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.

Would like to add more techniques or websites to look for a freelance job? You are welcome.

[tags]freelance jobs, how to get a job, telecommuting, networking, online communities, forums, web forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

I have already discussed social websites here and here. I consider them as a very important traffic source that allows to thrive those websites that are relatively new and can’t gain due to some reasons good rankings in Google (for the latter, website age and incoming links structure are probably the most important factors for ranging the website).

While reading the below tips from a regular top Digg.com user I thought: OK, one can follow these tips and do it with your own projects.

1. Recognize Big Stories: This rules seem to be obvious, but there is (usually) a recipe for big stories. For example, a story that contains, How-to, Tutorial, Reference or Top10 tag have more chance to get front page story. Also, a story about Digg itself, Google or Apple is always popularized by users

2. Track Pulse of Internet: To submit more and more big stories, you should have known “What’s populer right now”. My major resources for finding big stories are Delicious Populer, and Reddit. I track populer stories constantly at these sites. The populer stories which already bookmarked by dozens of people have big chance to get frontpage story on Digg, too.

3. Interesting Headlines: Some words like Awesome,Great, The only, Finally and Free are usually attracting more diggs than unexciting headlines. Create excitement with your headlines.

4. Humanized Story Description: Diggers usually prefer to quote from the original story. If quotation is exciting there is no problem, but usually there are better options. My advise is some add some human touch to your stories.

5. Trackback Your Submission: This is not applied by most of digg users. But it can be so powerful. If your story is taken from a blog, i recommend you to add a comment to the story. In comment you can say “I like the story and i submit it to the digg. You and readers please add your diggs to get it frontpage the story…”

6. Comment First: Comments added your story are important as the number of diggs your story have. Because diggspy get the latest dugg stories and the latest comment. If your stories have more comment, your stories take more impression and the possibility to get front page increases.

7. Timing: Timing is so important. Diggtrends have a great research about timing. They conclude that the best time submiting story is 9:00 EST because many office goers start digging as soon as they step in office. My experience confirm this. The stories i submit at night (at noon in istanbul) had less diggs than usual.

8. Make Friends: Digg is not %100 rational of course. People are more likely to dugg stories submited by their friends.

9. Digg Your Friends News: Rules of reciprocation is true for digg community, too. If you dugg your friends’ stories they respond positively and they start to dugg your stories, too.

10. Finally, Enjoy: Enjoy being part of world’s best community. Proud yourself to lead internet traffic.
Point 9 states: ‘digg your friends’ news’. And this comes from one of the top users of the community that fights against all those ‘bad guys from digg clubs’ (members agree to digg each other posts). I think this statement says for itself. Digg.com allows its regulars to digg each other, but disallows it if you are not their active community member.

Summary: I think the tips should help you to realize what it takes to succeed with Digg.com, but I do not think that it is that easy as described. You should definitely experiment: make a good combination of your website content and techniques described in this post, try it several times and do not expect to succeed with your every attempt.

Experiment with a number of social websites simultaneously. They are all different. Good luck!

[tags]social websites, digg, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, web forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

Recently Rand Fishkin has posted an article on levels of search marketing Well, I will not discuss the levels in this post. For me, the most valuable information is those people who belong to level 8.

Rand Fishkin is an authority on SEO issues, so I think his statement is likely to be true and those 5 persons that are assigned level 8 should be really good at search marketing. Here they are:

- Ammon Johns
- Dave Naylor
- Greg Boser
- Jake Baillie
- Dave N

What do you have to do with this information? I would recommend you to arrange a sort of online research and monitoring (I do not mean any interference with the personal life of these people).

What I mean is that to become a good expert it is best to learn from the best experts in your niche. Read their interviews, their blogs, forum posts, analyze their website if possible. Start with imitating the techniques – I am sure you will get your own style with time.

Summary: According to Rand’s post there are currently 5-10 persons who are great at search marketing. Five names are listed – take your time to explore why they are so good and how they do it.

[tags]search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, web forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]