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.


Friday, March 22, 2013

Getting Paid (Elance)


Be sure you have read these previous posts first!:
1- Getting started with Elance;
2- Applying for your first job (Elance).


You got your first job, you completed it, and got paid!! So now what?
When it comes to hourly jobs, you get paid only after the employer has reviewed your work sheet and checked all the screenshots from the time tracking software. This system works on a weekly basis, like this: you log your work hours during a one week period, meanwhile all the screenshots are uploaded to your worksheet, which you can constantly check from your Elance user panel. If you accidentaly logged hours that you were not supposed to log, you can go there and erase them. Once the one week period is over, the employer has one week to review the screenshots. If he approves them, then you will get the money transferred to your Elance account the following week.
If you completed a fixed price job, then you have to make the arrengements yourself with your employer. You can ask for an advance payment, you can establish milestones, or simply get paid upon completion of the job (this is what I usually do, and I never had problems getting paid).
After you had your money transferred to your Elance account, you have several withdrawal options:
1- Paypal (no fee);
2- Skrill (no fee);
3- Bank transfer (Free for US banks);
4- Wire transfer (expensive fees, which depend on which country you're transferring to);
5- Payoneer (no fee);
6- Bank Check (no fee, only for US and Canada).

I use Payoneer, because it's the most convenient method for my country (Argentina).
You can even use the same Payoneer account and card to withdraw money from most freelance work sites like Elance, Odesk and Freelancer.com.

So, this is basically how Elance works for a freelancer. I hope this works out for you! Feel free to ask me any questions!
Good Luck!!

No comments:

Post a Comment