A Designer’s View of Freelance Bidding Sites

Photo by Petrick2008

There’s a very interesting article about freelance bidding sites over at Freelance Switch. There are some very good comments too and a couple of links to similar articles on other blogs. This shows people are interested about this subject. That’s why I thought it might be helpful for some of my readers if I shared my point of view.

For me, Elance (probably the best bidding site out there) was a great source for generating new leads. I also tried a couple of other sites, but after registering, there wasn’t much for me to bid on. Working on $5/h projects is not really my thing. And since most of the projects were like that, I stopped using those sites a long time ago. Elance on the other hand is a bit different. While Elance has its share of crappy projects, once in a while you do find some solid leads.

Here’s my point of view: using freelance bidding sites is not a bad or shameful thing to do. These sites are not evil. As long as you don’t lower your standards just for the sake of winning a project, these sites are just as good as any other source for generating new leads and finding more work. You can make good money on bidding sites.

Sure, if you have a lot of work on your hands, coming from other sources, there’s no point in wasting time filtering through all the bad projects. You can go straight to the source. But if you browse such a site and stumble across a well documented, well budgeted kind of project that you think is worth a shot, I see no harm in that.