Elance: When Words Fail You

The Internet gurus are very keen to tell you that you can make oodles of money publishing your own niche market product, and while they're probably technically correct, they do rather skirt over the huge amount of work that's involved in this!

For me, writing my ebook, about alternative approaches to treating migraine, was the easy part. The big challenge, of course, was getting people to my website. I will confess that, although I have a niche within it, migraine as a market is probably rather too broad, so Pay-per-click was costing more than it generated, by a long way. Hence the need to look for other methods of finding customers.

An approach that had been successful for me in the past was Article Marketing, however, that was in a much narrower niche (Hair Mineral Analysis). Encouraged by that success, I decided to try Article Marketing for my migraine product. However the material I had already written was contained in the ebook, and it didn't seem fair to re-use it, so I needed more articles.

This presented me with two problems, the biggest one was that, after sourcing/writing/editing 100+ pages on migraine, I was facing a complete "writer's block" and couldn't think of another thing to say. It was taking enough effort to produce something for my blog, let alone more articles.

Then I remembered a colleague suggesting I hire a writer from Elance, a website that finds work for freelancers, putting them in touch with people like myself who need occasional help. At first I was very nervous about letting someone else do my writing - but finally desperation and procrastination got the better of me.

The site, www.elance.com, was professionally presented and well explained, if a little slow. To my surprise I found a much wider range of "providers" than I'd expected:

Web & Programming - 21,784
Writing & Translation - 17,801
Admin Support - 16,712
Design & Multimedia - 15,258
Sales & Marketing - 4,305
Finance & Management - 2,705
Engineering & Manufacturing - 1,715
Legal - 749

I needed a writer. You can see there were plenty to choose from and, looking at their rates, many for very modest fees!

Having defined your project, you can put it out to tender, invite specific authors to bid, or a mixture of both. The search facility helps purchasers by narrowing down the 17,000+ authors to a more manageable list and there's plenty of information on the site to help you choose between authors. For instance you can check out their total earnings over the last 6 months, how much repeat business they've had, and you can read other purchasers' feedback, often showing how much work was done. Most writers display a portfolio of their work, which gives a good example of their style and skill levels. Checking out their portfolios can eliminate the authors whose grammar and spelling is unacceptable. Yes, amazingly, many have basic mistakes in the portfolios intended to attract buyers.

I specified my project and invited bids in two ways, one by putting it out to general tender, and also by inviting authors I "cherry-picked". Being on a limited budget, I invited "New providers" who, I hoped, would be anxious to make a good impression and work hard to collect good feedback.

Then, with a bidding period of one week, I waited for the bids to come in, and wasn't disappointed with the number and quality.

Some of those tendering were no-hopers - sending me sample work littered with grammar and spelling mistakes. They were politely rejected. Perhaps it would have been kinder to tell them precisely why they weren't successful. Others were superb writers (from their sample work), but beyond my budget. I've "tagged" them for other projects when funds allow. I was pleased to find that several bids came in between $50 and $100 to write two articles and two sample blog-posts.

The negotiation and decision period took longer than I expected, but finally I found two new writers whose ideas I liked and, unable to choose, gave similar assignments to both. I was open-minded about the precise subject, and we negotiated that, which was actually very helpful, as both came up with fresh new ideas for articles and blog topics. I awarded both projects, put up the funds, and they set to work, while I went on holiday!

The agreed prices were $50 and $70 and, with hindsight, I think I could have negotiated even more words for my dollars when looking at the quantity of work some authors were producing. However, better to pay a little more for quality work.

For funding the project, I opted for the Elance Escrow service. In a nutshell, before the author starts work, I upload the agreed payment to Elance so they can see I have the funds available. On satisfactory completion of the project, Elance releases it to the provider. For small projects such as mine the tendency is to pay the whole amount as one stage, but for larger projects, funds can be released as a number of different "mile-stones" are reached.

One project was a great success; the author delivered promptly and her writing was far more professional and entertaining than I could have produced myself. I accepted her work after only one minor revision and will certainly use her again.

The other writer was rather disappointing. The articles didn't hang together well, and contained more spelling and grammatical errors than I would expect in these days of spell-checkers! I sent it back asking for a rewrite and clarification of some points that didn't come across well. The second version was hardly any better, so I asked for her source material (some scientific abstracts) and finished the job myself. Some will say that was a defeatist attitude, and I should have insisted on a better job, but I hadn't time or energy to waste sending it back again when the first "return" hadn't resulted in much improvement. I consoled myself with the thought that she had come up with some good ideas and had passed her research over to me, so in that respect I had received value for money.

My first venture onto Elance took quite a long time overall (about 15 days from putting up the project to completion) and I spent almost as long on it as I would have spent writing the articles. However, this was due to unfamiliarity with the system, taking a long time to negotiate with providers and the need to get my payment methods authorised. On the positive side, both writers generated original ideas, so I now have some content for my blog, and enough material to start an articles page on my website. Also I learned a lot about Elance and will be able to implement my next project much more quickly. For a start, I have an author I know I can work with.

My first experience with Elance has been a happy one, but I do know someone who has had problems, and no doubt there are others. The person I know with problems awarded a project in three stages, and while the first two were completed well, and payment released, the work supplied for the third milestone appeared to be of a completely different quality. A dispute is underway, with Elance in arbitration.
In conclusion, if anyone is wondering whether to take the plunge and hire a freelancer from Elance, I can recommend it to you. Go to my blog and website to see if you can tell which is my work, and which is freelance work that I've paid for. I sincerely hope you can tell the difference, and that the professional's work is obvious.

Joy Healey qualified as a nutritionist in 2000, at the prestigious Institute for Optimum Nutrition. Her dissertation topic was migraine.

by Joy Healey - 3rd June 2008

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Source: http://www.creativewriter.me.uk

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