A new Elance system update is making it even more important to limit the amount of time you spend on your job proposals.

I’m a big believer in limiting the amount of time you spend on each Elance proposal because, as I discuss in my book, most new Elance writers need to bid a lot in order to win enough work. And the latest Elance system update makes this strategy even more important.

As of July 13, 2011, Elance contractors will no longer be able to see whether buyers have specifically invited people to bid on their job or not. What this means for you as an Elance writer is that whenever you browse the job list and decide to bid on a job, you will have no way of knowing whether the buyer has already invited a short-list of preferred contractors.

This makes it much harder to decide how much time to spend on your proposal. After all, if you can see that the buyer has specifically invited someone to bid, you know that winning the job is a very long shot. And why throw all that hard work away on a long shot?

Before this system update, you could not only see how many writers were invited, but who they were. If the buyer had issued invitations to professional writers who charged professional rates, you could feel reasonably confident that this was a buyer whose project was worth bidding on. Conversely, if the buyer had invited only lowball bidders, you could assume that they were motivated by price rather than quality, and avoid wasting your time on submitting a proposal. Unfortunately, from now on, Elance writers will have to pay even closer attention to the warning signs in the job description itself, rather than being able to rely on the invitee list to give them some indication of job quality.

And if you are invited to submit a proposal, the same problem arises: you don’t know whether you’re one of 30 random invitees, or one of two or three carefully selected candidates.

Whether you’re browsing jobs or responding to an invitation, you just won’t know how much attention your proposal is going to get. That means spending an hour or more carefully crafting a well-researched, well-worded, customized proposal is not a smart use of your time.

Let me be clear: I do believe in delivering a quality proposal. The quality of your proposal is one of the most important factors in winning work on Elance. But now, more than ever, writing mini-masterpieces just isn’t worth it. Your time is money—don’t waste it.

It makes more sense to create a proposal template (or two or three) that can be reused again and again. Customize the template by attaching work samples appropriate to the task at hand, and write a sentence or two at the beginning that addresses the buyer’s specific needs. Send it off into cyberspace, find the next worthwhile job posting, and repeat. Your acceptance rate may go down a bit, but your overall profitability will go up.