is because I don’t set insane rates. High, yes. Insane? No.

What happened on this service is that I applied for one job to test it out–writing a half-page sales E-Mail. That comes out to about 30 minutes of work, so I figured up what it would cost at an hourly rate and set the fixed-price rate to $60 USD. The buyer hired me, I spent about 30 minutes writing the E-Mail and sent it to him. After, he gave me a bonus, two 10-star ratings, favorited me, and recommended me to people to the point where I’ve been spammed with job offers since.

I’ll tell you how I got that job when others were willing to do it for a few bucks.

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