13).The Job Board and Freelance Job Board (FJB)

These work something like the job classifieds of a newspaper. Employers are usually the ones that have to pay to post their jobs and projects. Freelancers usually do not have to pay to use them but there are some that do require a fee. The fees are usually less than the subscription fees of FWEs though and there usually no fees per project. There are the regular job boards like Yahoo HotJobs which have thousands upon thousands of jobs available. A tiny portion of them are freelance projects and positions. Then there are the FJBs that cater specifically to freelance jobs and projects. One major disadvantage with job boards is that there are relatively fewer projects compared to the number of freelancers competing for them. A good rule of thumb is that if the job board is free then expect plenty of competition and if you have to pay to use a job board, then you will encounter less.
When I started in freelance, I tried the job boards first and primarily stuck with the free ones because spending money to look for jobs didn’t seem reasonable to me. I was pretty much broke too. I even took the time to perfect my profile and applied for many, many projects. I was baffled, however, that I couldn’t get a response from even one employer. What I eventually found out was that I was rather unprepared to apply for job board projects. There is fierce competition for these projects plus you really need to know exactly how to bid and exactly when to bid on these projects. Knowing how to sell yourself and the timing your bid right are absolutely essential.
This is not to say that you will not find a project using job boards. It is very likely, though,that you will spend a lot more time searching for work compared to a FWE. You have to  decide if that extra time is worth it or not. Remember that you are not being paid while you are looking for work so the goal is to minimize time looking for work and maximize your time working.