Elance Blog

There seems to be a lot of buzz about web widgets, and so we asked Tracy Pizzo, an expert in this area, to define web widgets and their applicability to your small business marketing strategy.


Tracy Pizzo - Guest Contributor

What’s a Widget Anyway?
Widgets have certainly become a hot topic these days – and for good reason. They’re expected to break the web wide open. Despite the pervasiveness of widget talk in the press and blogosphere, there is still a lot of confusion about what a widget is in the first place.

Meet Jamie Good (username: jamie_seger) – a new Elance provider who was recently hired to complete her first project.



Jamie joined Elance last month to earn additional income for her family. With a career background in education and a degree in Social Science Education, Jamie was focused on finding freelance writing projects that she could complete while working from home.  

Each week, Elance Providers are awarded their first projects, receive hundreds of positive reviews, and reach significant earnings milestones. We celebrate the successes of our amazing providers by recognizing them on our new Provider Network Milestones page.



Just last week, 203 providers won their first project – and last month, 84 providers completed their 10th project with positive reviews.

Did you make it on the honor roll? Find out by visiting the new Milestones page in Elance University.

Wendy Piersall is the owner of Sparkplugging.com, formerly known as eMoms at Home. Wendy has years of experience freelancing, working from home and juggling the roles of business owner and mom.


Wendy Piersall - Guest Contributor

Through years of trial and error, Wendy discovered a few simple ways to find a balance that works for her. For a special Mother's Day post, Wendy shares some tips with us:

We are excited to announce the latest product release to the Elance community. The primary goal of this release is to optimize the evaluation, interviewing and hiring process for buyers (and in turn, leading to successful award outcomes for our providers.)

Imagine a ‘friend’ who could recommend websites you’re interested in. Sound good? StumbleUpon could be the friend you’re looking for – and might just help you drive traffic to your website or blog while you’re at it.


Brian Reeder - Guest Contributor

StumbleUpon isn’t a search engine; it’s a web browser plugin that allows users to discover and rate web pages, photos, and videos. Once you download the plugin (don’t worry, it’s a fast download), you’ll use the StumbleUpon toolbar to “stumble” the web.

Paul Ranson, Founder and CEO of UK-based Slam Productions, creates computer and video games for game consoles such as Sony PS2 and Nintendo Wii. The company was founded in 2007, and has created many video games - Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Telly Addicts, and Top Trumps, to name a few.


Margot - Lead Character
Margot's Wordbrain Game

When a downturn in the video game industry prompted Paul to streamline staffing from 12 to 4 in-house employees, he turned to Elance to find and hire creative talent to help fill in the gaps of his newly slimmed down team. The in-house Slam Productions team is now completely comprised of programming talent.

If you're a small business owner with too much to do and not enough time to do it, think about hiring a Virtual Assistant (VA) to help you with your work.

You will be amazed at the variety of work a VA can help you with - just browse our newest article, 25 Projects You Can Outsource to a Virtual Assistant, to learn how to work with a VA and help make your life easier and your business run more smoothly.  

If you have a website or blog – and even if you don’t – Digg.com is an incredibly valuable resource. If you’re simply a casual user, it’s a gold mine of great stories, tutorials, and tips...and better yet, it can be a great way to drive massive amounts of new visitors to your website.


Chris Bennett, Guest Contributor

What is Digg?
Digg is the biggest social news site on the web: According to Compete.com, in March 2008 over 19 million people visited Digg.com. Unlike traditional news sources where editors and publishers decide what qualifies as ‘news,’ what appears on Digg.com is controlled by the Digg community.

No doubt you’ve heard a lot about Facebook, and you might have even read Anita Campbell’s most recent blog post about why you should think about Facebook as a potential marketing channel. But how would you even get started?

We asked Usman Akbar (username: inexpensive222), an Elance provider and experienced Facebook Application developer, to create a primer on the Facebook API and Facebook applications so that you can hit the ground running when you find and hire a developer to create a unique, branded Facebook Application for your business:



In May 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform which allows software developers to create applications deeply integrated with Facebook. Over 20,000 applications have been built on the Facebook Platform to date, 140 new applications  are added daily, and more than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform.¹

Meet Ariel Tehrani, Elance buyer and winner in the Best Design category of the Best Websites on Elance Recognition Program. I caught up with Ariel to learn more about his company, Falcon Hyundai, and the award-winning design of the Falcon Hyundai website.



Elance: Why is it important for Falcon Hyundai to have a professionally-designed website?

Ariel: As the owner of a dealership, I have access to a number of resources that do template dealership websites. However, I felt that all of those templates were overused, and I did not want a “cookie-cutter” website.

What I really wanted was a fresh design -- something that other dealerships don’t typically do. So I used Elance to find and hire providers who could create and design a great looking website for my dealership.

We want to congratulate the winners of The Best Websites on Elance.


We want to thank everyone who nominated a website, and we look forward to seeing more outstanding website projects this year!

View winning entries 
 

Four Online Marketing Tools You Should Be Using

I’m not sure about you, but I know literally hundreds or thousands of people online who I’ve never met in the flesh.

One of them is Guy Kawasaki, the well-known venture capitalist and founder of Truemors and Alltop. Guy Kawasaki is a web celebrity. I’ve never been together with him in the same room – strangely, not even at a conference. For instance, I have absolutely no idea how tall he is.

But I still feel like I’ve met him.


And so do tens of thousands of others. It’s all because we have connected with Guy on some social networking site online or heard him speak via video or audio. We feel a bit of a personal connection with him. His brand – the Guy Kawasaki personal brand – sticks in our minds.

For Earth Day, we tried to estimate the kind of impact that Elancers are having on the environment.



Every week, small businesses farm out thousands of marketing, technology and administrative jobs to 50,000 members of the Elance professional network, and they are also doing something good for the environment.

Meet Carel Bekker, a technology expert, business consultant and Elance buyer, who left a corporate job to start his own strategy consulting firm, Beyond438. Beyond438 helps European and South African companies start business operations in the U.S.



“When I started Beyond438, all of a sudden, I didn’t have all of the nice infrastructure I was used to having while working for my former employer,” said Carel.

Like many start up business owners and entrepreneurs, Carel needed help with a variety of projects ranging from research and writing to programming. That’s when he turned to Elance.

Elance providers Debbie Feldstein and Bob D’Amico were recently featured on an ABC News segment discussing their experience working on Elance.



Debbie Feldstein (username: Debbie1328) runs a creative writing business and has been an Elance provider since 2000. Bob D’Amico (username: Millennium-Design), an accomplished cartoonist with 30 years of experience in graphic design, has been on Elance since 2004.

View the video
 

About
The creator and writer behind Doubtsourcing is Sandeep Sood, Founder & CEO of Monsoon Company, a web design/development firm based in Berkeley, CA and Mumbai, India. Sandeep draws upon his vast experience in outsourcing as inspiration for Doubtsourcing.

As you know, technology is so important to the growth of a small business. While all businesses need good technology strategies, larger businesses can throw tons of money into marketing, or into hiring lots of people and still be effective, up to a point, without using technology effectively. However, small business owners with our limited budgets, fewer employees, more demands on our time and other challenges have the most to gain and the most to lose by leveraging technology.



Just about every small business owner knows they need a website, email newsletter, email and some other basic technologies in their business. But once you pass the basics, there's some more key aspects of technology that you must consider. These are my Six Rules for Small Business Technology Success: 

About
The creator and writer behind Doubtsourcing is Sandeep Sood, Founder & CEO of Monsoon Company, a web design/development firm based in Berkeley, CA and Mumbai, India. Sandeep draws upon his vast experience in outsourcing as inspiration for Doubtsourcing.

With over 150,000 projects posted last year, it’s not surprising that there is great variety in the types of projects that buyers and providers complete on Elance.

To help illustrate the diversity of skilled Elance providers and projects that you can successfully outsource, we compiled a list of 100 distinct Technology, Sales & Marketing, Finance, Legal, Research and Business Planning projects. Small businesses and individuals just like you are literally outsourcing these projects on Elance everyday – and you can too.