Thanks Hannah. I am glad to hear that your experience working for the IAPWE has been positive overall.
Your point about some of these freelancing platforms creating bidding wars that do not benefit individual freelancers is well taken.
Online I see many freelancers blaming the freelancing platforms themselves for this phenomenon (and they may be right in doing this), yet I wonder if this is more a symptom of the over-saturation of freelancers that you talked about.
After all, if there were a shortage of freelancers, wouldn’t the freelancing platforms also reflect this, resulting in a shift in power where freelancers could command higher prices due to their scarcity? I don’t think you were blaming the freelancing platforms but this would be my question to anyone who is.
I realize it’s not that simple, since many freelancing platforms tend to have policies in place that favor clients more than freelancers. These platforms also tend to have very low bidding minimums for freelancers (if they have minimums at all!). I think ODesk instituted a minimum increase for their freelancers before merging with Upwork but I believe this increase was from $1 to $3 per hour? I could be wrong so don’t quote me on that but it’s obviously not enough of an increase. I just think that if some of these platforms were to increase their minimum bid requirements to a reasonable rate, this would help curb some of the undercutting but certainly wouldn’t fix it entirely.
I am optimistic in that I believe more and more clients will begin to realize that content is not just content. From what I have read, Google seems to be continually improving their algorithms and AI to try and weed out generic or poor quality content and I think it is only a matter of time before the momentum from this shift reaches the consciousness of most clients.
Hopefully it will soon become common knowledge for clients, that getting cheap content of mediocre quality will actually cost them more money in the long run (due to getting poor results with the cheap content and then having to pay another freelancer to create new, better quality content) as compared to just paying for quality content the first time around.
I also agree that freelancers should not drop their rates below what they feel comfortable with. Your proposal format outline idea made me think of how it may be beneficial if there were some statistics or articles that freelancers could quote and include in their bids, educating prospective clients on the significance of content quality for client ROI. I really believe that the clients looking to get content for the lowest bid/price are really just uneducated and don’t realize how counterproductive this is to the bottom line that they think they are protecting.
I was wondering if you had any specific strategies or tips that you use to grow your following or engage on social media? Are you engaging mainly with other freelancers and commenting on their posts while promoting your own content or are you taking a completely different approach that is more client-focused?
I had to add that I think your comment at the end about not being funny was actually very funny so I would disagree and say that you definitely achieved your goal of being funny even if you weren’t trying to be.