So you’ve got a problem. You want to start blogging and generating some income on the side, but you’re a terrible writer. First of all, you should start writing out of habit every single day. Buy this book and read it several times. But in the meantime, you want to generate some great, relevant content and start doing all the other stuff you need to do to make your website into a gold mine (SEO, link building, layout optimization, PPC, Adsense, whatever).
How do you do it?
There’s an easy solution. Elance.com. Anything you need, you can find someone who will do it for you for next to nothing. Elance is like eBay for internet-related services. Anything from article writing, to forum administration, to site or logo design.
It’s great because you can focus on your own strengths, whether that’s web design, sales, marketing- whatever. And contract out all your weak points. If I need a particularly hard hitting article, and I’m not confident in my own writing ability, I just post a project on elance, and the bidders come to me. They compete for my business. How great is that?
I need a logo for my website? I post a project.
On the other side, elance is an amazing opportunity for freelance web designers, graphic designers, SEO guys, and everyone else. If you’ve got any sort of free time, you’ll never need to search for work. Build a reputation for yourself on elance, and the work will flow in like crazy.
Everybody benefits. And since the feedback system is similar to eBay, the bad seeds are weeded out.
If you need something done, you can even use their own escrow system, and set up milestones. Your money is only released to the service provider when you are fully satisfied that the project is done to your liking.
Leverage your free time. There’s no reason you should spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to design a logo for your site in MS Paint. Your time is infinitely more valuable than that. Give elance a try, and do something more productive with your time.
9 Comments
Good post. I’ve never used elance before tbh. I tend to stick to the contests and marketplace at http://www.sitepoint.com
The system isn’t as advanced, but it’s very easy to get into.
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