The Wall Street Journal did a big story on freelancing today. Sarah Needleman, the author, did a great job of pulling together lots of good information for existing and prospective home-based freelancers. She even included some advice from yours truly (though she referred to our book as Undressed For Success, but beggars can’t be choosers and she did fix it later in the online version).
Specifically Sarah pointed to several of the freelance job boards that we recommend on this site and cover at length in Undress For Success—The Naked Truth About Making Money At Home (Wiley, April 2009) They include odesk.com, elance.com, and guru.com.
A couple of other freelance job boards I thought she should have mentioned include RentaCoder.com, FreelanceWritingGigs.com, and ComputerJobs.com.
By the way, I know we’ve said this before, but it’s important to remember that no one gets it right 100% of the time. Even the job boards with the best intentions, let the occasional scam, stale listing, or dead end slip through. While we do our best to only recommend the most trusted websites, you still need to be cautious when you’re looking for work online or elsewhere.
It’s also important to realize that anyone can say anything about you on the web. One of our readers, for example didn’t like what we had to say about a her supposed work at home job database so she posted a nasty comment RipOffReport.com—a site we actually recommend. RipOffReport.com’s policy, which we salute by the way, is to not edit comments. In the case of this particular comment, any intelligent reader can read through the noise and see what’s really going on, but not all negative posts are as see-through. Competitors have even been known to post negative information about each other.
As Tom’s post from yesterday pointed out, trust of traditional media (New York Times, CNN, etc) is at an 8 year low. So who and what are you supposed to believe?
The bottom line is there’s no substitute for a healthy dose of skepticism mixed with some good old fashioned common sense. Just because someone says it’s so, doesn’t make it so. Just because you read it in a thick book, doesn’t make it so. Just because you saw it on TV, certainly doesn’t make it so.
In the case of trying to find work-at-home jobs, freelance work, and home based business opportunities, the truth is particularly hard to come by. Stay tuned here and we’ll continue to do our best to deliver the naked truth about working from home.
So, I wonder if any of you guys know about Vois.com then. Not to dis. Guru.com, but why not just recommend other freelancing sites that are free? Try it! Just a recommendation = P.
Yes, there are oodles of freelancing sites on the web. The reason we’ve focused on Guru, Elance, RentACoder and others is because they offer somethingt more than just a connection between buyer and seller.
You seem to be a fan of Vois.com. Tell us why, we’re always willing to change our mind.
Just a quick note of thanks for supporting the efforts of Ripoff Report. We get lots of folks who don’t like our no-removal policy, but smart people like you understand the reasoning behind it. All we do is allow people to report, to speak their minds. We have to trust that they’re being honest. We appreciate your comments and what you, too, do for consumers.