Thanks to the web, the old adage that there’s strength in numbers has never been more true than now. Increasingly, web workers are finding ways to establish powerful partnerships with vendors that offer products or services that compliment their own. They’re learning that while they might be good on their own, together with the right partners they can be great. Here are some ways to find what could be the missing ingredient in your formula for success.
PartnerUp
PartnerUp is like match.com, but for businesses. You list your skills and available projects (called opportunities) and can check out the assets of others to see if there’s a fit. There’s a directory in which you can list your business, and add promising-looking contacts to your address book. You can create or join groups that focus on particular topics of interests and different levels of expertise. There are also helpful forums where you can ask or answer questions about business, or anything else for that matter. The service has a free basic account, along with a premium plan. Read the rest of this entry »
I got an exclusive sneak peek at the July edition of the Elance Online Work Index (a kind of Elance “Hot 100″), which will be published tomorrow. The index, which uses data from over 100,000 jobs posted on the site, is a monthly look at which job categories are the most popular in the freelance job marketplace.
PHP still holds the No. 1 spot (as it has since February), but what’s more interesting are the “movers and shakers” this month. In particular, jobs in the “Graphic Design” and “Adobe Flash” categories have leaped up the index this month to end up in second and third places overall (up ten and six spots from last month, respectively) — this is good news for designers. Another big mover is jobs in the “Joomla!” category (breaking into the top 10 by rising 10 places to eighth), suggesting that there’s increasing demand for people skilled in the open-source CMS. Read the rest of this entry »
The Monster Employment Index, a monthly snapshot of U.S. online job opportunities maintained by staffing site Monster.com, provides a distressing view of the general employment environment at the moment, as seen below. Year-on-year, the index is down 30 percent. At the bottom of this page, you can see versions of the index for large metropolitan regions, some of them hit very hard. Fortunately, there are still some good work opportunities out there for those of us who work online. Here are my top resources for finding online work.
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A few weeks ago, LimeExchange launched its online outsourcing marketplace to the world. The service is essentially a social network for freelancers, service providers and entrepreneurs that helps service providers matchmake themselves to buyers looking to outsource activities within those service categories.
Though marketplace services such as Guru and eLance have ably served freelancers and web workers for some time, LimeExchange seeks to differentiate itself from its predecessors by moving service marketplaces beyond simple matchmaking of buyers and sellers, to eBay-like reputation and feedback metrics that help users understand the prior reputability of their collaborators.
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Although I haven’t kept a close eye on Elance, my impression has been that it was a basic job “bid” site for freelancer programmers. The site description summarizes their main focus as “outsourcing to freelance programmers, web and logo designers, copywriters, illustrators and consultants.” People with the jobs are the employers or “buyers” and the Web workers with the skills are the “providers” on Elance.
Since launching in 1999, the company has worked to expand their offerings, integrating some features to create more than just a job site and more of a work tool. What interested me beyond the job marketplace is Elance’s concept of a Remote Work System with the goal of creating a remote workspace for freelance workers to provide them with additional incentive to continue using the site after the job match has been made. The features are meant to help service providers manage a part of their work through Elance and give buyer and service provider more ways to connect and transact business.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
