I used elance years ago. Bid on 10 projects, of those only one of them was awarded and we got it. I felt it was a lot of work to find projects. Seemed many p

I used elance years ago. Bid on 10 projects, of those only one of them was awarded and we got it. I felt it was a lot of work to find projects. Seemed many people just posted projects to get bids, but didn't follow through after that. I didn't bid on any weekend projects. Most were quite detailed and would easily take an average coder 1 or 2 weeks of work and the off shore firms were bidding $1,000 or so for that much work, so it's not easy. Plus, you have to pay to bid on projects and when 90% of them aren't even awarded, costs start to add up. I also posted a few projects at elance and got some real bids from locals, but the off shore firms almost always sent in form letter type bids. They weren't appealing at all. If you are going to do it, I suggest finding something you do want done and are willing to pay $100-300 for. Post it and see who your competition is going to be and how much work you'll have to do. If you are good with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, I have work I'll pay you $100-300 to do. Do you have a portfolio? It may be good to post it just so we get an idea of where you fit skill wise. Maybe you could peruse craiglist once in a while. I've posted links to sites there and off shore people email me and are like, "Hey, I could redesign your website!" So I said ok and they did a good job. No experience using the other sites. I did look at a couple sites like that back then, but the projects weren't a good fit and the values were too low to justify the customer acquisition costs in terms of time. If it takes 5 hours to find a project and it's only paying $300, $60/hr is the most you'll make if it takes you zero hours to complete the task. If it takes ten, you're down to $20/hr. It'll be hard to keep that ball rolling unless you work your way up to bigger and more valuable projects.