Simply put, it’s the eBay of jobs!
Being a computer geek/blogger I got many jobs from elance.com in my early days (not that early though).
Elance.com allows people worldwide to buy or sell their services and products, or even talents!

Here is how it works:

You subscribe to elance, a small monthly fee will be charged, you view jobs posted under your expertise, you bid a reasonable price for the job and the job’s poster might choose you based on experience (and of course your low bid), then you communicate with them, finish the job and get paid. That is it.
For example: I subscribed to elance in the beginning as a web developer, Then I was able to view and choose between 250-500 jobs posted at that time, choose a programming job that I thought fits my skills, the lowest bid was $150 for the entire job, I bid $145 and was awarded the job, talked to the job’s poster, she explained in more details what she needed, took me about 40 minutes to finish what she needed then submit it, she was happy with what I’ve done and paid me instantly using PayPal.
In this example, it took me less than an hour from start until I got paid, between searching, bidding and working on the job. Some jobs take a bit longer depending on the bidding ending date, or how big the job is.

As a freelance writer, I found it better for me to get a copyright (or ghost) writing jobs better than programming or web developing.
However, elance offers way much more variety of jobs, to name a few: Programming & web developing, Sales and marketing, graphic designing, writing and translation, finance and management, even legal advice is offered there as a job category.

At the time of writing this article here are some facts you may need to know:

• In the last 30 days there were 20,180 jobs posted.
• There are 134,658 experts on elance.
• The amount paid and work done since 2005 is of a value of $139,020,239

That means, that no matter what you do, there is a job related to you that you might want to grab the extra cash from.

In time you will build your reputation and gain trust all over the site, and job posters will preffer hiring you even if your not bidding or ask for a higher prices on their posted jobs.

Is it worth to subscribe?

Simply: Yes. My own average jobs is worth $250 per article. average writing jobs today is 7000+ taking only 2 jobs a day will equal $500 (a day!), with a commitment to do it for 30 days (considering being lucky finding 2 jobs a day and being awarded the jobs) that would be $15000 per month, the subscription as of today is $30 a month. So, I think it is worth it.

Of course elance offers a lot of advice from bidding to accepting the jobs, and it’s all available for free as soon as you log in (The Elance University!).

Did I mention that basic posting of a job is for free!

Learn more about elance here.

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