From a freelancers perspective

The best jobs are never placed on job boards. The best jobs are jobs that suit you perfectly, pay well, pay on time, with an ongoing relationship. The problem is, buyers that do those things, generally don’t find workers on job boards. Why? Because they are clients that want the best from freelancers, which is hit and miss miss miss miss miss on a job board.

You’re always quoting against competition. I’ve written before about how the only competition that matters is the status quo. The idea is that your expertise and approach to the job makes you the only suitable provider, so all you have to do is ensure your offering will leave the client better off than they are now. Well with job boards, that concept flies out the window. No matter how much quality a buyer wants, they have 50 quotes lower than yours, and they’re awfully tempting. From a theoretical perspective, Even if you’re 10 times better than anybody else, you still only have a 20% chance of landing any given job. That’s a joke.

The buyer sees you as replaceable. Say you do get a job, and the buyer is really happy with your work. The time comes to do some updates, he asks you for a quote. You submit a fair price. He thinks its too expensive, and figures he’ll just go and get someone else to do it. The thing is, people who are willing to go to job boards for workers in the first place, won’t have a hesitation to do it again. They don’t care about a long term relationship. They’re all about maximising their short term.

From a buyers perspective

The best freelancers don’t search for work on job boards. The best freelancers have full books, or close to full books. They demand fair rates, and don’t mess around wasting their time. Due to these conditions, the best freelancers don’t look for work on job boards. They know that the jobs are crap, the competition is too high, the quality of work is often low, and the costs lower. They don’t want to be replaceable.

You don’t get enough attention. As a buyer, you want someone to look at your problem in depth, and come up with a good solution. The vast majority of quotes you’ll get on a job board are. “We are expert web developers. We are a team of 40 professionals based in India and we can cater to your every need. We have been in business 7 years. We can do your job for $xxx”

Job boards suck. Spend your time selling smartly instead.

Related posts:

1. Assuming; the way freelancing to success
2. Freelance Philosophy Friday 3: Your time is not your value
3. Top 5 reasons to turn down a client

Before I go in to what you need to be successful, let’s define some terms.

Resources: I’ve defined resources here as the amount of time or money you have. If you are starting a part time business with a few grand in the bank, you’re starting with low resources. The more time you have and the more money/people you have, the higher your resources.

Margins: How much you make per sale. With high margins, you make a high percentage of the sale price, and vice versa for low margins.

Demand: How much pull there is for your product. E.g. The size of the market.

Competition: Who you’re up against.

You’ll notice that the first two are internal (margins are set by the market, but you have control over them), and the second two are external factors.

Combine the first two, and you’ve got your internal limitations. Combine the second two, and you’ve got the “pull” of your product.

Let me explain “pull” a little more. If you were the only outlet that sold Nike shoes in the world, you would have tremendous pull. There’s massive demand, and you would have no competition. If you were to sell no name digital camera’s in the current market, there’s not much pull at all because of the massive competition. You can find this out using the Adwords keyword tool. Be careful to be very very specific.

If you’re starting an ecommerce business, join me in this exercise.

Classify yourself from 1-10 in each one of the metrics above.

Now consider these charts.

margins-resources

demand-competition

To be successful, I believe you need to match up (or better) in both charts.

That is, if you have low resources, you need high margins and low competition.

If you have high resources, you can deal with competition as long as demand is high.

If there’s high competition, you need to have high resources, or target a specific niche of the market.

The idea of the charts is that it lines up your internal situation with your external situation.

And a quick disclaimer: In the words of someone much wiser than me “You can quote me an exception, but I’m giving you the rule”

Related posts:

1. E-commerce, 3 months in. What I’ve learned so far
2. Charging the right price: Price optimization for freelancers
3. 8 questions in an ecommerce conversation