Playing with Elance

Sep 05, 2005

There was a time I used to haunt RentACoder.com in search of writing projects. People there expect you to work for pittance — I felt ashamed of even going through project specifications. What part of the wretched universe do they live in? I mean, many offered $1 for “original”, “unique” and “excellent” 600-word articles. I stopped visiting the website and saved myself from a depression attack.

Then I put all my energies (a blessing in disguise, you may say) into reviving my content writing website — AmritHallan.com. I optimized it, switched over to a CSS-based design, attained a good ranking in Google and Yahoo!, and started advertising in AdWords. Work began to flow in and soon I needed to outsource my work.

Of late the queries have subsided despite a good position in the search results. May be some trend, some phase. But I’m not going to wait, although I’m going to analyze why there are only 3-4 business queries per week, whereas there used to be on an average 2 queries everyday. In the meantime I’m trying to get work from Elance.com. The beginning hasn’t been good: I had to pay $110 for a month where I could have just paid $70. They hadn’t clearly mentioned that it was only a $70 subscription that allows you to bid on certain projects, and this was revealed when I had already subscribed for a $40 subscription. In order to bid on the projects I wanted to bid on, I needed to subscribe again. Well, may be my mistake, but, they never responded to my query. But then again, may be there is a holiday there.

Anyway, the good thing is, I have received some response from the clients over there.