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The Online Freelancing Guide  >  Finding and Evaluating Online Freelancing Projects

Optimizing Your Searches and Limiting Your Pre-Bid Investment 1 Client Work History and Feedback

Freelancers, especially new ones, often pay too much attention to the quality of a freelancing project and not enough to the quality of the client who posted it. Certainly, the details of projects are very important, and I cover them in detail in the next section of this chapter. But the client’s characteristics are at least as vital. Remember that likely part of the reason you became a freelancer was to have some element of control over whom you work for. No matter how appealing a project may look “on paper”, a lousy client will make the job an unpleasant one. Learning how to evaluate clients and avoid the bad apples is critical to ensuring a positive freelancing experience.

In this section I’ll share with you much of what I have learned about what to look for in differ­entiating between good and bad clients during the project evaluation phase. I start with a discussion of client work history and what to look for in the feedback he or she has received on previous projects. I discuss the issue of awarded job percentage, and why it matters. I then examine communication, reasonableness and attitude, laying out for you why these attributes are important and listing warning signs to be aware of. I look at why the client’s geographical location can still matter even in an era of Internet-based commerce, and conclude with some important considerations for working with new clients.

Optimizing Your Searches and Limiting Your Pre-Bid Investment 1 Client Work History and Feedback