Water Cooler

Melissa Rudy is a 32-year-old mother of three young girls (ages: 4, 2 and 3 months) who recently made a life-changing decision to work full-time on Elance.



Melissa – born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio – graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1999 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and a writing certificate in Journalism.

Experience is a great teacher – but gaining experience takes time. To get new buyers up to speed quickly, we asked buyers who post and award numerous Elance projects to share their wisdom.



The following are just some of the great tips we received for communicating with providers, evaluating bids, and managing the projects you award. Plus we’ve included some additional tips to help you succeed when hiring on demand.

Do you feel as informed about your customers and their needs, or about your industry and recent market trends as you want to be? It's easy to stay up-to-date when you work with a qualified professional to do market research for your business.



Market research can provide you with valuable information to help drive the strategic direction of your business, and your business will reap the benefits:

Analyst firm NelsonHall recently forecast that business process outsourcing (BPO) will grow to a $450 billion market by the year 2012.

I’ve been noticing that small businesses are doing an increasing volume of outsourcing of project work and even certain parts of their business processes. It’s a strategy that helps you grow your business flexibly. You can increase your capacity and throughput, without adding fixed expenses that would be difficult to scale back.



But being smart about outsourcing is crucial.

Every week, hundreds of new Elance providers are hired for their first projects. We’d like you to meet one of them, Sharon Thompson (username: allamericangal) – a California-based freelance designer with over 20 years of experience in the graphic design industry.



Sharon has an impressive background in business and graphic design. She is a small business owner, having founded, Sharon Thompson Design Studio, in 1989, and has an extensive portfolio of logos, illustrations and photos.