Get a Freelancer Review
Not my top pick of bidding sites that’s for sure. Low prices, tons of emails, and lots a junk to wade through. However with over 500,000 service providers, they must be doing something right!
While they are flooded with projects and there is never a lack of work to sort though, it can take all day and if you are very lucky you might find a project that pays half way decent wages. According to their statistics, there are about 300 projects posted everyday, so you are bound to find something that suits you!
If you sign up for their email notifications your inbox will certainly be flooded several times a day, which is sometimes annoying even to those desperately seeking work. It’s even more annoying when you have to sort though 5 emails with 20 or more projects in each one and the pay is $1.00 -$2.00 per article. We aren’t talking 100 words here people.
One good thing about this site is the payment terms. Up until recently they used Western Union to make payments which was very expensive and, let’s face it, with the icky rates of pay here anyways, this was just another reason to stay away. However things are looking up. They just began sending out prepaid MasterCard’s that can be used at ATM’s, online or in most all stores. This is pretty great for those of us who like our money right away. Also if it is lost or stolen, then Get A Freelancer will replace it and give you your money back.
Another thing that I really like about Get a Freelancer is that if you pay a $12.00 per month fee you can get what they all “gold membership†which basically means that you don’t have to pay a commission on your work. There are no other bidding sites that I know of that do this. If you do a lot of work here, this can save you a lot of money. For regular projects where you aren’t a gold member the company charges you a hefty 10% of the total price! This is more than any other site I have ever reviewed so becoming a gold member is definitely a good idea.
Overall, there are some really good things about Get A Freelancer. The number of projects (which can be a bad or good thing), the MasterCard option, and the gold membership option all make it worth looking into. However, the lousy pay seems to be across the entire site and there are very few projects worth actually putting much time into unless you are simply very broke or are just trying to get some good feedback.Â
You must remember though that making contacts, even with very low paying buyers, is key to bringing in the big freelancing dollars. These people have friends whom they may send to you for more work, they may hit it big and require some more work in which they can pay more money for, you just never know. Many times I have gotten emails with good paying projects from someone I met on Rent a Coder several years before or gotten an “out of the blue†email from someone who said that so and so referred them to me.Â
Happy Bidding!
Another Writer Wrangler Honest Review
By Amanda
Hello, My name is Corena and I am a content broker. That means I need writers and graphic designers for contract jobs pretty often. This blog is something I put up to help my writers get honest reveiws..most written by other writers and not some scam. If it is interesting to writers you may find it here. If you're interested in writing some news let us know.I hope that I will post something of interest to you and if not let me know and I will do my best to get something up that will tempt you to come again and again. ~Corena
July 6th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Thanks Amanda for the review, I am looking for some freelance jobs there right now.
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Great review Amanda!
I was very happy to read a positive review after having spent the time wading through projects! Thanks!
I just stumbled upon this site yesterday and you summed it up perfectly
October 17th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Wayyyyyy too many emails. I get anywhere from 4-7 emails a day… everyday. Like Amanda said, way to much junk to wade through. If I need projects I would go to the website to place bids. I don’t need 7 emails a day telling me there are projects. It’s just a marketing ploy and seems to be a bit out of desperation to me.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
My attention was drawn to ‘Get a Freelancer’ for the first time today by a prospective client from whom I was seeking work. I was shocked to note the sub-Dickensian rates that are being paid for what are, in many cases, lengthy and substantial projects.
Worryingly, far from an occasional aberration, or the odd cash-strapped employer ‘winging it’ for bargain-basement fees, $1-or-so per 500 words appears to be the normal going rate.
In no sane world can this be right, surely? Such whingeing standards of compensation can only have come about by the pandemic of illiteracy fostered by, in descending order, poor education, emailing, texting and twittering.
While emails still allow ‘real’ writers their head – as the format in which I’m writing here proves – the latter two media are driving down the quality of literacy in the public domain to a base level that is infantile. (I used to make more money doing a paper-round than I would through many of the GAF assignments, so I’d call this an appropriate analysis).
I’d here declare that, as a marketing copywriter, I’m well versed in the craft of concision and how, in the context of business sales writing, to get away with as few words as are necessary. I know what rules to follow – or to break – in pursuit of text that is hardworking as a sales pitch, uses language properly to convey an instantly-comprehensible message and is engaging enough to keep the reader interested through to the payoff and call-to-action.
I’d suggest that such skills do not come lightly or immediately, but are the rewards of years of experience. It is difficult to believe that anyone prepared to write 500-odd words, again and again, in return for the pittances offered through GAF has such talents.
If any do, I can only conclude that a lot of good writers (who’d have commanded fees many times higher before ‘the 90-second update’ shrivelled everything down into bite-sized chunks with all the substance of a chicken macnugget) have been forced into flogging themselves off cheaply by the final triumph, in the modern headlong dash for the bottom-line, of quantity over quality.
Does anyone else agree?
November 5th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
I would like to let you know some of the reasons that people online are offering less for articles then you might think viable. AND why people are accepting that price
1. People that do not know English apply, that means hours of wading over example articles that make eyes crossed. It cuts down time as a buyer and a buyer will then need to hire an editor.
2. Most people that take the penny a word article do little or no research on a topic.
3. Penny a word writers are not asked to research or quote resources.
4. 80% of new writers plagiarize. Or quote Wikipedia and the articles are rejected
5. Penny a word writers are fast and can knock off 500 words in 15 minutes.
Plus the articles that people write are not suppose to be for a Cambridge educated reader , even your post here denotes that you are writing for a audience of an educated market.
Below is a breakdown of your writing. It is not the average penny a word fodder.
Text Analysis
Average Words Per Sentence: 30.8
Sentence Count: 12
Average Grade Level
Average Readability Level: 13.6
Average of grade levels scores that follow.
Approximation of number of years of education required* to read text.
Specific Scores
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease (Wikipedia): 49.3
Aim for 60 to 80. The higher the score, the more readable the text.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (Wikipedia): 14
Gunning-Fog Score (Wikipedia): 16.7
Coleman-Liau Index (Wikipedia): 11
SMOG Index (Wikipedia): 10.8
Automated Readability Index (Wikipedia): 15.4
These scores return a “grade level”, based on the USA education system. A grade level is equivalent to the number of years of education a person has had.
So in other word; If you have experience in writing and do not need to fill a resume with testimonials then you should be able to get a better gig if you know how to quote sources and do research beyond rewriting what is already found on the web..
Much misinformation is spread because all of the content written by people only doing research by visiting a few websites and re-writing what they see there.
Thanks for your comment.
~Corena
November 6th, 2009 at 4:18 am
Corena, in many, many GAF cases the advertisers insist, often very forcefully, that plagiarists need not apply, writers must be skilled in English and that a substantial body of research will be required in order to produce the work. How does this square with some of your observations, particularly your points 2, 3 and 4?
If what you say is true, an awful lot of ‘writers’ are bidding for work in flagrant disregard of the conditions apparently imposed by the advertisers. Judging by the mountains of truly dreadful writing found on the web, they’re presumably winning the bids, too.
Can I put something to you? Anyone who’s read Naomi Klein – or simply have their eyes open – will know of how globalisation and the headlong rush by multinationals to cut costs have resulted in the rise of low-paid, sweat-shop labour colonies in the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere.
GAF suggests to me that the same mentality is extending beyond the largely unskilled mass-production of tangible commodities (sneakers, clothes, appliances etc) and now is turning into a quasi-industrial process what, before lousy governments and quack educationists poisoned the teaching of good English, was a skilled craft governed by judicious research, intellectual process and an eye for a turn of phrase.
The point is, if the majority of people using the web don’t really care about how the messages they read are expressed, caring little for punctuation, syntax, grammar and spelling because they don’t understand the need for well-crafted words (see my earlier point in my last post about the inexorable and woeful march of ‘txtng’ and ‘twittering’) why would a putative employer of writers for a website bother paying top, or even ‘medium’ dollar?
If he can get the stuff by the metre, rolled out on a production line and kicked together as if words and phrases were simply cheap circuit boards or loudspeaker cabinets, he’s not going to be interested in genuinely talented writers, with exemplary skills and track-records, who have paid their dues.
Going through the points you’ve made (I’ve addressed 2, 3, and 4) I’m unsure what you mean by point 1. Are you saying that, despite the advertiser’s instructions, bidders are flooding the buyers with reams of foreign-language text which, as you put it, makes the eyes crossed? If so, again this suggests that no-one actually takes any notice of those conditions and simply goes ahead with a bid anyway.
As for point 5: I’ve no doubt that there are people out there who can bang out 500 words in 15 minutes. Whether or not the stuff is any good is another matter. While there’s bound to be a few who are genuinely excellent writers forced into sweated labour for little reward, I’d say it’s another reason why such a huge volume of online text is unreadable rubbish dumped in to fill a page with SEO keywords.
I appreciate your kind assessment of my writing as “not the average penny-a-word fodderâ€. But if I’m writing for an educated audience, it’s in media such as this, in which I can trade views with other writers like yourself. For a living, I write advertising copy, which can cover a heck of a lot of socio-demographic ground. This means I have to strive always for the writer’s own version of ‘method’; adapting styles and tones according to who I’m addressing.
As for your breakdown analysis (Flesch-Kincaid and so forth) I’m afraid I haven’t a clue what any of it means. I’d argue, however, that cast-in-stone metrics applied wholesale to writing can only lead to mechanistic sterility, with little written any longer from the heart. And yes, there remains a place for warmth and humanity, even (or especially) within a commercial genre such as marketing. Prospective customers will still respond as readily to an ‘emotive’ piece of text as they will to a set of hard-boiled facts and special offers.
But if not, as the modern world’s own version of Newspeak starts to bite, squeezing the life and warmth out of written communication, the Orwellian nightmare will only just be beginning…
What say you?
April 5th, 2010 at 10:42 am
You may also like to try ezdia.com another freelancing platform that allows employers to interview the freelancer using its in built chat mechanism before they hire.