Online Job Site Review

Online Job Site Review

Written by Administrator

Tuesday, 28 July 2009 11:07

Join ODEK. Click Here Join Now Actually oDesk is more than a place for outsourcing, but a whole system for hiring and managing coders. It's rather techcentric. It's not the sort of thing that a client would enjoy managing (one does need to know how to spec a project in technical terms and how to speak to a developer). It's something for someone like me with one foot in the commercial realm and the other on the technical side. But to be honest I would probably have John do most of the developer management (depending on the project). The decision about whether I would manage the project directly or not, would probably depend on whether John was already involved in that area of the business. Most of the SEO work is my direct province. To put someone between myself and the end developer would likely not improve matters. Most of the WordPress refinements and CMS (apart from the WYSIWYG editor and even that I've tried to hand off - but developers just don't understand WYSIWYG editors) are John's sphere. I am about to interview amother full-time developer locally with superb qualifications (finally!) this week. But if it doesn't work out or we need still more hands on deck, oDesk here we come! I will probably hire Russian and Ukrainian developers as I speak the language fluently. I don't really want to move to Tomsk (Vienna is quite nice, thank you!) to have to work with them. Without oDesk, you'd feel pretty cutoff. But with oDesk, I can live in Vienna and work in Tomsk a few days a week. Fantastic. Some things I really like about oDesk apart from the system itself. reasonable fees: oDesk takes a flat 10% fee. Small enough that nobody is really tempted to push them out of the middle. In exchange they provide a superb regulated environment. transparency - you can get objective tested evaluations of most of the developers and you can even check out their personal sites and contact them off oDesk if you wanted to. good design: unlike rentacoder.com, oDesk looks like it was meant to be used by people in attractive offices not tortured coders in industrial parks. As an ex-adman appearances are important to me. high rates for the providers. As a buyer that sounds like a crazy notion. But really I don't want to be hiring a developer for $2/hour. Not only would I not feel great about it. He will probably either not have the skills or do a shoddy job. oDesk gives really talented guys inTomsk (who might like Tomsk - I've been to Irkutsk but not Tomsk) a fair shake at earning something like a Western wages. $10/hour ($9 after oDesk's cut) might not sound like much to you but it's a great wage for a programmer beyond the Urals or in Rumania. Expect to see some international programming stars rise out of oDesk. I could even imagine that I would consider taking on an oDesker as a permanent programmer six months or year into the relationship. Who knows I might even move the guy to the West if that's what he really wanted and the commercial project justified the expense. Certainly, somebody who was doing regular work for Foliovision over six months would be more than welcome to visit home base for a couple of weeks, partly tourism and partly work. Click Here to Join Getafreelancer.com My first experiences with freelancers began with Elance.com a year ago and I was never 100% satisfied. I tried hiring writers and link builders and none of those were really good.I also didn’t get that many bids for my posted projects. (maybe I was just unlucky…) I decided to test GAF a few months ago with a few smaller projects like outsourcing ten articles or getting a few links to some of my niche websites. There are two things that I really liked about GAF: 1. Many different bids There are many more bidders here than on Elance especially for article writing. Most of them also have lots of reviews which give you a good idea of their quality. Many of these bidders also send you samples of their work so that you can get a feel for their writing style. 2. Very affordable prices You can see in the picture above the average bid of $677 which was for 100 articles. I often use Need-an-article.net for my articles but there is one disadvantage with them: You have to do your own research and supply the writer with the URL’s. It typically takes me from 2 to 5 minutes of research for one article to come up with good URL’s from which the writer can extract relevant information for an article. Doing that for 100 articles would take me 200 to 500 minutes! Nothing like that is needed when you hire a writer on GAF. All you need is to supply them with keywords and your own SEO suggestions. (keyword in title, keyword density and so on.) So this is a big time saver if you can get a good writer through GetAFreelancer. How it works If you are a buyer of services, you need to set up your account and then you can post your project. Once you post it in the relevant categories, you’ll soon start to receive bids in your email and on the project page. You can discuss details with every bidder through private messages. Once you choose one and they accept as well, you are given each other’s email addresses. This means that from then on you don’t have to use GetAFreelancer private messaging but you can use personal emails or chat through Skype or Google chat which is very convenient. If you offer services through GAF you can search for various projects by categories or by keywords. The Payment system GetAFreelancer offers you many methods of payment – through paypal, credit cards, Moneybookers and even E-Gold. One neat system they have is the escrow system. Typically when someone accepts your project, they will ask you to transfer the money to escrow. This means that the money is now in GAF and not in your account and also not in your provider’s account. You basically have paid but your provider hasn’t received the money yet. This protects both parties. Once you receive the articles (or any other completed project) you can release the money from escrow and it is tranferred to the provider’s account. My experiences I did a few smaller test projects for 10 or 20 articles and hired a few writers. One of them was really good and she only bid $6 per article. The articles were really good so I asked her if she would be willing to write 100 articles for me and I would offer her $8 per article. (for 600 to 800 words) She agreed to work long term with me and I can say now that I have an excellent writer for the articles of my niche websites. Of course, I don’t want to put all my eggs in the same basket so I am still testing other writers with smaller projects. I am also testing a few link builders with smaller projects but I haven’t really done any big link building projects. But looking at the number of bids and the number of reviews of bidders I can already see a lot of potential to find a quality link builder. In summary Since Chitika conveniently pays me through paypal (and my Chitika earnings still rock!) I use that money to fund my GAF projects. So far I have been very satisfied with the GetAFreelancer system and of course with the providers I got through GAF. And one last interesting thing I found on GAF: There are some buyers there ordering, for example, 1000 links or 700 blog comments or 5 times 100 articles for their online businesses. Just do a few searches on GAF (for link building or articles needed) and you’ll see what is going on behind all this blogging stuff. I wonder how many of those buyers are some big internet marketing names we all know, secretly building their online empires.