Online freelancing isn’t exactly a niche thing anymore. Elance, a major freelancing hub for both clients and contractors, is the current center of commerce where contract jobs and contractors are concerned.
Graphic designers, voice actors, film editors, writers,legal aids and many other professionals make their primary living on work acquired through Elance, and almost seventy percent of those with Elance profiles have college degrees. It’s not exactly amateur hour.
Elance makes use of a system of skills and experience brackets to sort its users into searchable indexes best-suited to their abilities or needs. It charges a commission for jobs booked through its services, meaning its revenues are conditional upon the quality and frequency with which it successfully places contractors with matching clients. Let’s take a look at some of the most common jobs encountered on Elance.
1. Legal Advice
Keeping a lawyer or legal professional on retainer can be prohibitively expensive, and so many clients would rather deal with a freelance professional. Elance, with its reputation for facilitating quality and giving clients access to professionals, is good for everyone involved in this respect.
A legal aid or counsel working through Elance can spread their time effectively across several client bases, while clients get easy access to qualified counsel.
2. Video Editing
A multimedia approach to marketing is much more common in the era of social media like Facebook and Twitter, and consequently whole new avenues of visual marketing like tutorials, commercials, and pitch sessions are being made.
Elance connects jobs like these with contractors looking to build their resumes and break into the field of professional video editing, and because Elance allows file hosting on project sites it’s easy for editors to work on teams or in collaboration with their clients.
3. Graphic Design
The ability to program StudioPress themes, along with a working knowledge of Photoshop and other related software, is one of Elance’s most-demanded skill sets.
Graphic design is a high-traffic industry accounting for a high portion of the jobs contracted from professionals who use Elance, and graphic designers often begin contracting in college, allowing them to start putting their names out on the market and building on-the-job experience.
4. Writing
Everyone needs writing done. Tech writing, SEO articles, ghostwriting; no matter what it is, any client with foresight is going to know they need quality written content. All kinds of freelance writers call Elance home, and nearly a fifth of the jobs contracted on Elance’s platform are content-writing or involve some form of writing.
5. Professional Voiceovers
Voice acting is something Elance’s file-hosting and communication support have really opened up. While there aren’t many voice actors contracting on Elance, the service is a growing part of the website’s catalogue. Voice actors can even provide samples of their voice and vocal range in addition to their resumes.
6. Audio Production
Elance brings audio production and editing out of the studio and onto the Web. It lets audio professionals offer their services digitally, giving clients access to a suite of skills that used to be sorely limited by location and overhead.
The majority of audio production jobs facilitated by Elance are commercial work, private fine-tuning for musicians, voiceover editing, etc.
7. Editing & Proofreading
Where there are writers, there are editors. The sheer amount of work that moves through Elance daily is enough to necessitate a dedicated corps of editors, and the loop of writing-to-editing contracting is a strong one that keeps Elance supplied with new work every day. Editing is, in fact, an even larger work sector than writing.
About the Author:
James Martell is an Internet pioneer who discovered the lucrative world of affiliate marketing in 1999. He is a self-taught Internet entrepreneur and a leading expert in affiliate marketing, natural search engine optimization and outsourcing. On his educational blog about WordPress functionally he addresses blog-improvement with resources like thesis themes, which cover useful tactics for those who wish to improve their graphical environments with the WordPress’s platform.
