Places to Find Work Besides Upwork and Freelancer.com

Glenn Stovall -

How to you find quality clients on freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Freelancer.com? Getting quality client work on these sites is nearly impossible. When an average Day Job in India pays as little as $0.65/hour, then doing web development online from the comfort of their home is a dream job. How can you compete?


Freelance Marketplaces are Fundamentally Broken

The issue with these sites isn’t the lower cost of foreign labor. Online marketplaces are a stacked deck against the freelancers that use them. The review system means that before you even have a chance at a decent job before you complete some work for peanuts in exchange for 5-star reviews.

There’s no good way to ‘win’ on sites like these. I strongly recommend skipping these sites entirely. The best clients come from your social and professional networks. However, you may have been unable to find leads there or feel you don’t have much of a network. In that case, there are plenty of higher quality job boards on the internet.

Here’s a list of job boards I’ve used and found clients that ended up paying me over $20,000.

21 Job Boards That Don’t Suck

You may have to filter through a lot of posts for full-time positions, but when you see contract or freelance opportunities, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much better. Most of these are jobs boards where the client is required to pay to create a job posting. For example, posting a freelance position on Authentic Jobs costs $149. If that potential client is willing to pay that just to look for a freelance developer, then know they are willing to pay a decent wage.

Next time you are looking for work online, pick one of these boards, and finding a couple of postings that look promising, and send them an email.