There are many freelancing sites out there that can help you hire virtual workers. These virtual workers can help you with a variety of different tasks from article writing, SEO, web design, programming and much more.
While each of the available freelance sites work a bit different, they are still fundamentally the same. You have to post a project description, get candidates to bid on your project, negotiate with specific candidates you like and then hire someone to actually do the job you want.
As someone who is hiring, you get a certain amount of protection by having your project fees put into escrow. So you only pay your worker when they actually complete the job for you.
Outsourcing is extremely important to most businesses these days. This is because you can get a lot of good work done for an affordable price. While it can be overwhelming to some to learn how each freelancing site works, the effort to do so is well worth it.
While there are a lot of freelancing sites to join, including ODesk, Freelancer.com and vWorker, the one that I end up using the most is Elance.
ELance
Elance allows you to hire by the hour and track your workers progress through their workroom. This gives you a complete history of your messages, screenshots and files that you have with each person you hire.
Elance also makes it extremely easy to create milestones so you can have your project completed in easy to manage chunks. Elance makes it’s money by collecting between 6.75% and 8.75% for each payment paid. Also, if you are an employer you are charged a one-time $10 fee.
In general, the workers you find on eLance are more expensive then some other sites. But on the flip-side, I’ve found the quality to be much better as well. As a general rule, I will definitely pay a bit more to hire a quality provider. There’s just too many headaches you will encounter if you only focus on price.
Which Is Best?
While I like eLance a lot, which site you use the most really depends on the work you need. For hourly work, you might end up going with ODesk. I’ve had some nice success with this site as well. But for everything else eLance has worked well for me.
Still, don’t be afraid to post your job on multiple sites at once. You can copy and paste your project description which makes this easy. This will allow you to find more qualified applicants for your job and increase the success rate of your project.