OnlineFreelance.com

Getting a project is probably the most difficult thing for most of the freelancers, both newcomers and experienced lancers. Some of the people that I know simply don’t have something that is essential for project search and interviews. And while you can always practice and improve your main skills even outside the marketplace that you are working on, there is no place where you can practice the project search and negotiation skills. So in this article we will try to give some general tips on how to get a project.

The first tip is – be 100% professional during the bidding and interview. Make sure that your messages have no mistakes, that you are polite and that you are posting information required for taking the project (like samples of your work and some ideas about how to complete the project.)

Pay attention to the buyers profile. If the buyer has a lot of serious projects running or already spent like $20.000 on this marketplace – pay extra attention to this project and his projects in general. You can offer him to do the job for a small rate. If you impress him it is possible that he will offer you work on some of his upcoming or current projects, or will contact you in a while to offer some work.

Stick to the buyers that have no problems with paying you the money that you consider okay for the completed work. There is no need to waste your time on some poorly paid job if you can earn more. Still defining the appropriate sum requires a skill that will come after five six completed jobs.

It is important to remember that this is all real life and while the buyers may be looking for cheap top quality freelancers, they understand that a real professional will work only for some serious rates. There is nothing wrong about bidding more that a buyer offers and argument this with good quality. It at some point the buyer will understand all the negative sides of low-quality work or simply gets tired of low paid unreliable workers (especially if he provides work in some serious areas like mobile devices or large web development projects). So it is possible that you will be the one who will rework or finish the project for the price that you set.

It is important to remember that a project is lost only when it is completed by someone else. I had some situations when I wasn’t selected during the interview, but due to some problems with the selected provider, I ended up as the one who finished the project and was paid for it.

And the final tip – don’t be upset if you lost the job especially if you were interviewed. It means that the buyer was interested in you and you already have some chances to get his next project. So try ending the negotiations with something like “Thank you Mike, feel free to contact me if you need some of my services.”

Tags: beginner, pricing, rates, tips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 18:55 and is filed under tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.