If you are making your living freelancing on a site like Scriptlance, project bidding can be one of the most important aspects of your job. You do not get paid for the time you have to spend bidding on projects, so you don’t want to have to bid on tons of projects just to win one of them. A lot of freelancing sites have a private message board for each project as well as the public bid posts. It is highly recommended that you communicate with your potential client through the private message board before placing a bid on the project. You want to do this for a number of reasons. First, it gives you a chance to make yourself stand out from the rest of the competition by briefly telling the client about yourself and what you can do for them. It will also give you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have about the project which will help you give a more accurate bid amount. When you get specific about their project, they realize that you have paid attention to their project and are not just running around posting bids and pre-made messages made to win projects. If you can make your message sound like you have put some thought into their project and can confidently do a good job, you will get a response more times than not, especially if you are asking a question as well. Being confident and polite can go a long way towards winning you a project and getting good feedback. At the end of my initial private messages, I close with ‘Thank you for your time,’ and then I put my full name on the next line. Some workers refer to themselves by their website username which just seems tacky and unprofessional to me.



Quoting Time and Money


It can often be difficult to tell someone exactly how much you want to get paid to do a certain amount of work. The more experienced you are with something, the more accurate you will get with estimating the amount of time it will take to do something. I would recommend getting a piece of paper and writing down the various steps you are going to have to take to complete a project. Then go back through your list of steps and try to estimate how long it will take to do the the step. Add up all of your times to get your time estimate. You can use this to state how long it will take you to complete something and also how much you want to get paid. If you find yourself underestimating your time on a regular basis, trying going through your normal estimation process and then double the time. This is often a good rule of thumb to go by when dealing with a programming or design project that might last more than a few hours and may apply to other types of work as well.



Project Selection


No matter what kind of freelancer you are, which project you choose to bid on can be just as important as what you bid on it. If you find yourself winning a large number of projects that you bid on, you should be even more careful with your project selection. Freelancers have something that nearly no other profession in the world has - the ability to choose your own boss. This power and privelage can also be used to increase your earnings, job satisfaction and future potential earnings. You always want to start with projects that are well explained. If you see a single sentence or two in the project description, I urge you to not even waste your time. First of all, you will spend a solid hour or two exchanging messages with these non-descriptive project posters trying to figure out what exactly the project entails or you may even bid on the project right away only to find out the real details behind the project. Almost all of the time, these projects will leave you frustrated and underpaid. When you start with projects that have a good description of the work that is involved, it saves you time and money plus it helps you to work with clients that are well organized and less likely to add in additional work as your project progresses. At the end of the project, you will have higher job satisfaction and likely a higher hourly pay rate when you are careful with your project selection.