Working from home is not a new experience for me I have been freelancing for years. I have also subscribed to a couple of Freelancer Sites, although with little success. I was subject to a “scam” on one occasion but fortunately spotted it for what it was early on and quickly pulled the plug.
Quite honestly, I never cease to be amazed by the “job” offers that appear with monotonous regularity on these sites. “Build me a website for $20” is quite common and believe it or not get a lot of replies. “Need SEO expert to get my site on page1 of Google in 2 weeks @ $2 an hour” lots for that one as well.
However, this is the one that really takes the biscuit:-
“I am looking for a freelancer to build up to 5 sites (if I am satisfied, this will be a long term project) on WordPress platform that can earn between $15 to $20 each and the site should be related to a topic that will remain of interest in a long run.
I don’t need a certain type of monetization, so you can use your own methods/ways — CPA offers, affiliate products, Google AdSense etc or can be a combination of them.
Please ensure the content is original and highly SEO optimized with good keywords. Site should also be neat, clean and look professional.
No spun content and pictures should be legal with no copyright problems.
The bid amount will be paid after I see a consistent income to ensure you’re not using bot. If this project work fine, I will need up to 12 website.
No bots or traffic buy sites, no autoblogs and must use white hat techniques only.
I want only organic traffic, no PPC, AdWords etc traffic.”
For a fixed price of less than $250!
Now in case you don’t quite understand this, what is being asked is for someone to make 5 complete professional websites, provide all the content, seek out the products, add monetisation and do the SEO, at no cost to the advertiser until the sites are up and running and making HIM money at a rate of $15 to $20, although it is not specified whether this should be per day, week, month etc. Why would anyone do that when they could do it for themselves and gain the $15 or $20 personally? Would you believe that as I write this 7 Freelancers have applied?
I am not sure if that is an indication of the type of Job offer that Guru, accepts on its platform or a reflection of the quality of Freelancers. Oh! By the way, the individual offering this work is from Nigeria, and if that doesn’t raise a red flag I don’t know what else would.
Seriously though, these Freelancing Sites are supposed to make a profit from the fees they charge to the freelancers who obtain work. A percentage deducted from the payment made by the employer. One would think that they should be able to make that a successful business model but it seems that is not sufficient so they try to gain additional income from freelancers by adding further costs. Limits on the number of jobs you can apply for unless you “upgrade for a fee”, limits on the quality of jobs you can apply for unless you “upgrade for a fee”, introduce a “verification system” which involves a fee for them to check your documents, which quite frankly is clearly a scam. And so it goes on.
But that might explain why there are so many repetitive job ads. The more they can get you to apply for, with no hope of getting a job, the quicker you use up your allocation and need to pay a fee to gain more chances to apply for jobs that most probably never did exist in the first place but were only bait!