Oh, yes, and it comes right around the holidays, doesn't it?!? Or, well, it did for me, anyways. It was short-lived, the break in work - exactly a week, because I immediately hopped onto the old places that I haven't frequented in over a year...
Elance, craigslist, Career Builder...okay, I went a little nuts trying to find some work for about 72 hours and then I decided to take a break for the weekend. And, on Monday (well, it would have been on Friday, but I figured if I hadn't heard from anyone by the early afternoon, I could give it up until Monday), there was work. A breath of fresh air and a major step away from feeling like I'm in an ocean full of freelancing fish who are swimming around trying to find some work, essentially taking what they can get.
There's a huge world of freelancers - you're competing against people from all over the world, who can speak various languages or might hold master's and Ph.D.'s. They all have their own areas of expertise in the world, whether it is business management and finances, e-commerce and marketing, social sciences, human resources, social media, HTML, or Travel Nursing. I mean, everyone's an "expert" about something, right? So, you better either be the expert of something, have a super-expensive degree or just really be able to consistently compose brilliant work.
Anyways, I feel blessed at the moment because I actually have some work, while I know that there are many freelancers who are desperately seeking something - anything - to do right now. And, for those of you who are the ones desperately seeking something to do...forget about craiglist. You'll rarely get answers back and some ads are spam. Freelancer has consistently cheap "employers", while Elance and Guru have the occasional intelligent employers who know that they are going to get what they pay for, right off the bat - and are willing to pay freelancers the money that they deserve for all of their hard work and hours committed to the research and writing.
I highly recommend people to NETWORK, NETWORK, NETWORK, no matter what industry you work in. You never know who you will meet, what connections they might have, and what opportunities may come from networking. Socializing on the networking sites on the web, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, can all be extremely helpful tools for finding and keeping work, too.
Does anyone else out there have any experiencing with seeking and finding freelance work? What has worked for you? What hasn't?
