Westchester Career Guide

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Businesses Weather Storm By ‘Elancing With the Stars’

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Owning or managing a business requires some fancy footwork. Especially challenging are difficult economic times like today when life calls for the tango, while all the steps you know are the conga, limbo and the hustle.

So, while many small business owners have already trimmed excess expenses and eliminated unnecessary spending, business experts advise that it’s equally important to jive with existing customers while pairing up with new ones.

But, how can businesses pull off this two-step, even during a time of cutbacks? Smart businesses have gotten into the swing of getting work done with speed, flexibility and at a manageable cost – tapping the army of professional online freelancers always accessible at Web sites like Elance.com.

Online freelancers, or “elancers” (rhymes with freelancers), are qualified professionals with expertise in areas like Web programming, design, copywriting, research and other specialized skills. At Elance, you can find, hire and work with stars who possess the skills and talent small businesses often don’t have themselves.

Here are a few ways elancers can help small businesses during uncertain economic times:

• Connect with Key Customers. Make sure you are closer than ever to your most valuable customers. Hire elancers to call and thank valued customers, write and conduct customer surveys, design and execute direct mail campaigns or develop special promotional offers to build loyalty with your best customers.
• Sharpen Your Sales and Marketing. Invest in bringing in new customers. Consider hiring an e-lancer to re-write your sales and marketing materials, re-design or upgrade your Web site, help you launch a blog, build and execute an online marketing campaign, qualify sales leads or simply update your customer newsletter.
• Maximize Employee Productivity. Let’s face it, there are lots of distractions that slow down your best employees. Empower your people to delegate activities to elancers who are specialists. Tasks such as conducting competitive research, sourcing new customer leads, entering data into your database, organizing customer or employee events and other administrative tasks are ideal to entrust to an online freelancer.
• Elancing with the Stars. Smart business owners say they’ve used Elance to reinvigorate their businesses flexibly and affordably, without adding fixed costs to their operations. Using elancers, they scale up or down as needed.

Best of all, these stars, with their specialized skills, are available around the clock to help small businesses stay productive and ahead of the competition.

And that’s something worth dancing about.

Courtesy: NewsUSA

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Tags:

competitive research, direct mail, Elance, Freelancing, General, managing a business, sales and marketing, Small Business, small business owners, web programming

 

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