Ted Bendixson, Freelance Copywriter and Shred Advocate

It’s a story you hear all too often on the bidding sites. Freelancers complain about never being able to find high paying clients while employers complain about the lack of qualified employees with excellent communication skills. Have you ever posted a project on one of the bidding sites and taken it down because you couldn’t get a single decent candidate to bid on it? If so, the advice I am about to give is for you.

Over the years, the online job market has come to represent the real job market in a variety of ways. The social media revolution has created a kind of real world responsibility that is fairly new to the web. What you do, as an employee and as an employer, is more visible than ever. Every action counts.

I don’t mean to scare you, but here is the new reality. If you want to attract talent online, you need to do the same things you would do to attract talent offline. You need to convince your potential employees that your project is worth the time and effort it takes for them to put a proposal together. You also need to look like you can follow a project through to its finish.

As a person who searches through the bidding sites for work, I value employers with a solid reputation who know what they’re doing. When you convey this image in your job posting, you will get more of the right people to bid on your projects. Here’s how you do it.

Don’t Ruin Your Reputation!

It doesn’t matter if you are hiring on Elance, Odesk, Vworker, or any of the over 20 different sources of online workers, reputation is the most important thing to consider when you post your job. Every time you post a project and don’t follow it through, your reputation suffers. The more your reputation tanks, the more difficult it will be to attract rockstar talent.

Before you post any project, think it through. Do you really want to do this? More importantly, do you really need to do this? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve posted a project and decided minutes later that I would just do the project myself. It’s this kind of self-destructive behavior that will ruin your reputation very quickly. Don’t do it!

Be 100% certain that you have the resources to devote to the project and that it is something you cannot do on your own. That is the only way to guarantee you won’t give up on hiring someone. My most successful hires were in areas where I knew absolutely nothing and desperately needed the help. My employees did a great job, and my online reputation improved.

Start Small And Work Your Way Up

As an experienced freelancer, I am past the point of considering employers who don’t have at least one project under their belt. I wish I could, but It’s simply too much risk to assume on my part. I would guess that most experienced freelancers are in a similar situation. We don’t want to work for someone who doesn’t have any experience hiring people online.

How can you get past this? It’s simple. Start with a quick little project and use it to build up your reputation. There are a lot of small scale projects you can do, and they shouldn’t cost you that much. How about taking care of a long-neglected but relatively tiny website tweak?

A single project as small as this will help you establish yourself as a high paying client who is worth pursuing. When I look through a potential client’s history and see that the client was willing to pay between $20 to $40 per hour for copywriting skills, I pursue that client. Do as much as you can to make it look like you will pay well for any services you purchase.

Don’t Look For Quick And Cheap Solutions. Look For Longterm Business Relationships.

I have a guy who will make tiny changes to my website whenever I need it done, and I can talk to him whenever he’s on Skype. He charges a very reasonable price for his services, and he saves me a ton of time. How did I manage to get him to work for me?

Very simply put, I never tried to fleece him. I posted the project on Vworker.com, accepted his bid, and after the project was finished, I just asked him to quote me what he thought was a reasonable price for the work. Most people aren’t trying to scam you. They know what you can afford, and they know how long it takes them to complete the work. Their quotes usually reflect their efforts.

Trust needs to be the cornerstone of all of your business relationships. If your employee tells you she is working overtime to complete your project, take that as a hint that your initial time estimate was wrong, and she deserves to be paid more. Give her a nice bonus, and she’ll happily stay on Skype to help you when it’s urgent.

The clients I have chosen not to keep are usually the ones who are trying to get an amazing bargain out of hiring an online freelancer. They think they’re playing the system, but we can smell them a mile away. After a single a project with one of these clients, I promptly delete their contact information and move on.

Be reasonable and generous from day one, and you will keep us interested and willing to continue working with you. The old adage is true, both online and offline. You get what you pay for. When you’re willing to spend a little more, you will attract many more qualified candidates. Just because you’re hiring online doesn’t mean you should take the hiring process any less seriously.

Now get out there and find the freelancer of your dreams!