19 Freelance Sites Worth Checking Out!

 

So you want to start a freelance career, but where do you look for jobs?

There are lots of freelance sites out there acting as middleman to freelancers and customers looking to have work done.  But how do you know which ones are reputable, above-board businesses that won’t waste your time?

Take a look at the table below. Listed are some of the more relevant freelance sites on the Web.

Since I can’t possibly have personal knowledge of all freelance sites out there and if they are legit, metrics I use are online business stats to validate their claims and a bit of research.

To find basic info about businesses that proclaim to be “the best, the biggest, the most renowned, the oldest, most successful”, etc., look for the following:

Freelance Website & URL

Check out their website! Is it well populated, does it have helpful content, a blog? Do they have legal pages – Terms of use, Privacy, other. What’s their contact info? 

You can find out how old their domain is and when it was registered.  Spammy sites that just want to sell you something are usually not that old and don’t have a lot of content.

And speaking of selling – job sites don’t ask you for money to see their listings. It is the rare exception that may charge a fee. IE. special membership freelance sites that may provide additional services and training.

You can find out the domain age of a site by doing a “whois” (who is) lookup.  In many cases you can even see the name of the owner who registered it  as well. There are many sites where you can do this – here’s one of them: whois.com

Global Site Rank

If the website has any age to it and substantial content, it will have a global rank. Global rank is the traffic rank a site holds compared to all other sites in the world. To give you an idea of the size of the Internet, there are currently over 1.8 billion websites. So a site that has a rank of 1 million is probably getting many daily visits.

Country Rank

What country is the site getting the most traffic from? For example fiverr.com has its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel. However, it gets most of its traffic from the U.S.

Category Rank

The category rank is its traffic rank compared to all other sites in the same main category.  If someone is looking for a freelance site this tells them how popular it is relative to other similar sites offering closely related services.

The popularity of a site is also a function of how well it’s serving its target audience. If a site provides good value, more people will visit more often.

Year Founded

It gives you an idea that the business is serious.

Estimated Revenue & Employees

These figures should give you an approximation of how substantial the business is.

Headquarters

Out of curiosity, nice to know where they live…

Where to find all this?

There are many sites that will give you all or part of this data.  The one I find very easy to use is SimilarWeb.com

Similarweb also has a companion site to find websites that are similar to one you might have in mind. Very handy, its SimilarSites.com

 

Note: Use the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the table below to see all columns!

 

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