The most important thing I learned was, the internet is a good place to follow your passion in your work. Most of the more successful people making their livelihood online decided what they wanted to do or were interested in, money aside and began with that. In my particular case, I have several, and so utilizing them all will involve utilizing a variety of techniques creatively. Whatever your passion may be, it will likely take building.
I have come to a decision about microworker.com, I am not going to use it anymore, unless something pretty drastic were to happen and I would need to resort to that again. There is nothing really wrong with the site itself, The reason I will not use it anymore is it does not build up to anything, It offers little micro-jobs for micro-pay and no real chance for advancement. If you are new to sites like mechanical turk and are only eligible for $0.01 or $0.02 jobs, and not even that many of those, I recommend doing a little on miroworkers to have access to $0.25 and higher things, or at least $0.7 - $.10 ones. It will help keep your sanity while you literally work for pennies. Once you break 100 HITs and especially when you get close to 500, I would suggest cashing in your microworkers earnings, or work until you build up enough to withdraw and then withdraw it. Microworkers will retain about $0.06 no matter what, and that is a fact I just had to accept.
When I was working with mechanical turk frequently, I found I could make around $30.00 to $40.00 a week without having any real transcription skills when I had about 200 HITs accepted and a 98% approval rating. I got stupid though, and started experimenting with different kinds of tasks to see what all I could do. I found out the hard way not to do that. A few rejected HITs can bring your approval % down low enough you will only get penny jobs and $0.10 jobs again. I tried to do many short jobs to fix this and worked for an appalling requester called p9r. p9r does not communicate well, and if you make the wrong move, your HIT will be rejected and your rating will suffer. I knocked out several on their HITs and received enough rejections in a short time to be demoted back to penny jobs and it has taken me a long time to get my rating back over 97%. AVOID p9r unless you feel you can afford to take rating losses.
Elance.com has a complex system if you are an American. They have several forms you must fill out. Fill out your W-9, and your 1099 and a few others. If you relocate, it is difficult to change your address. In my case, I was told my W-9 info did not match what the IRS had on file. The IRS office told a different story. My information did match what they had on file, and Elance does not have access to IRS records. Nevertheless, Their finance office insisted they had discovered a discrepancy between my W-9 and IRS files. Eventually, an exceptional customer service person talked me through every file and form Elance had, and we fixed all of the information on each file. After that, the finance team said my information "matched IRS records" which they probably never even saw. This was in addition to my adventures trying to get my address changed on my profile. Customer service had to escalate that all the way to the web programmers.After THAT was fixed I was able to change my information on the forms and expect the changes to still be there the next time I logged in or if I refreshed the page.
If I had it to do over again, I would go to the page that has all the forms on one spot and try filling them all out. Maybe I would have had less trouble, or maybe I still would have had a help request go all the way to the engineers. Either way, it would have saved me the trouble of dealing with the finance departments MISERABLE communication and service.
Here's how to do that:
In the upper right corner, click your username. A drop down menu will show up. Click on "settings."
Then, click on "Billing & Payment," in the left-side menu.
This menu will come up. You can see all the forms you have to fill out as an American. If you are not an American, it still is wise to enter here and check any boxes that tell Elance you are not an American and do not need those forms. The "Invoice and Tax," the "1099 information," the "W-9 Info" and "Currency," are all things you need to do before even messing with looking for work.
All that is if you want to do freelance work answering directly to someone else. As far as avialable jobs, at the time of this writing there were 25,313 jobs on all of Elance. 9,599 IT jobs, 5477 were Design and Multimedia jobs. 3872 were Writing & Translation jobs, 3142 were Sales & Marketing jobs, 1950 were Admin & Support jobs, 656 were Engineering & Manufacturing jobs, 408 were Finance & Management jobs, and 239 were Legal jobs. If those numbers do not add up to 25,313, it is because jobs were filled or more were posted while I went through the categories and recorded the number in each. I have found that many of the employers posting jobs here wants lave labor, by U.S. standards.
You must beware of sharks in the waters of the freelance market. I am exclusively in the writing and translation category and I have seen 500 to 2,000 words for as little as $1 USD. This is often because the employer is from a place like the Philippines, where $5 can buy a week worth of groceries or something close to that. I have seen Brits and Americans offer that little as well though, while specifically asking for native English speakers. Beware of those who are out to take advantage of you. When employers want "Price per word"or tell you how much they want to pay per word without telling how many words they want, I would not even bother. They did not read the directions. Elance does not allow less than $20 billed-to-client for fixed-rate jobs, or less than $3.00/hr billed-to-client for hourly jobs. If they are not paying attention to what they are doing, do not pay attention to them. You do not want clients who do not communicate well or consider the constraints you must bid within (or Elance will not even let you submit the bid). I have also found out the hard way not to work for clients who do not know what they want. If you submit a sample and an idea and they like it, they might change their mind later and expect you to be able to do something you never agreed to do. Also beware of people who want you to submit a sample in the form of doing a part of the job for them before they will hire you. That is either an idiot not thinking through what they are asking, or a scammer who wants to get the job done for free. Elance.com rules say that you are under no obligation to start work until a milestone payment has been submitted by the employer. That milestone is your insurance that you will be paid and they will not take the work you did and run without paying. I had a person needing 100 to 200 product descriptions written. He said, "price me per product." Of course the lowest you can bid is $20.00. After a long time, he asked me to write descriptions for about 15 products so he could decide if he wanted to hire me. I wrote two and sent them in, not willing to do up to 15% of the job for free. He probably did that to a lot of people and tried to get it all for nothing. I never heard from him again.
I worked for a lady who asked for my email address after she hired me, She gave me a 5-star rating and did indeed contact me for more work OFF of Elance. I did $50 worth of work, based on the agreed price,and was supposed to be paid in two weeks. Three weeks later I got two thirds of it, and after a month she was paid up. She is a freelance writer who farms out some of her work to others and pays them a smaller cut. This will never advance your career. Clients will know the persons who hired you are, but not you. The employer will build a reputation and grow their business, you will not. Off of Elance, you do not even have the rating or records to show you did anything. It will look like you have no experience from all that work. You will also might get less money than the person who hires you does. I did five articles for a very grumpy client that the aforementioned client outsourced to me, and I got $10 a piece. She went between us as a middle person so all the communication came to me through "the grapevine," and got very confusing at times. On their files, it looked like she was the one doing the work. On Elance, those articles would have been $20; it also was way too much work for $10 - or even $20, as those were terrible clients. If I take a job on Elance that says "there will be more work if you do a good job," I am going to let them know I do not usually do additional work if it is not on Elance, because Elance protects both of us in a lot of ways, and is worth the small percentage I must pay.
In the writing field, I have noticed so many of the potential clients want content for a website or blog to get them more hits. Usually they want it SEO optimized. I guess some are aspiring professional bloggers who do not actually wish to blog. A high volume of these jobs on Elance led me to investigate how to generate income from a blog. In the process of learning this, I realized I would be happier writing about things I care about and helping people who have similar interests or challenges. I also realized that such things take a lot of building, so instead of working for low fees to build someone else's corner of the web, I should spend that time building my own. It could eventually pay better and will make me far happier. If you would not mind working hard to take others to the top and getting crumbs thrown your way for doing it, feel free to take those Elance blogging jobs.
Blogs need to be focused, or readers never know what tto expect from you or whether what you write will be any use. People do not get interested in literary Russian roulette. The topic of this one is actually not how to make money online, so this topic will be found at erdavis01.tumblr.com from now on. I expect to update the Tumblr blog once a week or more. CrossCastle will hereafter be about various inspirational or spiritual things. In my case, I find that I have several interests I would enjoy writing about. Therefore, I write more than one blog, with focus aimed primarily at one at a time. I advise others with multiple interests to start with one thing and progressively expand, as you are able. Working online is a journey, not a destination. It is a road, not a doorway, into a new lifestyle. Enjoy the process. :)
Godspeed.
~Mother Star
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