Details:

URL: www.elance.com

Industry: Freelance Agency

What they are looking for: Freelancers, each contract has specific requirements

Pay: contract

Alexa rating: 806

Elance is a freelance mecca. It is a website used by freelancers and companies looking to hire freelancers for jobs. Elance is a great place for writers and photographers to find work. It is also a place where many other types of freelancers can find work as well.

To gain work through the Elance system, you have to bid on jobs. Elance works in a reverse auction fashion. Each time you want to bid on a job you need to use one or more “connects”. The amount of connects you need to use to bid on a job depend on how much the job pays. The higher the job’s pay range, the more connects are needed. The amount of connects you get each month depends on what kind of account you have. If you use up all your connects then you can buy more as needed.

Working with Elance

Each job is only posted for a limited amount of time. Bids are only accepted during this time. To apply to jobs you have to write a proposal. The person or company offering the job can read your proposal at any time. Once the time limit is done the job will hopefully be awarded to one of the freelancers. The reason I say hopefully is because so far I have written proposals for three contracts. One was awarded to another writer, the other two have yet to be awarded. Unfortunately this seems to be almost normal on Elance. It seems only 50% of contracts get awarded.

So the question remains, can a freelancer make decent money via Elance. The answer is maybe. It would take a good, if not great, writer who dedicates a lot of time to Elance. That writer would also have to have a reserve of money to live on until they start winning enough contracts to make a living. When you start out, you will have to take a lot of contracts at very low pay to build up good feedback. Even bidding at the website’s lowest allowed bid, you still may not win the contracts you bid on. Elance is a hard road but a living can be made here, it just takes the right kind of person. Personally, I am not giving up on it.

If you are just starting out with Elance I would recommend only trying the free account. You will get three connects a month and some information about jobs will be obscured to you but this will give you a good idea of how the website works and whether or not it will work for you.

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