I am a freelancer and I would say Odesk is the best place for freelancing. I have worked on both Elance and Odesk. My first job as a freelancer was on Elance and also the last one on Elance. Odesk seems to have more good projects on the field I work on and that is tasks automation on servers.
As far as getting the first job is concerned, I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and suggesting the client that he should choose python over bash for the script he wanted despite his unknown attachment with bash. And my suggestion worked out pretty well.
I made an account on Odesk on 10th Dec, 2013 and I have already completed 2 projects and 3 are on progress on Odesk.
As far as getting the first job is concerned, I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and suggesting the client that he should choose python over bash for the script he wanted despite his unknown attachment with bash. And my suggestion worked out pretty well. I made an account on Odesk on 10th Dec, 2013 and I have already completed 2 projects and 3 are on progress on Odesk.