Information Filled Under 'General Outsourcing Trends' Category
Building a Blog: From the Ground Up Thursday, September 9th, 2010
Whether to drive business, expose your expertise or keep an ongoing personal narrative, blogs have become the de facto publishing method for much of the content we consume on the web. Here are the key steps to building your own blog – from concept to reality: Purpose Start with one deceptively simple …
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Building a Blog: From the Ground Up
With awkward setups and slow connections a thing of the past, real-time collaboration tools have hit their stride as serious business tools. You don’t need an IT department to support them, or a dedicated T-1 line to handle the bandwidth–any user can benefit from the productivity …
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Live Wire: Real-time Collaboration Tools for Better Business
We’d all like to believe every opportunity on the Internet is legitimate, but unfortunately that just isn’t true. Independent contractors and freelancers need to be aware and keep themselves smarter than the scammers. If you avoid businesses and individuals with these red flags, you can prevent yourself from falling for a …
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Online Work Scams: 7 Red Flags to Save Time & Money
After having such a blast presenting at SXSW last year, we were excited to see that the 2011 SXSW Panel Picker was finally open for voting! Even more thrilling is the number of panels suggested that remote team members and managers would find valuable (including two from oDesk executives!).
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Remote Work at SXSW – Vote for your favorites!
Whether you’ve got one remote worker or your entire team is distributed, helping them embrace your company culture can mean the difference between having truly engaged employees and those just in it for the paycheck. Consider adopting the following tips to make your remote workers truly part of your team.
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Maintaining Culture in Your Remote Team
If you’re thinking about becoming a remote contract worker — or maybe you are a newbie in the biz — you may be subjected to some well-intentioned (but inaccurate) advice and information about the ins and outs of contract work and freelancing. We’re here to set the record straight by debunking the …
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10 Biggest Myths About Remote Work
Tamara wrote a great post for contractors to avoid embarrassing or career-damaging crises that could leave their employers in the lurch. But an employer would be crazy to leave that kind of disaster preparedness solely in the hands of a contractor
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Ready for Anything: Crisis Management for Employers
So, you lost your job and are wondering if now is the time to make the switch from traditional employment to contract work. Don’t worry — it can be done! Here at oDesk, our experienced managers and savvy remote team have brainstormed 15 tried-and-true ways for you to go from fired to …
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First Contract Job: 15 Ways to Go from Fired to Hired
As an independent contractor, you can feel a bit alone when it comes to matters of disability insurance. Benefits that traditional employment provides automatically, by way of private insurance or government programs, freelancers and contractors must find on their own. With other more pressing safety-net needs – like health insurance …
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Disability Planning for Freelancers and Contract Workers
There’s good news and bad news when it comes to small businesses and government contracting. First, the good news: According to the SBA’s fourth annual small business Procurement Scorecard , small businesses got a record number of federal contracting dollars in 2009. Contracting to all five categories the government measures—small businesses, women-owned businesses, businesses owned by service-disabled veteran, businesses in HUBZones (historically underutilized business zones) and small “disadvantaged” businesses—rose compared to 2008 figures.
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Small Businesses and Federal Contracting: Good and Bad News
As summer draws to a close, for the millions of seasonal business operators across the country so does another peak selling period. Whether you operate a hot dog concession stand on the Jersey shore or run a B&B establishment on the ski slopes of Vermont, choosing to make the bulk of your profits during certain times of the year requires a particularly innovative and tenacious small business owner who knows how to ride the highs and optimize the lows of running a seasonal business
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3 Tips for Running a Successful Seasonal Business – Year Round!
The real key to economic recovery isn’t in the form of a piece of legislation waiting for passage in Congress or on the President’s desk awaiting signature. In fact, the real key to economic recovery doesn’t lie in the hands of any legislature or government entity on the face of the Earth. The real key to economic recovery lies in the hands of people like you and me
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Small Business News: The Real Key To Economic Recovery
A recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report on entrepreneurship training asks a central question for anyone interested in starting a business: “Does entrepreneurship education make a difference?” You might think that this question has been resolved.
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Does Entrepreneurship Education Make People Better Entrepreneurs?
Working and traveling can be both exhausting and rewarding. Whether you’re traveling for pleasure but can’t afford to drop all of your clients, have work that requires you on-site in a location abroad or some combination of the two, you’ll need to balance the rigors of travel with the demands …
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Freelancing on the Fly: International Travels
Maintaining strong working relationships over a distance of thousands of miles can be challenging. Services like oDesk and Skype help ease complications, but there are some hurdles that require special attention when working with international clients. Time Zones Depending on how you manage your international clients, time differences can either help …
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Challenges of International Clients
Finding a remote worker online is fairly easy these days. Finding a great remote contractor online can be a whole different challenge. The interview process becomes extremely important in pinpointing that remote worker who is a perfect fit for you and your business.
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Hiring Remote Workers: 5 Red Flags To Never Ignore
We’ve released a new version of our Email Preferences page, giving you even more control over the communications you receive from oDesk. We know you’re busy. Our emails are designed to give you pertinent information and allow you to take action as efficiently as possible. However, if you manage …
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Giving you more control over email
Here at oDesk we’re always excited to offer special deals and promotions to our hard working community. That’s why we’re super excited to announce that our partner, Startup Weekend, is extending a generous offer of 25% off to attend their upcoming Bay Area event. Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated …
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Startup Weekend – Special Offer for oDesk Users
Being a remote contractor has its benefits–like not having a boss, working in your pajamas, and all the insane things that we say we could do (but never actually do them). However, with this freedom comes great responsibility. Security
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Protecting Your Clients: Online Security for Remote Contractors
We usually offer tips on improving your remote-work techniques, but this time we wanted to step back and just appreciate how cool remote work really is. Consider this your summer break (unless it happens to be winter where you are), and check out our new Future of Work video.
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oDesk Celebrates (and Rewards) Big Ideas
At one point or another it is inevitable that you will experience an unexpected crisis that interferes with your career as an independent contractor. In a less serious scenario, you may lose your cell phone, kill your laptop or just come down with a 24-hour virus. But, in a total disaster, you might …
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A Crisis Plan for Contract Workers: 8 Career-Saving Steps
Whether you’re hiring someone to build a simple informational website or a robust software systems, you’ll want to establish a clear path for your project and have a central location for code and documentation to live throughout its life-cycle. Software Configuration Management, Source Code Management, a Code Repository, Version …
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Code Repository Basics
If you stop and think about it, you might think it a bit odd that everybody is still talking about the Great Recession when the economy has been growing for a full calendar year. Except, of course, that it certainly doesn’t feel like a recovery, does it? That are two reasons for that: job growth and consumer spending, both of which are pretty tepid.
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Research Roundup: Where’s the Recovery?
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you create or what product or service you offer. In some ways all businesses are the same. How we build them, make them stronger and finally reach our business goals involves a set of principles that are the same for every entrepreneur
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Small Business News: Business Building Basics
This week’s list has some excellent opportunities for growing companies to learn and network over the next few months. This list of small business webinars, events and conferences is brought to you every two weeks as a community service by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com
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More Conferences for Growing Small Businesses
With the growth in social media, it was inevitable that there would be a corresponding growth in social media books. With a strong Twitter following (over 141,000 and counting), Chris Brogan, New Media president and longtime blogger, would be a fitting author to weigh in with a social media advisory book of his own. Co-founder of the PodCamp “unconference”and co-author of Trust Agents , Brogan has spoken, consulted and blogged on social media. He has condensed tips and tricks from his past experiences into a book called Social Media 101: Tactical Tips to Develop Your Business Online . Hymnal-sized, Social Media 101 checks in at 313 pages thick. It is divided into 87 segments, each a few pages long and consisting of tips on subjects such as blogging, incorporating video, podcasting and developing an online social community
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Start Your Social Media Tactics with Tips from “Social Media 101″
Starting a business need not be scary and you don’t need to be a seasoned entrepreneur to get on the right road to success. In fact, for the most successful entrepreneurs, the key has been simply experimenting to find out what works and then letting the right market find them.
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Small Business News: So You Want To Start A Business