Winning freelancer.com bid is not tough nor so easy. It does not depends on luck, but does on your presentation & reputation. In my opinion, reputation are not the key factor always. Key factor is presentation. Things you should need to keep in mind for your presentation are – Clients requirement, Clients Geo location, Your Experience & working Knowledge. For bid pricing, just think how much money you would spend to get the same thing done.
If you have an account at freelancer.com and you have no or few reputation / reviews and you have planned to bid on a project, then i have few recommendations for you that might help you to get the project creators attention and get rewarded.
Always go for Projects which match your experience
No matter if you are a PHP developer or Python, don’t try to bid on projects from Latest Projects page. Try going thought Project Categories, ex: for PHP related jobs – http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/PHP/, for Magento related job – http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/Magento/. You can see all available category to work at – http://www.freelancer.com/job/. Go through it, find a better matched category for you, the go for projects of it.
Read Project description twice
Read the Project description carefully, Note: Bidding first doesn’t mean you have a better chance to win. So read the description to understand what the client actually wants.
Look for – “Include the word in your bid so that i understand you have read this”
Experienced & Senior Clients (who already posted couple of projects before) put a note like this Include —– In your bid so that i understand you have read this. It’s very very important that you read that and include the word in your bid description to let them know that you have actually read the project.
Do not waste your bid if the project doesn’t suit you
After reading through the project description, if you think you can do 90% of the work, and rest 10% is out of your knowledge, just put 2/3 minute maximum to find a solution by searching for it on Google or Yahoo search engine. If didn’t find anything helpful, just skip the project and go forward. Remember, if you take a project where you have no solution for few requirements of the project, it will really make you suffer later and at the end, this suffering will effect on your other work and waste a lot of valuable time of yours.
Always ask Questions and Show your Expertise on bid description
OK, that’s the most common & hard part to get Clients attention. Showing you Expertise means, tell them something related to the current project requirement, how you will achieve this, what are the alternative, what could be good, what would not be good etc. But Don’t bother posting multiple website links that you have done earlier. After letting them know your expertise, ask them something that you haven’t understand or need further clarification. This will provoke them to send you some replies, and that’s where you will get a chance to start a conversation and increase your change to win.
Go for a Price that you think would be best for you to do the work
Do not consider what price other have bid for, bidding minimum amount could help you a bit to win, but it’s not correct 80% times. So go for a price which you think would be good for you. Because, usually you wont have a chance to increase the price after getting selected for the project. So select the best suitable price for you, as if you are happy with the price, you would also be happy to provide a high quality service.
Do no accept before milestone is created
While you bid, you do post a milestone amount. Milestone amount means, how much money the client will reserve to freelancer.com for paying you. Client must create the amount before you accept and start working on the project. So don’t accept if client already haven’t created the milestone amount after awarding you the project. Why not ? Well, asap you accept the project, freelancer will deduct the project fees from your account based on your membership level, and in-case the project creator wish to cancel the project you will be the only victim of it, as project fees aren’t reversible.
Schedule next conversation / meeting
You must ask to schedule what is the next time client will be available to communicate. Show interest in communication and try to be online on time. Lack of communication increase high chance of dispute. And yet, if you haven’t done something on time or as promised, share it with client, but do not ignore their message.
Conclusion
I am a freelancer too and all i have written here are from my own experience. I hope it could help you. If you do have some tips and want to share, you can post comments and i will include that also. Thank you for reading.