When you first start out freelancing, it can be tough! Building a client base, getting work experience, and making a living can take a long time.
Although a lot of traditional online freelance bidding sites, such as Elance or Freelanced, aren’t the best way to get long-term freelance work (particularly because the pay can be ridiculously, below-minimum-wage low), there are some benefits to them when you’re just starting out.
Here’s why Elance and other similar sites can be a good option for new freelancers:
1) It gives you the opportunity to gain work experience.
Don’t have much work experience? That’s rather a critical component of getting into any field! With the frequency of jobs posted on Elance especially, you can get access to a variety of different types of jobs. Many of the job opportunities are for fast-turnaround projects, and there’s a wide range of different opportunities for freelancers of all backgrounds and fields.
2) You can learn how to manage clients and multiple projects.
One of the best parts about freelancing is that you’re always learning! Every client and project is a little bit different, and therefore might require a different management style.
Elance can help you learn how to juggle a few different clients and projects when you’re starting out, and also help you to test the waters with the best way to interact and communicate with various clients. It’s certainly less intimidating when doing it through a site like this than when working on much larger projects.
3) You might build some great relationships from it.
Yes, you will likely meet some awful clients who try to squeeze every penny out of you and demand you to do more and more work. On the other hand, you will probably meet at least one or two clients who you end up forming long-term, positive relationships with! 
Frankly, Elance isn’t that great of an option for being a long-term freelancer. But for the first few months of freelancing, you can definitely gain work experience, build a client base, and learn a lot about the freelancing industry before you expand your business and leave Elance behind.
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Thanks for writing this post Sagan. I definitely need to look more into Elance (I was scared away originally because of the ‘you’re worth more than that!’ type of posts I always seemed to read about the sites. Have you ever had any freelance opportunities popup on there that helped better prepare you for blogging?
You are definitely worth more than Elance… but I still think it’s a good place to start 🙂
None of the work that I did on Elance really contributed that much to my BLOGGING skills, per se, however it was all a good opportunity to try different styles of writing, to get more experience with editing, to build relationships, and to learn how to deal with clients.
I also didn’t actively seek out blogging opportunities, although those are also available on Elance. But if you want any practice doing different types of writing, then getting gigs through Elance could in a roundabout way be super useful for blogging!
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