Elance

Anyone have a success story?

[balinor]

Hi all...been poking around Elance lately and wanted to see what everyone here thought of it. From what I can tell, there is no way to compete there on a purely price basis, as the folks in India seem to have the market cornered from that perspective. Anyone here ever had any success on Elance? Interested to hear your stories...

[kwasher]

Lots of people have success with Elance. They also tend to pay a lot too. There are a lot of small 'lance' sites out there on most every imaginable topic (for instance, I just bought TaxLance - no website there yet).

[Trisha]

I used elance for a while, I stopped about a year and a half ago. Some things may have changed since then. My experiences were pretty much like what you described in your post. I did get a couple of good clients through it though. I only paid for the lower end level (I don't remember what the names of the different member/paid, whatever they call them are anymore.) It might be worth it to try the level that you have to pay more on, but if it doesn't pay for itself right away, quit before you spend too much money.

In addition to not being able to compete with people willing to work for $2 an hour, I also found that many of the people wanting work done were not very serious businesses. I found this out by putting in some really low bids to get people to open a private message board with me. Some of them were just more or less kids with a dumb idea to try and make money on the web. That higher level, whatever its called, may weed out some of those.