Make money from Elance

Over the past few years, there has been a veritable outsourcing revolution, as companies both large and small have begun to discover the effectiveness of recruiting ad-hoc talent, as project requirements demand.

The king of all outsourcing sites is Elance, click here to take a look at their site.

In this short article, we offer some advice on how to profit from Elance as a service provider, without competing with low ball competition.

What is Elance?

The concept behind Elance is quite simple.

It is a website that matches project buyers (people requiring jobs done), with service providers (people offering to do the work).

A project buyer posts a bid request, outlining the project requirements, the budget and the deadline, and then providers bid upon this bid request.

The buyer then chooses the provider which fits their needs best.

As a service provider, the key to making profit from Elance is actually wining the bids that you make on projects, at a good rate of pay, and this is sometimes quite difficult for new Elance providers to achieve, so we offer some tips below:

Writing an Effective Profile

Every Elance provider has a profile, that they can fill in with information that project buyers will find relevant.

Regardless of what you put in your Elance profile, there is one part that you must get absolutely correct. Failure to do so will leave you at a serious disadvantage.

The part we are speaking about is the section title “Overview”, as this is the only section of the service description a project buyer sees when they visit your profile. Take a look at this screenshot:

Do you see the “Read More” link? Without clicking that link, a project buyer will not see anything else you have added to your profile.

So it is vitally important that you exploit this valuable short extract.

You need to tell the buyer that you are a serious professional, and include some form of call to action that makes them want to read that “Read More” link.

Build a Solid Reputation

The next big selling point, after your Elance profile, is your service reputation. Every time you complete a project through Elance, the project buyer has a chance to leave a rating and review. These ratings are visible on your Elance profile, like this:

The better your reputation is, the easier it becomes to win work at Elance. Take the example above, showing $141,653 in earnings, with a perfect 5.0 rating across 299 completed projects.

Now, if a project buyer views this profile, alongside one with a much lower rating, and negligible earnings, which one does he naturally choose if price is not a consideration? The former of course.

Your Elance reputation will over time, become your major asset.

Bid Sensibly

Many new Elance providers make two basic mistakes:

a)     They bid on far too many projects, instead of taking the time needed to choose only projects they have a good chance of winning.

b)    They bid on price, thinking the only way to compete is to come in at a lower price than the competition.

Both of these are losing strategies, and should be avoided.

With regards to choosing the right projects to bid upon, the first thing to do is discard any project requests that do not contain a proper project brief.

For example, you will see single sentence project requests saying something like “I want 10 articles.” It is simply best to avoid these kinds of projects, as the client has obviously no idea of how to work professionally, and they could be more trouble than they are worth.

Instead, look for bid requests with a clear definition of what is expected as a deliverable, a good example of this is shown below:

When it comes to price, don’t compete with the cheapest, come up with the rate you NEED to do the job, and stick to it.

Don’t compete on price, ever; you will regret it down the line if you do, when you try to raise your pricing.

Offer Value

As mentioned above, competing on price is not a good idea. Realistically, most professional project buyers are not interested solely in price, they are looking for value.

Value can be seen as something like this: value = price+quality+ service.

By this we mean that value is the sum of the price of the deliverable, the quality of the deliverable, and the level of service the project buyer receives.

If you provide a high quality deliverable, combined with an exceptional customer experience, then price becomes less important to many project buyers.

In Conclusion

Many people complain that there is no good paying work to be had on Elance, others complain that there are too many low bidding providers.

If you stick to the tips offered above, you will not be affected by either of these problems.

Don’t compete with the bottom feeders; see yourself as a hardworking, valuable professional instead.

Why not enhance your presence on Elance with your own website offering your services? Click here to find out how AffiliateX can help you.