Let's go jobbing - What's the other side of Free lance in the Internet?

Internet is a thriving job market for those who are looking for short-term projects in the IT, graphic design, writing and other fields available online preferring to work from home, to obtain the clients and deliver work via online. The phenomene that accumulates all said above and is regarded as the best description for the new economy has become known as elancing. Growing demand for the high skilled professionals, independent agents has created a trillion-dollar elance market. This market has a great potential of growth within following couple years due to the  strive of the employers to hire professionals of the highest skills and abilities with disregards to their location and to cut a considerable amount of fixed and recurring costs on menial tasks and occurred expenses related to regular, traditional employment, such as health insurance, paying for vacations, days off, dealing with personal day-to-day  problems and etc. The elance market is boundless with a unique exception: most of freelance outsourcing is confined to non-core functions that company can easily give to outsiders and, in return, focus on strategic highlights.

Internet offers a great variety of exchange sites that cater to an evolving need of contractors. There are two general types of such sites: the one where you have to bid the posted projects, such as elance.com or translatorbase.com. let us remind you that back into time, elance.com was one of the few survived online businesses which has developed as the prototype of the eBay for the services. Similarly to it Logoworks provides the platform for designers to display their portfolio, this site was lately acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Others are similar to job banks that storage resumes and information on thousands and thousands of freelancers. Some companies have a special list of freelancers able to start up to work in a short-term notice.

For a long time freelance was hardly a cower choice in any profession as it usually offered a poor pay, undetermined professional status and didn't show any opportunities from the point of professional growth. Development and globalization of Internet brought the freelance out of shade and put into the mainstream.

Freelancing has a lot of challenges; however, before you would decide to step in unknown water you have to be realistic about your goals and expectations.  It sounds simple and easy from the one point of view, however, there is enormous hard work that is hidden beneath this simplicity. First of all, you have to choose the strategy and decide for yourself what type of projects would be interesting for you, how far goes your ambitions and appetites, as well how many hours and projects you would be able to handle.  Probably, the hardest thing in the freelancing is effective time planning and marketing yourself.  The range of the online freelance fields is astonished: IT specialist and web designers, webmasters and graphic designers, marketing and PR, engineering and architecture, networking and telephone system, legal ad fashion, writing and translating, admin support and business consulting ad etc. It's easy to get busy; staying busy is a little more harder. The online market is saturated with freelancers from across the world, the globalization opened the cyberspace for the India, post Soviet Union countries, China; many of specialists originally based in the countries historically considered of being third-world would rival with let's say US -based freelancers who have a quiet a long and successful history on freelancing via Internet. Experts from the third-world countries or new to the elance market would try to damp the quotes just to get a small piece of pie.

The other problem that may arise while freelancing - payment. At first, the freelancer has to figure out what kind of payment he would lik to receive. Usually the companies offer such type of the payment as: check (e-check as it's variety), bank transfer/wiring or international swift, money transfer via Western Union or MoneyGram, iKobo, Money order, PayPal (Moneybookers, StormPay or even e-gold, depending on industry as variation), some webs give you an alternative of payment option as Xoom and ePassporte. Once roading through web sites hunting the freelancers, we have noticed the growing popularity of Safe Escrow Payment system, another type of the 3^rd party processor. Many of contractors promote the Escrow as one of the payment options. The interesting thing is if client pays via check, e-check or wire than 2% of paid amount is converted into free Loyalty Dollars.  You, as a payer, would get the chance to win $100 as a daily bonus. In order to change the Loyalty Dollars into real fiat money you would have to address either through guru.com escrow request or invoice payment. Money transferred by client is locked on the escrow account until the project is submitted. 

There a lot of different criterias that would allow you to figure out the quote for your services: basing on your knowledge, experience, recommendation and ability to stay within the stated deadlines and quality requirements. At the same time, keep in mind the old adage that nobody got rich by freelancing and it's is extremely difficult to build valuable career, given the regimented nature of clients and projects that would work for. Some of the companies don't support freelancing manly because they believe that to fulfill a task the person has to physically present to exchange views with other colleagues and develop the best and the most cost -efficient way to reach a company goal.

There is also a common belief that the type of jobs given on outsource is limited simply because either it doesn't work either because of the tricky side of the task. As an example of the first case we would cite one of the dropped projects -online tutoring service. TutorVista honestly believed that through development of online tutoring service it would become the first in creating a market space for trading in tuitions. At the end they came up to reject even the idea of such service, basing on failures of other portals, dis-intermediation between teachers and students and non-assurance of quality.

The other aspect is related to the involvement of the freelancers in the high risk industries such as adult industry. It's probably one of the fields that evoke the biggest number of pros and cons. Some people wouldn't involve with it taking as immoral and non-correspondent to their values, another would overpass the embarrassment and work with adult content as with any other else, it became just work. As to now, porn industry is worth $57 billion world wide, with Internet pornography of over $ 5 billion, 4.7 million of porn sites run across the world that corresponds to 12% of the Internet. In accordance to recent research the revenue of the web with an adult content would be equal to $1 million every year. It usually employs, at least, four persons from the technical side and from four to seven from in sales.  Mechanism of getting the job in the adult industry remains undiscovered mystery until now. It is basically explained by the fact that the industry is mainly represented by private firms that have no legal obligations to disclose their activities. The main way to find job in the adult industry is through particular webs such as adultstaffing.com, at adult industry conventions, like Internext and AVN's adult Entertainment Expo or by the recommendation. The first one, Internext, offers a huge variety of jobs from adult industry to technology. As to the second one, Adultstaffing.com, we would say it's more focused on promoting US-based jobs in all fields of the adult industry, but mainly focused on web designers, programmers and webmasters. As to the overseas, in some countries there are examples when the offer to take position in the adult industry is posted directly in the local media. Usually, potential contractors don't have to possess advanced level of technical skills, as it's clear for everyone that if he would be a guru in technical support and software development, he would rather prefer to work for a specialized company and to have a bigger payment. As to the design side - most of the employers would incline to web designers who had the experience to work with adult content before, in order not to waste the time on his adaptation to "working material". Most adult sites, especially with child content have bad history of the interrelations with their freelancers, being taken as "bad debtors" running away after the closure of web by legal authorities. Despite some definite challenges that might occur from the perspective of working in the adult industry, some insiders have a strong belief that the work in this sphere would more likely affect business opportunities of freelancer in other industries.

Basing on the opinion expressed in Harvard Business Review we would declare that "freelance outsourcing could take over the world. Setting for this invasion if it would actually happen, has never been more propitious". Experts conclude that the proliferation of online marketplaces for freelance work is one of the signs proving that the outsourcing had overpassed the individual level.

Natalia, reporter of Ecommerce Journal