When I started freelancing a few years ago there weren’t nearly as many job boards as there are now. In fact, we’ve published a list of 101 places where you can find paid freelance gigs.On the one hand, it’s great because it means there’s work to be had. On the other hand, it’s also become completely overwhelming to monitor freelance job boards.
Over time. my team and I have learned some ways to streamline the job board process in a way that we can monitor multiple freelance job boards at the same time. Here are some of the ways in which we’ve implemented these strategies.
Subscribe to Job Boards via RSS and Email
Some job boards give you the option to subscribe via RSS or email. This means either you have them all in a place like Feedly or you get email notifications whenever new gigs arise.
Some job boards like Freelancewriting.com even offer a newsletter with jobs curated especially for people who sign up for the email list.
There are also other high quality job boards that also send exclusive gigs via email to their members. They are not free, but they are definitely worth the investment.
Use an IFTTT Recipe
Using an IFTTT (If This Then That) recipe to mintor freelance job boards has been a major time saver for me and my team.
This is actually something I learned from Michelle Nickolaisen’s YouTube channel where she has a tutorial on how to create an IFTTT recipe to automatically send you new freelance gigs posted on multiple job boards.
After watching the tutorial, I created a recipe for specific search terms (ex. personal finance writer) with all the major cities listed on Craigslist. This helps weed out the random jobs and helps save a lot of time.
I also did this for all the job boards that didn’t have an option for subscribing via email. Simply find their RSS url and create a recipe where new postings at that URL get directly sent to your email.
Outsource it.
The longer I run a freelance business, the more I jump on the outsourcing train. After I subscribed to job boards via email and created IFTTT recipes for all the job boards that didn’t have an email option, I quickly became completely overwhelmed with all the emails I was getting.
Although I was technically no longer wasting time checking job boards individually, and although I narrowed down the searches using IFTTT recipes, I was still wasting time going through some terrible leads.
After a few months of this I decided to let my virtual assistant take care of it. By that point she’d been working with me long enough where she knew what kind of gig I’d be interested in. I have her specific guidelines and each day she looks through the listings that get emailed to me. She then notifies me if there are any good ones worth applying to.
Final Thoughts
While it can be overwhelming to look through so many job boards, there are ways to streamline the process. This is the exact system I use in my business to monitor freelance job
