To win a job bid on Elance – or any other bidding site for that matter – you need to sell yourself.

In fact, to get a job over other applicants, you need to sell yourself.

The question is: do you?

Many freelancers are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of selling or marketing themselves and their services. I understand. To sell yourself, you have to commodify yourself to a certain extent – see yourself, your skills, your experiences as a product, with features that are worth a certain amount of money to other people.

It’s not easy to think of yourself as a chunk of pie on the store shelf (or whatever product you want to imagine yourself to be). But it is necessary.

You sell yourself on your professional website. You sell yourself on your Elance profile. You sell yourself on your bid. And on every single piece of communication you send to your prospective and existing clients.

So my conclusion is that every freelancer should have at least a basic understanding of copywriting. You don’t need a $1500 home study course. If you just want to master the basics, here’s a list of some free resources I recommend:

1. Copyblogger Copywriting 101 - Brian Clark is one of the most respected and most successful bloggers to date. He knows his stuff. Even if you just read Copyblogger every day, you’ll get enough copywriting and marketing education to boost your self-selling skills.

2. Copydaddy’s Salesletter Writing Training Series – If you’re into video, you’ll like Brian McElroy’s videos about how to write a sales letter. Check it out even if you’ll probably never have to write a sales letter.

3. Remarkable Communication – Sonia Simone is one of my favorite copywriters (I stalk her on Twitter, LOL). Read her blog to learn how to communicate better with your clients. And do sign up for all her free e-courses.

4. Ittybiz – One can hardly mention Sonia Simone without Naomi Dunford coming up, so my next recommendation is for you to read Naomi’s blog too. Ittybiz’s content is more general, covering all things small businesses should be concerned about (you DO know your freelancing gig is a small biz, don’t you? Or potentially a big biz). But in this particular post, she does actually talk about copywriting. Warning: Contains profanity (but she’s really funny, too). Oh and don’t leave without signing up for one of her free e-courses.

If you’d like to find out more about how to win bids for high-quality projects on Elance, check out “How to Make Money on Elance” by TheSavvyFreelancer.com.

So there you have it. Build your copywriting skills, implement something new, and do let me know how it goes. Post a comment below. Thank you!

Disclaimer: I am a complete Elance failure; I’ve never won a bid on Elance. So I picked up these nuggets of wisdom from six-figure Elancer, Trish Lamber. Click here to learn more about my interview with Trish.

photo credit: Cosmic Kitty