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Improvements and Fixes to WP E-CommerceImprovements and Fixes to WP E-Commerce Like many of you, I am a user of the WP E-Commerce plug-in for Wordpress as well as a Gold Cart upgrade customer. While WP E-Commerce has many excellent features and does wonders for the Wordpress-based...

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Credit cards: a lifeline for cash Hi all. It certainly has been a while since I've last posted. That's because in many ways the 4HWW concept has been shot given the urgency of making ends meet and scrambling to get whatever dollars are...

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Mar

23

2008

eLance Sucks

Posted by rexreed | Comments : (46)

Category : outsourcing

Tags: , ,

Sorry, Tim. eLance sucks. And here’s why.

  • Enforcing exclusivity – The big mistake is that the folks at eLance assume that I won’t be simultaneously posting the job req. on other outsourcing sites. Why wouldn’t I? I’ll be increasing the number of respondents and selecting (I presume) from different resource pools. But eLance wants you to be with them entirely or not with them at all. How do I know? Because…
  • The 20% rule – If you don’t award 20% of your issued projects to eLance respondents, they’ll shut off your account. That simple. They want to force you to use them for 1 out of every 5 bids. Now, that might not seem like exclusivity to you (after all, you can award 4 of them to other sites), but it really is because….
  • eLance penalizes canceled projects – Let’s say you don’t want to continue forward on the project at all, or more likely, you found a better resource on another site or on your own. So, you have the chance to cancel the project. All good, right? No, because eLance counts all projects towards the 20% rule. So if you start 5 projects and then find a better place to find those 5 resources, guess what… you can no longer post on eLance because your account will be frozen. This is complete bunk. So, why am I not finding resources on eLance in the first place? Because…
  • Poor Quality of responses – I find that I get few qualified responses on eLance, at least in comparison to the other sites I’ve been bidding on. The respondents tend to respond to everything on the site, which means that you have to really filter to find the person appropriate for you. It’s like the problem with Monster.com… too many people vying for too few jobs yields very poor results. But, if that weren’t all…
  • High Average Bids — The bids I get on eLance are easily twice as high if not as much as ten times as high as the ones I get on GetaFreelancer.com. Why is that? I’m not sure, perhaps because eLance respondents are mostly in the US while in GAF they are overseas, perhaps? Or maybe because of the sort of resource pool on eLance? You’d think it would be the opposite given that there’s oversupply on eLance.

In any case, I’ve now been banished from eLance because I couldn’t find any resource on that site to meet my needs. I gave them a really good shot – I posted 10 projects there. But I simply was able to find better respondents somewhere else. Sure, if I was exclusive to eLance, I would have awarded them to someone on eLance, but that premise is false. I do what any responsible buyer would do and look to multiple sources for my resources. If eLance wants to take themselves out of the running by not allowing me to include them in my sourcing pool, that just makes things worse for them. I really can’t understand their business justification for that. At least give the benefit of the doubt to the person who is responsible for building their value in the first place — the buyer.

I have had my best luck with GetaFreelancer.com, and maybe Guru.com. Anyone else have any thoughts to share? Disagree with me? Have any better luck with some other sites I haven’t mentioned? Let me know and share! I need some outsourcers for website development, product prototyping, etc,and have not been fully happy with my experiences so far.

Jan

05

2008

What a difference a day… and clarity… makes!

Posted by rexreed | Comments : (1)

Category : outsourcing

Tags: , , ,

Yesterday I complained about the results received when I posted my first, somewhat vague post on outsourcing websites. I determined that I needed to split my one post into three separate posts, each made more specific. I uploaded those posts, and wow… what a difference it made.

I received six bids on GetaFreelancer.com for one of the posts, selected one provider (for just $55!) and I’ve already started to see results. Yes, that fast.

For my second post, I received 2 responses on eLance.com and 3 on GetaFreelancer.com. I already have my eye on one respondent (from the US, no less at $25/hr), and I’ll probably settle on her shortly. The bids on GetaFreelancer.com were a bit lower, but we’ll have to see about quality.

On a final note, I received three bids on Guru.com (yes, they finally posted my original request) for my original, vague request, but the prices are much higher than I received on the other two sites. Perhaps that’s because of the vagueness of my post, but perhaps that has something to do with the sort of respondents on Guru.com as well. I’ll have to find out when I post my next request online.

So far, this is working out well. I’ll let you know about quality of the workers soon!

Moral of the story: breaking down large projects (or even seemingly small projects) into smaller projects and defining them in great detail leads to more qualified responses at more favorable prices, with hopefully better results. Perhaps this should be called micro-sourcing?

Jan

04

2008

A lesson in clarity…

Posted by rexreed | Comments : (1)

Category : outsourcing

Tags: , , , ,

So, yesterday I posted my outsourcing / VA job requirements on eLance, Guru.com, and GetaFreelancer.com. How did it go?

Results: Zero responses on eLance and 5 ill-suited responses on GetaFreelancer.com. Before I delve into each one of the above, I would like to complain about Guru.com. I was unable to make even one submission. For whatever reason, my submission is in limbo, not having been posted. I will try again, and then give up with Guru.com if I can’t make it work.

Are these poor results the fault of the responders or a black mark on the reputation of the outsourcing web sites? Heck no. The fault lies squarely with me. I simply did not word the job specification clearly enough or post it in the right places to solicit the sort of responses I was looking for.

So, I’m following the good advice of my new friend M @ The Four Hour Trial Blog and using his advice to see if I can solicit much better responses simply by being clearer about what I want.

For example, it’s too vague to say you need “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” or “Blog Marketing”. Specifically say what you want posted where, in what quantities, and in what time frame, with what particular measurable result, and your results should be much better. That might mean shrinking the task or splitting it into multiple tasks (as it did in my case), but that also means more qualified respondents as well as a greater likelihood of success.

Also, I was given advice to:

  • Make sure to select escrow service as a way of implying trust in this anonymous Internet environment…
  • Repeat the post in different categories and sections with different titles so as to attract different people who might be keying off the title and section as an indicator of interest. I’m therefore going to post the description in 5-7 different places on eLance and do the same on Getafreelancer.com where it makes sense…
  • Create a separate task for doing some of the parts that are unrelated to the other tasks. Rather than have one outsourcer stretch and do two jobs in a mediocre way, the advice is to have two outsourcers do individual jobs very well. This might mean higher cost, but also better results.

I’m giving the above a try today and I’ll let you know shortly of my (hopefully much better) results!

Jan

03

2008

Beginning the Outsourcing journey

Posted by rexreed | Comments : (4)

Category : outsourcing

Tags: , , ,

My first New Year’s Resolution was to outsource some of the tasks that were making my current business consume 60+ hours of my time per week.

Now, for me, outsourcing is really hard to do. For one, I believe that I’m the only one that can do some task well, so I tend not to delegate to others. Second, it takes time and effort to find and manage the outsourced contractor. Finally, I’ve had mediocre luck in finding good resources, so I tend to say to myself “well, it’s just better if I do it myself”. WRONG. The only way to get to the 4HWW goal is to buckle up and learn how to outsource well.

In addition to the book, I read a great post at 43 Folders called Enlightened Outsourcing that really helped pull things together. In particular, the lesson learned is: find out which tasks are readily outsourcable and easily defined, define the task WELL, and set the constraints in a narrow fashion so you know for sure whether it’s working or not. I know, obvious advice, but hard to execute well without experience.

The outsource-able task the promotion and marketing of events to get attendees to our events. I decided to focus the first outsourcing task on just the first of these events.

As a first step, I defined my task. I managed to get some feedback from other FHWW bloggers (Thanks a ton, M @ The Four Hour Trial!). I then simultaneously posted this task on eLance, GetaFreelancer.com, and Guru.com. Total cost:$20. It would have cost even less, but I chose to post on eLance as a “Featured” project to increase the odds of getting a good response.

I haven’t yet gotten any responses or feedback as the job has just been posted, but I would like your feedback. Do you have any good examples of well-crafted outsourcing posts that got good results? Any experiences with this sort of outsourcing?