Paid per hour with Elance

comberspud

If you have a skill, whether its typing, website design, book keeping etc.... you should try Elance. Jobs are posted on a regular basis and its all done online. Its mainly for freelancers.

I have been on it for a while now and it can be rewarding.
Anyone else use it???

Black_Dynamite

I started out on it, but do very little on Elance now.

I work in Web Design and Development work, tend to get more work by referral and repeat clients now than I do on Elance. You have to be ridiculously cheap to get a sniff at 95% of the jobs.

I was applying for around 15 - 20 jobs per week and getting 2 or 3 replies, then from this I got 1 job. I put alot of effort into my proposals but when you're competing against somebody who is willing to do the work for £5 per hour, you've got next to no chance.

Great for starting out but eventually I had to move, still do a little bit but only when I get invited to apply and the client is right.

SandraGenJobs

Black_Dynamite wrote: »

I started out on it, but do very little on Elance now.

I work in Web Design and Development work, tend to get more work by referral and repeat clients now than I do on Elance. You have to be ridiculously cheap to get a sniff at 95% of the jobs.

I was applying for around 15 - 20 jobs per week and getting 2 or 3 replies, then from this I got 1 job. I put alot of effort into my proposals but when you're competing against somebody who is willing to do the work for £5 per hour, you've got next to no chance.

Great for starting out but eventually I had to move, still do a little bit but only when I get invited to apply and the client is right.

Same thing here. I started off on Elance a couple of years ago. I can' t completely agree with you here. I got my first job in two weeks and I had some really good clients there. I guess it all depends on which job offers you apply. You really have to put yourself out there. There are so many freelancers from third world countries who would work practically for free and it is hard competing with them, that's true. But if you have a good portfolio and application letter you can easily overcome those problems. Choose your clients and don't apply for minimum wage jobs. There are clients out there who prefer quality over the price, it's on you to find them.

george79

I am a member at Elance. It's a good site with lots of projects available, but i think that Odesk is still better.

SouthUKMan

Sadly in my experience the biggest issue with Elance is that many of the people who post jobs want an incredibly cheap price and have unrealistic expectations of what they will receive for their money. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule but after a year of applying for jobs (and winning a couple of dozen of them), I simply had to give up. The amount of time it took to apply for work vs the financial end result simply wasn't worth it for me. If you have some spare time and you're prepared to apply for a lot of jobs in order to win a small handful which will mostly be very low rate, then Elance represents a way to earn some pocket money. Certainly in my line of work there is no way that Elance can be an alternative way to earn a fulltime living. For what it's worth, I've been a freelance worker for nearly 20 years - so I've learned how to develop business relationships, bid for work effectively, manage client expectations, etc. Elance really isn't the answer.

InsideInsurance

Didnt use Elance explicitly but have used other similar sites.

In web development, which was may area of interest, only a tiny proportion of jobs ever get awarded to anyone which is always frustrating. You quickly need to develop a skill of trying to understand which projects are from people with proper funding in place, realistic expectations etc otherwise you waste a lot of time pitching for things you've no chance of winning.

My experience was arguably even worse as I was only doing it "for fun" rather than as an serious revenue generation and as such was picky about what projects I bid on as didnt want to do the basic brochureware Wordpress site or a bog standard ecommerce solution so a lot less projects and many more where people underestimate the time/cost of programming a complex web app from scratch.

Did build things up though over time and eventually sold my portfolio of clients when it got to the point that it was taking more time than I could dedicate on top of my day job

ktcoil

hi guys, I was looking at maybe doing this as currently work monday to friday full time but would like a little extra money as want to save for a deposit for a mortgadge and looking at getting any extra money so looking at doing this on weekends or evening in spare time, only think i have noticed is there asking for a cv which i dont have, does anyone know anywhere i can do a free cv? thanks