Positron Ideas Manufacturing

Hello first time visitor!

Visit the URL: Elance

Before going any further, let me tell you I have had a good success in freelancing without using Elance as a service provider. I have done pretty well just with RentACoder and Scriptlance. So you don’t necessarily need to join Elance and spend money on their memberships. But as you’ll probably conclude from this review, you can hugely benefit of making this reasonable investment.

Overall Impressions

When talking about Guru as about one of the largest freelance sites, I meant mostly the huge amount of work categories it offers. The number of projects on Elance seems to be even more than Guru. For example at the time of writing this article there were 2,281 open projects with 970 in Website development category alone. Around 6,000 projects were posted in the last 15 days. There were 30,000 registered professionals at that time (the number of providers is much lower than on Guru). It’s a huge business.

The site looks different than the most popular sites like Scriptlance and GetAFreelancer. It may not be as easy to use, but is much more featured than them. The support is excellent and the overall level of the clients and providers is much higher.

Generally there is no free membership for freelancers in Elance. All membership options are paid.

Positives

• A huge marketplace. There is really work for everyone in Elance. If you have not had success in other sites, probably you will have it here. There are all kind of projects and there is a lot of them.
• Less competition. Let me elaborate a little bit on that. There are thousands of service providers on Elance, so there is a lot of competition just like anywhere else. However as you can see in their membership options page, the number of bids allowed is limited per account type. So the freelancers need to carefully think on which projects to bid and which projects to skip. This generally leads to less bids per project which means less actual competition.
• The most respected. Being in Elance already means you are a real professional. Most buyers rate the freelancers working on Elance higher than those on other sites. Just the fact that you pay for membership makes you look much more serious (and it is true).
• Higher prices. The project bids are overly higher on Elance than on any other freelance site. This means that you will be paid more for the same work.
• Some very big projects. Elance is the only freelance marketplace where you can often find projects for $25,000 or even $50,000 and above. Certainly this can happen in any other of the sites, but on Elance it is not an exception. Even real big companies bid on these projects.

Negatives

• High prices for membership. The cheapest Limited membership costs $11-$29 monthly, $22 - $59 quarterly or $59 - $199 annually depending on your category. If you want to be a Professional member you’ll have to pay $29 - $89 monthly, $69 - $169 quarterly or $139 - $339 annually. The Select membership costs $69 - $199 monthly, $149 - $459 quarterly or $349 - $1149 annually. On top of that you have to pay 6.75% to 8.75% commission on each project
• Not appropriate for beginners. Probably there are some freelances who start right away with Elance, but most of them already have some freelancing experience when joining. There are no projects for $5 just to take a review like on Scriptlance. It’s a serious business marketplace.
• High minimum bids. You can’t bid less than $50. If you have Select membership you can’t bid less than $300 - $500 on a project depending on the category. While this is very good on one side, on the other it’s limiting your competition abilities.
• The membership is limited per category. You can’t just take any project. It must match the category you have profile in. The membership fees have to be paid for each category you want to participate separately.

Additional Information

You can withdraw your funds from Elance thru a Bank wire only. The good thing is there is one free withdrawal allowed each month. For each additional withdrawal you have to pay $25 processing fee. If you are from USA you can withdraw your funds via ACH Transfer or Check.

In general Elance has a very serious business image and it’s a place where to expand your freelance career. If you are currently busy with freelance work but not getting paid enough, it is time to try Elance.

If you still have no experience at all in freelancing, better try some of the free sites like Scriptlance.

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Filed under: Finding Freelance Jobs