You are more than welcome and I am delighted that you found the information in this post useful.

Amanda

1. Contrary to popular belief: more bids are bad (for the buyer and provider)
2. More standardaization is needed in RFP writing
3. Minimum budgets of $50 is inappropriate for US-based providers, in most cases.
4. A “great” ghostwriting project has a budget of about $500 (US).
5. The incremental “connect” increase with budget benefits larger projects, but has nothing to do with the quality of the writer.

Hmmm, Outstanding Amanda… Outstanding…

You are right there is a lot of competition and it was much easier when I started using the site back in 2004 and the standard rates for 300 word articles was $5 with 500 words fetching $10. There was really no low bidding back then, you might get someone bidding $8 for 500 words but that was as low as it went. It is only in the past 2 years that Elance and other freelance websites have become inundated with low bidders from India and other places and this is what is making things so difficult. I can only assume that the dollar is worth a lot more in these countries.

Thanks for your comments and I’m so glad you found these Elance articles beneficial. I would recommend the individual subscription which is the one I use. You get 20 connects per month which should be enough although you can purchase more if you need to. Connects can be a little tricky to grasp but they are basically just bids and the higher the project budget the more connects you need. A small project under $500 is 1 connect, $500 – $1,000 is 2 connects, and so on. Featured projects require double the amount of connects in order for you to bid on the project.

There are a few things to beware of when bidding which I think I have also covered in the posts. If you see a project that says “this should be easy for someone who knows what they’re doing” it normally tends to mean that the buyer is looking for really low bids so I do tend to avoid these. I think when starting off on Elance you should bid on article writing projects as these are usually the easiest to get.

Let me know if you have any other specific questions and I will answer them here too.

Amanda

Thanks for all of the elance articles. You’ve convinced me, I’m ready to sign up. As a freelance writer, would you recommend the individual (not free) for that?

I need to go read your previous article on connections because I’m not sure I understand.

If you have any other pertinent advice, I’d appreciate it!

George