First time Elancing

[weinerschizel]

I posted up my first elance project. It's for Wordpress development, and I scoped it as precisely as I could (I'm a systems engineer mountains of experience scoping design and writing requirements). The project is very small, simply integrate two things into my plugin and should only take the developer a few hours at most...

(1) create a CSS style sheet and use divs to replace my table
(2) integrate Wordpress image handler into the admin panel portion of the plugin to select images for my advertisements the plugin hosts.

My goal is to get people talked down to the $50 mark. Of course $50 is still a fortune for what I'm asking but I want practice doing this. I have a couple questions with the whole process...

1. Some proposals are requiring I hold a virtual meeting with them. For something this small the meeting would take more time than the work. How do you guys handle this?

2. How do you guys typically approach getting your bids? I only have 3 bids in and several of them are refusing to post a price up front.

3. Do you guys use the paid site features? What extraneous charges are associated with Elance if any?

Thanks!

[10smom]

You will want to interview the freelancer even though small project to be sure they are legitimate and can handle the work. Thye do not want to make a bid and be locked in until they are sure the price you want to pay is equal to what you are asking them to do. They need to message with you to find this out. I have many bad experience with freelancers. It is worth it to take the time to spell out exactly what you want before they make a bid and to be sure they even have the skills to handle the job.

[10smom]

I forgot to mention that you will want to do a search for qualified freelancers through their system and invite them to bid on your project. Otherwise many will not even see your project unless the happen to log in on the day you posted it.

[charlestown]

I've never used Elance, but this outsourcing business is not always as simple as many would have you believe and I've had mixed success with those I have employed so far across various sources including oDesk, Getafreelancer and Guru. Some have been great, while others have clearly lied about their past experience and abilities. One particular website designer I hired springs to mind as I write that...

Recently I hired a guy to handle the transfer of all my domains from one dedicated server to another and go through everything to make sure it was all running smoothly. He knew his stuff but had this habit of disappearing for days at a time and leaving me waiting there by Skype for ages when we were supposed to discuss something. The end result was that a job which should have taken no more than 48 hours without any great intervention on my part ended up absorbing two weeks of my time.

Judging purely by the sites I have gone through I think I like oDesk the best. You can search for people who have passed their certified tests and at least use that as a way of judging their basic competency within the chosen area. The site I like least is Getafreelancer now called freelancer.com because their support staff are downright awful if you have a problem.

[weinerschizel]

Well. I'm not holding meetings for the small beans stuff. Otherwise it's a waste of my time.

I've already delegated my next 6 articles for my Fitlish (http://www.fitlish.com) blog. The first milestone is article one which I set for this Sunday. I want to review the author's work before I let her finish off the remaining articles. We'll see how that goes.

I've actually delegated hundreds of work tasks but all within the companies I've worked for. Any reputable engineering business has a system similar to Elance where work tasks can be documented and delegated. Most always I refused all meetings and found it worked nicely so long as I was explicit about the task.

Now I've never worked with Elance. I figured I would be overly specific and leave no margin for question. Plus try and I follow up on the work shortly after they begin working to make sure they are headed in the right direction.

I just bought a livescribe pen to better illustrate the various work products I want completed on Elance as well. Have yet to get it working though :(

[weinerschizel]

Hit my first difficulty. I funded the Escrow and had the web programmer I hired complete the first milestone. Instructions to him were to complete the milestone then demonstrate his work to me before proceeding.

Elance paid him out for that milestone before I could approve the work he did for it. So I'm not sure how to keep Elance from paying out until after I have signed off work. Here's how my milestones are setup for work on my Wordpres plug-in:
1. Complete CSS layout ($20.00)
2. Complete image handler plug-in integration on admin panel of Wordpress. ($90.00)

[charlestown]

Having never used Elance I can't comment on their procedures but I don't like the sound of what they have just done and personally I'd stay away from them in future if they are releasing payments before you have even had a chance to verify the work. I've never had a problem like that with the other services I have used.

As a quick afterthought on such a small job you shouldn't even need milestones. They should just do the damned job, prove it's satisfactory and then wait for you to release payment. On the couple of occasions that I've used oDesk I haven't even put a payment in Escrow. I just paid them at the end of the job when I was satisfied.

[weinerschizel]

Having never used Elance I can't comment on their procedures but I don't like the sound of what they have just done and personally I'd stay away from them in future if they are releasing payments before you have even had a chance to verify the work. I've never had a problem like that with the other services I have used.

As a quick afterthought on such a small job you shouldn't even need milestones. They should just do the damned job, prove it's satisfactory and then wait for you to release payment. On the couple of occasions that I've used oDesk I haven't even put a payment in Escrow. I just paid them at the end of the job when I was satisfied.

How do you like oDesk? Things seem to be going OK so far with Elance. Guess I just didn't fully understand how Escrow worked.

New issue. How do you find people that are truly qualified for the work? Is this just trial and error or are there some shortcuts to it? It seems this guy is asking fairly novice questions about what he should already know (given I asked for a Wordpress developer) or even be able to easily look up answers to on the internet.

[AlexMoen]

Elance has never released payments before I went through the procedure for doing so. As you are new, you may have accidentally clicked the button or something, I would imagine. I pre-fund my big projects and let the money sit there for ages until the milestone is complete; or, if it's smaller like yours, I usually won't even put it in escrow until it is completed.

As for finding qualified workers:
Typically I'll search many companies first and see what the average business that can do my work looks like (among varying price ranges and qualities). After that I'll post my project, and if it's sizable I'll pay the extra $15 or $50 or whatever for extra traffic to it. At that point I'll also invite some of my favorite companies from my review process to place a bid.

You can learn a lot just from the hiring process. Get in contact with them, see what kind of questions they ask, and how they respond (both quality responses, and how long it takes them to respond). Make sure you can review their work and have feedback available. I typically also view other people's reviews (keeping in mind half of them are probably fake) and check out how much money they have made on Elance. Through this process you can typically gauge how the work will be. I then have somewhat of a mental feeling of each of my top possibilities and will choose the ultimate winner based upon everything I find, and what I'm willing to pay. Also, be sure to keep in mind the cheapest one isn't necessarily "best." Make sure you like their work, they're knowledgeable, that they're punctual, and that you can communicate with them- other times they're cheap simply because they have to be to get any work.

[charlestown]

How do you like oDesk? Things seem to be going OK so far with Elance. Guess I just didn't fully understand how Escrow worked.

New issue. How do you find people that are truly qualified for the work? Is this just trial and error or are there some shortcuts to it? It seems this guy is asking fairly novice questions about what he should already know (given I asked for a Wordpress developer) or even be able to easily look up answers to on the internet.

I've only used oDesk a couple of times and on both occasions with the same supplier. It bugs me that they keep asking me to log in so frequently but I guess that is a security safeguard. The billing process is very transparent though and they send through nice clear invoices at time of payment so you can keep your paperwork neatly in order. I have never had to go through any Escrow putting money aside, which is what happened with freelancer.com and Guru as well I think.

The actual website itself offers useful features such as the ability to view screenshots of your worker's desktop as they work, so if you are paying them on an hourly basis and you see they are constantly on youtube you can complain and cut them lose. The filters for searching are also very effective.

Ultimately I think any of these services are only as good as the people who answer your job advert on any given day. In my case I found a Russian guy to handle some server work who was extremely capable but kept disappearing, so something that should have taken two days ended up taking two weeks and luckily I still had the old server in action during that time.

I am not sure about the alternatives, but oDesk have certified tests so you could look for somebody who had scored say 95% in Wordpress tests, which would put them in the top 10% and then you can be pretty sure they are a safe bet. After making contact it's a good idea to try the interview process via Skype using the instant chat, so you can fire off some rapid questions and see how they respond.

The worst case for me was an Indian web designer hired through freelancer.com who showed examples in his portfolio that were really slick and beautiful, though it later became apparent he must have lied about doing that work. The first draft he showed me after starting had graphics like a 1980's arcade game and I pushed him to do better but it was very clear after a week that everything he tried was hopeless. When I wanted to cancel after two weeks of going nowhere he became really belligerent and I ended up paying him 50% of the agreed figure to basically go away. Neither freelancer nor the designer has ever supplied me with any kind of receipt for my payment and I'll never use either of them again.

For the moment my natural instinct is to go on using oDesk when I really need help like this but I should add a point here. In certain cases where I need something really particular e.g a cover design for an ebook I would just go to some well established specialists with a site set up to show that one thing and just give them the job. It will probably cost you a few dollars more at the start but the process is likely to be so much smoother with a far better end result, so you move on quickly to your next task without all the stress and associated risks.

[weinerschizel]

I actually watched a video on Outsourceforce.com while learning up a bit more about outsourcing then I had learned from the 4hww.

He scorned the use of elance. Said if you use them be leery. Instead he used forums and some other alternative sites that pre-qualify people for work (cannot remember those sites perhaps oDesk?). I thought of the forum approach but cannot find a decent Wordpress developer's forum.

Then he farmed out small tasks, kept a list of the people he liked, and later went back to hire them full time. I'm kind of hoping to do something like that although I couldn't afford to hire anybody full time right now. Not even if it's only a few hundred bucks.

Anyways, this is defiantly a great learning experience. I'll be returning to full time work for a few months and want to keep my business going full steam ahead while I'm designing flight controls for Honeywell. I'm nearing a point where I can cover my mortgage on my own and want to be fully established once my 6 month contract is over but I can see this will require a mastery of outsourcing work.

Thanks so much for the help!

[charlestown]

The forums sound like a good idea if you can clearly see that somebody is qualified expert in a given subject and very importantly seems predisposed towards being helpful. Again though it takes time to search out these people at the start. You will also frequently find that somebody who does a great job the first time becomes a complete nightmare with the second job.

Overall I think outsourcing works, but the fairy tale vision that you simply log on to some site and find top quality professionals falling over themselves to work for $5 is myth. It takes time, patience and a willingness to suffer a certain degree of frustration in order to assemble a team of people you trust and can work with at workable prices. I suspect those people will ultimately come from a wide range of sources like all suppliers.

[weinerschizel]

The forums sound like a good idea if you can clearly see that somebody is qualified expert in a given subject and very importantly seems predisposed towards being helpful. Again though it takes time to search out these people at the start. You will also frequently find that somebody who does a great job the first time becomes a complete nightmare with the second job.

Overall I think outsourcing works, but the fairy tale vision that you simply log on to some site and find top quality professionals falling over themselves to work for $5 is myth. It takes time, patience and a willingness to suffer a certain degree of frustration in order to assemble a team of people you trust and can work with at workable prices. I suspect those people will ultimately come from a wide range of sources like all suppliers.

Well I outsourced both 6 articles for my site and a plug-in I developed that needed a few finishing touches.

The articles are working nicely. My author just got back with me on the first one.

The code is up in the air though. Deadline for the milestone is today yet I've only heard from him to learn he doesn't understand what I'm doing. This is iffy. Not sure he'll produce anything of quality.

Where do you guys typically go to outsource code? Still Elance or do you guys outsource it at all?

Thanks!

[weinerschizel]

The code is up in the air though. Deadline for the milestone is today yet I've only heard from him to learn he doesn't understand what I'm doing. This is iffy. Not sure he'll produce anything of quality.

Well it's official now. The guy I hired for coding is pretty much worthless. I've had to spend the whole evening spoon feeding to him the smallest details. He cannot figure out any of it.

I've been writing code on a professional basis for over a decade. Really hope to get away from it. Ultimately need to get a system down of outsourcing my code.

[charlestown]

I think you will often find if you are good at something that outsourcing in that same area is a remarkably frustrating business. Along with the issue of costs it's the key reason why most one man businesses (like myself) remain a one man business and choose to take on every single task that has to be done. The end result however is a nightmare, working every day until 2.00am (again like myself) and constantly feeling that your work isn't as gratifying as it used to be.

On this occasion you've hit a minor stumbling block and picked up some experience along the way about outsourcing. You can relax though because in a day or so it will all be resolved one way or another. I think the one question you really need to ask yourself in all of this is how often you will require somebody to help with coding and how complex will it be. On that basis you can work out where it makes sense to outsource in future and by what means.

The one area in my current business that I really need to kick start is the marketing. I have a product that I created and it sells but I am pretty sure I could increase those sales 10 fold or more with some solid and consistent marketing. I have found that the pursuit of affiliates is a slow frustrating business and in a nutshell I've only found a tiny number who are even worth an email because more than 90% will never sell anything. Last year I wasted weeks (literally) helping one particular affiliate get set up who was promising the earth and after it was all done he turned out to be a huge waste of space, so I will never make that mistake again. Three visitors a month from his site is a little less than I was expecting...

To really market a product on the web nowadays without spending a fortune on PPC I am convinced it is a full time job with all the competition out there, so I have to be honest with myself and accept I won't/can't do all that work personally. The only options are to stay as I am or take a leap of faith and look for somebody to employ full time who can just chip away on a constant basis to hopefully ensure my product gets a huge amount of targeted traffic all year round to make the sales that I'd like to see.

[AlexMoen]

As far as I'm concerned, hiring in and of itself is a skill set we have to learn. Whether outsourcing or "in-sourcing" I found myself wading through piles of semi-mediocrity. Running my own physical business (offline) I would easily go through about 80 interested applicants for every single decent hire I made. From what I've experienced, I actually prefer outsourcing through sites like Elance. I get feedback and reviews, and can see their work before they even attempt to apply. I go through maybe 12-15 possible people before I have to widdle down 3 solid candidates for my projects now.

It's all a process. Just see what's wrong with the guy you hired, and think of how you could have preemptively avoided that disaster.

As for the forum idea- that could work, and it's a good idea. However, that same extra effort should have been made before hiring from Elance (or anywhere, for that matter).

[weinerschizel]

Yeah I think the guy's portfolio and feedback may have not all been legitimate. It's quite obvious he doesn't know what's going.

Had these things been honest I believe he would have been able to more than easily handle the job. I have a number of fairly large scale projects in the future from custom email auto responders to payment portals that split commissions.

On my own this work could take a year or two simply because I'd have to do some learning. But if I can break it up and farm out the different pieces, I could have it all up and running in short order. However, people have to have honest qualifications.

I think next time I will have to do more work pre-screening. I simply reviewed their email in Elance, looked at their feedback (especially number of returning customers), and their portfolios.

[charlestown]

In your shoes I'd check out oDesk and look for suppliers who have oDesk certification in your required areas. If you find somebody for example who has scored 95% on Unix it hopefully means they know their stuff for that particular requirement, however, not even that core competence will ensure they are actually going to be reliable on the day.

I suppose the secret with all of this is to do something once and then not need to make any changes for a considerable amount of time. Forward planning for your entire business so that it is scalable and not needing to be personally involved should be your key objective if you are aiming towards a four hour work week.

[weinerschizel]

I want to fire my provider (guy I hired) for the web development. Cannot for the life of me figure out how to shut down the project in elance or drop the provider. Googling for the solution has proved to provide little input.

I just want to make sure he doesn't get payment in any way shape or form. I'm going to retry on oDesk this time. And do a little better screening.

Thanks for the input everybody! This has really been a learning experience.

[dalerus]

I just want to jump in here and add my thoughts. I am an Elance provider for web design, only about 25% of my work has come from the site, my prices tend to be too high for a lot of projects. I have hired companies from Elance as well.

I find that Elance is a great place to do business, but you get what you pay for. I have seen too many projects go to guys for $5-10 an hour, and the client gets left in the dust, or just gets a really badly coded project, which you don't know about until the next guy goes to work on your project.

I would check out FreelanceSwitch.com if your looking for high quality web talent, free to post a job here.

Also http://www.pick.im is a great place to locate talent. They are invite only so they vet the talent before allowing providers to post their work. You can check out my stuff here (http://b.pick.im/jesse-orndorff) to see a sample of what view you have.

Lastly, for some of the best out there, you can look at Dribbble.com, while not a site like Elance, some of the best designers in the industry are located there.

Hope some of those places bring you luck.

[charlestown]

Thanks for offering your perspective dalerus and also offering those alternatives to oDesk etc. None of us are on a bashing spree or trying to spam one of these sites, so having a list of options that may well be better is very useful.

[dalerus]

Thanks for offering your perspective dalerus and also offering those alternatives to oDesk etc. None of us are on a bashing spree or trying to spam one of these sites, so having a list of options that may well be better is very useful.

Hey no worries, I wasn't thinking that people were bashing these sites, I just want people to find quality providers.

[charlestown]

The part which I find curious is that the vast majority of us looking for providers only seem to come across those few that were listed previously in the thread and I suppose that is the power of marketing.

I passed on those links you gave me to a friend who has been selling online now for a couple of years and is constantly pulling his hair out due to problems he encounters with providers and his biggest complaint is that they are either clueless or they simply don't turn up for work, while disappearing half way through a job is quite common he tells me. He had never heard of these two options.

[weinerschizel]

I just want to jump in here and add my thoughts. I am an Elance provider for web design, only about 25% of my work has come from the site, my prices tend to be too high for a lot of projects. I have hired companies from Elance as well.

I find that Elance is a great place to do business, but you get what you pay for. I have seen too many projects go to guys for $5-10 an hour, and the client gets left in the dust, or just gets a really badly coded project, which you don't know about until the next guy goes to work on your project.

I would check out FreelanceSwitch.com if your looking for high quality web talent, free to post a job here.

Also http://www.pick.im is a great place to locate talent. They are invite only so they vet the talent before allowing providers to post their work. You can check out my stuff here (http://b.pick.im/jesse-orndorff) to see a sample of what view you have.

Lastly, for some of the best out there, you can look at Dribbble.com, while not a site like Elance, some of the best designers in the industry are located there.

Hope some of those places bring you luck.

Awesome, I'm going to check out your recommended sites when I get ready to outsource the next chunk of code. Once my site starts getting traction I'm going to have some pretty serious stuff to outsource. Right now I think articles are a high priority. Perhaps split testing as well to convert customers.

I like your work, and bookmarked your page. You're absolutely right, you get what you pay for. The guy I hired's portfolio looked legit but after seeing him in action it doesn't seem like an authentic honest to goodness portfolio of his work.

Thanks for the pointers!

[weinerschizel]

I'm posting so much.. lol thanks again for all your great advice.

I've also since discovered my article outsourcing is pretty much crap quality but not a loss by any means and worth the investment. I get a fair amount of traffic from scribd simply by throwing up my draft articles and linking to my main website. So I was thinking of using the junk articles my author wrote for supplementary sites such as scribd to drive traffic to my site.

Now that raised the question, have any of your outsourced SEO? I really need my getting traffic from Google on my various keywords. I have now posted a good 4 - 5 articles over the past month targeted at specific keywords (using market samurai and techniques from 30dc). However, only getting an occasional hit or two from this.

Guess I'm not sure how I'd even provide work direction for SEO outsourcing but think it would be a good move. I'm currently getting 5-10 hits a day when not posting and around 30-50 hits on days when I post articles. I really need somewhere around 200 hits a day when not posting to get on a roll. Ultimately that's where the money is at and what I should outsource is building sustainable traffic. Any ideas?

[charlestown]

I haven't outsourced SEO but without doubt I need to look at getting some help now to create a lot more quality traffic, so it's something I am studying right now. I just don't have the time or inclination to try and do it all myself.

Regarding the ongoing problem of finding quality help through outsourcing I just found this site http://www.expertrating.com/ where you can get potential helpers to sit an exam, after which you should know just how capable they are before doing a job.

[charlestown]

It looks like each test costs $14.99 and as the employer you would have to pay that but it could prove to be a major saving in time and money if it helps you to avoid hiring somebody who can't do the job.

http://www.expertrating.com/examlist.asp

[charlestown]

I've just hired my first assistant to help with marketing and she starts on Monday, so I'll be nervously waiting to see how she gets on and what kind of difference it can make to sales. I am here now as usual at 2.15am answering support emails and thinking strategy, so something needs to change and I am hoping this will be a positive step forwards. I've asked her to do 30 hours a week to really give a big push to the marketing.

One thing I am sure about now is that this work needs to be split up because it's impossible to do everything yourself.