Although I have a real live job as SEO engineer, three years ago, together with some friends, we decided that we want to make some extra money doing outsourced projects. After we analyzed many alternatives we decided to settle on vWorker.com and so far, we have not regretted the decision we made at that time. And now, three years later, we have more than 250 projects and have a great record here on vWorker.com (constantly ranking in the best 1% of all workers). I want to share with you four things that helped us achieve that great rating (great especially when you consider that we work on vWorker.com only during our spare time and earn a lot of money).

1) Care about your reputation

When an employer decides which worker he will choose, he has two things to take into consideration except bid quality itself - the price and the worker's reputation. I'm not saying that workers with a low or with no reputation can't get projects (because they can), but most likely they'll have to lower their price in order to get them. A great reputation is the key to getting projects at the price you want and deserve.

So you must try not only to complete your projects, but also to make your customers happy. That's because if they're happy then they'll certainly leave you a good rating and a nice testimonial. Anyway don't freak out if it happens to get a bad rating - since you're overall rating is an average of all your ratings you'll can easily counter that bad rating with some good ones.

2) Bid reasonably

We all want to win as much as possible and we may be tempted to make large bids. However we must remember that here, on vWorker.com, we're in competition with thousands of workers from all over the world and if we make a too large bid, the employer may simply choose another worker who made a more reasonable offer. On the other hand don't fall on the other side and make ridiculous low bids, as that will result in a very low income.

As a general rule it is good to always play a bit with your prices; if despite the fact that you make quite a lot of bids you don't take any project, then you'd better lower your prices; on the other hand if you get a lot of projects, more than you can handle, then is probably the time to raise your prices a bit.

3) Be honest with your customers

Learn to be honest with your customers! Yes, it is frustrating to lose a project because you were honest and said that you can't fulfill the customer's request100%, but it is even more frustrating to being awarded with such a project and later lose it and end up with no money and a bad rating just because you weren't honest upfront.

And being honest doesn't necessarily mean that you'll lose that project; personally I was surprised to see how many employers still chose me, despite the fact that I admitted that I can only complete a fragment of their project, or that I'm not a native English speaker.

More than that, you shouldn't stop being honest after being awarded by the project; continuing to be honest with your customer even after that can only turn to your advantage. For example an employer is much more likely to extend your deadline if you let him know in advance that you're behind schedule, instead of telling him every day that the situation is under control and only in the last day ask him to extend your deadline.

4) Maximize your profits

Even if you're using the same average price-per-hour for all your customers and projects, there are still a few ways to drastically increase your profit.

To help you understand how to increase your profits please let me explain you a "hidden cost" of all your projects, a cost which most workers are ignoring. I'm talking about the time you spend trying to find projects that suit you, make bids on those projects and try to convince the employers to accept you and not any other worker. Well this usually takes quite a lot of time, time during which you're not effectively working and for which you're not paid for. Furthermore, if you start looking for new projects after you have finished your old ones you may have a few days, until you get new projects, in which you do not have any work at all.

Probably the best solution to this problem is to convince your occasional customers to become your loyal, returning customers. An employer that has a project that falls under your area of expertise will have other similar projects in the future (either a completely different project or some needed / required changes to the old projects). And if the employer was happy with your work and communication skills and if you also let him know that you would like to work for him again in the future then there is a high chance that the next time he will directly contact you, saving you a lot of time and helping you increase your profits, and maybe even open a one-to-one auction to you which again helps you make more money.

Another solution is to "go big"; I don't have anything against small projects, but the truth is that small projects bring small profits, and that's because more or less you spend as much time on contracting a small project as well as on contracting a big project, but the rewards are much bigger in the second case. Add to this the fact that when you have contracted a large project you don't have to worry about searching and bidding for other projects, but instead you can focus on what you know to do better - coding - and on making money.

There are many things that could be added, but after all the goal of this article was not to be a comprehensive guide, but also to give you 4 pieces of advice that can help you improve your experience here, on vWorker.com.