All You Need to Know About Elance

Elance.com is an online job site where buyers can advertise their jobs and providers can advertise their services and bid on jobs in the marketplace.

Getting started

Before you can apply for any jobs you must make sure you verify your telephone number and pass the elance admission test. Then you should update your portfolio with any skills you can provide, the types of jobs you can provide for and your education or references. You can also outline your interests and activities through your about me description.

Membership levels

On elance you can select between four membership levels which determine how many jobs you can apply for each month. With a basic membership which is free you are limited to 3 job proposals per month. This type of profile only lists 5 skills. The next level of membership, the individual membership allows you to list 10 skills and allows you to submit 20 job proposals a month for a monthly cost of $9.95. Other higher levels of membership are also available which allow you to apply for as many as 60 jobs.

Types of jobs available

There a range of jobs available and some are higher paid and more sought after than others. The most popular jobs fall under writing and translation with the highest paid jobs falling under website programming, design and multimedia. Other jobs available are finance, sales, marketing, engineering and legal. The most sought after skills are those involving PHP,HTML, and SEO.

How to increase your chance of getting a job

In order to increase your chance of getting a job you should make sure you only apply to jobs where you can demonstrate you meet the requirements for the job, for example if you apply for a blogging job about getting out of debt, it is a good idea if you provide evidence on your writings about debt. Secondly if you have no feedback then you are going to have to bid a little lower than you would like in order to secure your first elance job. Once you have some positive feedback and references it will be much easier to get higher paid jobs. Another thing you can do is to take the numerous skills tests on elance which will provide evidence that you possess such skills. This is particularly beneficial for those wishing to apply for graphic designing and website programming jobs.

How payment works

Many buyers use the Escrow service which means they upload your earnings to Escrow before you undertake the job. When you have completed the job the money is released to your paypal account. However elance charges a 6.75-8.75% fee on all earnings. Therefore when you are bidding on a project make sure you take the elance fee into account.

Disadvantages of Elance

The most unfortunate thing about elance is that there are many providers who are desperate for a job and will set their hourly rate very low in order to win as many projects as possible. As the buyers are looking for as cheap a service as possible they are more likely to overlook the quality offered by more expensive providers in favour of the cheaper providers. Therefore it can be more difficult for those who set their services at a high price to get a steady stream of work.

Elance works well for many people and lets them earn an income working from home doing jobs they are interested in. The more skills you possess the more likely you will be able to get a range of highly paid jobs. Unfortunately though many people are prepared to work for very little and this means even quality providers have to drop their rate to gain employment.