Guru - Online Freelancing

Today was a no-spend day. Yay! I also sold a book on Amazon and now have $21.75 to add to my monthly challenge fund! It has been a good day.

Like I have talked about before, once you start looking for money, it seems to appear all over the place. Well, maybe not the money itself, but the opportunities to make money certainly do. And that gives me hope that if I keep looking, I eventually will be able to make some extra money. I came across a website: Guru.com. This is a freelance website – people can offer their freelance services to others in a variety of different areas: legal, design, marketing etc. I signed up for it yesterday, and here’s my impression of it so far:

How it works:
You sign up and make a profile that indicates what sort of freelance service you are offering. You can create more than one profile, and can search for projects that fit your profile (employers post projects that require specific skills etc.) Guru will also email you when a new project that fits your skills is posted. Once you review the project and think that you can do it, you submit a proposal and place a bid stating how much you would charge for the project. Once the bidding closes, the employer picks a bid and if your bid gets chosen, then you get notified and can start communicating with the employer to discuss the details. Guru uses SafePay Escrow and you get paid once the project gets completed. They take 5% of the payment as a commission, and 10% if you are a non-paying member. As a paying member you get to place as many as 100 bids/month and as a non-paying member you get 10 bids/month.

Now the cons:
The membership is expensive - $74.95 (Quarterly) and $149.95 (Annual). This is more expensive if you are a vendor. If you aren’t a paying member, the percentage of projects you can bid on is miniscule. That’s all the cons I have experienced in two days.

And the pros:
This website offers work to people all over the world. Since most of the communication is done over the internet (and maybe the phone in a few instances), the freelancer does not need to be located in the US, and can still get paid. There are several thousands of projects available that you can bid on. Guru emails you when a matching project is found, and the website is easy to navigate.

I placed two bids totaling $110. That is $99 after Guru’s commission. I’m not sure if I will get picked, but I certainly hope so. If I find enough freelance work here, I might upgrade my membership and become a paying member. We’ll see. And even if it turns out that I am not paid, it feels really good to know that there is such stuff out there, and it motivates me to keep looking.