Throughout this week, we’ve been looking at how and why Tamara and I have used Guru.com to jump start our freelance business. To read the whole three-part series, you might want to check out Finding Those First Few Freelance Clients and Using Guru.com for Your Freelance Business.
The Good
If it wasn’t for Guru.com, I suspect that our business wouldn’t have lasted more than two weeks; and the second week would have been because I wheedled Tamara into trying some more. The fact of the matter is that it has been a means to an end. We really needed to find some work, and we needed to do it immediately. At Guru.com, there are employers who really need to find someone to do some work – immediately. This is pretty much a match made in heaven when you’re trying to prove to yourself (and everyone you know) that you really can earn money with your crazy freelancing idea.
While there are a lot of small, one-time-only jobs listed on Guru.com, there are some pretty major projects listed, too. If you’re a good computer programmer who wants to spend the next couple of months on one project while earning several thousand dollars, you will likely find some potential gigs on the site. Another good thing is that some of those one-time-only jobs actually turn into repeat business.
One client was so pleased with Tamara’s ability to edit his text book, for example, that he now sends her a new $500 project every few weeks. Another is constantly adding to their product line, so they just send her pictures every once in a while, and she sends them back a few sentences at about a dollar a pop. We just finished ghost writing some articles for one lady who was so happy that she’s enquired about us ghost writing an entire book!
Probably one of my favorite aspects of Guru.com is the sheer number of jobs listed daily. While I absolutely love sites like Freelance Writing Jobs, there are a lot more opportunities posted at Guru every day. There darned-well should be, too, since you’re paying for the service. Just to show some of the variety, here’s a list of some of the jobs we’ve applied for through them so far:
- reviewing a resume
- writing keyword-rich articles
- editing textbooks
- editing a travel-related e-book
- writing furniture descriptions
- blogging
- writing website content
- writing tourism articles
- ghost writing books and reports
- writing resume descriptions
- writing articles on motherhood
Another of the pros about Guru.com is that just landing one job can pay for your sign-up fee. Tamara and I spent $200 to set up our account (which I think may have been a bit steep), and we had that repaid within the first week or so of receiving jobs. Since our earnings are listed right on the site, there’s no point in hiding that we’ve currently been paid $857 through Guru.com, and we still have a few hundred dollars’ worth of invoices left to be paid in the near future. Obviously, I can’t guarantee you will make any money at all through the site, but we’ve more than made back our initial investment, as well as having cultivated repeat clients.
The Bad
Finding jobs through Guru.com is not all puppy dogs and roses. It’s actually a lot of work in and of itself. In the first couple of weeks we used Guru, I think Tamara literally spent two to four hours on the site every day. First, you have to read through all of the job listings to determine which ones catch your interest. Next, you have to figure out how to create realistic bids for each job. We use a template for bids to some degree, but because the jobs are so varied, each bid has to be fairly customized. You also need to choose the most relevant of your writing samples to include with the bid so you can show the employer that you’re the best candidate for the job.
Ah, there’s another downside to Guru.com. The competition is fierce. You may be one of 50 or more “professionals” bidding on the same job. The fact that so many people are vying for the same project really puts a lot of the power into the hands of the employer. While you can see how many other bids are in, you can not see the dollar amounts of those bids, so you’re on your own there. This is one of the reasons that the jobs really don’t pay all that well. It’s also why we chose to sign up as Vendors. We thought perhaps it would lend more weight to our bids.
In her article on Pricing Your Freelance Services, Tamara suggested that most writers don’t want less than nine cents a word; and most of us expect a lot more than that. Many of the Guru.com writing jobs end up paying a penny a word or less. This is exactly why using this type of service is so controversial. By accepting such a low rate of pay, the overall market is hurt; and it’s harder for everyone to get paid a decent wage. Unfortunately, I do not have the solution to this problem.
In our case, we have chosen to accept some of these lower-paying jobs in order to a) establish a relationship with new clients, b) create materials to add to our portfolio, and c) actually have some money to contribute to our households. Flame us if you must, but we’re not making apologies for the route we’ve taken. It’s working for us. Also, it’s already paying off, as we’ve been able to get enough breathing room to be able to submit much higher-paying proposals to organizations, and several of these proposals have now been accepted. As time goes by, we are able to become less and less Guru-dependent.
Finally, we have run into another problem when using Guru.com. In one case, I severely underestimated how long a project would take. When all was said and done, I figured out that we actually ended up making about $5.00 an hour. Ouch. Still, we had agreed to do the job at a certain price, and I didn’t feel comfortable backing out. (Don’t forget about protecting your rating, either!) The employer was really happy with the outcome, however, and is interested in having us do more work in the near future. I hope that when I explain why I would have to charge so much more, the employer will take it in stride and not think that we just low-balled the first bid to get our foot in the door. I know that some people do that, but it really wasn’t our intention at all. Here’s hoping the employer isn’t so turned off that she returns to Guru.com to hire someone else for future projects.
The Ugly
In our opinion, there is a bit of a dark side to Guru.com. We already mentioned that a lot of freelancers are being paid pennies on the dollar just for the opportunity to do some work. It seems to us that the freelancers are the only ones not making a killing off of the service. Because Guru.com insists that you get paid through them, they are able to double dip. Not only do they get your sign-up fee, but they also keep a portion of every payment you receive. The amount they withhold depends on how you get paid.
For example, we recently earned $100 for some articles we wrote. Not only did Guru.com keep 5% of that, but PayPal also took a cut. When all was said and done, our total payment for the $100 was $92.62. That sort of ticks us off, especially since we suspect that we’re expected to pay taxes on the entire $100. You could possibly offset this by setting your bid a little higher, but then you risk not getting the job at all. In addition, if the employer pays by credit card, then I believe Guru.com gets the extra 2.5% that would have otherwise gone to PayPal.
We have also run into a couple of cases where the employer reneged on our deal. In one case we hadn’t gone through the strict Guru procedure in being hired, and we therefore didn’t have any recourse when they just stopped returning our emails after they received $100 worth of work and ordered another $150 worth. We had all of the work completed (and this was a tedious job, no less) before we realized that they weren’t going to pony up. It’s absolutely infuriating, as they got half of the project without paying, and we spent all the time doing the second half and won’t get paid for it, either. To add insult to injury, this tedious, time consuming project can not be altered in a way that makes it useful for anything else. It was just a complete waste of several hours of our lives. We don’t even have the recourse of giving them a low rating, as you can’t rate one another until after the payment has been made.
Even though we didn’t go through the Guru.com procedure, they did still attempt to contact the employer on our behalf to request payment. Apparently they got blown off, too. Guru.com was kind enough to let us know that if the employer uses their service again, they’ll be monitored for non-payment. Um, why would they be allowed to use the service again? I don’t know . . . seriously, don’t get me started. We do intend to take the matter up with the Better Business Bureau in Georgia, where this particular employer is located. Losing out on $250 isn’t the end of the world, but it really sucks when you’ve worked your tail off for it.
This is how we discovered that the “Safe Pay Escrow” account may not be a bad idea. This leads nicely into one of the other ugly aspects of Guru.com. Some of the employers are kind of jerks. Don’t get me wrong, we have worked with some really, really awesome people through the site! There are some, however, who don’t know what they want. Unfortunately they don’t realize it until after you’ve done what they told you they wanted. Then they can get a little huffy because you didn’t read their minds. I’d tell you all about it, but that’s an experience that will take an entire post of its own somewhere down the road. Suffice it to say that we’ve learned from the experience and have bounced back nicely.
I’ve also been asked to do things that I felt were unethical. One employer who I’d worked with a few times asked me to make up testimonials about their products and then sign something like “Dorothy in Kansas” at the bottom of it. I had to mull over how best to respond. Should I tell them off for being unscrupulous? Should I politely decline and hope that they still wanted me for the other work I’d been doing? Should I just . . . no, I never actually considered writing the fake testimonials. It’s just not my style and would probably make for bad karma anyway. 
The Summary
While we don’t think that Guru.com is the right choice for everyone, it has been a great stepping stone for us. We knew from the very beginning that it would be a temporary measure that allowed us to get a little momentum in order to propel our business forward. Between it and the non-Guru jobs we’ve gotten, we’ve not only paid back our initial investments in the company, but we’ve also been able to earn enough money to reach our business goals. (We’re on the verge of our second “pay day,” too!) More importantly, the Guru stuff has kept us viable so that we are able to work on our other priorities – like developing more lucrative business opportunities.
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Christina Lemmey is the mother of two school-aged girls, a wife, and the owner of 
This is a great review, Lorna. I reviewed Guru and Elance myself about a year ago, and found that I was getting more joy from Guru and nothing from Elance. Sometimes the time you have to put in doesn’t pay off. What are your thoughts on Ifreelance?
Lorna – This is great information; you’ve done a thorough job of explaining guru. Thank you for sharing your experience with it.
Excellent review! I reviewed this service last summer, but your review is very thorough. Your posts will be excellent reference points for new writers who might be trying to break into the freelance writing business.
Sharon – Guru was the first service I tried, so I can’t really compare it too much to the Elance or iFreelance, other than to look at the info available on their sites. I’m hoping to do a little more in-depth comparison down the road, though. I’m especially interested in learning more about iFreelance.
holli jo – You’re welcome. Our hope was that it would give you folks a heads up on what to expect and the ability to make a more informed decision about whether it was the right choice for you.
Laura – Thanks! I’ll have to go back through your posts and check out what you had to say!
Sites like Guru have their place, but that place seems to be more “third world country”. As a freelancer, if you want to earn enough to make a living, trying to find projects that will pay you enough through the different job bidding sites is going to be frustrating.
Instead, freelancers in “mature market countries” should focus on developing a base of LOCAL clients through networking, posting your services to online directories like http://www.FreelanceLocalTech.com and Kudzu (if that’s where your clients will look for you), even pay-per-click ads specifically targeting cities in your area (if your work supports that kind of potential expense). With local clients you get paid local rates that are in line with the income you’ll want to earn from a project.
I have been using Guru.com to bid on transcription jobs. To say they pay pennies is an understatement. Here is a copy of one of the job posts I was notified of via email today: “The rate that I am willing to pay is $15.00 to $20.00 per audio hour and do not bother to apply if this rate does not work for you.”
For those who don’t know, it takes about 5 hours to transcribe an hour of audio, more or less. This employer is willing to pay $3.00 to $4.00 per hour, for five hours of transcription work. I have worked with this employer before, and she is a nightmare. She makes unreasonable demands, will require that you communicate with her at all times, yet ignores any emails you may send to her. She also routinely sends me emails when I bid for jobs, sarcastically noting that I have not received any responses. Guru.com’s response to my complaint about her…nothing. I would not recommend this site to anyone. It may work for some people, but overall, I have found it to be a way for employers to pay as little as they can for work that is tedious and time consuming.
Sorry this is a bit late but I only just noticed it. You say that you have managed to get repeat customers from Guru.com and also that after the first few jobs, you have managed to raise your prices. I’m assuming that you raised prices for your repeat customers here. If so, how did they take the rise?
Alan -
We actually didn’t raise prices on our original customers. We got some pretty low-paying gigs in the beginning, and we let those clients go as we began to grow and get better paying jobs. The more money side of things came later, as we built up a good portfolio and got a much higher ranking on Guru.com.
One thing I have found that works, though, is to put in a low bid for something like a press release and then charge more for other writing jobs. For example, a guy hired me to do a press release for $55. He loved it and immediately put me to work rewriting his webpage content ($300). Since it was a different kind of work entirely, he didn’t balk at the price difference.
We used Guru.com extensively as our primary on-line channel of focus. We moved up from a ranking in the Web Design/Programming category from unranked (there are over 14,000 freelancers listed in this category and simply upgrading your account to a paid “Guru†level account will get you ranked within the top 1,000 or so) to a top 5 ranking within our first 9 months using the site. We also generated over $120,000 worth of revenues from the site, which accounted for roughly 2/3 of our revenues for that same period. We only received three negative feedback ratings the entire time we were there – one from a client who attempted to steal our work and give it to a company in India to finish – and the other two were from a fellow developer who was outsourcing their development to us and got pissy when I put a stop to their endless feature creep (piling on and on of additional work expecting no additional charges).
We encountered a number of issues during our one year membership with Guru.com. First, the Guru.com management sides predominantly with the Employer (who pays no fees to guru.com) rather than with the Freelancer (who pays ALL of the fees to guru.com). We had several clients who allowed us to complete their projects, made final payments, and then filed charge backs long after the work had been completely delivered. This happened four times, and not once did we ever have a single complaint from the client before they did the charge back. It was simply blatant theft!! And Guru’s response was simply that they don’t pursue these types of cases!! Nor would they give us ANY information to pursue them on our own.
In a separate incident we had a client who paid with credit card, acted like a complete arse during the entire design time being the most anally retentive nit-picker I’ve ever seen, and then eventually just disappeared after making the second payment. A month later we had over $1600 taken out of our Guru account with an e-mail that stated simply,
“Good evening. Recently, we received a notification, stating that the employer you worked with on project, “Project ID: 381960, “PHP/CSS geek needed (Facebook-type)” was not authorized to use the credit card he used to pay your invoice. This is with regard to Invoice ID: 162325, for $830.00.
The credit card company has issued a chargeback/reversal on those funds. Since the payment of an invoice or escrow is contingent upon receipt of the funds from the employer, we’ve been left with no choice but to revoke the payment and debit your SafePay Account in the amount of $764.82.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this causes you.â€
There were TWO of these within a twenty-four hour period.
I had a LONG and heated discussion with Guru in which I explained our position that since Guru.com doesn’t allow us access to the Employer information it is up to them to assure the validity of payments. We had absolutely NO recourse – ZERO. After about four months had gone by I had some downtime one afternoon, so I looked up the domain name owner through the WHOIS database and tracked the guy down offering to buy the domain name. He gave me all of his information and was trying to sell if for $10,000 saying he had “changed his mind†about launching the site!
I tried to get Guru.com to cooperate with an investigation and to get law enforcement involved as this was clearly a theft of service on a felonious level. They refused to assist on any level.
I am still debating on who I should turn to. Local LE officials tell me that they can’t do anything because the “crime†didn’t happen in our city.
Back to Guru –
So in July our firm encountered some major adversities, and we had to completely restructure our organization. As a result there were 20 projects that became problematic. We had to give refunds to several clients and several projects were delivered several months behind schedule. We FINALLY got that number down to our final three this week, but as soon as our Guru account was back in black (after paying all of the charge backs) they closed our account. In the e-mail notifiying me of the account closure Joe K. made several misrepresentations stating that I “would never change†and that I had failed to communicate with several clients with whom I have been communicating on a daily if not every other day basis.
This is pretty much the synopsis of our Guru.com experience. I was compelled to share.
Off to Elance & ODesk, where I’ll build a new presence.
My friends and I have had similar issues with Guru.com and are considering dropping them from our stable of employment options, which sucks, but may be necessary. In one case, a woman (who I’ll call “Kym”, and who operates a “grocery coupon discount site”) was extremely upset that we couldn’t read her mind when it came to her long list of requirements. After being extremely complimentary of our work and the progress thereof for several weeks, she suddenly backed out of the project. We were fine with this because the project had become a loss r.e. the amount of time spent working on it versus the profit. Now, several months later, we get the dreaded “chargeback” message from Guru, i.e. that they want to offer “proof of your willingness to work and of work performed”.
Hello! That proof is on your own system, Guru! What more information can I provide than 477 documents filled with graphics created specifically for that client, and thousands of lines of code with that client’s name all over them and our notice of authorship in every header?? I mean, c’mon, what kind of “service” is that? It certainly isn’t worth $1000/year for a “pro” account + 5% + ??% (”processing” fees) from every transaction.
This service is not meeting my expectations. I really expect more out of a company than declaiming any responsibility. I’m sure that the ownership of Guru regrets problems caused by the Employers (and, I’m sure, the Employees of those projects), but it doesn’t seem like they truly try to sympathize and help.
Thank you for such an honest review! I read through every line AND every single comment.
I’m glad I did because I was seriously considering forking over the $74.95 to become a quarterly member.
Now I’m not so sure. I don’t like drama in my client relationships.
…I guess I’ll just stick to the old fashioned way of marketing my services!
I certainly learned a lot from your review. I will say that I took a different route using Guru. I am a free user and my goal with Guru was to allow employers to see my qualifications and have the employers come to me.
It took about a month or so but I finally got my first contact and that first contact turned into my first job on Guru. I did well on my first job which lead to another month of working for the employer and the employer referred me to another one of her associates.
All for free minus the time it took me to create a template for proposals. I am very picky about the projects that I apply for and because I have basic service there are only a few jobs that I am able to apply for.
I recently submitted a couple of contracts but did quite a lot of research on the employers payment process and reviewing what other professionals had to say about working for them. My rule is not to submit an application for a contract when there is no proven track record of payments and if the employee reviews are substandard.
My way of addressing submissions limits my jobs, but it also limits my headaches.
I wish every one the best of luck.
Al
I have been doing work for guru.com for about 7 years. They are in the building where I work here in Pittsburgh. Recently, they changed their policy of email notifications for job postings to the top 2000 paid freelancers with the right keywords. July 17, 2009 my notifications stopped even though my rank is 1265. This right after I dropped $200 plus for vendor status. I’ve had it with them and encourage all to avoid it.