One of the most important lessons I learned in business was from the quote “ focus on what you do best and outsource the rest”. This is one of those things that may sound pretty obvious. However, for many of us who have used many freelancing websites understand that this task is not as easy as it sounds.
This is because without hiring the right team members, task can end up taking twice as long and costing much more than anticipated. When using Upwork I felt that many of the candidates were unqualified and were prolonging tasks to have more billable hours.
Sometimes I felt that for many of these tasks, it was faster to do them myself. This was primarily due to the time spent finding, screening, training, and monitoring my freelancers and I found it was almost faster just to do everything myself.
After a friend told me to give asklorem.com a chance, I quickly became hooked. They take all the project management parts away from finding the right candidates, and with their reviews and strict hiring standards (only accepting 5% of applicants) they guarantee that the job will be done right the first time.
Today I wanted to give a full review of Asklorem.com to explain both pros and cons and why it's the best alternatives to Fiverr or Upwork hire and manage outsourced team members.
What is Lorem Freelance Marketplace?
The best way to describe AskLorem.com (Lorem) would be to it a pre-vetted freelancer marketplace for those looking to hire top talent for any website development or digital marketing task.
However for those that don’t speak nerd, you can describe it as a 24/7 marketplace that automatically connects businesses with top freelancers who bid on any type of task related to running your online businesses, with quotes typically coming in less than 10 minutes.
The founders of Asklorem.com originally started out creating a website builder, but realized that there were far too many tools and most businesses did not have the time or skill to do it themselves. They also realized that the current marketplaces were too intimidating for most businesses and everyone was just competing over price versus service.
This is when they decided to come up with a solution that works for not only businesses, but entrepreneurs (freelancers) looking for contract work. By creating a marketplace of vetted professionals, where they only accept 5% of applicants, are able to act more of a digital assistant or project manager to help get instant and more affordable help for both sides looking to use their services.
How Does Lorem Work?
As mentioned above, Lorem is a marketplace that connects both businesses with freelancers in a controlled and vetted system. Much like how Amazon works and reviews businesses, their internal controls review and make sure to filter out low quality profiles.
This can be divided into 2 different main categories.
Lorem for Business Owners
From the business facing side, Lorem takes all of the headache out of recruiting a talented freelancer. This means instead of learning WordPress, Facebook Ads, or Email Marketing you can post a job and they guarantee that you have a top quality candidate for your job, and only pay once you are 100% satisfied.
Once you have setup your business profile and created your website development brief, it takes less than 10 minutes to post a job and wait for the quotes to come in.
1. First Choose Which Type of Job You Want To Post
This can be either completely redesigning a new website, fixing a current one, or another digital marketing task such as setting up email marketing, Facebook ads, copy-writing, or something more specific.
2. Choose the type of Platform You Want To Use
For the option above, I choose a new website. For this, they let you select which type you want to use. Depending on your task, if you want to choose a WordPress expert, they need to have many different skills then a designer that you would want for square space, or Shopify design. But they let you choose from many different types of platforms (about 15) and can also message if you want something custom.
3. Add your specific details in your brief
The most important thing you can do when hiring remote team members, is write an extremely detailed brief. This will save you time, money, and make sure that your freelancer has everything required to do their job efficiently. Last thing you want is scope creep, or resentful team members, so make sure that everything you want is done. From what type of sidebar you want, templates you want used, what social icon / accounts you want, your email access, then post it.
Afterwards, you may want to ask the contractor to add in any additional notes that they think, before agreeing on the brief. If this is not included, (like adding custom images or graphics) then you need to pay more for this. Think of this as a house blueprint, and your hiring a framing contractor. Would adding a new floor to your house cost extra? This is what you do in the third step.
Lorem For Freelancers & Making Money
From the freelancer side, Lorem does so much more than any other freelancing website I have seen. This is because they are very selective in choosing their freelancers, and only accept about 5% of total applicants. By keeping less freelancers, they are able to offer more jobs and to remove many of the extremely low bids from lower cost markets. They are not saying you can not be from other countries like India or Pakistan, but no $2 / hour bids.
At the same time, Lorem cares about their freelancers and uses this in their processes to make sure that not only are the freelancers fast at responses, but also businesses. This means, you are not waiting for weeks for a client to confirm changes, asking for many different changes not a realistic part in the brief, and asks as an escrow so everyone gets paid on time. Aka they do follow up on your behalf to make sure that the clients are not stalling out.
If you think you have what it takes to be one of the vetted freelancers on Lorem, you can sign up through their website on becoming an expert
Pricing & Different Plans
Lorem is not the cheapest platform to use, but it has fair pricing. I still think it is far below market average what you would pay for a contractor for this type of service. The reason why they do provide such rates, is that one of their main value add (for Freelancers) is the amount of jobs they send through your way.
Traditionally 35-50% of much time is towards sales / customer service, and they have seemed to streamline this. You can view some of their past projects with realistic and fair estimates (plus its fixed rate quotes) so no extra or hidden costs.
Editors Comments 5 / 5 For Freelance Services
There comes a point in all of our businesses, where we either grow to fast to stop handling tasks ourselves, or simply get a project or task that we do not know what to do. Everyone needs to focus on what they do best, so for those of us in any digital businesses we are always looking to hire reliable and knowledge team members fast.
This is the entire premise behind Lorem, is that it is a higher quality marketplace, and does not have fair pricing. If you want to hire really cheap jobs, you will use one of the alternatives live Fiverr or Upwork, but do risk many troubles. Heck I had someone steal my own website once, and use it as their own digital agency.
With Lorem they do act more of the project managers, and are here to do their best so you hire many different jobs through them. I have a friend that has hired more then 100 jobs through them, and has grown their own team whenever they get a website or task so that they can sell and deliver.
If you have any jobs, tasks, or services you are looking to outsource? Start by posting a job with Lorem and see exactly how much it will cost. Start outsourcing your tasks, and focus on growing your business.