Not long ago, Sarah posted on the importance of specializing and you can read all about it here.

She made some very good points, because the truth is you can make far more money as a specialist than as a generalist, on-line or 0ff-line. That’s because when you’re a generalist you’re working for people who need anyone; when you’re a specialist you’re working for people who need you.

The only catch with specializing is that while the jobs do pay better, they’re often harder to find. One of my specialties is ghost-writing fiction. It’s interesting work and I’m good at it. It also usually means fairly large jobs so I can spend more time working and less time looking. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately there’s a problem.

Last time I went to oDesk there weren’t any of those kinds of jobs. None, nada, zip, not a sausage as my father would say. What’s the point of specializing on a job they’re not offering?

Well, just because oDesk doesn’t have those jobs right now doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. I’ve seen those very jobs on other sites, such as Rentacoder, Elance, and GetaFreelancer. The last job of that kind I did was on GetaFreelancer, and I’ve applied for related positions at the other two sites. It doesn’t hurt that they all support my preferred payment method, either so I don’t have to rely on PayPal if I don’t want to hand out banking information.

All four sites send regular updates of new jobs, and have a section for writing jobs as well as for the more common coding jobs. They also all provide free memberships, so you can at least start working there without having to spend any money. Both GetaFreelancer and Elance have paid membership options as well, but you don’t need them to get started.

I was able to use a small first job on GetaFreelancer to pay for my membership and bootstrap myself into their gold status without any initial expense, so there’s no reason why others can’t too.

The thing to remember is that if you narrow your net, you have to cast it more times to cover the same area. So if you’re going to specialize, you’re going to have to look in more places to get the same number of job opportunities. Those people who’re willing to do absolutely everything can probably find enough work to stay busy on a single site, especially if they work for an article mill.

Let’s look at some numbers:

What does it take to make more money as a specialist?

For our example we’re going to postulate that you can get twice as much money for your specialty as for other jobs, and that only 10% of jobs fit into that category. We’ll also say for the purposes of illustration that you get one in every four regular jobs you apply for, but you win half the jobs in your specialty.

1 Site:

100 jobs/week at $10/hr you win 25% of the jobs and earn $250 for 25 hours of work.

10/jobs/week at $20/hr you win 50% of the jobs and earn $100 for 5 hours of work.

4 Sites:

400 jobs/week at $10/hr you win 25% of the jobs and earn $1000 for 100 hours of work.

40/jobs/week at $20/hr you win 50% of the jobs and earn $400 for 20 hours of work.

If you look at the numbers you might think– well if I generalize I can still make more money on multiple sites. You’re right, by the numbers you can. Unfortunately you’re working 100 hours a week to do it– and most of us can’t work that many hours. So if you limit yourself to a 40 hour week you end up with the same amount of work as you would specializing and you’re only working half the time.

It’s a much better scenario.

So do specialize, but if you do remember to look in more places than just one site.

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