About a year ago, a friend of mine told me that she was freelance writing for work. I was as well, but my friend was working full-time at it; I was not. We started discussing project sources and ran through many of the Internet options available for the hunt: craigslist.com, various message boards, gumtree.com for the UK, and several like this essay writing one. She said, however, that the majority of her projects came from guru.com.

Since then, I’ve come to agree that it might be the best place to get freelance jobs, and that’s not just for writers. Guru has job forums for most forms of legalized freelance work available. From marketing to web design, accounting to photography, and computer programming to architecture, if you’ve got a marketable skill set, chances are guru has a job for you. The first time I punched in my writing credentials, almost 800 jobs popped up for perusal.

It’s an easy system to use. You create a profile and are ranked as you complete projects. There are free basic profiles with which one can bid on up to 10 jobs a month (not that useful for someone seeking full-time work, but not bad for just supplementing income) and more extensive profiles; these do include a fee but allow up to 100 bids and access to many more projects.

Possibly my favorite thing about the site is that it also employs its own Escrow and Mediation and Arbitration services, which cut out a ton of the risk and self-administrative hassle characteristic of freelancing. They offer templates for proposal letters and project agreements as well, basically holding the freelancers hand through the ‘œjumping in’ process.

Possibly my other favorite thing about the site is its user-friendliness. I love a website that immediately makes me feel at home, and Guru does just that. (I’ll admit I’m most shallow when it comes to the virtual world. I’ve been motivated to apply for jobs in the past simply by a company’s well-designed web page, weeded out some grad schools from my potentials list when their websites gave me a ‘˜bad touch’ feeling, and even removed people from my myspace top friends for hideous page layout aesthetics. Get on Guru and make a difference in my world, designers!)

The site looks like it works really well for employers seeking freelancers as well, although I can’t speak from that perspective. So, if you find yourself wanting to make some extra cash while not wanting to pick up that second social life-crushing job, or if you just hate getting out of your pajamas to go to work, check out Guru.com.