Finding Work Online…

There are a lot of great services for freelance graphic designers out there – and a lot of junk. I’ve worked with some of the best, and I’ve even dipped my toe into the pool of piranhas. Be careful of the services you align with, as you can spend a lot of dough on something that just won’t work – or worse yet – take up a lot of your time and actuall cost you more money than you make.

I’ll outline a couple here, and when I get the rest of this little site actually done, I’ll have a page with many. I’ve done a lot of footwork on a lot of sites, and I’ve fallen flat on my face on some of them. Now, you can learn from my bumps and bruises.

By the way – I don’t make a penny from endorsing or slamming any of these.

First up – my favorite – Guru.com. Really nice system that’s not over-saturated like some of the big boys. They’ve got it broken down into nice categories like graphic design, illustration, web design, copy writing, etc, and they break those categories down even further, so you can really narrow your search and find the jobs that interest you or utilize your strong suits. It costs $75 per quarter to get 100 bids monthly (you can buy more – called BidPax if you run out) and the jobs are varied and from all over the world. I’ve worked for Swedes and for people 1 town over. There’s plenty of competition, but if you bid appropriately, you get lots of work – and repeat business, which is ALWAYS good. Billing protection, 1099 service, etc make this well worth the investment.

Secondly – one of the lesser-known and less traveled – iFreelance.com. At only $10 a month, it’s really affordable, and there are a fair few jobs. Not huge, but growing. You have to handle your billing outside the system (PayPal, anyone) so there’s not a lot of protection for either party – but a good contract system (I’ll eventually put some sample contracts on this site) will keep you in the swim.

More later – but really, get out and check out some of the lesser-traveled freelance job sites. The less traffic they have, the better your chances. Plus, it’s kind of nice to design bottled water packages for a manufacturer in Belize…