My Freelance Story: How I Made 460 Rubles on Workzilla

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my page!

I decided to do some freelancing during my vacation, and I came across this platform called Workzilla.

What is Workzilla?

It's a freelance platform where you can find various tasks to do remotely.

To get started, you need to understand how the platform works.

This is a platform where clients post various tasks with different levels of complexity. Freelancers can then choose tasks from various categories, such as social media and advertising, simple assistance, design, writing, website help, and more.

To become a freelancer and start receiving tasks, you need to register by clicking on this link: [link].

Then, you need to complete several mandatory steps:

Testing, Paying for a subscription, Filling out your profile,

The developers claim that this is necessary to protect users from scams and unfair competition. I'm not sure about that, but it seems like just a marketing ploy to me.

Testing.

To get started, you need to study the platform's rules and then pass the testing phase. There are many questions and answers, and you need to choose the correct options. However, when you make mistakes, the system doesn't show you which question was wrong. I personally had to retake the test several times and passed it only on my fourth try.

Paying for a subscription.

I'm generally against investing in freelance work. I'm here to work, and I should pay an initial fee? But without it, I'm not getting anywhere...

I paid the initial fee of 490 rubles and received some bonus points worth 200 rubles, which were also deducted from my account. The subscription options are for 10 days, 1 month, or 2 months. The best value is the 2-month option.

Now, the subscription fee is:

If you don't want to continue working, you can cancel your subscription by clicking the button.

For myself, I decided to take a closer look at the platform and stay here, at least to cancel my subscription.

How to fill out your profile correctly?

You need to upload a high-quality photo for your avatar and fill out information about yourself, if you want to.

I uploaded my photo, but didn't fill out any information.

You should consider the following points:

Your avatar should be the same as your social media profiles, so clients can easily find you there.

First of all, I had to provide my real name and surname.

I also needed to verify my passport, with both the first and second pages. You can still work without a passport, but you won't be able to withdraw any money.

The passport verification costs 96 rubles, while linking a card is just 1 ruble.

Total: 490+96+1= 587 rubles - that's how much I invested at the initial stage.

Now, I could move on to choosing tasks. Each task comes with a price, but it's not the final price - they'll withhold 10% from you.

There's also a timer next to each task, showing how much time you have. Some tasks need to be completed within 18 minutes, while others can take 3-4 or 7 days.

The website has a Jobs tab. Workzilla claims that they're not responsible for the data on this page.

Filter.

You can blacklist tasks that you don't want to see in your feed.

Ratings

At first, everyone is a newbie, and later the rating increases - unless you break the site's rules, in which case it decreases.

Tasks tab has three tabs: New, Open, and History.

New tasks are the ones available to work on right now.

Open tasks:

These are the tasks you've already signed up for, but haven't been assigned yet - they're in the "Queue" list.

These are the tasks you've been assigned - they're in the "In progress" list.

And these are the tasks that are archived - they're called History.

When I got into the feed, I initially scraped the tasks for newbies - they were literally called that.

For newbies: these were penny-ante reviews on various platforms: Yandex, Yandex Maps, etc.Some of these tasks were paid, while others were just a waste of time - they were called cheat codes. I tried to take them to build up my rating, but in the end, I was just creating activity and getting 0 payments.

I've had some pretty weird tasks on this platform, to be honest. There were tasks like 'secret shopper', but I had to make calls and get paid from my own pocket, and I might not even get paid for the work... I tried taking on those tasks a few times, but they'd get archived before I could complete them. The client would already have found their own workers (the client can see the first three workers and choose from them).

There were a lot of tasks for IT specialists and designers, but since I'm neither of those, I didn't take them on.

I've also had tasks like writing reviews on review sites and affiliate recommendations. But I'm a pretty proud person, and I didn't want to ruin my reputation by writing fake reviews. As the saying goes, 'don't poop where you eat' (I added the smiling faces for extra emphasis), and I didn't take those tasks on.

Now, I want to tell you about a really strange task I had. It was called 'vent about something', and it paid 100 rubles minus a 90-ruble commission, so 10 rubles in the end. I had to listen to a woman for 20 minutes.

And the result was?

So, a woman called me on WhatsApp, she was young and ambitious. She immediately showed me her place, saying she didn't need any advice from me. She was walking down the street when she tripped a few times and swore at me, a stranger. Then she started talking about a psychologist she was seeing, but the psychologist said she needed to extend the sessions and do more exercises. I told her that psychologists can be pretty expensive these days. In the end, she talked to me for 10 minutes (half the time she was supposed to), said she didn't see any support in me, and hung up. She paid me 45 rubles (half the commission), but I felt like I'd been kicked in the gut.

Actually, I used to work as a child psychologist myself, so I knew what was going on. I realized that this call was just a recording, probably for her to use in her diploma or to sell to other clients. And I thought maybe she was building a database of calls to later offer her services. There were a few more calls, but then they just stopped.

I also wanted to do some text work and presentation design, but those tasks were really poorly paid. I mean, they paid 50% of the real value, and you had to stick to a strict time limit. For example, a task that was worth 15,000 rubles was only paid at 8,000 rubles, and so on.

Check out this presentation on psychosomatics, for example. It paid 400 rubles, but with a 360-ruble commission, so you'd actually get less than that.

Now, look at these tasks I've highlighted in red. Some of them are pretty funny (I added a few smiling faces for extra emphasis).

Now, let's talk about withdrawing money and limits.

In the end, I managed to earn 508 rubles, which is the minimum amount you can withdraw as a new user (the lower limit is 500 rubles).

I decided to withdraw it.

Getting paid out takes a while - it's held in a buffer for 3 days before being transferred to my card, and even then, I lose 5% to the site's commission. To make matters worse, I'm charged 15% of my earnings each month, plus a monthly subscription fee of 990 rubles.

Once I transferred the money to my card, things on the site suddenly went quiet. The tasks were scarce and unfulfilling. It felt like I'd been used for their own gain. I ended up with a paltry 460 rubles in my hands.

Looking back, I've made some key takeaways:

Easy money is just a mythThis site seems to be more geared towards clients than freelancersMy skills are undervaluedYou need to put in the effort and often deal with obscure schemes to get byIt's tough to balance work on the site with other commitments - you need to be fully invested to succeed.I'm glad I took the chance to try something new and see what online tasks are all about.

And let me say it one more time: get out while you can! It's up to each individual to decide whether to keep working on this platform, but for me, it's a NO GO - I won't be renewing my subscription!

Wishing you all a successful day!