18).Creating Winning Bids

For some job boards and nearly all freelance work exchanges, you will need to learn  and understand the bidding process. For those unfamiliar with it, a bid is simply a written proposal sent to a prospective employer that briefly details yourself, how you will handle the employer’s project requirements, cost estimate and estimated time of completion.The bid itself is actually the most important part of the bidding process and we’ll go into it in great detail in this chapter. An employer’s first impression of a provider lies in the bid,and sometimes they will decide on a provider just on the bid alone instead of your profile.Therefore it is important to have this done correctly.
Freelance work exchanges (FWE) make it simple to create and submit bids on projects.They put in measures, however, to prevent freelancers from “spamming” employers with bids. One of which is to limit the number of bids you can send per month so it’s important to make every single one count.
One major advantage you’ll have over other freelancers in any FWE is knowing that most do not take the time to write a really good 
personalized
bid to a prospective employer.
They pay relatively little attention to writing the bid thinking the price they submit is the only deciding factor. This couldn’t be further from the truth.In fact, read the following excerpt from Mitchell Harper of the company Interspire:
As an employer with over 30 staff at Interspire, most of the time when I need something done I can call on a staff member in the office and they will take care of it for me. However, sometimes I need the skills of an experienced freelancer for one-off jobs, such as writing a user guide or putting together a product overview video in Flash. In these situations I turn to freelancers on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com.
After posting a job ad, the responses start to come in within a few hours. 95% of the time the candidates have no idea how to reply to the job ad and will either send over:
• The same old copy-paste reply which they use for every job ad
• A vague reply in which they don’t sell themselves to me
(How to Win Any Job on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com by Mitchell Harper, FreelanceSwitch.com, 05/16/2009)
You see, by knowing this you are already ahead of 95% of ALL freelancers out there, not just the rookies. That’s why we will go into detail on creating a winning bid. Writing a winning bid will take you some time at first but, with experience, will be no problem later on down the road.
First of all, a successful bid contains the following parts:
• Subject line
• Introduction
• Your skills and experience related to the project plus benefits of hiring you
• A plan of action, or how you will handle the project on hand
• Questions to the employer if any project specifications are unclear
• A cost estimate
• A time estimate for completion
• Closing with your contact info
• Attachments
We’ll go over each part individually and I’ll provide sample bids to illustrate how they are used.