Welcome!

Welcome!
My name is David Vecchio, and I am a 3D Artist from Argentina. My dream was always working independently, not having to answer to anybody, to be able to manage my own schedule, and taking vacations whenever I felt I needed them. I wasn't born to have an office job. I tried that for about a year and a half when I was in college and it certainly didn't work out for me. What do you get from an office job? You wake up at 7 AM, you go from one end of the city to the opposite, putting up with the daily chaos of a metropolis, you waste 8 hours of your life with stuff you don't even care about, making money for someone else, and then you get back home late and too tired to do the things you really enjoy.
I like travelling a lot, and the only way I can afford this is by working as a freelance. It doesn't matter if I'm at home, or at a hostel in New Delhi, I can always work as long as I have my notebook, an internet connection, and a comfortable place to work.
I took me a while to establish myself as a freelance 3D Artist, but it was all worth it. This is not just a secondary job to make extra cash. I can now actually make a living out of this.
How did I achieve this? Well first, I did have to get an office job, because when you're working as a freelancer, you might not have a fixed monthly income. But after a couple of years of working on an average of one project a month, I began to build myself a list of clients that are constantly hiring me for different assignments. Having a list of semi-regular clients, and working on several other small projects per month can be enough to make a living out of freelance work.
I started this blog to save you all from the frustration of signing up to a freelance work site and never getting hired. I mean, it CAN be frustrating at first, but once you get your first job, it will all be a lot easier, believe me!I won't give you obvious generic tips that will apply to any site. I have an established profile with 400 logged hours of work on Odesk (plus several fixed price jobs) and several completed jobs on Elance, and I will guide you through the process of getting hired on these two sites, which, from personal experience, are the best places to start working as a freelancer (considering they're highly trustworthy, and have a wide variety of ways to get your money out).

Getting Started

So, you can start now by reading a little bit about the two platforms that I use the most to get freelance work: Odesk.com and Elance.com. Please note that these sites are not just for design jobs. They have a wide variety of categories like Web design, programming, engineering, writing and translation, etc.


Thursday, March 21, 2013

Getting started with Elance


A litte bit about Elance: Pretty much the same than Odesk: employers post their job offers and freelancers apply based on a bidding system. The employer sets an approximate budget and you get to make your best offer, competing with the rest of the freelancers on the site. The employer takes a look at all of the profiles and decides which freelancer to hire based on portfolio, experience, and pay rate. You have two types of jobs, fixed priced jobs and hourly jobs. Now here's a difference with Odesk: Elance does have a way of guaranteeing your pay with fixed priced jobs, called Elance Escrow. This is how it works: If you apply for an Escrow enabled fixed priced job, the money will be funded into the client's account as soon as you get hired (this is, of course, if the client has already validated a payment method with Elance). Once you've finished your job, the client will release the funds and the money will be transferred to your account.
Hourly jobs, just like on Odesk, are based on a time tracking application provided by Elance. This little software tracks the time you spend with a certain job, and takes screenshots at random intervals while you're working (just to make sure you're not slacking off on facebook!). With this last system, they guarantee that you'll get paid, since (after the employer has approved all hours by checking the screenshots) the time you have worked gets billed automatically from the employer's account. For further information and a more detailed explanation, you can read THIS.

So, go to Elance.com and open up an account. Now it's time to fill your profile. Let's do this quick and simple:

- Upload your profile picture. It's always a better idea to show your face instead of a logo or an avatar, so make sure you get a good picture of yourself (don't crop your face out of a picture from your trip to Machu Pichu!).

- State your minimum hourly pay rate. Now, you have two options here: You can start with a low rate to encourage employers to hire you despite being a new contractor (this is actually sad, but true, many employers emphasize the importance of a low rate when posting jobs); Or you can simply browse through the site's statistics to see what's the average hourly pay rate for the services that you offer. I personally chose the first option. I started with a U$10 rate, and after I got the first couple of jobs and some good feedback my clients, I started to raise my rate.

- Write a brief description of your skills. Don't go overboard writing too much, since most employers will have to read dozens of profiles when posting a job and they can't afford to spend much time reading descriptions.

- Upload your work to your portfolio. Post only your best work. Don't try to make your portfolio look more important by overcrowding it. You have the option to sort your work by categories, which makes your portfolio look more neat and organized. It's also a good idea to open up an account on an online portfolio site like Behance.net.

- List your employment history and describe your education. Be as specific as you can.

- Take tests. Elance has a wide variety of competency tests. They're not really good proof of your talent, but they will sure look good on your profile, and it will show that you are seriously commited. Even though it's not usual, some employers do restrict their searches to those freelancers who completed certain tests (For instance, a 3D Studio Max test, or a Google Sketchup test).

You've completed your profile. Next time we'll go with the next step: Applying for your first job.

Feel free to ask me any questions!

1 comment:

  1. very good good…this post deserves almost nothing …hahaha merely joking: S …nice write-up: P original site

    ReplyDelete