Aug 11
17
Discovering the Joy of ODesk
I first heard of ODesk a couple of years ago but for whatever reason I never actually got round to checking it out until last week. I am kicking myself for not visiting sooner. It really is the answer to an outsourcers dreams. I’ve been a big fan of Fiverr for the past 8 months but there is a lot of rubbish on there that it’s a bit of a hit or a miss as to how good a contractor you will find and the really good ones get snapped up pretty quickly. With ODesk there is so much more transparency over exactly what you are getting and you can hire to suit your individual budget.
I had (wrongly) been under the impression that you would have to pay a premium price to hire a decent outsourcer. The truth is you can hire freelancers from as low as a $1 per hour to over $100 per hour but the fact is there is guaranteed to be someone who can fulfill your needs and meet your budget requirements.
There are two options for hiring – you can create an hourly paid job and agree an hourly rate with the contractor or you can create a fixed rate job and on completion of the job you pay the fixed price.
So far I’ve used both options and both have their plus points. I’ve hired three excellent blog post and product description writers on a fixed rate basis and I’ve hired a data entry contractor on a longer term basis on an hourly rate.
By far my favourite aspect of ODesk is its ‘work diary’ which allows you to see exactly when and what your contractor is working on with regular screenshots. This makes explaining instructions so much clearer on a visual basis, but it also removes the likelihood of ‘cheating’.
Find OpenSocial Developers on oDesk
