A good friend of mine asked for a quick run-down of how freelancing sites like vWorker.com work. Freelancing is a great way to earn extra money on the side. When work dries up, I go to vWorker.com and bid on projects and make some quick money. It's not going to make you rich but it'll keep you alive or give you some extra spending money :) And if you enjoy your work, like I do, then it's fun. So here it is, short & sweet:

• A person with a project posts it and requests bids
• Then you as a worker bid on the work saying u can do it for $xx.xx and how long it will take, etc
• Then they pick out of the pool of bidders
• If you win a bid request, 15% of your bid goes to vworker.com for facilitating the process
• The rest goes to you
• Money is paid into vworker (escrow / safe-keeping)
• And u get it once you're done
• Then person rates you
• Once you get some good ratings, you can charge more and win more and also start getting invited to bid on more projects
• Unfortunately, i don't know a way around being cheap at first
• And u can bid on 100 and get none, or get all 100
• In many cases, it's purely about price
• So bidding lowish but bidding on many projects seems the best strategy, at least to start out with
• Be warned, it can take a lot of time to bid on them all and then you wait

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