Leaving Elance? You Are Not Alone!

Taking a cue from a fellow writer, I am moving my "assets" and for the most part my time from Elance. Over the course of a year I have spent a good deal of time on the website looking for work. Being a freelance writer or actually a freelance anything is not easy. It essentially means that you do not have a place to call home as far as work is concerned. For me, and I suspect many others, Elance was supposed to be just that. Unfortunately it did not turn out to be what it promised to be.

The Promise 

The Internet is a sea of potential. It does not matter what your business is or what industry you work in. If there is something that you need done, need to sell, find out how to make, or just want to find, chances are you will get what you are looking for on the net. So it is no surprise that people from everywhere look to the Internet to solve their queries, whatever they may be. I was, I am no different.

I have been on the Internet since before the Internet was. I used to run a BBS (Bulletin Board System) with a chain of computers that users would call with their computers using a modem. We would trade files, data, and games along with online games and message boards to keep entertained. Of course, this is nothing compared to what the Internet eventually became, but still. Point is, I have been here a while. So when I first came to Elance I did not expect too much. I was cautious at first because I was not about to get my hopes up just to see them deflated before my eyes.

At the time I was just about 6 months or a little more in to actually selling my writing. Although I have been doing it in varying capacities for a while I was not actively marketing myself or my work yet. I thought Elance could be the answer. At least that is what I was lead to believe by their advertisements and what I am now starting to think were phony testimonials. In the end, I put a decent amount of time and effort into Elance. I searched for jobs that suited me and my skills and bid on those jobs knowing that nothing is guaranteed.

All in all I landed a couple jobs but nothing that would have been worth the time and effort used. The few jobs that I did get paid much lower than what the going rate was for that type of work. In addition, the jobs that were being peddled at the time always seemed to be bigger and better than what they actually turned out to be. In other words the people doing the hiring were using flashy headlines and promises of more work to come just to get people on board for a small one-time job. It allowed them to basically get away with low-balling writers for quality work. The jobs that were honest about what they were just were not worth the time as they just your typical content-farm style of writing. Fluff pieces.

I was really disappointed by the time I came to my senses about what Elance really was. Even is all of the jobs being posted were great jobs that any writer would love to have, it is difficult for people to compete with the low wage labor that has somehow found its way into this industry as well. It can be compared to a company who outsources their work to another country because they are getting the work done at a fraction of what it used to cost them. People like me are losing out on jobs because people who call themselves writers from India, Portugal, Spain, and Pakistan are bidding for jobs at roughly 20% of what anybody else is. So if a job is (in reality) worth say $10 these people are bidding $2 for the job. How do you compete with that?

Where's the Quality?

This brings us to  the obvious question and one that I am sure is creeping into anyone's head who is reading this.  

"Surely if someone is offering to do a $10 job for $2 the quality will likely reflect the cheap cost. You get what you pay for right?"

This is exactly what I was thinking at first too. I figured there is no way that people bidding so low are keeping these jobs. There is no way they are producing the same quality work that I or someone else would. Generally that does end up to be the case. Over time, this ends up degrading the work place and the entire pool of jobs overall. Because of the lower quality of work people get they stop expecting quality from freelancers hired through the system. It is soon expected that the work will be poor, the "bar has effectively been lowered".

So It's Bye-Bye Elance!

I guess what this means is that I am back to square one. In essence this might be the better option. On the surface it looks like it will mean more work. I will have to market myself more and I will have to put some work into getting information to to prospective clients on a consistent basis when not working. That is the one thing that Elance and other sites like it provide, a forum.  They give people a place to meet and a place that helps to communicate your needs with the clients needs and match them up. When you are doing this on your own you do not have  the security of a website or a company behind you. Sometimes that could be a helpful thing.

I have always been on my own, it is just that now I will not have the Elance pool to find work in. That will be okay though because that pool has been saturated with poor quality work and tainted with sour freelancers working as cheap as possible in order to take work from the qualified writers that produce quality pieces. So just as always I will have my blog and then I will have my "Services Site" that details the various services I can provide. I pride myself on the variety of these services, hence the name: Diverse By Design.

Whether or not you choose to stay with Elance is up to you. Some people might find that it works for them, while others might just simply have different reasons for staying or going. Earlier in  this post I mentioned that by leaving Elance I am following the lead of a friend. He stopped using Elance for some of the same reasons but not all of them. Every one has different needs when it comes to using a site like that. So it really is up to you. If you can make it work for you and the jobs you get from the site are worth your time then great. I only wish that I could say the same. Good Luck!