Live the Outsourced Life with oDesk

When you run an online business, regardless of what actual service or product you offer, soon you may find that you simply have too much work for you to do by yourself. There may even be times when you need expertise in a certain domain which requires knowledge that you don’t have. For example, you may be an Internet marketer, and require someone to write an ebook for you, or do graphics. In a traditional business, a shop with a building to work from, that’s when they would start hiring employees. But thanks to the Internet, you can do all of this thanks to sites which specialize in outsourcing. One such site is oDesk, and it’s quickly becoming one of the most popular online outsourcing site out there. Here’s a quick review.

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First, outsourcing simply means taking work that you have, and giving it to freelancers, workers who live elsewhere and agree to complete it for a fee. While you can find these people yourself, and deal with everything that’s involved in doing outsourcing, it’s much easier to rely on a site that’s built for this purpose. Right now there are a couple of well known sites like Elance, Freelancer, and oDesk. The way you get started with oDesk is simply to go there and register for an account. It’s free, and you can get started in only a few minutes. There, you will need to select whether you’re a freelancer looking for work, or a business owner looking to give out projects. If this is for your online business or web sites, then you need to start posting projects. Each project is basically one assignment for which you need somebody. It could be writing blog posts, writing an ebook, making a banner, and so on. The types of tasks are limitless.

Once you’ve posted your request, along with the description of what you need done and around how much you’re willing to pay, freelancers will start making bids. This is simply the amount of money they are willing to do the work for. You can select to pay a fixed fee for the whole work, or an hourly fee. oDesk comes with a large amount of tools you can use, such as a calendar which can track work hours, and even request screenshots from the worker’s computer in order to make sure they are working. For payment, oDesk also makes it easy since it keeps the money until the work is completed, to make sure both the project owner and the freelancer are happy with the result. Note that unlike some other sites, oDesk doesn’t require you to use an escrow, so you don’t have to pay upfront. Also because oDesk is so big, whenever you post a project, you can expect multiple people to start bidding within a few hours.

When you go to hire a worker, make sure you identify the right one. While oDesk has a lot of tools to make your job easier, in the end it’s always up to you to get the right person for the job. You can look at a bidder’s past history, see what other job he or she did at oDesk, how many hours, what rating they have, and so on. You can also communicate with them to see how well and quickly they respond. Overall, when you need someone to do some work for you, oDesk is a great choice.