I hope you took some action after reading last week’s post on How to Start earning Money Online by Providing Services- Part 1. If you haven’t, I highly recommend you stop right here, go back to one of those job bidding sites we discussed about and sign-up.  This week, I would like to focus on some basic elements that make for a part of your marketing campaign as far as providing services online is concerned. This post will have 2 aspects of freelancing that I think you should know before you get started. No one ever tells you these things so I suggest you bookmark this post.

The Law of Numbers and Why You Can Bet Your Life on It

When I frequent job bidding sites and eavesdrop into the conversation most freelancers seem to be having. I started to notice certain common remarks being made. Here are a few of them:

“I hate job bidding sites. These guys from India, China and Philippines low-ball and take jobs away from right under my nose”

“I didn’t get a single project until now; I don’t think this will work”

There are even more cribs and complaints that you are likely to come across – all of them can be classified as excuses. Period.

The moment you go online, you are not pitting yourself against people in your geographical confines; you are competing with the world. When you talk about the world, you must include some really competent service providers operating out of countries with a low cost of living and a huge  gap in the currency values (currency arbitrage). You can’t do much about this, can you? So, why waste time lurking in the forums cribbing your life out?

The only way you can make a sustainable income off these bidding sites is to respect and follow the law of numbers – the more proposals you make the more projects you get. Elance and Guru, for instance, show you a set of numbers that you can use for your benefit called conversion ratio – the ratio of how many projects you gain out of the total proposals you make.

Let’s assume a modest conversion ratio of 10%. It means that you are bound to get at least 10 projects if you make 100 proposals in a month (assuming). With an average project monetary value of about $250, you are bound to end up with $2500 a month on an average. Quite impressive, isn’t it? So, now, how do you make more money?

Bid on more projects.

Bid on projects that pay more.

Improve your conversion ratio.

Was it rocket science?

However, putting up proposals blindly bring home the turkey for you. You will have to approach each bid by using expertly written, highly-customized proposals that reek of quality, expertise and your personality and that leads me to my next point.

How to Write a Winning Proposal

Everything else being the same for all providers on all the bidding sites, what do you think is the one thing that still help you to cut through the clutter and stand out?

Your proposal!

Your project proposal is your marketing pitch. It’s your bread-winner. This is the big daddy of all sales pitches since you are not with the buyer in person (so you don’t have an advantage of expert body language, rapport building, pleasant looks and all that could have worked in your favor if you met the buyer in person). This is salesmanship in print.

Coming right to the point, your proposal must reflect the brand “YOU”. Show some personality, write with a style, use your skills to the maximum and create an indelible impact on your buyer. Ordinary is boring and won’t get you results.

Open with style, introduce yourself, show the buyer why you are the best person for the project, state your bid and the delivery time anticipated and finally sign-off with style. Showcase some of your published work or work-in-progress as your portfolio. If you don’t have any yet, create them.

Much later, if possible, I might actually want to share some real, highly-converting proposals. For now, I think this will suffice. Take your word document out and write a great proposal to get started. Keep the following in mind as a take away from the post this week.

• Respect and follow the law of numbers. Bid more and bid consistently, using high quality proposals. More bids, or more bids on higher paying projects or improving your conversion ratio is the key to success on bidding sites.
• If you don’t bid enough, you won’t earn enough.
• Know your conversion ratio to give you an estimate of how much you can earn each month.
• Write a winning proposal – start with a bang and grab attention, introduce yourself, state your experience and prove why you are the best, show samples and sign off with style.

How about getting started on sites like odesk.com, elance.com and guru.com — the best on the Internet so far – and see how you go?You got to get started now. Please post your results here for me to know.