You are lowering yourself too much at that rate Alan. You cannot possibly earn a decent income at rates like $6.50. Elance is ok and you can find clients but avoid odesk, it fills up with low bidding wars you just cannot compete against here in the UK.
Hope this old thread update reaches you. Perhaps a year on, you have progressed a lot and now have an income. If not, I run a LinkedIn group for content writers where I post lots of sites paying for articles, and many as much as $300 an article - mostly web dev and design article writing at those rates.
No joke, no salesy pun here. I have written for these sites and you can ask me about these and in other niches like Finance and Debt articles on the LinkedIn group. I can't post the link yet, need 30 posts but my sig leads to it from the blog page. The group has 4000 members and very active with discussions.
I will try and bring the pains and successes talked about to this forum. Lots of interesting topics being discussed like rates, contracts, best sites to contact, etc.
Let me know here in the thread if a year on, things are still dicey.