It was about time and the beginning of the year is the best opportunity for taking inspired decisions. After almost two interesting years of online freelancing, I decided that my profile on Freelancer.com is no more relevant for what I am interesting to build in the next months.
Yesterday, after checking the last job offers for my skills and even made the effort to submit my interest for two of them, I decided that it is about time to finish this relationship.
To be honest, I am grateful to Freelancer.com for a couple of good projects that helped me to improve my writing skills, and also to set up some very good partnerships, one of them continuing for two years. I had good times, when editing, translating and writing contracts kept me busy for days till late in the night. I enjoyed working on different projects, challenging myself to know more about so different topics as IT industry, fashion or cooking. I discovered the pleasure of doing academic editing, that lead me to the idea of writing a new book and who knows, launching my own business one day. I also loved to do translations for a while and I learned as well how to sell myself properly in order to convince a client that I am the best out of a group of more than 20 persons that requested to be picked up.
On the other hand, I had enough more than once of working for customers that forgot to pay or simply deleted their profile after they received the work, of characters that refused to pay the convened price or that were unable to explain in a proper and simple language what they are looking for.
From a year to another, the network improved considerable and new features were added in order to prevent scams, but the overall level of the project was kept under the average life standards of the poor Western world. A couple of weeks ago, I discussed with a potential client about an editing work that he wanted me to do for around $15. More than 3 hours of work, correcting the language and also adding eventually references for less than the price of a cleaning work!
My decision to request the suspension of my account - you need to request for a support ticket as they need to check if you don't have debts or pending issues with the clients - was less spontaneous that it might look at the first time. It is the result of a lot of frustration and mediocre successes that from now on, I don't want to deal with.
I don't mean that I will continue to watch the jobs on other platforms. At the beginning of my online writing adventures, I also followed other platforms and the results were equally disappointing: a scam on the then oDesk, and a lot of time wasted on Elance. Too much ado for nothing!
However, for anyone at the beginning of the online career, including for young graduates and students looking to do some small jobs for some extra money for parties, trips or books, online marketplaces are strongly recommended. But, don't expect wonders and be ready to deal at least with one scam once in a while.
I am thankful for the great moment and learned a lot from the bad ones. Time to move to a different level of my career!
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