Add This to Your Internet Marketing Strategy

Next to web hosting and setting up your email list, outsourcing is the next most critical internet marketing strategy an affiliate marketer or business owner needs to ensure success. You simply can’t do it all yourself and hope to grow your business.

Elance Review

Elance is one place where you can hire an independent freelancer to provide you with skilled talent to do the tasks you don’t have time or the desire to do.  Is Elance a good service?  Let’s take a look.

What is Elance?

Elance acts as a brokerage house for all kinds of services, bringing buyers and providers together.  The types of services offered include programming, writing, administrative assistance, graphic design and hundreds more. The talent pool of  freelance contractors exceeds 100,000 individuals.

What can Elance do for you, the Buyer?

The buyer is in the driver’s seat at Elance.  Buyers are not charged to use the service, other than to pay for the providers you hire.  Creating an account is very simple and within a few minutes you can be posting your first project. To activate your account, there is a one-time $10 charge to verify your payment method.

Elance is designed to make it as easy as possible to get your “job postings” on their web pages and in front of potential bidders.

Before setting up your first Elance project, I recommend taking a few moments to review the talent available and to get a feel for how the system works.  Be as detailed as you can in outlining your needs so that you attract the type of contractor you require and to avoid being bombarded with non targeted low quality bids.  One disadvantage of a freelancer site like this is that anyone can be an member if they pay their montly fee and any member can then bid on your project. The quality will vary and you will likely receive bids from all across the board.  The more detail you can include in your project without giving away everything to your competitors, will result in a more satisfactory end result.

After receiving your bids, read the samples, ask for interviews and set up checkpoints to ensure that you are receiving the quality of service you are seeking for your project.

The Providers

As has been have mentioned in other Elance reviews, “you get what you pay for”.  If you want quality work, the top level and premium providers in any category will cost more.  Providers are rated by the buyers and the scores are posted to help you scout out the best and most skilled talent.  The ratings are by project, the amount earned by each provider, how many repeat clients, and show an overall aggregated score.

Behind the Scenes

Elance was one of the first to offer an escrow service between buyers and providers. Escrow generally refers to money held by a third-party on behalf of transacting parties.  The freelancers pay the escrow fees out of their earnings and transactions are instant in most cases.  The “workroom” provides similar same hour tracking and other tools as Odesk, another freelancer middleman company, although Elance doesn’t have the same level of desktop tracking and mobile apps as Odesk.

Elance’s behind the scenes operations can be confusing with several overlapping options for invoicing and payment. This could be due to rapid changes and upgrading at Elance.  Periodic updates in operations and ongoing feature testing can leave the user of the site confused.  Support in the terms of customer service and documentation in most cases is limited.

Using Elance can reduce your work load

As most good Elance reviews will mention, there are pros and cons to using Elance as part of your outsourcing internet marketing strategy.  Elance does have more providers and a more extensive network of projects being offered than other sites in the outsourcing category.  Buyers pay no fees and can assess skilled talent quickly and easily from around the world.   On the other hand, the actual platform the system runs on can be confusing and the quality of the talent pool can be difficult to verifty.

Smart Internet Marketing Strategy

Overall, Elance is a useful tool as part of your internet marketing strategy to reduce your work load significantly.   You will still need to take time to interview the applicants for your project, perhaps edit their work and check out the rating tools to hire and retain talented, reliable contractors for your future projects.

Tags: Elance