Earning money on Elance

Yesterday I completed my first project on Elance. It was not anything big - a small project of rephrasing a recommendation letter based on the answers given by that person. And thus I earned my first 50$ at Elance.

So far, my experience with Elance was a positive one. I started with the Basic free plan in which you get three Connects a month for free (three opportunities to bid for projects) and I used all three by bidding on three small projects. When bidding for projects I really wanted to start with something small – around the minimum budget, just to see whether the system really worked. That is something I try to do with all the clients – I don’t want to earn 1000$ and then to realize that the buyer is not really a serious one, don’t have the money or whatever – you should beware of that kind of people if you are thinking about starting the freelance writing career. The good thing on Elance is that you have the Escrow option – the buyer has to fund the project first by placing his money into the Escrow so you know that you will be paid when you finish your work. Then when you complete the project and the buyer verifies that it’s done, the money from the Escrow is transferred to your account.

But let’s return to the story. I spent all three connects and was waiting for the buyers to award the projects. One project was immediately awarded to someone else, my second bid was declined because the buyer wanted a person from a specific location and I was still waiting for the third answer. At that moment I was wondering whether it is worth changing my membership plan from free to the paid membership. And at that time, I was contacted by the buyer of the first project (from above – which was awarded to someone else) asking me whether I would be interested in a similar project with a similar budget. I believe that he contacted me because I placed a good bid (I will write about the winning bids later). I answered positively and he invited me to a project. When I completed the work and sent the files to him, he confirmed that the project was finished and the money was transferred to my account. Of course, I upgraded to the paid-membership plan, which is only $9.95 and I got 20 Connects for that money.

So, I’ll keep you posted on what happened with the 19 other bids.