Three Places to Hire Freelancers for Digital Tasks

By: Seth Resler
Jacobs Media Strategies

From time to time, your radio station may need to hire a little extra digital help. Sometimes, you need something for a project that is outside the expertise of your current staff members. When this happens, where do you turn? Here are three places to consider:

1. Use Fiverr for small odd jobs.
Fiverr is a great website for hiring people to do small jobs, from editing podcast episodes to designing event logos to providing voiceovers for commercials. Each freelancer sets the price for their service, and they usually offer additional services for an extra fee. I find myself paying $25 to $50 for most tasks, though the maximum price for a job on Fiverr is $10,000. The company takes 20%.

Fiverr makes it easy to communicate back and forth with the person you’ve hired, ensuring that you don’t pay until you’re happy with the work.

Use It For: Graphic Design, Voiceover, Audio and Video Editing, etc.

2. Use Upwork for Larger Jobs.
While there are services that you can purchase through both Fiverr and Upwork, I use Upwork for bigger projects. Upwork works best for projects that have a well-defined scope. While Upwork does allow you to purchase “Ready-to-Buy” projects with predefined scopes similar to Fiverr, most of the time you will post a project and invite freelance experts or agencies to bid on it. When they do, you can read their profile and see what other projects they have worked on and how people have rated them. Select a few candidates and conduct a video interview before hiring.

Upwork allows you to set milestones for a project and only release funds to the freelancer when those milestones have been hit. You can set deadlines for the milestones to ensure that your project stays on track.

I have used Upwork to hire an expert to devise an SEO strategy in the past.

Use It For: SEO, web development, video editing, etc.

3. Use Codeable to Hire WordPress Developers.
Nearly 40% of the websites in the world are built on WordPress, including many radio station websites. If you don’t have a website developer on the payroll, there may come a time when you need a small coding project done. That’s where Codeable comes in. Codeable is a site solely for hiring WordPress developers. It vets the freelancers that work through its site to assure that they know what they’re doing.

Instead of asking people to bid on your project, Codeable uses an algorithm to determine the price of your project. This frees you up to choose the right freelancer for the job instead of choosing the cheapest. This works out to be $70 to $120 per hour, plus Codeable’s 17.5% service fee.

I have successfully used Codeable to hire a freelancer to design landing page templates and mobile website themes in the past.

Use It For: Small WordPress coding jobs.

Everybody needs a little extra help now and then. Next time you do, consider outsourcing it with one of these sites. I recommend starting with a project that isn’t critical so you can get a feel for how to best work with freelancers through your site of choice. Once you feel comfortable, you may find yourself returning over and over again.

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