oDesk and Me

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A Couple of years ago, I would have brushed off any thought on freelancing if anyone had mentioned this as a career choice. I was happy with my 9 - 5 job, and life was going on (as it should be, with acceptable highs and lows.) Later, when the "wakeup call" hit me, it hit me hard. I decided to take a sabbatical from work, and turned to blogging to keep myself busy. Oh! Boy, I am hooked to blogging. I came across interests that I never knew existed in me. I could get in touch with few long lost friends, and make some new friends along the way. I was an 8 year old when I actually met my Blog-friend.( call it the new age pen-pal / blog-pal).

I was tired of getting typecast into Cooking - family-childcare-type of posts that were expected from a female blogger. I wanted to offer something different in my own special kind of way. It was during these times, I was searching for information on freelancing to make a blog post. So, in an attempt to gain first hand knowledge of the freelancing industry, I signed up at all major freelancing sites, oDesk, Va4U, Elance and several others (that's from a spectrum of 10 -15 sites). I was awed at the kind of talent pool just waiting to be harnessed at all these sites, and now I was one of them.

You might be familiar with the phrase "Performance Based Incentives". Well, I got a first hand experience of this at oDesk, one of THE BEST freelancing site ( from my own spectrum), I have come across so far for the same aforementioned reason. To prevent overbidding by service providers ( and flooding the buyer's inbox), every oDesk user starts off with 5 bids per week. However, he can increase his / her quota of bids by taking skill tests with oDesk, i. e. at the end of 5 skill tests; you have about 20 bids per week. Moreover, These skill tests also put the provider on the buyer's radar when a matching job is posted.

Although, seasoned providers don't actually use more than 20 bids in an entire month, this matters a lot to newcomers, especially when they have to "apply for as many jobs as possible", to get their foothold. But this is just one of the many aspects at oDesk that impressed me. Providers who stay and Buyers who come back at oDesk are professional in every sense. Others signup on a whim and expect a plum job to be handled over in a platter. It has more to do with lack of conviction and the rest is meaningless noise.

All of this started with a quest to make a single blog post on freelancing at my personal blog. I admit, I never made that post in my personal blog. Instead I now have a blog completely dedicated to freelancing and an Orkut Community to this effect. Now, who would have imagined that....?...?...?.

I no longer hold my 9- 5job, and the pay-packet is certainly not as regular as it used to be. Yet it makes me happy about the work minus the burnt out feeling coupled with the guilt of not being able to attend to family at short notice. But, Let me remind you, before my first VA-Project, I too had interview calls, that never saw the light of the day... but hey!.. don't these things happen in the non-freelancing/ Virtual genre as well???

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