My oDesk Freelance Examples

I have said it in the past, that oDesk is my favorite resource for finding Cheap freelancers. I believe it is the best freelance site. In fact, within the past couple of months I hired out 2 jobs that ended up costing me so little, that I almost felt guilty. Almost!

In this post I am going to share with you in detail my recent 2 oDesk jobs that I hired out for some pretty big jobs. When I say big, I mean there was no way I could have done it myself.

This should serve as motivation for anyone looking to try odesk outsourcing.

First oDesk Online contract

The first job I needed was to have a website converted to a wordpress theme then migrated over to my Host gator account. The website was Shakacostarica.com this is my main website for my day job which is owning and operating a Surf & Yoga retreat in Costa Rica.

The site was originally on an old joomla CMS platform. I wanted to have the blog on the same URL. I believe WordPress is easier to manage, and more SEO friendly. The website would look the same but it hand to be built completely from scratch, hand coded PHP, with a custom theme.

What’s great about oDesk is that it is free to post a job. So you can test ideas and prices to see if people bite. Here is the ad that I posted on oDesk with a maximum budget of $400 for the job.

 “I need someone to take my Joomla website and convert it to a WordPress site keeping the same look. Curently the site is on joomla but with a wordpress blog in a sub directory. I want to move everything to just one new wordpress site. I also need everything moved over to my new host.”

Within 12 hours I had over 20 contractors bidding on my job. I probably could have set a maximum budget at half of that and still had bidders, but since this is my primary brick & mortar business and I didn’t want to be to cheap and only attract the less experienced Freelancers(Oh yah, I forgot to mention that a local US design studio quoted the job at around $2000-$3000).

I actually had 1 oDesk contractor bid $100 for the job. But he was new to the oDesk system and did not yet have any ratings or work history. 90% of all the applicants were from India.

I let the Job run for about a day and half then settled on a girl named Sadia from india who had a 5star rating(here is a snap of her profile). So yes, you could go to Odesk signup and do a search for her if you need webdesign work.

The experience was amazing! She had the first draft done in about 3 days. Then it only took 2 small revisions and it was DONE. I was blown away at the level of service and quality.

All I can say is the American digital work-force should be very worried. These third world countries are spitting out young anxious pros who are more reliable,ambitious and willing to do a better job for 1/10 the cost.

 Second oDesk Online Contract.

This was more of a spur of the moment impulse. I wanted to see about how much it would cost to have my Passive-income eBook course translated into Spanish. Since this was not the most important project I wanted to see how low I could go.

Here is the ad that I posted with a maximum budget of $100

“I have a how-to eBook and 3 web pages i would like to translate into Spanish. It is an eBook on how to setup simple word-press websites as well as basic instruction on creating content and basic SEO. The book is about 130 pages and written in a very clear easy to understand style.

 the ebook can be downloaded for free here http://www.zzzprofits.com/course/ if you want to check it out.

 the 3 pages to translate are

http://www.zzzprofits.com/course/

http://www.zzzprofits.com/internet-marketers-resources/

http://www.zzzprofits.com/making-money-online/ “

The Freelancer bids for this job came in a little slower, so I let it run for a couple of days. At this point I had about 10 freelancers who put in a bid. The interesting thing was that all the freelancers who had high ratings and work history counter offered my maximum bid stating they would manually translate at 2-3 cents per word.

I did a quick calculation and added all the words together, and it came to about 33,000 words total. At that price the cost would be $660-$990. That was quite a bit more then I was willing to spend.

I was just about to scrap the idea, then on the 3rd day I received a bid of $25. I thought for sure that was a typo and wrote back a message confirming if the price was correct. Here is the exact email conversation:

Me:
I just want to make sure you read and understand the job?

Contractor:
Ok, this is what I understood from your job description:
- You need someone to translate from English to Spanish an ebook of 130 pages and also three web pages is this alright?

Thank you

Me:
yes that is correct. Can i ask why you bid so low? Is it because this would be your first job on oDesk but a good way to gain some initial work history/ratings?

Contractor:
To be honest that is the main reason, I know that is a lot of work but normally no one will hire me because I have no feedback. That is a problem for me because I am able to translate from English to Spanish perfectly. So I didn’t want to put a bid which you could say like “This guy has no feedback and his bid is too big, I will choose another one”. I am just being honest.

Are you kidding me? This offer was to good to be true. The worst case scenario I am out 25 bucks. It was pretty much a no brainer, so of-course I had to gave him a try. The other bonus was he was a computer science major so he understood most of the terminology about building websites, SEO and internet marketing.

It took him about 1 week to complete it. He probably spent 20-30 hours on the job. I had my Costa Rican friend take a look, and she said it looked good. I gave him a glowing review and 5 stars so it worked out for both of us.

So guess what? ZZZProfits is now a multilingual website. You can see it in action here http://www.zzzprofits.com/es/ all for 25 bucks! Well, actually after the oDesk fee $27.50 muahahaa!

In case your wondering I used a premium plug-in called “WordPress Multilingual Plugin” to handle the backend. The plugin makes it easy to setup all the translations as well as make sure its SEO friendly.

It cost $79 for the complete version with a license to use it on as many websites as I want. I did a lot of research and it seemed to be the best method available.

 Go Team oDesk!

In fact I currently have another really cool oDesk project in the works. I am in the process of having a oDesk freelance writer write a zombie book for my son and I. I wanted to do something fun and expose my son to the concept of outsourcing. When the project evolves I will post more details about it.

Once again I can say oDesk has been a great tool in keeping my internet marketing costs down. If your thinking about giving outsourcing a try, I highly recommend you try a small project on oDesk.