Have anyone tried Elance?

vani · Apr 6, 2005

I read in a couple of newspaper articles that Elance is a good place to get some free lance projects to do from home. Has anyone tried that?

Roshni · Apr 7, 2005

I have tried Elance

Elance work from home jobs is a very good source for freelance projects. Especially if you are a sofware or Marketing person, you will find lots of projects.

You can go and bid on projects and once you establish yourself in a particular area by doing a couple of projects, later buyers themselves would invite you to bid.

ammu · Apr 7, 2005

Elance - Isn't the subscription charges too high?

Hi,

I tried Elance work from home jobs for a few months. But I felt the subscription charges are too high and at the basic level of subscription there are not promising projects.

On top of all this, there is also a transaction cost at the time of project billing.

sheetal · Apr 8, 2005

I also did some digging around Elance work from home jobs.

What I find is that inorder to make descent money, I need to offer a service that requires some level of expertise. I can't offer a very basic service - like data entry or web research - and make money.

There are small 1-5 member companies in India that bid in elance and will work for $3/hour or less. At such rates, I am not getting motivated to bid on elance projects.

Roshni · Apr 9, 2005

Telemarketing

What Sheetal has found out regarding the data entry and web research related projects are very true - folks back in India are competing for very minimal rates, since in rupees it might make good value for them.

Telemarketing is another area where I found lots of projects. Many small companies prefer telemarketers who can call up people within their cities.

If you are thinking of part time jobs in the spare time, this will be ideal.
With cheap unlimited locall calling phone plans it should work fine.

rathi · Apr 11, 2005

Are projects awarded only based on lower rates

Hi,

I just went through the Elance work from home jobs website on reading this message thread.

Looks to be an interesting site with so many service providers and buyers dealing with lots of projects.

A quick question that came to my mind - is it just the lowest bid rates that gets a project awarded? Though it might be the case of many projects, some projects in areas like sales & marketing, writing services and web services I found it is the experience and the subject matter that plays a role in winning a project than the rates.

akalya · Apr 24, 2005

Just wanted to share my experience as a buyer in Elance work from home jobs.

I recently posted a project in Elance for designing a logo for my husband's company. I got 23 bids and I selected one among them. The rate I am going to pay is $110 whereas regular logo design companies charge somewhere in the $200+ range. I got a good deal!

If you are good in creative aspects, you can also start offering services like that in Elance. Rs.5000 ($110) for designing a logo isn't all that bad, particularly if you enjoy that work.

sonal · May 11, 2005

I recently did a project for a company in Elance work from home jobs.
They wanted me to call 10 companies and collect a few set of information. The company paid me about $140 for the work and it took me about 6-8 hours to do it.

But I should say that this type of activity needs some work. I bid on 5 projects or so, before I landed this one. So, if we want to be successful in elance, we need to constantly see what projects are being posted and bid on the projects that give us the most income for the time spent.

It has taken me more than 3 months to get steady on my feet in elance work from home jobs. I figured that there is no easy money. We need to work as hard, as we would in any place else.

pooja · May 13, 2005

I took an Elance work from home jobs project that was about doing some sales presentation work. I originally thought that it is going to be fairly simple work as the company said that they already have all the content and I just need to put them in pretty slides.

Only after I get into the details I find that the company has only half-baked ideas on what they wanted to say on the Sales presentation. I had to work with the company and ask n number of questions, receive answers, come up with points for the presentation and make slides. What was supposed to be two evenings work, ended up consuming my whole weekend.

My husband was very supportive, but I couldn't spend a lot of time with my 2-yr old during that weekend. The good part is that the company did agree to pay me more for the work that I did. But I guess there is a price we have to pay for making money. But all in all, I enjoyed the experience and made some money in the process.

Pooja

jyoti · May 14, 2005

Hi Pooja,

I see what you had been through. Since we get to know the work requirements either by email or by few messages posted on the site, it is difficult at times to estimate the actual time required.

May be if possible depending on the location of the client we can have telephonic conversations with them to get the requirements clearly. That might help.

However, it would still be a post mortem for we would have already bid our rates and delivery time based on what they posted in project description.
Good that you atleast made a few bucks at the end of it ;-)