Elance is excited to introduce a new guest columnist to our blog: Sarah Ratliff of Coqui Prose Content Marketing. While there are many ways to find success on the Elance platform, Sarah will regularly share her many experiences with our readers.
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Whenever I meet anyone for the first time—whether it’s over the Internet or in person—the usual exchange of pleasantries (kids, dogs, cats, etc.) is predictably followed by, “So, what do you do for a living?”
“I own a content marketing agency,” I say.
And then I wait.
“What does your company write about?” they ask.
“We’re pretty versatile, but our niches are medical writing, writing about addiction (which my team and I do for the U.S.’s largest addiction treatment center) and behavioral health.”
“Sounds like things are going well for you.”
“Yes, they are, thankfully. I started out a solo freelance writer five years ago and I got busy very quickly. Today we are a 20-person team with plans to expand again this year.”
“So you get a lot of work?” This is a very predictable and, of course, appropriate question.
“I do. I have four full-time clients, which is all I need for my team and me to keep busy. They’re repeat clients, so I no longer look for work,” I’ll say.
“How do you market yourself?” they’ll ask.
“Elance,” I’ll say, and then I wait.
“Can you really make a full-time living using Elance?” they’ll ask.
At this point I ask no one in particular, “Did I not just tell you that I have all the work I need to keep us busy and that I no longer look for new work?” But in my outside voice I say, “Yes, absolutely. I work exclusively through the Elance platform.”
“Do you think I need Elance?” they’ll ask.
“In my opinion, if you don’t have clients knocking down your door whom you’re beating off with a stick, then yes. But this is just my opinion based on my experience. I am a huge fan of Elance. I couldn’t have done as well for myself as I have without it.”
“But I’ve heard a lot of things about Elance,” they’ll share with me.
“And I am sure you’ve heard a lot of things about the Pope, and yet there are still millions of adoring fans of his all over the world,” I shoot back.
If You Are a Freelancer, Why Do You Need Elance?
All I can do is share my experience when I explain why I personally wouldn’t try to market my company without Elance.
When I decided to become a writer (having done marketing in my previous life in corporate America), I was pretty lost about how I’d go about marketing myself.
I did as most in this position would do. I asked several friends for recommendations. Not a single person gave me one that was useful. All said to market myself on the Internet. “How?” I asked. Nobody—not one person—had any useful advice.
Finally I Googled “Freelance bidding sites,” and Elance’s name was at the top. I checked it out.
I read and digested the Terms of Service, looked over its infrastructure and the jobs being offered in the Writing & Translation category, and I was sold! I decided to give it a try.
Diving headfirst without a parachute, I registered. I created a profile. I started bidding on jobs. There was a lot of faking-it-till-I-made-it. With no writing samples to offer clients, I frequently fell on my sword and admitted that I had none, but if they’d be willing to take a chance on me, I’d make sure they wouldn’t regret it. The overwhelming majority of them became repeat clients after I made good on my promises.
If you have samples, you’re way ahead of where I was in the beginning.
With nothing to lose but the reputation I was trying to build, I had no shame in admitting my inexperience.
Back in the day, $10 for an individual membership bought me (if I recall correctly) 20 Connects. I ran out after about two weeks, but by this time I had already won a few jobs. I spent $15 to buy a few more. Today an individual membership gives you 60 Connects, which means, if you use them wisely, you can put your face and samples in front of between 40 and 60 potential clients. (In future blogs, I will give you tips on creating a winning profile and writing great proposals.)
Today I am registered in three categories: Writing & Translation, Administrative Services and Design & Multimedia with plans to add a fourth in two months, and I pay Elance $120 a month for a large business account.
At $120 a month, I personally haven’t found a more cost effective and successful way to market my business.
What’s the Alternative?
I live in Puerto Rico. English is my first language and not the same language as the primary one spoken here. Although my Spanish is decent, it’s nothing close to what my English is. I couldn’t, for example, market us, negotiate with clients, write an article or a book and maintain the relationships we have with clients long-term in Spanish.
On an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, how else am I going to put us in the faces of the CEOs of successful corporations who can afford to pay our rates?
While social media is an excellent way to market one’s products, it’s not the best for freelancers. And believe me when I say I learned this the hard way.
LinkedIn:
I could rely on LinkedIn, which many of my other freelancing friends do. The problem is, years later they’re still “connecting” with people trying to market themselves.
Facebook and Twitter:
Clever? Witty? Charming? And you offer great content on your website, which you use Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to? Fabulous—for those who are following you and who are fans of yours. The problem is, of your 500, 1000, 2000 or more fans and/or followers, your clients aren’t among them because they’re not hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.
Your fans and followers invariably comprise others who are just like you. The problem is, that’s not your target audience. Despite all of those things you post and all the cleverness you offer people, it’s being lost on the one person who needs to see it—Mr. or Ms. CEO with the big bucks who’s dying to hire you.
Word of Mouth:
Sure, this works, but it has to start with that first client. And again, how do you find this person? Your uncle, who owns a hardware business, who “hired” you to create his website and his logo for free is nice, but then what? Sure you’ve got a great start to your portfolio, but again, then what?
Job Sites like CareerBuilder, Monster, et al.:
This is actually not a bad way to market yourself—in theory. You know from the ads that companies are looking for someone with your skills. In fact, you could read job posting after job posting that are perfect for you!
What’s the problem? Most of the jobs posted on the Internet’s version of the Help Wanted section are recruiting full-time people who will work on their premises. In other words, they’re not looking to outsource, but want to fill an in-house spot. This may be what you want, in which case I say go for it. But if freelancing is what you’ve committed yourself to doing vs. getting back in the rat race, the return on time investment will be a big fat zero.
Billable Hours.
What it all boils down to is simple. How much time and money do you want to spend marketing yourself to potential clients? No matter what avenue you choose, you will initially spend 100 percent of your time marketing yourself. Once you land a job, then another and another, the time spent doing so obviously comes down.
But here’s the thing: if you already have the clients quite literally at your fingertips and can choose from among hundreds of jobs to bid on—all for just $10 a month—having them all come to you, so to speak, seems like a “no brainer,” doesn’t it?
But if you’re always chasing clients, you’ll need to charge $200 an hour or more to make up for the time spent marketing yourself.
These days I spend less than 5 percent of my time marketing my team and me on Elance, meaning I haven’t gone job hunting in over a year. Any jobs I bid on are the result of invitations to bid from clients, so I obviously can’t discount the time it takes me to write a proposal on a job that I have a 90 percent—or higher—chance of winning.
Of course this won’t happen overnight and it will take some time to get to where you no longer need to market yourself, but it can certainly happen.
The Quality of Jobs on Elance.
Surely you’ll hear people complain about how crappy Elance is—whether it’s the “crappy jobs,” “crappy clients,” “its crappy rules” or “the crappy competition,” to which I say that I have no time to notice, let alone complain about the so-called crappy conditions. I’m too busy working and turning down work.
But not only that, here are a few of the “crappy” stats from Elance's Hiring Trends Page:
• 87 percent of Elance clients indicated that hiring freelancers online are a vital part of their business
• 83 percent of businesses plan to hire at least half of their workers online in the next 12 months
• 15 jobs are awarded on Elance every 20 seconds
• Elance clients search the Elance marketplace up to 582 times an hour each day
• 4,935,829 jobs have been posted on Elance as of August 2014
• The total value of jobs posted on Elance has exceeded $5 billion as of August 2014
• February 2013 to August 2014 accounts for $1.8 billion of that $5 billion
More Stats Anyone?
As far as the “crappy” competition goes, Elance's Employment Trends from last year looked like this:
• Elancers earned $285 million from the 1.25 million jobs posted
• 3.6 million registered Elancers since 1999 have earned $1.2 billion
• 89 percent of Elancers stated that freelancing is an integral part of their career strategy
• US Elancers earned $310 million in 2013 (across all categories)
According to Forbes, Newsweek, the Freelancers Union and myriad other reliable sources, one in three (42 million) Americans currently freelance. By the year 2020 that number is estimated to swell to 50 percent of the American workforce. Estimates suggest that globally this number will be about one-third of the workforce.
If you are currently freelancing or are considering it because you were laid off, left of your own volition or you never wanted to go the traditional brick & mortar route, have you given serious thought to how you will market yourself?
For $10 a month, can you think of a more cost-effective way to do this than using Elance? Leave a comment below and let me know.
PS: Looking for more free Elance tips? I recommend Danny Margulies' Top 5 Elance Hacks.
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About the author:
Sarah Ratliff is the owner of Coqui Prose Content Marketing, which she has operated exclusively on the Elance platform since March 2010. Starting out as a one-woman freelance writer, things got busy for her almost overnight. Today, she not only retains all of her company’s clients on Elance, but she also hires all of her team members and occasional freelancers to fill one-off jobs from Elance’s talented pool of freelancers.