This is a followup, and part 2 of a 4 part series, on the work at home factory job of today (read part 1, The Work at Home Job Scam, the New Factory. This post deals with the freelance job market, the upcoming posts will deal with the call center jobs and Internet evaluator or website annotator jobs. Keep in mind the term “freelance” encompasses a huge genre of work from photography to writing to virtual assistant to anything you can find on Craigslist in the job area. The scope of this post is really just dealing with Elance and the Elance alternatives.
Elance is the biggest player in the Internet freelance job area. After paying for their premium service for 2-3 years, and trying over and over for years to find a good flow of freelance jobs, I found exactly one decent hard working person who hired me to do some ‘Internet research” for $10/hr, which over a period of 6 months has earned me $85. I still do work for him, he is trying to build his business, and he pays higher than most at $10/hr, but after almost three years, I have found nothing legitimate and it cost me $14.99/month ($450) for revenues totalling $80.
I am not here to say Elance or the others are scams (although there are posting scams all over the place), I am just trying to point out the value of your time and what it is worth.
There are plenty of alternatives to Elance like oDesk, Guru, Rentacoder, Scriptlance, Mturk, Freelancer, Getacoder, and some of my observations from sites like these are:
- there are always tons of jobs available
- Elance at least has it down to a science as far as pay and project organization
- you are competing with an endless supply of workers from India who charge $1/hr (yes, on average your competition will charge $1-2 PER HOUR)
- you have to work literally for nothing to get started by taking projects that will pay $50 for 30 hours of work
- you are competing with noobs and people who have no idea how to run a legitamate business who will do anything for nothing, though their work is often very low quality, something you can easily overcome
- quality is not valued as a whole… I have found the large majority of listings on these sites are looking for the cheapest possible outcome, with no regards for quality work
- and of course, there are tons of scams everywhere you look, offers for work that will have your ISP ban your service, have eBay shut down your account, or worse… some offers might reward you with a federal search warrant and your computer equipment confiscated
Of course not all freelance work is like this, but I know of many people, who live and work within the U.S. and have to pay expenses associated with living in this country, not India. You can only work for nothing for so long, eventually you have to either cut all expenses (not realistic) or have some revenue.
I have basically worked freelance as a photographer for more than 15 years and the key is to slowly build a client base that will recommend your work to others. It is slow, tedious, and doesn’t pay well, but it’s far better in the long run than the results from these sites listed above.
Do yourself a favor in the long run. If you are interested in doing freelance work, treat your business like you would any other entrepreneurial endeavor by looking at some of the basics. For what it’s worth, my list also includes ::
- Don’t quit your revenue stream (job) until you are established
- Determine what unique skill or art you are going to freelance (what’s your market)
- Be prepared not to make any money early on, but even so, stay away from the sites above
- Pursue your passion, not a position
- Know that trying to monetizing your passion may destroy it or at least significantly change it
- Seeking alternative “positions” in that industry may also destroy your passion
- Seek out others who are doing the same thing and try to learn as much as you can from them
- Working more hours will not always equal better results
- Trying to integrate your passion into #1 above (results may vary)
- If you can mentally live without a steady paycheck, a 401(k), a retirement package, and stability, forget about #1 and pursue your passion instead of the culturally accepted “American Dream” but when you struggle to find your way, re-read #3, then, as Buffett would say, breathe in, breathe out, and move on. My wife and I went over 15 years without a single paycheck (the W-2 type) and I still managed to eat.
Have you had any experience with Elance or any of the other sites listed above? In my experience most, if not all, of these sites way over promise and way under-deliver for those with quality, experience, and education in their field. I would love to hear if you have had any success with any of them in your freelance pursuits.
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This is the final followup from my previous posts, Are You a Linchpin, Assignment and an upcoming post Are You a Linchpin, Answer. I took the above photo of Seth Godin back in 2009, see Tribes, We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin // Review, and shortly after I took that photo shoot, I gave up my art for dead. I had spent the better part of 15-17 years chiseling away at my art of photography and had felt like I was rarely valued for that art (monetarily speaking). In fact, in over 15 years of actively shooting, I probably made less than $1,200 total ($1,000 of that coming within the last 6 months of that 15 years), on an investment of probably close to $30,000 or more in equipment. With a degree in Accounting, schooled in the ways of business, that didn’t compute. Expenses always have to be less than revenue, but I was looking at it totally wrong.
Rarely does a book motivate me to make an actual change. Many books motivate me, but not enough to do anything about it. Linchpin on the other hand was one of those that just happen to light a fire under my feet and get me to look at my art in another way. Mainly, that an art is done for the sake of the artist, and those who receive his gift. I knew this from the moment I picked up a camera, but over time and many other circumstances, I had forgotten that.
Profit, something which I was always taught was a simple mathematical formula; “revenue minus expenses equals profit”, was totally rearranged in Linchpin. Godin explains profit, from the business side, as the value you, the artist, add or contribute minus the amount you are paid. Same thing really as the MBA version, but when you look at the work, as “value” it adds something more than just money, it changes everything.
A fast food worker at McDonald’s can add a wide range of value to the company, yet they are pretty much all paid the same thing, minimum wage, so there is no reason to create or add value above a certain level, but that doesn’t mean some don’t create and add value where it is not needed or appreciated. Brother Lawrence was one such person. A 17th century monk, and someone who had enormous value to add to all of society in his book of letters, spent much of his life doing dishes, as a cook. His conversations with God and letters to his friends make an incredible book, and it is free, you can read it right now, doesn’t cost you a dime.
My art of photography had created value for years. I gave it away to the wrong people, businesses and companies, and tried to charge those in my close circle. So thanks Seth, I am going to get back to the business of creating my own unique art. I don’t know how I am going to accomplish that, I have no equipment, no resources to buy any equipment, and at the moment, no clients to shoot for, but those are just details. I have going on 2 decades of knowledge in my own art, the equipment is just a tool.
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It costs me $20-$30 per hour worked to have a work at home job. Working from home is totally different, I am talking about a specific classification of job, the work at home job. The job that targets those who want to spend more time with their family, not waste half their life in traffic, the homeschool mom, the out of work in between work individual.
Notice I didn’t say it made me x-amount of money, but it has cost me x-amount of money. That is the difference between today’s standard work at home job and one you have to actually drive to get to, between $20-$30 per hour less even though today, most jobs can be done from anywhere.
If you are looking for the newest in sweat shop factory work (and there are tons of people who are), you won’t find it at the local tire or car plant. No way, their union wages are far too high ($50-$75/hr) to compare with these jobs. The new factory work in our culture today is the work at home job. After owning my own business for 15-20 years (and running it from my own home no less) I never understood the extent of the work at home scam until I started looking for one of these great jobs. I figured that there was some company that could see the value in hiring me, a Linchpin, to work from my home office, but after 2-3 years of searching, and working, now I’m not so sure.
I will review a few companies and positions in a series of upcoming posts for those who are still looking since every time I came across one of these positions, I had to find a decent review about the company (look at forums and sites like WAHM, JobVent or GlassDoor.com) to find out if it was an actual scam or not. Most were not scams in the technical sense of the word, but I am amazed at what conditions we are now willing to accept just so we can have a work at home job (there is a huge difference in working from home and work at home).
Most of these jobs pay under $10 per hour (many well under, like $5-7/hr) and in the U.S. you will be lucky to cover your home office expenses for that. Generally you are required to put in a specific volume of tasks per hour, calls per hour or however they rate you, and always follow the manual, map, guide, instructions with no deviation. Most hire you as contract labor so they don’t have to pay taxes, worry about law suits, pay for training, or pay for any benefits whatsoever.
The difference that makes one job an actual scam, or at least a big clue, and the other job not a scam is if they require you to pay them for the job. Most of these work at home jobs don’t go that far into the true scam world, they are factories of course, not scams. They do go as far as paying you by the minute, requiring you to incorporate, and require you to take “tests” to become qualified, and they don’t pay for your training. These “tests” are in essence the very work of the job, work you do for free because it is part of the “interview” (I took a 10-15 hour “test” to “qualify” and later realized that I was doing their actual work, unpaid of course).
In each site or company I list in my upcoming posts I am only showing the most obvious match, and those I have direct experience with in the past. Under the surface there are tons of companies all doing the same thing, looking for the cheapest most expendable warm body, but I know for some, any job is better than no job, and I totally understand that.
The list could be endless. You have freelance work, call center (centre) jobs, tech support, customer service, programming, search engine evaluators, data entry and so on. In these three upcoming posts I will highlight the three areas I have looked at the most, freelance, call center, and search engine evaluator (or annotator, search engine technician, ads quality rater, etc). For those of you who are looking for a meaningful job where you can add value to the company, I have an exahustive list of who to avoid, but I would love to hear from you too. Good luck in your search.
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This question comes up quite a bit, but when you are talking about individuals businesses or blogs, not a corporation, the simple answer is, probably not as much as you think. Certainly not as much as you have put into it.
One of my favorite things to watch is Buy it Now prices on eBay and personal items people put up for sale, like their car or motorcycle. I have this GREAT thing, I paid $5,000 for it, used it for 5 years, it is in perfect, brand new condition and here it is for sale for $5,500, great deal. What we deem as precious and important to us, really only has a value of what someone else is willing to pay, and in my experience, it is not as much as we would want it to be.
There are “collectibles” and things like that of course, but I find those don’t even hold up to current prices unless it is really the hottest of hot in the latest trend or gimmick. We even had a genuine Rolex watch, with an appraisal that had a replacement value of $7,500 and it looks like its current ebay selling price is around $1,200. It comes down to this. Do you actually want to sell the item or business in question, or do you want to sell it for what you want to sell it for?
I am going to examine this question in a series of posts since it can be quite a long subject. In this post I will look at a few variables in determining value to your business, asset, blog, online property, or other digital assets and what it might be worth if you want to sell it. Should you look at selling on Sitepoint as opposed to eBay or Amazon and what other alternatives are there for you to sell your Internet assets. Other points that might come up as future topics are pricing domain names and their value (you can also see Register a Domain Name for eBay Affiliate Traffic, 10 Ways to Set Goals for Your Online Business, or GoDaddy Cash Parking Makes Little Money for some of my other related topics on this subject.
Value is Determined by Someone Else
As I mentioned above, the value of something is not really determined by you at all. How much something is worth depends on how much someone else is willing to pay for it. If you think something is worth $5,000 and someone else is willing to pay $10,000, then it is worth $10k, and of course the opposite is also true.
A good example of this is the current fire sale of blogs. At first, the money making seo blogs were said to be worth bundles. Then as a few were sold off, the value of each was shown, to be what someone else was willing to pay for it. There were, and are, several metrics that bloggers decided each blog was worth and gave it value, but most went by a price per subscriber of about $15.
All of this came to mind when I read, A Difficult Decision – BloggingExperiment.com For Sale, a nice blog which I have read for some time. All of sudden the for sale sign went out. It was up for auction, but has since been sold for an undisclosed amount, but the seller / owner (Ben) was looking for “5 figures”, which is about in line with the price per subscriber listed above. That would make the sale about $13,500 (that is according to the calculation above, I have no knowledge of what it actually sold for).
If we just stay with the guesstimate above as an example, Ben was doing a year long experiment, which he was 265 days into, when he decided to sell his blog. Since he sold it, I would assume he got a price he was willing to accept. If it was my guess above, that comes to about $51/day, or about $6/hour if you go on an 8 hour day, or approximately $18,000/year. But, it is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and sometimes that is better than what we know it is worth.
Don’t self impose an over valuation of your asset. If you do, whatever you are trying to sell will sit there for a long time, perhaps months or years before you find a buyer you will agree with. If you decide you want to sell it, sell it, for what someone else is willing to buy it for, in a reasonable period of time. Ben obviously made the decision to sell his blog, and did so, in about 5 days.
Value Depends on What You Put Into It
As with most things in life, you get what you put into it. One thing that I think is a misnomer among others looking at Internet entrepreneurs is how much work is involved. Sticking with the blog theme from Blogging Experiment, I know it is a hands on, daily grind, meticulous operation to keep that blog at its current traffic level and subscriber list. If he just let it go for a week, or a month, and let it run itself, it would run right into the ground from its prime.
Blog in particular are not self sustaining businesses that you can setup and let run. They take a lot of time and effort, effort that most are not willing to put into a blog, which is what makes sites like Pro Blogger so good, they put a ton of hours into the site each day. Not all of us have the staff and resources to do what they do, but it certainly adds value to their site. What a quick tip to add value to your blog or website. Add content. Not scrapped content or stuff just pulled in from other sites, but real, well written, new, fresh content. That will add readers, advertisers, and value to your site.
Value Depends on How You Present It
One final way to put value into your online asset, presentation. You may have the worlds best thing, but if it looks bad, smells bad, and isn’t generally presented well, it won’t have the value you think it should, or probably does. This may be a clean design or new look, but most likely you have already have this in place.
I can relate this to an eBay listing (or ad if you prefer). You can have the exact same product as someone else on eBay, sell it for the same price, same shipping, and delivery time, but yours will not sell if the presentation it not better than the competition. This may just be nicely worded descriptions of what you are trying to sell or site metrics, visitors, stats, all the things people really want to know about the item for sale.
Give a lot of information. I think people generally read about 10% of what is presented to them, so make the important points stand out. Highlight your strengths, but don’t hide your weaknesses, and give a lot of information about the item for sale. The more questions you get about the item for sale, the worse you did in explaining the sale to potential buyers, especially if you get 10 people asking the same exact question.
What are your best tips to showing the value of an item?
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How many feeds to you have in your reader? All of them, right. I just hit the 300+ mark this week and counting, so I don’t quite have all of them yet, but I am working on it. Have you ever subscribed to what someone else is reading instead of what someone else is writing?
Have you ever offered a feed for your own shared or starred items? If not, you might want to consider adding one of these less used features and give some added value to your readers. I am always fascinated with what others are reading, not just with what other bloggers are writing and I subscribe to a few reader’s feeds. These are not always easy to find because not to many people post their reader feeds, and I am not sure how well this works in any reader other than Google Reader.
How Shared Items Work
These feeds come in the way of the shared items in a users readers. When someone reads a feed and clicks on the shared link at the bottom of the feed it sends out its own feed based on that user. It also provides an actual page where those feeds go, but who needs that if there is a feed. It works the same with starred items, but these are usually private feeds. To make it public, you just need to go to manage feeds => tags, then just change sharing from private to public. Once you do that you will be able to view the public page and add a clip (or widget) to your site.
Why Offer This To Your Readers
You may ask why anyone would want to offer this in the first place? It doesn’t monetize your blog or site, this feed doesn’t even keep the visitors on my site, it takes them somewhere else, and it isn’t something you wrote. Well, that is probably why you don’t see to many of these feeds anywhere. But, I do think it gives your reader some added value that you don’t find on many other blogs.
Your Name Follows the Feed
When you create this feed link, either in feedburner or just the long url provided by Google, you add your name to the feed. For example, the feed for my shared items is http://feeds.feedburner.com/chipseo-shared and when the visitor adds the feed to their reader, the name of the feed, Scott Fillmer’s shared items in Google Reader, follows.
Every single time the user looks at the feed, it shows the name of the feed and puts a little reminder in the mind of the reader as to where the feed came from. One of the feeds I subscribe to is called “rksmythe’s starred items”. He updates his starred items a few times a day so even if he didn’t post an article himself that day, I am reminded of his blog, My Blog Utopia.
Updated More Often Than Post Schedule
As you can imagine, these feeds will be updated a little more often than a normal posting schedule, unless you only read one good article a day. This adds to the readers list of “things to read” but it also puts your blogs name in front of the reader much more often than it would if the reader were only reading your once a day (or less) articles.
Offer Something a Little Personal to Your Readers
Some of us try very hard to stay on topic and write serious articles or copywriter material for all our posts. This will give you an opportunity to let go a little bit and show something a little more personal to your readers. I think we all like a little insight into the lives of the blogs we read, and offering something like this will show your readers there is a real person behind the screen.
Find Different Blogs You Have Never Read
One of the advantages from the subscribers perspective is that no one is going to share or star the exact same items, so you often find different blogs and sites you have never seen before. I am amazed at how many high quality blogs I have come across that were found just because someone else starred or shared the article.
I do find it very interesting to see what other people read, and I learn quite a bit by looking at a different perspective. So, if you haven’t tried offering a feed from your Google Reader give it a try. At least I will be able to add another reader feed to my list and get to see what you read, you already know what I read.
You don’t have to do something that takes over your blog or something as overwhelmingly obvious that competes with your normal feed icon. I use two very small rss icons aimed at the more savvy users. I figure those who can see it and understand what it is are the readers I wanted to offer this feed to anyway.
What do you think? Do you subscribe to a reader feed? Did you know this was even an option?
Update: The Google Blog just published an article, Attack of the 20%’ers, that goes show some detail about how to use these features, if you want some further reading on the subject.
