Freelancing web sites?

While looking for a Cold Fusion coder to fix some bugs on our web site, I stumbled upon guru.com. Besides tech geeks, the site matches people in other fields, such as writing, design, etc.

I’d be interested in taking on some freelance writing gigs from time to time (I wouldn’t want to try to make a living at it) and am wondering whether a site like guru.com would be a good place to find gigs. Are there others I should take a look at?

Thanks!

elance.com and ifreelance.com come to mind, though the online freelancer marketplace thing isn’t what it used to be a few years ago.

GAF(GetAFreelancer)dotcom.

One of the problems with these places like elance is that you are bidding your services against freelancers in India and they are willing to work so much more cheaply.

So much of it is SEO optimization crap, too. It’s companies trying to game google’s search engine with a flood of craptastic articles stuffed with search terms. You don’t want to do that kind of writing.

Here. Read this and weep:

We need articles on technical and semi technical subjects like push email etc. these should be 550 worded and high end work. We are paying handsome price of $4 to $6 per articles.

It’s not even really writing. It’s taking existing articles and doing a quick rewrite so the plagiarism isn’t obvious.

The odesk creative writing section is my new favorite go-to comedy site. Because those listings are jokes, right?

My favorite so far is the guy looking for short scripts so he can make videos for “virus marketing.”

I’ve found a couple of legit-looking (and actually interesting!) jobs on elance and oDesk. The SEO stuff does look horrid and it’s all over the place; cherry picking stuff like translating 24 pages of a Cuban novel, or blogging about indie games in Spanish doesn’t sound so bad, though…

Not guru.com.

Hence my comment about the the online freelancer marketplace not being what it used to be. I did nothing but freelance creative work for about 8 years straight (ending in 2001 or so), then ended up taking a job that lasted 7 years. Once that tanked (in 2008) I went back to freelancing and was amazed how the competition had changed. I’d be competing for a bid on quality and deliverables and everyone else would be competing on price and nothing but price.

For people who don’t know better (like most who buy services from freelancers via these sites it seems) the lure of a extremely cheap vs quality work is hard to ignore.

I still freelance from time to time these days (took a great job about six months ago) but it’s a different ball game.