Elancer

Feb/Mar 2007

How Using Elance Changed Net Guides

An Interview with James Martell, CEO of Net Guides

Many companies measure their growth by how many employees they need. James Martell, CEO of Net Guides Publishing, Inc., measures his growth in exactly the opposite way: the fewer employees he had the more successful his business became.

Net Guides creates information-rich websites. Several years ago James had seven employees, mostly writers who created content and managed his growing stable of sites.

"When I needed new writers, I ran an ad in the local paper and struggled to find space in the office for them." After speaking at a seminar with over 250 attendees – including executives from Yahoo! and eBay – James changed his staffing and hiring procedures completely.

"One of my listeners walked up to me afterwards," says James, "and asked, 'Why don't you just use Elance?' He literally changed my life." James started small, awarding a few basic writing projects. His reliance on Elance providers quickly grew, and as his own writers gradually moved on to other opportunities, he didn't replace them.

Instead, James forged ongoing relationships with providers like writer Kellie Fowler (Elance username: WriteSolutions), voice talent Mark Lindsey (Elance username: PrimaryMark), and office automation specialist Rosalind Triggs (Elancer username: rmttracking). It's a good thing, since he maintains and updates over one hundred websites and often has more than twenty Elance projects active at any given time. "My background is general contracting," says James, "so with the tools Elance provides it's easy for me to manage multiple projects and providers."

James uses Elance providers for a broad range of needs from audio production for podcasts to creating brochures to adding sophisticated tools to his websites… and for the occasional emergency. "Awhile back I 'broke' my auto-responder," says James, "and I had no idea how to fix it. I posted the project, got a number of responses, and had it fixed that afternoon."

The virtual workplace also gave James the time to write a best-selling affiliate marketing guide and to lead seminars and online training courses for budding Internet marketers. "Elance is the perfect interface to find and manage specialists from around the world," James says. "Plus, I receive better quality work for about 25% of what it used to cost. I honestly can't imagine running my businesses any other way."

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Technology for Small Business

By Brent Leary

Technology For Business $ake is a new radio program aimed specifically at small business folks who want to understand the technology maze and figure out which tools, services and applications will help them compete and thrive. As the show is aimed at mainstream small businesses, we figured the best way to reach them would be through traditional media. And because our show can be downloaded as a podcast, we're hopeful that we can help our audience feel comfortable enough to begin using Web 2.0 tools, strategies and other technologies to expand their businesses.

In the few short months we've been on the air we've covered everything from search engine marketing with Google's director of online sales Emily White, to best practices for email marketing with Constant Contact's CEO Gail Goodman, to getting GoDaddy.com's Bob Parsons' perspective on how small businesses should leverage the web. We've also had best selling authors like The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, E-myth Mastery's Michael Gerber and Crossing the Chasm's Geoffrey Moore join us to share their considerable insights on how small businesses should view technological developments and their potential impact. Additionally, with the growing impact of Web 2.0 phenomena like blogging and podcasting, we've had superstar blogger Anil Dash from Six Apart and FeedBurner's VP of Publishing Services Rick Klau to explain how these tools can generate business opportunities. And we've also had executives from companies that small businesses have counted on for years, like Tom Harshbarger and Eric Ligman of Microsoft, Intuit's Catherine Harrell and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion's David Heit.

Being a small business ourselves, and experiencing how Elance made it easy for us to get much needed work done on our terms, we thought it would be great to invite Elance's CEO, Fabio Rosati, on our show to talk about the many ways Elance can help small businesses.

Our guests really make it interesting and easy to understand how to make sense of the ever increasing wave of technology. That's really important as this show is not for the IT guys, it's for those looking at technology as a way to find, catch and keep good customers. In other words, it's about Technology...For Business $ake!

About the Author
Brent Leary is Co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials, a customer relationship management consulting/advisory firm. He is the host of "Technology for Business Sake" (http://www.businesstechnologyradio.com/), a radio program on 1160AM in Atlanta, GA aimed at helping small businesses make sense out of technology. His popular blog can be found at http://www.brentleary.com/.

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Tips for Winning Business on Elance

Michael Russer is an authority on Virtual Outsourcing and a long time member of Elance who has posted numerous projects and hired many Elancers. Over the years, Michael realized that many service providers had the talent and expertise he was looking for, but the proposals he was receiving from them didn't clearly communicate what they had to offer. In the video below, Michael offers his tips for submitting winning proposals.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Michael J. Russer is an internationally recognized business speaker, author and strategic consultant about Virtual Outsourcing and the author of the upcoming book on the subject, titled: The OBSOLETE EMPLOYEE – How Businesses Succeed Without Employees – And Love it! http://www.theobsoleteemployee.com.

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Boosting Your Web Presence

By Brent Leary

Recently I had an interesting conversation with customer relationship management guru, Paul Greenberg, about small businesses and their lack of corporate websites. According to a recent AMI Partners study of businesses with fewer than one hundred employees, only 56% had a website. With the growing dependence on Internet search as the primary means for information discovery, it's important for even the smallest of businesses to have some sort of web presence. But Paul brought up an interesting point – he doesn't have a web presence (meaning no website) but he has a whole lot of presence on the web based upon the 109,000 links returned by Google in a search on his name.

Paul argued that your business doesn't necessarily need a website to be found; you can make your presence felt in other ways. For example, review popular books in your field on Amazon.com. You'd be surprised at the contacts you can make by writing thoughtful, concise reviews to important books in your industry. Another proven tactic is to write a press release for newsworthy topics and distribute them on PRWeb or PR Newswire. If written correctly, news outlets and industry websites may include your release and generate a great deal of web exposure. Participate in popular industry forums and creating a profile on business networking sites like Elance, LinkedIn and JumpUp. Writing articles and submitting them to extremely popular sites like Digg where users vote on which articles get posted on the front page can make you a "star" overnight. You can also submit articles to the sites below to raise your GQ (Google Quotient) dramatically:

• Ezine Articles (http://ezinearticles.com/)
• SearchWarp (http://searchwarp.com/)
• Buzzle (http://www.buzzle.com/)
• IdeaMarketers (http://www.ideamarketers.com/)
• eBooks N' Bytes (http://www.ebooksnbytes.com/)
• Article Central (http://thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/)

These are all great ways to gain a degree of prominence on the web, but I believe the best way to begin building your presence is to use a service like TypePad or Blogger to blog about what's going on in your industry and to share your experience and knowledge. Because of the ease of getting started and adding new entries, you may even find using your blog as your corporate website will work for a while. Blogs really make sense if you are a consultant or need to bill yourself as a subject matter expert. Use free services like Slideshare and YouTube to easily add slide presentations and video to your blog to create compelling content. And if you have enough of the right people commenting and linking to your blog, nothing can be better in terms of branding.

Blogs are great, but at some point you will probably need a fully functionalized corporate website to create a grander image for your company and to transact business. And nowadays it's easier than ever to do this. So I think Paul and I are both right. You will need both a web presence, and presence on the web to really make some headway. After all when it comes to the web, it's not just who you know, but who knows you AND what they know about you that makes the difference.

About the Author
Brent Leary is Co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials, a customer relationship management consulting/advisory firm. He is the host of "Technology for Business Sake" (http://www.businesstechnologyradio.com/), a radio program on 1160AM in Atlanta, GA aimed at helping small businesses make sense out of technology. His popular blog can be found at http://www.brentleary.com/.

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What's New at Elance

There's always something new at Elance! Below are a few things we wanted to highlight.

• The Elance Zazzle Store
  Our biggest fans can now purchase Elance apparel, mouse pads, mugs and more. Just visit our Zazzle store at www.zazzle.com/elance.

Here's a picture of Elance provider, HireRussians, in their new Elance T-shirts!

• Good Links
  This is a new section of our Resource Center with links to various websites and articles we find interesting, including:

• Recent Enhancements
• • Escrow is now optional for all projects regardless of project budget
  • Milestones can be modified until a project is complete
  • More milestones can be added to make it easier to manage larger projects

As always, we encourage you to contact us with any comments, questions or suggestions.

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