Review of freelancer.com contests

After my bad experience with fiverr.com, I decided to try my luck with freelancer.com.

Freelancer.com offer a contest service where you create a project and open it up for people to submit their concepts or designs. Then you can award a winner.

When you create a project you choose how long it runs for and the prize, which can be anything from US$10 and up.

I still needed a logo for a new website, and I looked at current open freelancer.com contests for logos to see what kind of number and quality of entries I could expect at various prize levels.

It appeared that even at low amounts under US$50 I could expect at least 30 entries.

So I created a seven day contest with a US$50 prize for a new logo. I chose not to go with a guaranteed contest (where you have to choose a winner) as I was worried about not getting a good quality winner.

Within 24 hours I hadn't had many responses, and the ones I did get were pretty poor so I replied to an email I received from my personal concierge at freelancer.com offering assistance. I got back a lot of advice, mostly about increasing the prize, or making the contest guaranteed, or choosing one of the many optional enhancements. But one bit of advice was to invite freelancers to enter, which is free.

So I browsed through the listings of freelancers for logo designers and sent off dozens of invitations.

This seemed to pay off and I started getting more and more entries, many of which were of a very high standard.

I also changed to a guaranteed contest as at least one entrant requested it, and the quality of entries so far showed enough potential.

By the end of the competition I had several exceptional entries and it was hard to pick a winner.

My experience with freelancer.com contests was very positive and I would certainly recommend it as a way to get design work done inexpensively and in a way where you can choose from multiple designers, rather than having to choose one and hope they do something suitable.



Update:

I've used freelancer.com several times now and it has almost always been a very positive experience.

I had a logo designed for another website and I had several exceptional quality contest entries to choose from, despite a very low prize.



I also had some illustrations done, again for a low price, but amazing quality work.



The only negative experience was when I requested some illustrations be done in a similar style to some clipart I was using. The person I awarded the work to was not doing a good job but we agreed for him not to complete the work and I was able to change to another freelancer (without penalty) who did a better job.