I have written a post on my way to search freelance projects. What would you add?

I have my own way of searching for freelance projects online. I would not say that it is an original way or that my search always results in getting new projects, but I hope that you will find some tips to add to your own search techniques.

Imagine that you are a freelance PHP developer. And you need new projects. Here is my program:

1. Search freelance websites. The nice list is available here. Not all freelance websites are equal. Industry leaders: elance, getacoder, guru, freelance work exchange and a few others.

2. Coder’s forums:

- devshed.com
- codingforums.com
- phparch.com
- phpfreaks.com
- daniweb.com
- sitepoint.com

Webmaster forums also work. Check the forum sections: ‘help wanted’ or similar. You can also post your own adv offering your services if they are in line with the forum guidelines.

3. DesignCrowd.com - A nice place to search for freelance projects. The owners scan online resources and re-post the projects doing a great job for you. According to their statement they have about 80 resources on the list.

4. Kebberfegg – a cool tool that does miracles when combined with some news aggregator. You create custom search feeds that scan many online resources for the word combination you need and deliver the results to your PC.

5. CraigsList.org. To make your search of this marketplace for freelance opportunities easier - read this post and apply the tool.

6. ComputerJobs.com – one of the main IT job resources. It is not focused on freelance or telecommuting jobs, nevertheless you will find some job openings as well.

7. Indeed.com/ SimplyHired.com (the latter is reviewed here) – mega job websites that searching job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages. The best ways to work with this sort of job portals – create custom feeds and add them to your news aggregator.

Summary: You can use the same techniques to search any freelance jobs – for designers, copywriters, search optimizers, data entry, etc. Just make the required modifications according to the nature of projects you need.

getafreelancer.com

Do you guys not find that when you're trying to get jobs online you are just always up against guys from poor European/Eastern countries underbidding you by several orders of magnitude?

I haven't tried for a while as most of my jobs come about via word-of-mouth and referrals but when I do, I just seem to waste my time writing proposals that get binned.

It's hard to find buyers looking for quality (or sticking to it) when they're faced with cheap offers.

Its not the most helpful place but can get you a nice reputation and a fair bit about of money as well...talkfreelance.com.

freelancing has always been a nice way of making money ont he internet. But i have found that i have been undercut by people from other countries as well. It is kind of unfortunate.

Target places with few people offering the service, you then get quite a bit of referral customers.

Vi5 is right, I would go somewhere other than sitepoint or a webmastering forum that has alot of users on it offering the same services.

You need some type of portfolio to show your work to everyone... makesure the portfolio uses your style.

By checking out this thread:
http://www.earnersforum.com/showthread.php?t=5987

Don't forget Project4Hire.com, which is a new freelance website but is growing quickly.

You can also market yourself with a website, like you maket a product.

I'm surprised you don't have scriptlance.com or rentacoder.com on there...

Chose any of the forums it has always been work hard, earn hard for freelancers. So its the way we have chosen, have to work hard to get to top.