[talia0803]

So many of these freelance sites want to take huge chunks of my profits or charge me hundreds to sign up with no guarantee of work. I don't have the money to deal with that kind of crap. I am looking for serious sites that have good paying jobs on them, well, jobs that pay at least $10 for a 500 word article on average. I mean, I know that most sites have loads of people offering to pay a whopping $1 for a 500 -8000 word article but I am looking for sites where at least most of the jobs are legit.

I'm okay with some that take a bit off of what I make once I have been paid, but only then.

The problem is that there are SOOOOOOOOO many sites out there now and most of them are total crap but you have to wade through so much crap before you find that out

Any leads would be helpful, I will be sure to share anything I pick up and learn along the way too Fingers crossed I could land a whale of a project and need your help

Anyone?

[AnneGeorgiou]

Hey!!
I think oDesk has free registration and doesn't charge the freelancers, only the employers!!
Personally i'm not using it but i think it is the most suitable considering your preferences!!
Best of luck and my advice, register for free accounts in several and check them out until you find the one that suits you the best!!
Anne

[domino214]

There are a number of freelance sites that I have joined.
Odesk, Scriptlance and Elance are all very similar.

Vworker.com are good because the employer pays the admin fee.
but you get a fair range of writing jobs and new projects can be delivered to your email daily.

I am wary of freelancer.com
they tend to favor the employer in any dispute and a lot of the writing jobs are low paid.


Hope this helps

[racechick79]

Great question. I am new to freelancing although I have been writing for years. I worked in the private sector for many years and recently became a stay at home mom looking for some extra work. I, too, have found that most of the sites I am looking on for freelance work either take all of my profits or want to charge me to work there, which I am not willing to do at this point. Thanks for posting. I am looking forward to seeing more of the responses and I think I may have to try some of the other ones that have been posted!

[Mystique]

I was a member with Freelancer but after writing for two "employers" who didn't pay the money that they owed me for the work, I couldn't be bothered to continue working for them. In fact, I stopped looking for work in Freelancer. My partner and I decided to look for writing jobs elsewhere, and we found a great employer who taught us a lot and we were making good money until BMR shut down.

[moondrop]

I've just signed up with textbroker and submitted my first article. What is the reputation of this site? The pay is pretty low per word, but it seems to be free to the writer.

[irenen1]

I have been writing for Knoji (formerly Factoidz) for a couple of years. If you follow the rules, it is possible to make a couple hundred a month doing Product Reviews and Comparisons in addition to residuals.

WriterAccess will give you a rating level before you start. You will be able to do assignments for that rating and lower. Each level pays per word. Assignments are from clients. There are not as many assignments as we'd like with stretches of inactivity but the pay is good when assignments are available.

[mommy0906]

I am new to this site and so far I love what I am seeing. I have been looking for a site that pays me good money to do what I love doing, and that is writing. I am looking forward to reading more from all of you and trying out some of the sites you have mentioned. Thanks again.

[crumblepie]

Textbroker and Knoji I've never heard of, but they seem really promising. The only such website I signed up for and earned money from is Helium. You could write articles for them (they have a huge variety of topics to choose from) and they share the Adsense revenue 50-50% with you - since their site ranks pretty high, you earn a lot more with Adsense than you would if you were to put it up on your own site. I haven't used them for a couple of years but they're still around and I think they've got quite a lot of new features now - such as competitions where you could earn a lot more a lot faster.

[SpikeTheLobster]

What do you mean by "freelancing sites"? Rev share, bidding sites, job listings, content mills, marketplaces, other sites?

Assuming you mean the bidding sites (which, from your original post, I think is a safe assumption), I've tried four of the Big Five - Elance, oDesk, Freelancer and vWorker. I haven't really tried Guru since the interface doesn't work for me. It's a purely personal thing.

Note that I'm both an employer and employee on all of them except vWorker, where I'm just an employer.

Of the four I've tried, I've found Elance has the highest quality writers and editors - and consequently the best jobs. I found my book editor, cover designer and logo designers on there; only the logo designers were a bit crap but they turned out OK with some management.

oDesk is also pretty good, especially for the mid-range work. I picked up my best long-term client on there.

Freelancer, well... like AnneGeorgiou above, I'm not keen on it: it's a bit too easy to scam and spam (or was when I was using it) and I still get invites for crap-pay jobs which seem to proliferate there. Maybe just my experience. Maybe not.

vWorker is excellent for coders but I haven't tried it for writing.

Most of the others are either scams or too small to be of interest to me - they're generally a target for the low-paying employers and the freelancers who spread themselves too thinly across too many sites because they either have a bad reputation or produce crap. Given time, some of those smaller sites will grow and become more of a prospect, IMHO.

Knoji is rev share, as is Helium. WriterAccess and TextBroker are content mills like iWriter: generally, they favour the client and pay fairly low. That said, they're better than a lot of the dross work you'll find on the bidding sites and the short-term pay is a lot better than rev share (which, of course, totally outstrips everything else in the long term).

All in all, it depends what you're looking for, really. There are so many permutations that it's almost impossible to just list everything without reducing yourself to just that: a list with no other info!