What is a SteemGig? A beginner's guide to Steemit's #1 freelancing marketplace, with a challenge to bolster our ranks!

The Steem Blockchain offers us a lot of things other Blockchains can't... One of those things is the ability to create lasting connections between freelancers and employers, without the need for a middleman that charges a fee every time a job is done. Services like Fiverr and Upwork will take upwards of 20% of the commission from a freelancer just trying to make a living. In my opinion, that's egregious, and @surpassinggoogle created the perfect solution!

This description is vague for a reason, but there is certainly a distinction to be made between what IS and SteemGig, and what is NOT. A #steemgigs post can be just about anything, as long as you are offering something for a price, or requesting something while offering a bid. Many people offer services like writing, artwork/design, voice/music production, and marketing. Here's an article about some of the craziest services that are offered on Fiverr. These are definitely not your conventional freelancing services, but they are certainly services none-the-less. As you can see, freelancing is a very wide ranging industry, but it still has definite parameters.

@chrisgoans creates Logo Designs for just 10 Steem each.

@fitinfun needs help with a Video editing project.

@antminer will produce original music for Steem!

@barbara-orenya is selling coloring pages, and you can pay what you want!

There isn't some specific way your post should be laid out, you will find what works best for you with time. The only real "standards" that I personally hold a #steemgigs post to are that they be offering or requesting a service or a product for a set amount of steem or sbd. There are, however, a couple tips I'd give to make your offers or requests more visible, and to improve success.

• Your title should explain that this is a SteemGig. This can be a done in numerous ways. I personally put [ SteemGig ] at the beginning of the offerings I create, but that is by no means a standard, or required
• Your title/opening text should explain exactly what you need or offer. The Steemit feed displays a very small amount of text, so if you want people to click on that post in their feed, you're going to have to grab their attention. This is important for any Steemit post, but is especially important when trying to buy, sell, or find work.
• Your post should explain exactly how much your service/product will cost, or how much you are willing to pay if requesting something.

Contests and challenges, among other things, aren't really the right type of post. If you are requesting that multiple people submit work, but will only be paying your "favorite" or the "winner", you're running a contest, not a SteemGig. If you're just posting about something you drew, or a picture you took, your post probably isn't a SteemGig. @surpassinggoogle has made a second tag ( #untalented ), which is an outlet for all of your creative juices that aren't offers or requests.

There are obvious exceptions to the "offers & requests" standard. Writing about completing an offer or finding someone to work for you is called a testimonial, and those are very relevant to the tag. If you're writing about the tag itself (like this post), or are writing about the content on the tag, you're adding value, and will be recognized for it.

You can easily promote your offers and requests via Steemit.chat and Discord, as well as on popular social media sites. Click the buttons below to be taken to those channels.

@surpassinggoogle has also talked about an "interface" that is in development, but details are pretty hush hush at the moment. This could be something that skyrockets SteemGigs into a position to create the connections and real change that it was always intended to create.

In the Discord channel, users are able to call upon the @steemgigs account to vote on their post. It is not programmed to discriminate between tags, nor is it able to actually tell whether your post is relevant. That's left up to moderators like myself. @surpassinggoogle turned the @steemgigs account into a bot that is meant to reward people for using his tags. Not just the #steemgigs tag, but his #untalented tag as well. As of late, I've seen a TON of people taking that generosity for granted, calling for votes from the bot for posts that have nothing to do with either community.

I've begun flagging a random few of those posts a day, because I consider them irrelevant spam. My 100% flag will do just barely more than negate the bot's upvote, but I'm working on that... I don't enjoy going around using up my voting power to protect the reward pool from the small amount of abuse I actually can, but I feel very strongly about the freelancing community, and have been a part of @steemgigs since a week after I joined Steemit all the way back in May. I understand @surpassinggoogle avoiding "punishing" people for massively misusing his creation. He does a lot to onboard new users, and needs to save face whenever possible. I also understand that someone has to do it, or the whole project will crumble under the weight of spam. Freelancers need a place to be able to showcase their skills. A place where those skills will actually be found. Project leaders need a place to find skilled employees to hire. Again, they need to be able to find those posts. I will do my part to keep the freelancing community as clean from spam as I can, always.

@surpassinggoogle loves to say "Everyone has something to offer!", and I couldn't agree more.

Let's face it, Steemit is geared toward being a "blogging" site, but not everyone is a writer. Everyone has some sort of skill or talent that might be useful to someone else, though. Steemit is the perfect place to turn that talent into cash! If you don't know what your talent is, join the discord and chat with me. Let's figure out some service you could offer, or a product you could make and ship to steemians with extra money in their wallets. The more people we can help create real value for the blockchain, the stronger SteemGigs becomes as a whole, not to mention the fact that getting more people using steem as currency could push it's value through the roof, and, well, you now where. That could make everyone on Steemit a very happy camper, and that's just a side effect! Let's show "services" like Fiverr and Upwork what freelancing should really look like!

This challenge is for anyone who has never created a #steemgigs post, as a way of onboarding and educating users about the community, and to show that "Everyone has something to offer!". The rules to this challenge are simple:

• Create a post detailing your skill, service, or product, and how much you would charge. If you're requesting something, remember to state clearly what you need and how much you are willing to spend on it.
• Use the .#steemgigs, and the new .#myfirststeemgig tags.
• Put a link to your post in the new my-first-steemgig channel on the SteemGigs Discord. TAKE NOTE This should be the only time you drop a link in that channel. It will not be a post-promotion channel, so much as a way for new freelancers to showcase their first SteemGigs post. This is your warning.

This challenge will have no end. It is a new permanent initiative to show steemians that anyone can be a freelancer, you just have to have something someone wants. I will also be taking a journey to freelancing blogs and communities across the internet to talk about the many things a platform like Steemit could do for their careers, in an effort to bring a wave of professional freelancers to our fee-free community. I will be paying close attention to the new tag, and the channel I have set up for it. I might even be paying a few bots like @randowhale (praise his return!), to shower some of those new #steemgigs posts with some love... and money...

and @steemgigs could be an integral part of that change. Any time a new project is started on Steemit, some new way that the blockchain could help others, where do you think those project leaders should be going to find people to help code it, build websites, write blogs, create graphics, do voice-overs, or anything else they should need for their project? Should they be leaving Steemit to go find a pool of skillful people eager to work? Absolutely not! We need those project leaders spreading that money around to their fellow Steemians.