Elance is the one of the hottest spots on the internet where freelance professionals offer their skills and services for businesses to hire. These independent workers are experts in their fields. They work on projects in a timely and professional manner in order to deliver quality. As a business owner, all you have to do is search for the best talent that meets the needs of your company.

Hiring expert independent contractors and freelance workers is made easy with Elance. You can manage your employees and issue payments efficiently once they deliver results. Elance gives business managers the flexibility they need to get the job done in a cost-effective way. Marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, and information technology managers are some of the most popular Elance users looking for rock star employees. Professional service firms, web developers, and even non-profit organizations hire talented workers for various projects.

What Types of Services are offered At Elance?

Elance offers an extensive range of services that are tailored to various industries. Companies can simply browse through the services and find the best talents out there. These skillful service providers are competing for projects and to work with companies.

The services include:

* Web and Programming
* Design and Multimedia
* Writing and Translation
* Administrative Support
* Sales and Marketing
* Finance and Management
* Legal
* Engineering and Manufacturing

Hiring, Managing and Paying

To hire a qualified candidate for your project, you simply have to search through the services. You can choose a category and browse through the independent professionals. You can look at their skills and portfolios. You can find information on their earnings, feedback rate, read reviews and see their pay rates. Your company can also post jobs so that freelance workers can locate projects.

Once you find the candidate you like, you can contact them for hire and begin the project. To manage your providers, you can set up milestones for tracking work and review their status reports in order to approve their work. You can always communicate with your freelance worker and leave feedback.

Funding the work is made easy with a system called Escrow where you deposit the money and insure the worker that it is there. Once you get your results and approve the work, you can release the payment. This allows employers to review the work and determine whether they are satisfied or not. Should any employer end up dissatisfied, he can refuse to pay but Elance works very hard to monitor any disputes. The upside is that the independent worker is aware of this system and is motivated to deliver quality.

The Benefits of Using Elance for Your Business:

* Independent professionals can market their skills and expertise to clients in order to get hired and to start making money.
* The Elance work system allows freelance workers to work more productively at home or at the office.
* Business managers have the opportunity to hire for results as opposed to just billing for hours spent.
* Elance is effective for finding individuals to market your business whether it is through writing search engine optimized articles or being part of a marketing campaign.
* Employers can easily locate thousands of freelance professionals all in one place

Top Features of Elance

The Elance Work System: This feature of the site allows employers to manage the work online and convenient ways to connect and communicate as well as make payments. Communication is at the heart of this system so that both sides know what is required and expected. You can perform the following tasks:

* Post job descriptions to attract talented workers
* Take advantage of the workroom to collaborate and communicate
* Set milestones to achieve goals and use status reports to track progress
* Status reports can automatically become invoices

Elance Escrow: This feature makes exchanging payments safe and easy. Employers and service providers agree on milestones and money is placed into the Escrow. Once employers review the results and approve work, they can release the funds. This system avoids paying for work that does not deliver quality.

Elance is by far one of the most comprehensive centers providing businesses and firms an effective way of hiring experts.

You already know that your online business needs products and product pages. After all, the site’s products are the reason why customers even come to your site. Not only do you have to have well-designed product pages to display your items and their descriptions but you also have to build your brand and establish credibility via other pages.

The following 10 pages are critical for the success of any e-commerce website yet so many businesses are missing one or more of them. Once you go through each one, you may have to get in touch with your designer and add these 10 pages to your design plan.

#1 About Us

The About Us Page is crucial for an e-commerce site because you want customers to like you and to want to buy from you. In order to do this, they must first learn about you. The About Us page provides a background on the site including when it began what the vision of the company is. You can write about the site’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and describe the management team.

This page makes an impersonal venture into a personalized medium. You can include photos of yourself and the team. You basically want to add a face to your brand and have your customers feel connected. Everyone knows how many spam sites exist nowadays. The About Us page tells your readers that your site is a legitimate one, which grants you credibility.

#2 Privacy Policy

Legal information is downright boring but your site needs a privacy policy page without a doubt. This page outlines your companies policies regarding the information obtained from customers. Customers are purchasing from you and giving you very personal information. They want to feel secure that their information is in safe hands. The privacy policy should be understandable to the average consumer and avoid any hidden statements. You can add a link to your privacy policy in the footer of your site.

#3 Terms and Conditions

The last legal document your e-commerce site will have is a Terms and Conditions page which is an agreement between you and your customer. The Terms and Conditions page specifies restrictions for the use of your goods and services. It should be written in plain English for the average visitor to understand. This page protects you in case something goes wrong during the purchasing process.

#4 Contact Us

Customers need to be heard—it’s part of customer service. A contact page should be easy to find and should provide information so that customers can easily reach you. Shoppers want to know where you are located and how you can be reached. Not only does this help establish credibility, but it also adds a level of trust. Provide a phone number, email address as well as a physical address. Some sites offer availability times to avoid constant calls.

#5 Why Us

You are not the only e-commerce company on the web and chances are, you are not the only selling the product on your site. Customers know this and always want to know why they should buy from you. Tell visitors what sets you apart from others and offer compelling reasons that persuade people to buy from you. Do you price match? Do you offer free delivery or issue refunds? If you offer coupons and special deals, outline it in your Why Us page.

#6 Guarantee Page

By adding a Guarantee page on your site, you are eliminating any fears that a customer may have when it comes to making a purchase. The first question a customer will ask is “is it worth it?” You want visitors to reach the final buying stage and you will guarantee that they will be satisfied with their purchase. With a guarantee page, customers will not be inclined to think they are taking a risk. Instead, they will feel more comfortable buying the product thanks to the reasons you outline for them.

#7 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

With every e-commerce site comes a set of general questions customers may have. To save yourself some time, include a page with questions that you may receive on a regular basis and provide the answers. This way, customers will have their basic questions answered and they won’t have to contact you (except for those who think they are an exception to every rule).

#8 Site Map

A site map is critical for every e-commerce site in terms of search engine optimization as it links to all the important parts of your site. Crawlers need to be able to get to every part of your site in order to index each page. Providing a single page that allows the crawler to reach the rest of your site is an excellent step towards getting your entire site indexed

#9 Blog

If you go to e-commerce websites today, you will notice that most of them don’t have any blogs. Not only does this mean that they aren’t being indexed frequently, it also means there isn’t enough content on the site to attract those who are searching. With a blog, you will add fresh content to the site and you can begin to rank in search engines. You will also beat competition by being unique and offering informational and interesting content to your visitors. Another perk is that a blog will allow visitors to leave comments, thus creating a community on your site.

#10 Testimonials

Without any access to customer feedback, new shoppers will only have your word. A testimonials page proves to shoppers that their needs will be met and how they can benefit from your service and products, just like past customers. You can build trust between you and the shopper through feedback from others. Customer service is the lifeblood of any consumer-oriented business. By demonstrating your great service, you will get more customers.

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Pamela Abolian is a Guest Blogger at JonWaraas.com and a writer at Developer Hut, Inc. Upon completion of her bachelor’s degree at UCLA, Pamela dove right into the world of Online Marketing to satisfy her own curiosities in the industry. She combined her experience in writing and interest in Search Engine Optimization to start a full time career as an online freelance writer. She writes web copy, informative articles and blog posts in a variety of niches for numerous clients. Pamela is dedicated to producing quality content and sharing her knowledge to further educate the online community and help online businesses grow. She spends her spare time painting and developing her graphic design skills

Ever since busin3ss posted pics of his automated command center (update) I have wanted one of my own. Well I am half way done with what I looking for. Right now I have 14 crons that run daily at 3 am, they do my accounting work, send email to customers, move orders around, some automated seo stuff, etc. Those crons along with this command center help me work efficiently (another work for me wanting to be more lazy).

Let me know what you think, sorry I had to black some shit out. Also feel free to suggest any statistics that i am currently not tracking.

Below is the my home screen. It basically shows all the need to know info.

Below lists orders for developerhut.com and daily earnings for that site.

Below is how I can view my writers, there are 14 now.

Below is a website that displays info for my whole network. I just started on it but when its complete it will import adwords shit and do inventory daily for me. Then at the end of the month I will have all of my accounting done along with pretty charts for adwords, inventory, and other stats. Right now I only added 4 sites, but I still have 6 more to add.

Also, if your interested in setting up something like this then I suggest get clicky for your stats. I find that its better to track visitors with get clicky than google analytics.

I just got done taking out all of the advertisements on this blog. I don’t have time to write good 1500 word long blog posts, nor do I have the time to manage all of the advertisements on this blog. Its not really that I dont have the time, I just rather focus that time on something else.

From now on this blog will be strictly a blog about my life and the successes and failures that I will be faced with in the future. I feel that the networking from this blog is a lot better then the cash money from it, so that is what I will be focused on from now on, every time I write another blog post

I will still do some experiments and hopfully give some people who are new to the industry some good pointers. But mostly I will probably be talking about my current projects, what I am working on, and just stuff going on around me. It will be the same stuff I would like to read, rather then reading blog posts about loosing weight (haha).

No more paid blog posts and no more ugly ads taking up 80% of the blog from now on…

ok so let me explain things before I post the funny stuff. If you didn’t know, I run Developer Hut and I have been hiring writers to do paid posts for the company.

My process to hire writers is to post on niche related forums about the job and then having people email my jobs email. After they email me I briefly look over there info and then send them a “training process” email. That email goes more into details on what there job will consist of. It also explains to them that they must do 25 blog comments, 15 increase blog comments, and 15 yahoo answers as a “training phase”. If they complete the training phase and there works looks good I usually hire them.

Well, one day I realized that some random person on a forum posted a reply on one of my paid forum posts (I have to pay $10 to post in the hiring section). You can read what she said below, but basically she dosen’t like the fact that I have a “training process” where the writers must do 35 free blog comments for me.

I do get about 30-40 people emailing me everyday about writing jobs. I post at least 3-5 different posts a week on different job sites or forums within that niche. I dont have the time to look over peoples work samples, and even if I did look over there work samples, why would that help me?

The actual writing part of the blog comments aren’t a problem with people, its the process to find the blog posts that are related to the customer niche. I need to make sure people understand that process before I spend my time (its kinda valuable to me) on training someone.

So where am I getting at? Well, the smart person below dosen’t think my process is the correct one, so I am asking you, what do you think I should change or add to make the process better? I asked the smart person and she said said something about “indian counties” and didn’t seem to want to help me out any.

Post from smart person on forum:
———————————————-

Let’s look at this…

“After you email us you will start a training process which requires you writing 25 blog comments, 25 increase blog comments, and 15 yahoo answers at which you will not be paid for.”

You seriously have to be joking. That in itself is extortion. You could ask for writing samples or even better… if they have a yahoo answers account, you can see how they write by asking to see links to answers they have provided. But personally, I would never do something for free to prove to you that I can do the job. Heck in the real world…they give you three months probation period and you still get paid regardless and if they don’t like you afterwards, then they tell you to go.

So ethically…this is just trying to get free comments. How do I know this? Because you stated exact numbers… the fact you want 25, 25 and 15. I mean I would have to be the world’s biggest idiot to fall for that.

I myself have a yahoo answers account and if I wanted to do a job like this, I would simply link to all the answers I have done.

But as it stands… people would have to be real desperate for this crap.

PM sent from me to the smart person:
——————————————————————

Hello,

“That in itself is extortion” <-- that got me and my mates a good chuckle thank you.

I get over 50 people applying for the job daily. I post on numbours forums throughout this niche. The blog comments, and yahoo answers are all done for a website that was specifically set up for this. Duh!!!

First of all, who cares what you think.

Second, this training process weeds out the weak ones. If you are too good to do 25 blog comments then you dont have to do them. Pretty simple really? I think so, how the **** would i have time to look over 50 peoples samples everyday?

Hey how about this, you can use your overwelling knowledge and let me know that answer. Till then this is the process.

Oh and please look up the meaning of "extortion" and stop posting your BS on other peoples paid threads.

People can make decisions by themselves you know? if they dont want the job, then they dont have to take it. You silly goose...

Another reply from smart person:
—————————————-

his made me laugh… “overwelling knowledge ”

Overwelling knowledge? It seems you must have meant ‘overwhelming’!

Point one: I can spell unlike you, second you must be a kid, and thirdly, no person with any decency in their right mind would do so many posts just to get accepted. Now that made me laugh ten times more. Go to any decent writer forum and tell them that and then let me know their responses. Only idiots from indian countries that are desperate for a bit of money will apply for your job.

Enjoy it while you can.

My final reply (I couldn’t help it)
—————————————-

“Only idiots from indian countries that are desperate for a bit of money will apply for your job.”.

Indian countries?? hahahah

What are “indian countries”? I am overwelling in the need to know thanks!

End of smart persons convo
——————————————

So as you can read, apparently only people from indian counties will only do this training process?

The process is actually working pretty good so far, like I said in the Pm above, it kinda weeds people out. I get about 30 people emailing me a day for a job, after I send out the training phase email I get about 5 replys to that, and then maybe 1 or 2 people actually goes though the training process. Most of the people who do the training process will become a writer. So I took 30 emails and broke it down to 2-3 people without much work. Then I can focus my time into those 2-3 people instead of 30…

But I guess that is extortion… haha

Conclusion: After writing all of that I feel that I should be paying the writers for that work. I will update my process so that all writers will be paid for there training phase on the first payment. The problem is that I wont be able to pay every single person that applies to the job and then dosen’t do any of customers work. But I will figure out that later, I want to hear what you guys all think!

Oh and making fun of my spelling is no big deal to me, I am overwelling use to it. That and being call “warass”…

Oh you know not to much…

The last few days I have kinda been taking it easy, but now I need to get back working so I can get shit done before summer. And since I don’t want to write a nice, sexy, and lengthly seo post I will be writing about what I have been working on lately… again.

Still No High Risk Merchant Account

I am still looking for a high risk merchant account, its a big pain in the ass.

Launching 2 E-commerce Sites

I am looking to get 2 e-commerce sites up this week. One will be a simple wordpress niche site that will be set up like survivorman fans. With the other one, the designer got the design done and now I need to code my own shopping cart into the site, that will take me a few days to get 100% done. But after that the site will be pretty much 100% automated, except for the support and sales work.

Code Other Merchant API

Im excited about this, I just went to the bank today to get the final details and shit set up for my other merchant account, now this week I get to code the api for that. I have already look at it and it looks pretty simple, but I have been thinkin up all of the order quality filtering stuff that I can add, and all of that will take some time to learn and implement (it takes me longer to code since I’m new to php).

So that is what my week is lookin like. Fun huh? I think so..

Funny video of Billy Mays.

My roommate Wes first showed it to me.

Well unfortunately I don’t have much to blog about today, so I decided to blog about what I have been working on lately, which is better then nothing.

Mostly what I have been working on is getting all the orders caught up with developer-hut.com. Right now we are out about 20 days and I would like to get each order done in about 14 days max. Last year I was advertising to get it done in 7 days or less, but to get all orders done in 7 days I would be rushing to much and quality would go down, so now all orders are done within 14 days instead.

For me to get caught up I need to hire and train a few more people, which is a lot easier say than to do. I actually get about 5-10 people a day emailing me about a job. I send most people an email about our training course which takes a few days to complete. That helps me weed out the people who really don’t want the job. After that I usually work with each person one and one somehow explaining the process to them. Then finally if they do good they get the job.

As you can see that is a pretty big process, and it weeds out a lot of people, and also takes up some time. But I am not complaining, the writers I currently have are all great and I think the process works great because of that, but the only problem in the past was that the company was growing faster then I can create an efficient process to get orders done on time and with quality.

I solved that problem by creating a whole backend that manages everything for me, which I have been working on since last October. These last two months I have been tweaking the system to be as correct and automated as I can make it.

Over the weekend I built in a better tracking system to manage my writers payouts. I pay my writers on the 1st and 15th of every month, and I wanted my backend to create the mass payment text file automatically for me because I’m lazy. And to do that I needed to correctly track my writers work.

The first part to this is assigning orders to certain writers which was solved by a cron running every night that checks to see if the user currently has 5 orders assigned to them (each user gets up to 5 orders a day, most of the time they only complete 1 or 2), if the user got a order done and the order moved to the status “user review” then her or she will automatically get another order assigned to them. I finished that script a lot time ago, but lately I have been working on the script that displays the writers there stats and makes me the mass payment script.

Now to track my writers work I created 3 different process which are done, not done, and user review. They get paid when an order is marked done, and a order can only be marked done if the customer didnt make any support notes or I manually mark the order done. So from there I broke it down to 2 different earnings, the “available” earnings” is the amount that was maked “done” during the certain timeframe which would either be the 1st-15th or 16-30thish.

I created all that back in December, but I just barley got everything 100% this past weekend. This past weekend I made it so all my writers can easily track all of the orders they have worked on, and also check there earnings. I also completed the script that makes me the mass payment file. So slowly all of my processes and tools are coming together to make the business more automated. The more automation for this company means more spare time to work on other projects

Other Work
Some of the other stuff I got done this weekend was:
1. fixed and made updates to new ticket system
2. I had a writer look over all of the automated emails because I suck at English, so I had to recode most of those emails.
3. I started working on a pretty complicated tracking system which will track monthly orders and check certain stats for certain users. That should be done later this week, and I am also hoping to get the new customer homepage re-designed.

This Weeks Work
This week should be pretty busy. My main focus will be to code the 2 merchant shopping carts. The shopping cart is already made I just need to code the part that sends the order to the merchant, which should only take a day each because I’m such a new coder.

I also paid a designer to make a nice looking homepage graphic for developer-hut.com which should be done this week. He is also re-designing the testimonial box aswell.

Besides those I also have to complete the coding for my lead generation network and manage all of my normal support emails. Lately my normal work weeks consist of about 35-40ish hours a week, and I usually work 4-5 hours a day, but I work all 7 days a week, not just 5 days.

Not to busy of a week, but I’ll let you know how it goes.

Oh man this week has been busy. But I got a ton of shit done. I thought I would blog for everyone that is wondering how my current projects are going. As of right now I have 3 different projects I am currently working on, they are all below.

New E-Commerce Websites
Like I mentioned in my last blog post, I found a really great niche that is pretty profitable. Only problem is that the product I am selling is kind of a pain in the ass. I need a high risk merchant for this certain product because one of my competitors told Paypal.com, so Paypal.com pulled the plug on that particular website.

I am still waiting for the merchant to get back to me, which will hopefully be monday. I have also been working on another website that will sell the same product, the designer just barley got done with the design so that site will be up monday aswell. Im just hoping I can get the merchant account soon.

Developer Hut, Inc.
Everyone keeps asking me why I switched developerhut.com to developer-hut.com. Well last year Google banned all of my websites that where on a particular IP (dont think its possible? Think again..) because I was selling text links on my whole network of websites. So I had to sell or get rid of all my seo websites on that IP because they where all banned in google. I had to switch over to developer-hut.com so I can get some SEO traffic.

I have also been hiring more writers, right now I am at 6 submission writers (social bookmarking) and at 5 regular writers. So I have 11 people working for me right now. However, I am STILL backed up and I will need to hire even more writers to get all orders done within the 14 days that I promise.

I have also been upgrading developer-hut.com backend this week. I made a custom ticket script that makes it so I can manage all of the support tickets for all of my websites. That piece of the backend only took me 6 hours to make and it works just like one of those expensive ticket software that sell for something like $50 a month haha.

I will also be upgrading the admin panel making it easier for customers to manage there orders. And I will also be creating a stats page where customers can track the status of there link building campaigns. That will all be done this week.

Lead Generation Network
I am so stocked, it took me 4 months but I got a website ranking for a very popular and profitable term. The sad thing is that I am only getting 2 leads a day for that term, so I need to change my design or something to increase leads.

I have also been working with a buddy of mine on a pretty kool and fun project. I don’t want to say much but basically we generate the leads and then sell them exclusively to company’s within that certain niche. We got our first client and we have been working on getting everything set up this week.

I have created a backend where the private buyers can log in and then check there leads in real time, they will also be able to add notes to the lead, and also mark if the lead converted which will be great for our side of tracking things.

Well that is what I have been working on, no big deal. BTW I love my job

Back in 2007 I first launched buyblogcomments.com because I was using the service myself and by reselling the service I could secure that method of link building better and secure the writers for more volume of work, plus a bulk discount. I then started buybookmarks.net because I use social bookmarking a ton myself and thought that reselling would be a great idea. And then in October of 2008 I decided that reselling all the services I use for my own seo sites would be a great idea and way to make sure I can actualy keep my writers for the volume of work that I want done, with the bulk pricing

Well 6 months later and developerhut.com now offers blog comments, yahoo answers, social bookmarking, directory and article submissions, and even increase blog comments. And even this week we will be launching content creation plans. Very exciting huh?

Why am I telling you all that pointless info? Well, back in October I put 100% of my effort in developerhut.com, and now that everything is coming together I can start on some new projects. As of right now I plan on working on 2 new projects which include an e commerce network that consists of 3 different websites and 2 seo websites. I am also teaming up with an old friend and we will be launching a private lead generation network which will be my other project.

Foundation?
On both projects I will be using developerhut.com as my foundation. Each website that I will be promoting from now on will have a custom monthly link building plan that is set to about $25 a month (my price) and also include my daily ping tool, and a new grey hat tool that I will be launching later. All of the other services will be available very soon.

Those monthly link building plans will pretty much automate my link building process. I would have to do some work in building up quality long term links but I like doing that kind of work. With my link building pretty much automated I can focus on sales, content creation, support, and other projects.

I am very excited about the new network of e-commerce sites. So far I only have one that is up and running 100% and just running adwords right now, well this week I have spent only $336.61 on adwords and have made $1550.66 in sales. That is with no seo traffic (the website is only 2 weeks old), so when the seo traffic starts coming in then I think I will be a very happy camper

The network of lead generation sites is also a fun project. I am teaming up with a buddy of mine and we will be launching about 10 or so targeted lead generation websites for the private offers that we will be running. I think at this time we have 3 or 4 different private offers that pay out in the low $xx a lead.

The leads are automatically sent to the buyers using the code that I made. I will also be programming a system were my partner and I will have a website were we can login and check stats and stupid shit like that.

So yeah, that is what I have been busy doing. No big deal. Also, for everyone that wrote a review I will still be posting the mini reviews just hold tight.