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Best Online Marketplaces To Find Freelancers

October 29th, 2010 elifemagz Leave a comment Go to comments

Outsourcing work to freelancers is a great way to giveaway up your time and full a plan on the cheap. Whether you need a bard to post every day blogs or a planner to revamp your logo, freelance workers can help you full only about any charge without you having to sinecure full- or part-time staff.

Over the past 5 years, the number of freelance marketplaces has exploded online, so how do you select the most appropriate marketplace to find your freelancer? Here are the pros and cons of the tip freelance marketplaces for outsourcing your work.

oDesk.com Cost: Free for employers

This marketplace has more than 750,000 freelancers from 150 countries. A useful feedback ranking system lets you find the most appropriate freelance designers, program developers, Web developers, writers, and practical assistants in the oDesk network. You can moreover select professionals formed on work history, portfolio, rsum, and assessment score.

Pros: It offers a unique “work diary” that guarantees “an hour billed is an hour worked.” The work journal allows you to conspire online and work together as if you’re in the same office. A image is taken of your freelancer’s work journal every 10 minutes, so you can see work being completed as it happens, that will enable you to step in to scold something or simply pledge that you’re not being billed for haunt hours. You can even use oDesk’s useful work journal iPhone app, that lets you examine in on your freelancer’s work position no matter where you are.

Cons: The firm doesn’t offer phone support, so if you confront a problem, you’re stranded sifting by its help topics or watchful for an e-mailed respond to your question.

ScriptLance.com Cost: $5 per agreed bid

Running a website requires a hold of technical might to make it successful and profitable. If you can’t pattern your way out of a box or if programming denunciation is as unfamiliar to you as Chinese, try a freelance site similar to ScriptLance.com.

Posting a plan is free, but once you select a winning bid, your account will be charged a prosaic price of $5. An escrow account keeps your allowance secure until the freelancer finishes the project. When the plan is completed and you’re satisfied, you can have the allowance transferred. In add-on to programmers, ScriptLance moreover gives you access to designers, writers, and marketers.

Pros: ScriptLance has a useful forum that lets you talk with programmers around a summary house or by private messages.

Cons: ScriptLance’s website is outdated, that creates it difficult to navigate.

Elance.com Cost: One-time price of $10 for infinite job posts

Elance.com is maybe the best-known and most-established freelance marketplace. Choose from more than 165,000 experts in areas such as programming, design, writing, marketing, administration, and consulting. You can hunting the Elance database using criteria similar to tested skill, location, category, feedback, and hourly rate, and compare your selected freelancers by experience, ratings, profiles, credentials, and portfolios. All payments are placed in an escrow account and are only expelled after you authorize the project.

Pros: Elance lets you sinecure by the hour or by the plan and keep follow of the job in an online “workroom,” where you can perspective and succeed your freelancer’s work-in-progress. Messages, screenshots, files, and completed work are automatically saved here for you to view. You can even entice coworkers to come together your workroom as needed.

Cons: Some Elance buyers have complained that after accepting a bid from a contractor, they detected that the executive hardly understood English. This can interpret in to catastrophe if you’re stranded with grammatically improper work or have to take the time to notify instructions over and over. The escrow account is expected to safeguard you from profitable for work you do not like, but it can’t safeguard you from wasting your time on a freelancer when you could have been seeking for other one. Avoid this by receiving the time to scrutinize the bidder fully before you accept. This “con,” of course, could request to any freelance marketplace.

Guru.com Cost: Free

Guru.com is a of the oldest freelance marketplaces and a preferred amid many. Connect with more than 250,000 freelancers in categories such as technology (websites, e-commerce, engineering, etc.), imaginative humanities (graphic design, writing, photography, broadcasting, etc.), or business (administration support, marketing, consulting, legal, accounting, etc.). Refine your hunting formed on skill, location, industry, or bill criteria, and differentiate by your hunting results using collection such as rsum, tested skills, feedback and ratings, work samples, and even video. Payments are deposited in to a SafePay escrow account with a remuneration way of your choice.

Pros: A “workroom” lets you work more keenly with your freelancer by permitting both of you to upload files and perspective plan files.

Cons: Reviews of Guru.com uncover that a few employers who were payable with their freelancers were not able to to obtain any encouragement from Guru to redress the situation. Most of the bad freelance work appears to come out of India or other non-English-speaking countries where freelancers are peaceful to bid exceedingly low on a project. Keep in thoughts that a unequivocally inexpensive bid frequently equals low completed work.

99designs.com Cost: $39 inventory price in addition to 15 percent of what you pay is to project

While 99designs.com may be more costly than other freelance marketplaces, it’s a of the most renouned planner marketplaces for a reason. It lets you plunge in to a pool of more than 82,000 freelance designers from all over the world for any pattern plan you have, inclusive trademark design, Web design, stationery, Twitter backgrounds, ensign ads, print design, T-shirts, and more.

The thing that creates 99designs mount detached from other marketplaces is that you obviously obtain to see the pattern before you agree to a bid. Here’s how it works: You horde a “design contest” in that you describe your requirements, and dozens of gifted designers vie to emanate a pattern you admire by submitting their pattern concepts. You select that pattern you similar to most appropriate and let go the remuneration for it. If you do not similar to any of the designs, you obtain your allowance back, guaranteed. You’ll then take the last pattern along with a