Freelancing Sites & Their Lies
When you’re trying to build your business, your reputation, and your portfolio, a piece of advice I’ve seen again and again is to set up accounts on sites like Elance, Freelancer or 99Designs. I don’t know where someone got this idea, or why it has ever been considered sound advice. No one I know has ever had any success building a steady flow of projects and income from any of these sites. Way back in the day, I’ll admit it, I tried them. I was young and naive, and had big hopes and dreams like everyone else fresh out of college. The problem is that online freelancing sites give you a delusion of grandeur. It’s important to understand why freelancing sites are crap, especially for trying to build a portfolio and a client list.
Too Competitive
Imagine being interviewed fresh out of college for the same project as a seasoned Paul Rand. Unless you give your work away for free, and even still, you don’t have a chance of landing a new client. Everyone is jockeying for the winning bid or design, and they’re willing to do anything to make sure you don’t.
It Costs Money
Most of these sites allow you a certain amount of projects you can bid on, and after that, you have to pay for bids. There are also some places that ask you to pay for extra emphasis in results, which means if you have money, you can use it as leverage to make more. When you’re fresh out of college, you’re broke. We all know that. This is not geared towards freelancers or designers that are new to the business.
Some Sites Make It a Contest
This is infuriating. You are submitting real design work to a contest holder, who doesn’t know the first thing about design or what they really need. All they know is that they want a logo and want it to look good. There was no personal interaction with the client. You only read a design brief and get a vague description of what the client wants. Half the time, they pick something that doesn’t even make sense to begin with.
You have No Way To Prove Your Abilities
Some sites have tests you can take, some which even cost money, before you even earn any money. Just about anyone can pass a written test about Photoshop or Illustrator, but neither of those things prove you have talent as a designer. Also, if you’re fresh out of school, you have little or no real world experience. You can try to gain clients, but you have no real examples to prove your experience. You need these to gain clients.
Bidding Sites
Some sites make you bid on projects. Now, I know that we give clients a written estimate for our work, but on sites like these, we aren’t chosen for our talent. You are often overlooked, because someone from a third world country can undercut our professional rates and charge $50 for a $500 project.
They Waste A Lost of Time
Freelancing sites like these, have you fill out profiles and jump through a bunch of hoops to even get started. Then, you upload your projects and if you give it a real effort, you put in bids and reply to projects with quality bids. This eats up a ton of time, just for someone to overlook our proposal, because they can get someone who can’t even communicate to throw something at them for $20.
They Dis-hearten Good Designers
Like other designers who tried this when first starting out, I was discouraged. it’s a real blow to your confidence when you can’t even land one project. Also, it causes you t over-ridicule your college portfolio, which can make you seem desperate.
They Devalue Our Work and Our Industry
Bidding sites, Design Contest Sites, and Freelancing Sites all cause us to lose money. It didn’t take me long to realize that these types of sites weren’t the real way to promote yourself and start a business. Any time you promote or utilize a service that promotes bidding wars and slashing prices on our work just to land clients, is not in our best interest. Businesses also get a skewed view of our industry, which means they only go on the face value of our design work and the finished product, not on the thought and creativity that went into it.
They Make us Look Bad
Freelancing sites like these make us all look like money-grubbing trolls. All the general consumer or business owner sees is that they can get a logo for $99. They don’t know about the work that goes into a logo. They know nothing of the research and the brainstorming. They don’t know about the personal interaction that goes into the development of a quality logo or any other design. Al they see is the ability to get a product at a cut rate price. The fact that we charge what we should makes us look like divas compared to freelancing sites and design contests.
Conclusion: Avoid the Hype
Freelancing Sites and bidding sites take a direct stab at the quality of our work, as well as our livelihoods. There are a lot of downsides to these types of sites. It may look like a quick way to jump right into design work and paying clients. However, you are sure to be severely disappointed. A better way to spend your time is contacting non-profits and very small businesses, starting out with small design tasks at first. Build up your portfolio and your connections and go from there.
