Experience earning side income with elance, oDesk, RentACoder, etc?
jasonkester: I got a lot of work off Guru when I was first ramping up the consulting work.  I have only one piece of advice:Differentiate on Quality, Never on PriceI would write proposals by hand, in literate English, after reading and considering the project description.  That alone would differentiate me from 90% of applicants.  I'd then include a ballpark estimate along with my hourly rate.The response I got back was pretty much always a variation of "Wow, you really understand our needs a lot better than anybody else who's responded.  Unfortunately, your bid is 3 times that of the next highest bidder.  Any chance you could come down a bit on price?"My response to that would be some variation of "No.", and their response to that would generally be "OK, let's give it a shot."Here's what's happening in that situation.  I wanted the project owner to end up with two piles of bids on his desk.  Pile A would have 150 English-as-a-second-language generic bids that didn't address the project at all and quoted $7-$14/hr rates.  Pile B would have exactly one bid from a guy who obviously knew what he was doing and would definitely deliver, yet was quoting a much higher price.At that point, the project owner has two choices:  Sift through all the garbage in Pile A in hopes of randomly finding somebody good.  Or spend a realistic amount of money with the guy from Pile B.I got plenty of work this way, and as an added bonus it did a good job of filtering out the unrealistic "I need an eBay clone for $400" types.