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When your computer problems get too much to handle just Elance it!
If you plan to travel the world, take more time off and spend more time enjoying your life (as opposed to working), than you probably have a muse (a.k.a. Business that funds you lifestyle). And if you have a muse, then eventually, you’re going to get stuck somewhere along the way in this technology obsessed world. When you do, it’s Elance to the rescue…maybe.
Elance is basically a service that helps you outsource all the things you can’t or don’t want to do to someone who can. You can Elance everything from marketing or web design to legal or administrative work. Companies or individuals bid on your project. This is often a faster, more inexpensive way to solve your pesky problems. Personally I’ve only Elanced problems with web design and WordPress (which I have plenty of, why can’t someone just make WordPress a little easier for the non-computer geek!
Being an “outsourcing virgin” Elance was my first. I find the website confusing and the system definitely has flaws, but in the end it’s worth the aggravation because my problems get solved.
Here’s what I learned, what I wish I had known and my outcomes.
Experience #1: I needed some help with WordPress blog stats, website crop navigation and PDF to HTML conversion. I posted the job on Elance and within an hour I had an offer. I was so excited that I actually got I bid, that I jumped right in and awarded the project immediately.
What I learned: The project objectives and time line should be completely clear before awarding the project.
What I wish I had known: I wish I had used milestones to not only fund the project, but to make sure the guidelines were followed. Also, I realized after the fact that correspondence should always go through the Elance private message boards and not my own email or phone to protect myself from he said/she said problems.
Outcomes: Often I found myself repeating the objectives of the project. The Elance worker began wanting to be paid even though silly mistakes had been made and not corrected. I found myself wondering why the quality of what the Elance worker did was so poor and not what I was looking for. Then I figured it out. I pay him, he pays workers a fraction of it to actually do the work. Most of the time, he hadn’t even seen the project before he told me it was completed!
My WordPress problem and crop navigation were completed to satisfaction eventually, but not nearly on the time line that the Elance worker had predicted. The PDF conversion to HTML, was a disaster. He would literally email me the link for what he called a “completed project” with the same errors that I had previously asked him to fix. He tried a few sneaky tactics to get paid, but I caught onto him. This one just didn’t workout. I had to pull the project and re-Elance it. Hence, experience #2.
Experience #2: The PDF to HTML conversion redo project. I received multiple responses and this time I basically interviewed of all of them. In the end I found the right guy for the job.
What I learned: If you spend the time before the job is awarded making sure the objectives are understood, then you’re chances of a better experience increase drastically.
What I wish I had known: Nothing.
Outcomes: Perfection and delivered on time. He’s respectful, honest, hard working and only delivers a polished final product. No sneak, sneaky.
So, what has Elance done for me? My blog stats are fixed, the beautiful crop navigation on my blog is complete and of course, my PDF to HTML conversion of The List for each destination on our website is beautiful.
I love to give recommendations, so here’s the link for my Elancer, Bhupendra Singh Kunwar.
If you have any Elance stories you want to share or recommendations for Elancers, please post!
80°F Sunny & No Humidity
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As long as each experience is a learning experience! Haha, I’ve had fun with my personal (virtual) assistant through GetFriday. The tasks need to be, as you said, very clear and defined and for the most part they turn out okay.
But for more complicated stuff I always turn inward (who do I know?). If you’re still looking for (professional) WordPress help definitely check out Crowd Favorite and we can help you out.
Great post – good to know.
Hi Kim,
Nice post. I have experimented with Elance too. I posted a project for a logo design for my brother. It can be quite overwhelming, I got over 50 bids! I managed to narrow it down and was pleased with the results (I’ve had experience of overseas outsourcing ‘issues’ through my day job). The key is not to go for the cheapest but like eBay look through feedback and past bids.
Earlier today I posted similar stuff about my experiences with my VA from getfriday. Check it out, also some tips on delegation you might find useful in my outsourcing category.
Yours is muse creation,
Chris
Hi Kim, glad to hear that you got things sorted out eventually. I’ve had a couple of experiences with elance (and oDesk) now, and they are similar to yours, along with similar lessons learned. I think the big one, and one that Tim Ferriss mentions in 4HWW (but perhaps doesn’t stress quite enough
is just how important it is to have a very well-defined project.
This definitely means clear and measurable objectives, and ideally should have milestones. A point on that: if you set milestones, make them reasonable, linear and measurable, then stick to them. Don’t let your worker continue onto something else until the previous milestone is completed, delivered, verified (by you) and paid out. This avoids piling up payments and avoids them trying to get you to pay for bigger chunks of work that haven’t been completed to your satisfaction.
I’ll also second the practice of “interviewing” potential workers. There are all sorts of people on elance and other sites. Some are good, some are bad. I’ve had a fair amount of experience interviewing people for office-based positions (face to face interviews), so I know how important it is to work through people’s “credentials” and get to know what they are really made of. I’ve also seen how hard it is to really do that. If you’re outsourcing larger projects, it’s just as important to make sure that people know what they’re talking about, but keep in mind that you’re probably talking to a project manager, who (as you said) then gets other people to actually do the work. Ask to see some examples of other work they’ve done, confirm *who* will actually be working on your project and try to talk to them directly if possible.
You can have good and bad experiences – it’s up to you to try to make it as good as possible!
I’m really glad that you posted about your experiences. I recently signed up as a provider, since I love to write and would love to have more articles published. I also have a blog/wordpress site and I’m totally with you on the fact that they don’t make it easy for beginners. Thanks to your post I’ll probably look into having someone take care of it for me, rather than me spend hours on it.
Great to hear:
1) real-world experience
2) That negative experience did not deter you
3) Support for what I’ve been told: Payoff is to do the planning up front rather than on the fly.
More! more!
Kim,
I’ve just started the Muse business after reading 4HWW a couple of months ago and I’m certainly interested in people’s experiences with Tim’s advice. One thing you might checkout is the company I use for my site, http://www.squarespace.com. Their interface is really easy from posting, to changing widths, to stats. You can try all of their bells and whistles on a test site for a month. Might be easier than Wpress.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and lessons learned, Kim. I tried an experiment with Elance nearly a year ago and didn’t have a great experience.
I’ve since been a beta tester for a couple of sites more along the Ask Sunday model and have learned very similar lessons to yours. It’s critical to be extremely clear and outline tiny steps for each project. If you can assign one discreet task at a time, you’re likely to have good results.
Hi,
When I first started outsourcing work, it was the creation of my blog, theDisplacedAfrican.com. I went to Elance, Guru and Rentacoder.com and eventually chose rentacoder.com because it was the cheapest option. I have been in love with rentacoder since.
If you want a place that balances price vs quality of work well, rentacoder.com and getafreelancer.com are probably best – except for copywriting, then I am totally behind Elance.com as an awesome place to get copy written.
My tips after dozens of projects and now that I work with a full time VA and webmaster:
* Break the project down into its smallest possible part – when I first created my blog, I wrote that I wanted a wordpress blog created and got someone to do it in 2 days for $50. About 6 months later I was hired to do it for someone else and i got it done in 6 hours for $10 because I was more specific:
I have paid for a domain (provided domain name, url, username and password). Please create a wordpress blog from that domain and install the following plugins
In addition to that, setup Google analytics, hittail and crazy egg (had already created accounts and gave him usernames and passwords)
* To take this a step further,as soon as the projects awarded insist that they meet you in the chatroom and/or message board where they’ll tell you exactly how they’ll go about achieving the tasks.
* You can also break it down and award tiny bit by tiny bit by tiny bit. Slightly more expensive and a bit time consuming but more efficient and better results e.g.
Project one: Create WordPress blog using domain name
Project two: Setup the plugins and make sure they all work
Project three: Customize the theme
Project four: Setup plugins for SEO etc etc
At the moment I recommend, John Jonas and his ideas in his free call (the paid course is good but the free call is more than enough to get you started) in replacemyself.com to get yourself a fulltime webmaster or VA.
Hope this helps. Cheers. Thanks for inspiring me via this site as I go through My 4 hour work week journey.
Excellent site, keep up the good work
I also got this from an experience and it’s all about time management. Valuing time through outsourcing gave me better ideas on how to find my staff on my behalf and to let them do the automation of business’ success through my assistance and with the help of these outsourcing environments to find better resumes.
With this inspiration, I would also like to share about this website which I got from a blogger in my email. When you check out this website at http://www.massoutsource.com
you can have free access to outsourcing videos, all easy to understand and interesting through this Australian guy’s real life experiences to business. I hope this brings another inspiration to great outsourcers.
I totally agree that using Elance, the leading marketplace for online talent, is a great idea. I personally have been using them to find providers for over 5 years and I can say that 9 times out of 10, the experience is a very positive one. Here are some tips that I’ve discovered over the years;
1. Research providers carefully by checking feedback and interviewing shortlisted candidates via the private message board.
2. Don’t ever pay off of Elance. Instead use their Elance payment system for both deposits and final payments.
3. Be very clear about what you need.
4. Use Elance’s escrow payment system and their milestone tool. Bonus tip – only fund milestones as they are completed.
5. For hourly projects, require the use of Elance’s timekeeping system so that you can review invoices on a daily basis.
6. Leave feedback so that others will know of your experiences (good or bad).
Good luck!
Thanks for posting this very interesting article on outsourcing. We know that it will be a good thing.
Boy, this really is some high-class internet site
Oh, a great post! No idea how you were able to write this article..it’d take me long hours. Well worth it though, I’d assume. Have you considered selling ads on your website?