On Guru, it is against the terms to ask for a free sample. This doesn't stop many people from doing it, but it should. A professional has samples. Period. If you can write and have been trained to write, you have written many things. Modified school assignments can work as samples. The longer you work, the more samples you should accumulate.
Some jobs require NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). No. Don't even think about using a sample from those unless you get explicit, written permission from the employer to do so. I cannot tell you how many freelancers believe it is okay to attach samples from work on NDA projects as long as they do not post them. It is not. An NDA means you might keep a copy stored on an external jump drive solely for your records, but you do not share it.
For employers: What does the NDA mean for employers? Well, if your work requires an NDA (and certain employers always ask for them), you should be a little more lenient about specific samples. I encourage every freelancer who specializes in certain areas of business and finance to create mock samples, but few freelancers want to do the work for free, and I don't know many who would have four or five different samples they simply made up for use as samples. If you want an NDA and a freelancer is sharing several projects with you they have done in the past, keep in mind that they may share your project, too.
The same goes if an employer works in a niche area. Do you make a special sample so that it matches? Well, if you think that will sell your work and the sample is around 100 words or less, I would say go for it. But if you have to come up with an in-depth sample that will take 2 -5 hours (or more) of your time, you have to ask if you are going to get paid enough to make the unpaid sample worth your time. If you are planning to work in that area long-term, a better sample might pay off.
Monday, February 26, 2018
Monday, February 19, 2018
Warning Signs That You Might Not Want to Bid on That Job...
If an employer has only paid 80% of their billed invoices... You might not want to bid on that.
Why? This employer might have valid reasons for not paying one bill, but if 1 in 5 of the invoices they receive go unpaid it is probably a sign of financial difficulty, unclear project instructions, or a generally disagreeable employer.
If a job post says, "Gets excited about the possibility of growing with a startup."... You might not want to bid on that. Why? This is code for "We are going to pay you practically nothing." This is like playing the lottery with your income. This is a new business and like any new business it plans to grow into a big business. It is being upfront in the fact that it cannot pay you well for your work, but it is being dishonest (intentionally or not) by implying that you might make a lot of money if you take a chance on them. If a business starts out paying you peanuts, what reason would they have to increase your pay even if they could afford it later? Yes, I am sure one in a million would, but a more likely scenario is that they will pay you the same thing forever. This has actually been a complaint on some freelancer boards- they don't understand why freelance employers don't feel they need to pay more after working with freelancers long-term.
If an employer has a positive rating below 90% on Guru... You might not want to bid on that.
Why? It used to be that Guru allowed you to dismiss 10% of your negative feedback. It no longer does this and 100% positive ratings have (naturally) been plummeting. 10% is a good amount to prevent freelancers and employers from using feedback for blackmail. I would say in my lifetime I have deleted the feedback of 3 employers. Considering I have worked for at least 100, that is not too bad odds. Without the feedback deletion, the same rules should be applied: 90% (and above) positive feedback is good. The flip side is that once it falls below this (and the freelancer or employer is already established with more than one or two paid jobs), there is something wrong with the way the employer deals with freelancers. If you work with this employer, chances are good you will have problems because not every freelancer leaves feedback.
If an employer has not paid out any money or hired any freelancers... You might not want to bid on that. Why? Yes, everyone is new, and of course I bid on jobs posted by new and old employers. I still felt I needed to include this as a negative reason to bid because the chances of a new employer hiring anyone are much less than the chances of an old employer hiring someone. New employers frequently don't know how much to pay for their project. When they find out that quality freelancers charge more money than what they expected and often take more time than what they expected, they simply don't hire. They are also intimidated when they get 100 bids on their project--many from people who have no business bidding. Receiving "canned" bids also is a turn-off (but this shouldn't be in most cases).
Why? This employer might have valid reasons for not paying one bill, but if 1 in 5 of the invoices they receive go unpaid it is probably a sign of financial difficulty, unclear project instructions, or a generally disagreeable employer.
If a job post says, "Gets excited about the possibility of growing with a startup."... You might not want to bid on that. Why? This is code for "We are going to pay you practically nothing." This is like playing the lottery with your income. This is a new business and like any new business it plans to grow into a big business. It is being upfront in the fact that it cannot pay you well for your work, but it is being dishonest (intentionally or not) by implying that you might make a lot of money if you take a chance on them. If a business starts out paying you peanuts, what reason would they have to increase your pay even if they could afford it later? Yes, I am sure one in a million would, but a more likely scenario is that they will pay you the same thing forever. This has actually been a complaint on some freelancer boards- they don't understand why freelance employers don't feel they need to pay more after working with freelancers long-term.
If an employer has a positive rating below 90% on Guru... You might not want to bid on that.
Why? It used to be that Guru allowed you to dismiss 10% of your negative feedback. It no longer does this and 100% positive ratings have (naturally) been plummeting. 10% is a good amount to prevent freelancers and employers from using feedback for blackmail. I would say in my lifetime I have deleted the feedback of 3 employers. Considering I have worked for at least 100, that is not too bad odds. Without the feedback deletion, the same rules should be applied: 90% (and above) positive feedback is good. The flip side is that once it falls below this (and the freelancer or employer is already established with more than one or two paid jobs), there is something wrong with the way the employer deals with freelancers. If you work with this employer, chances are good you will have problems because not every freelancer leaves feedback.
If an employer has not paid out any money or hired any freelancers... You might not want to bid on that. Why? Yes, everyone is new, and of course I bid on jobs posted by new and old employers. I still felt I needed to include this as a negative reason to bid because the chances of a new employer hiring anyone are much less than the chances of an old employer hiring someone. New employers frequently don't know how much to pay for their project. When they find out that quality freelancers charge more money than what they expected and often take more time than what they expected, they simply don't hire. They are also intimidated when they get 100 bids on their project--many from people who have no business bidding. Receiving "canned" bids also is a turn-off (but this shouldn't be in most cases).
Monday, February 5, 2018
Writing quizzes Part 5
In addition to seeing the quiz takers as money, they saw the freelancers as content producers. Well some freelancers went months with topics on their plate, we all were told we needed to hurry and finish quizzes. The deadlines became shorter. Then they hired a slew of freelancers to "get through the list" One month later, the new freelancers were gone and so were most of the easy to do movie quizzes. What was left was mainly knowledge quizzes.
Those of us who were still writing (and I will never know if those temporary freelancers just left themselves or got up one day, tried to log on and found they couldn't) were told that we could come up with our own ideas. We were given a set of criteria and then once we found an idea that met this criteria we could post it for "approval."
After a few months of this, I happened to notice that some of the "unapproved" ideas I had presented were being given to other freelancers.
Now, at this point, I almost left. I SHOULD have left. I demanded payment for my ideas (since it did take a lot of time to do the research). I was refused. I was told I could leave if I wanted and they would understand (of course they would- why would they want me around once I figured it out). But I needed the money. And getting new jobs is a bigger pain than keeping old ones. I had grown lazy in my freelancing. With warning bells going off (that had actually been going off since the start), I kept pushing forward.
A new moderator was hired, (the old one moved up), jobs that were posted irregularly were posted on Fridays between 3 and 8 pm. Freelancers would hover like vultures on the spreadsheet for sometimes five hours waiting for the release.
And this is where the system became inhumane. Again, warning bells. Sometimes they would only post a few quizzes. Maybe ten for twenty freelancers, but those who could were still allowed to get four at a time. People went weeks without one quiz. At that point, they should have looked at different variables: who has produced the most in the past year, who gets the most positive quiz reviews, who has been working for us the longest, etc. They should have explained they no longer had the volume and needed to let freelancers go. Instead, they kept promising more work. They asked who wanted to write articles (but never transitioned many to that task.) And then there would be another disappointing week with not enough quizzes to go around.
Finally, last week, they stopped responding to my questions. I had begun to upload two of my quizzes and ran into a problem with one. Someone dropped a long overdue quiz and I jumped to take it, but that guy told me I could not (and he was just another freelancer). I figured out later that he had been told to give it to someone else. Anyway, I asked if I was uploading the quiz correctly and asked them to check one of the problems to see if I needed to include more information. They didn't reply. Not for a day, but for three days. In fact, I realized I hadn't been getting responses for several weeks with some of the other questions I had asked and some of my past conversations were archived and no longer accessible (including the one where I had called them out on using my ideas without permission). Hmmm....
When I got on Friday to try to grab some quizzes and everyone was told there was a technical difficulty. We had to wait until Monday.
I got on Monday with no problem initially. Suddenly, I lost access to the chat server we use. Then the spreadsheet. Then the quiz loading site. Nothing was said to me, it just all went down before my eyes. Keep in mind, I had completed quizzes that just needed to be uploaded and I had bills to pay with those completed quizzes. I also had more than ten ideas for new quizzes posted on the spreadsheet that I had been waiting 8 weeks to hear a decision on.
I heard no word, until thankfully I was able to make an announcement about my predicament to all the group on Guru. (Guru doesn't allow conversations to be deleted. That is probably why they made all the freelancers switch to Slack about a year ago.) That got a response- "Sorry, we don't need you anymore." Uh, what about the quizzes, especially the ones I had partially uploaded? Sadly, I didn't use SafePay at this point. I wonder if the freelancers still using SafePay are the ones still employed. I did submit a bill (with the complete quizzes in Word format) for the two partially uploaded quizzes that I did not think would be paid (it was), but I am out the other two. I spent the rest of the day looking for a new job, but in the world of freelance the chance of getting something that I can turn into income by the end of the week (on such short notice) is rare.
Did they have too many freelancers? Yes. Did they need to weed some out? Yes, but long before this point. The way I was "let go" was very unprofessional. I should have had my questions answered last week so I could have at least finished uploading all the quizzes. I should have been told (preferably a week in advance) that I was being let go and not to take any more quizzes, but to finish the ones I had started. It is never acceptable to "let someone go" without first letting them know the reason. This applies to the freelance world as well as the traditional workplace. Unfortunately, in a society with dying social skills (due to the online fake social world we have created), professionalism is suffering.
As a freelancer, I had warning signs this was happening, but it is tough to let go of regular work. Finding new regular projects is much more difficult than finding temporary ones. Getting new employers to pay what writers are worth ($0.05-$0.10 per word for good writers up to $0.50 per word) is also hard. But, it was definitely time to move on. The final message to me said something along the lines of we will contact you in the future if things change, but do they really think I would want to work with them again? Steady work is wonderful, but the chance that you might not get paid for it is not. Also, not giving someone a couple weeks to find a new job in the world of freelance can be financially devastating.
Those of us who were still writing (and I will never know if those temporary freelancers just left themselves or got up one day, tried to log on and found they couldn't) were told that we could come up with our own ideas. We were given a set of criteria and then once we found an idea that met this criteria we could post it for "approval."
After a few months of this, I happened to notice that some of the "unapproved" ideas I had presented were being given to other freelancers.
Now, at this point, I almost left. I SHOULD have left. I demanded payment for my ideas (since it did take a lot of time to do the research). I was refused. I was told I could leave if I wanted and they would understand (of course they would- why would they want me around once I figured it out). But I needed the money. And getting new jobs is a bigger pain than keeping old ones. I had grown lazy in my freelancing. With warning bells going off (that had actually been going off since the start), I kept pushing forward.
A new moderator was hired, (the old one moved up), jobs that were posted irregularly were posted on Fridays between 3 and 8 pm. Freelancers would hover like vultures on the spreadsheet for sometimes five hours waiting for the release.
And this is where the system became inhumane. Again, warning bells. Sometimes they would only post a few quizzes. Maybe ten for twenty freelancers, but those who could were still allowed to get four at a time. People went weeks without one quiz. At that point, they should have looked at different variables: who has produced the most in the past year, who gets the most positive quiz reviews, who has been working for us the longest, etc. They should have explained they no longer had the volume and needed to let freelancers go. Instead, they kept promising more work. They asked who wanted to write articles (but never transitioned many to that task.) And then there would be another disappointing week with not enough quizzes to go around.
Finally, last week, they stopped responding to my questions. I had begun to upload two of my quizzes and ran into a problem with one. Someone dropped a long overdue quiz and I jumped to take it, but that guy told me I could not (and he was just another freelancer). I figured out later that he had been told to give it to someone else. Anyway, I asked if I was uploading the quiz correctly and asked them to check one of the problems to see if I needed to include more information. They didn't reply. Not for a day, but for three days. In fact, I realized I hadn't been getting responses for several weeks with some of the other questions I had asked and some of my past conversations were archived and no longer accessible (including the one where I had called them out on using my ideas without permission). Hmmm....
When I got on Friday to try to grab some quizzes and everyone was told there was a technical difficulty. We had to wait until Monday.
I got on Monday with no problem initially. Suddenly, I lost access to the chat server we use. Then the spreadsheet. Then the quiz loading site. Nothing was said to me, it just all went down before my eyes. Keep in mind, I had completed quizzes that just needed to be uploaded and I had bills to pay with those completed quizzes. I also had more than ten ideas for new quizzes posted on the spreadsheet that I had been waiting 8 weeks to hear a decision on.
I heard no word, until thankfully I was able to make an announcement about my predicament to all the group on Guru. (Guru doesn't allow conversations to be deleted. That is probably why they made all the freelancers switch to Slack about a year ago.) That got a response- "Sorry, we don't need you anymore." Uh, what about the quizzes, especially the ones I had partially uploaded? Sadly, I didn't use SafePay at this point. I wonder if the freelancers still using SafePay are the ones still employed. I did submit a bill (with the complete quizzes in Word format) for the two partially uploaded quizzes that I did not think would be paid (it was), but I am out the other two. I spent the rest of the day looking for a new job, but in the world of freelance the chance of getting something that I can turn into income by the end of the week (on such short notice) is rare.
Did they have too many freelancers? Yes. Did they need to weed some out? Yes, but long before this point. The way I was "let go" was very unprofessional. I should have had my questions answered last week so I could have at least finished uploading all the quizzes. I should have been told (preferably a week in advance) that I was being let go and not to take any more quizzes, but to finish the ones I had started. It is never acceptable to "let someone go" without first letting them know the reason. This applies to the freelance world as well as the traditional workplace. Unfortunately, in a society with dying social skills (due to the online fake social world we have created), professionalism is suffering.
As a freelancer, I had warning signs this was happening, but it is tough to let go of regular work. Finding new regular projects is much more difficult than finding temporary ones. Getting new employers to pay what writers are worth ($0.05-$0.10 per word for good writers up to $0.50 per word) is also hard. But, it was definitely time to move on. The final message to me said something along the lines of we will contact you in the future if things change, but do they really think I would want to work with them again? Steady work is wonderful, but the chance that you might not get paid for it is not. Also, not giving someone a couple weeks to find a new job in the world of freelance can be financially devastating.
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