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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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In my last few posts I’ve been focusing on how you can make money on oDesk.  However, as I read the oDesk community I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that not all the providers really understand how oDesk works.

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:

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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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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’m still fairly new at writing for money. I took the plunge January 1st, this year. In many ways, I’m still a rookie. So when buyers contact me directly with an invitation, I am delighted and a little amazed.

The usual pattern is: read the job board, find something that I can do within a buyer’s budget, construct a cover letter, submit samples, apply, and wait. And wait.

The thrill comes when this process is turned upside down and interested buyers email me. Yippee!

What was it about my profile or my portfolio that had them picking me (and maybe a few others) out of the vast herd of writers at oDesk? Whatever it was, it’s a great feeling when it happens. I’m suddenly no longer a 5-drink Lucy (the one who only gets propositioned at the bar after suitors have had a few) and I’m the budding starlet plucked from an obscure waitress job to work on the big screen. (That would be a better set of metaphors if I were female.) Anyhow, it’s really nice.

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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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This time, I’m going to talk about money. I speak of “bling,” in the parlance of our times. How can you squeeze that extra buck out of a client while still keeping them happy? If you’re not too worried about the “happy” part, you can take a page from la …

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You’ve done what you said you would do. You took a few low-ball projects and got some decent feedback. You’ve taken some tests, posted a nice picture, and filled out your portfolio with examples of your best work. Time to raise your rates.
Inertia is your enemy
Remember when you first started out? How hard it was to get into the groove? Well, you are in a new groove now. And it’s time to push yourself a little.

One of the hard and harsh mathematical truths of freelancing is that we have a finite number of hours to sell. If you aren’t getting top dollar for your time you’ve got a lower paying job than you ought to have. But, having regular work is a comfort. It’s nice to relax into the routine and let inertia just carry us along.

The way to see inertia as your enemy is to recall the last plateau you were on. Before you climbed up to the plateau you are on now. You wouldn’t conceive of sliding back to the ‘before’ and you won’t want to go back to where you are now– once you make the next little climb.
Consider this
You’ve already demonstrated you can do the work and do the work successfully. Buyers should have little doubt that if they hire you, you will get the job done. The income bottleneck isn’t with the buyers, it’s with you.

Here’s some info to wise you up. From the 2008 Writer’s Market:

e-mail copywriting: $73 (these figures are all hourly averages)
Web page writing: $83
Technical writing: $84
Online editing: $58
Web page design: $90
Ghostwriting: $70
Rewriting: $63

That’s per-hour averages. That’s what writers are getting paid to do what you do. There are plenty more categories I didn’t list. I couldn’t read through my tears.

So, the excuse that you aren’t worth it is bull-dooky. You are worth it.

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“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”- Lewis Carroll

In the end, I lost two working days, $25, and risked some bad feedback from an upset buyer. It started well enough…

The job posting was to ghost a hundred page e-book. More details came after an inquiry: The buyer already had most of the book done; he just wanted a rewrite. He said he was a writer himself and proudly pointed to a web page he’d written. His only problem was not having enough time to ‘tweak’ his e-book. Fair enough. I’m in.
An easy job starts to go downhill.
He touted it as an ‘easy job’ (don’t they always say that?) and sent me his first draft. There was a lot of material, and it wasn’t badly written, so I sent a letter of understanding to finalize the project and got to work. So far, as common as plastic ware.

Ah, but then I sent him my proposed table of contents and part of a chapter to get some feedback. “Oh,” he writes, “I sent you the wrong draft.”

“That part was already done by the first writer.”

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