When it comes to selecting a freelancer or a team of freelancers, follow these several points so you actually get what you want.

1. Do they follow directions? When you create your bid requirements for elance.com or rentacoder.com, you can state you’d like a sample of their work. Are you hiring a writer? Ask for a 100-200 word sample on topic X. If they contact you and don’t even provide that, don’t hire them. You know they will not follow directions and not listen to what you want done.

2. Do they have negative feedback? The beauty of looking at sites such as elance.com or rentacoder.com is their feedback system. You are able to see what kind of projects the freelancers have completed in the past and whether or not they deliver in a timely fashion. This is your hard earned cash you are spending, so it makes sense to see what other people have experienced before in the past. You don’t need to waste time being someone’s guinea pig.

3. Consider the time zone differences. When you outsource your work to a team half way around the world, expect there to be some lag time in work completion and also communication.

4. Look at the profile. Take a quick look at the freelancer’s profile. Do they have a clean-cut picture of themselves? Do they fill out the biography section that should state what their qualifications are. This may give you a little more insight into whether or not this person will be able to meet your needs and the needs of your business.

5. Do they write proper English? If you have an article you want to outsource, does the person responding to you actually write proper English? Seriously. This is something your name will go on, so you want to make sure it sounds professional. At the same time, you really shouldn’t expect a journalist either unless you come prepared to the table with some money. Most writers will charge between $5 and $10 for an article.

6. Can they actually meet your deadline? Often times a freelancer will create a generic bid and basically send out the same message to a bunch of different jobs at the same time. Once they win an auction, things all of a sudden crop up. Take the time to send them a quick message and reiterate the importance of them meeting your deadline. They may have other jobs going on, but then they should take on more than they can handle in the first place.

When the economy is down and money starts getting tight it is time to think of new ways to save money. What ways can you save that do not impact your lifestyle too radically?

The first thing people do when saving money is to cut out their favorite things and either do without or replace them with cheaper items.

Another option is the try a 50-50 solution. This report tries to get you to think about what you have in your life that you could change slightly and still have your favorite things.

“The 50-50” solution, is adding 50% more of a cheaper item to a more expensive item. You mix cheap or generic brands with brand name product to come up with a “hybrid” that works well or tastes good.

If you eat macaroni and cheese, one option to save money is to switch from the major brand to the store brand. Often it tastes just as good. If you 50-50 Mac and cheese, you just add plain unflavored noodles to the mix. 50 per cent is the amount of noodles in the box and 50 percent is plain noodles. You get the same flavor, the meal goes farther and you save money.

Do you have a cat? Do you use clumping cat litter? Buy plain clay cat litter and mix the two 50-50. It still clumps and you just saved money. Test this before mixing all of both as you may need to adjust the formula slightly. If the mix breaks apart too easily add more clumping litter. If it works good add more clay. Test the best mixture for your cats.

How about hot sauce? Mix a cheaper low flavor sauce with a more expensive high flavor sauce. For example mix Tabasco Sauce with some less expensive generic Mexican hot sauce. You still get the flavor of Tabasco but mixing it with a cheaper brand you save a little.

When you try the 50-50 method, you may go 30-70 or any combination that gives you results that you are still pleased with. If you mix products in this manner you will save money.

Cut a paper towel in half. Some paper towels now come as half sheets. You do not always need a full paper towel for a small job. You can even quarter paper towel sheets. Instead of using a full paper towel for a small job, you can use only the amount of towel you need.

Facial tissues: You can cut them in half also. A slight drip does not require a full tissue or the same amount of tissue as a full blow.

Traditionally we use a full product even when it is not needed. Think HALF and 50-50.

Are there items in your life that you could easily use one half the amount of? Are there other things you could mixed a less expensive brand with the more expensive brand and come up is satisfactory results.

How about breakfast cereal? Could mix a generic brand with your favorite more expensive brand and be just as happy with the flavor. Start with a 20-80 mix and increase it from there.

The sole purpose of this report is to get you thinking of a different way to save money. When times get tough, it is time to think a little differently than we do in the good times.

Remember it is not one thing you do that makes a big difference. It all the little things added together that add up to big savings at the end of the year.

The name of the game with Internet Marketing is productivity. Productivity means reaching the greatest number of targeted prospects with the least effort and expense to generate the most sales.

The key to productivity is leverage: expanding your marketing activity with resources and systems that run without your direct effort or excessive involvement.

Developing a Link Partner strategy is one recommended way to leverage your efforts and increase your productivity, although there are numerous additional ways to apply leverage to your Internet business efforts. These may include:

- Advertising in ezines, online forums, websites and other sources

- Participation as a member in online business and marketing forums

- Participation in Social Networking sites

With each of these leveraging systems, it may take some effort and time to get them set up and to begin establishing your website presence.

The advantage to any or all of these systems is that once set up, they will produce results for you with minimal effort and will continue to do so for extended periods of time.

Link Partners are website owners or webmasters with whom you exchange your website link. You will place a link to their site somewhere on your website, and they will place your link somewhere on their site.

Links can be in text ad form or banner form. Links might be included in an article, a site review or a blog post. Or they might be listed in a business services directory. The style or nature of the link exchange should be agreed upon before the links are posted to prevent any misunderstandings or disappointments.

Link Partners may be easy to find, but the real essence of an effective Link Partner strategy is exchanging links with quality websites. That is, sites with a respectable PageRank and who are already attracting the same kind of visitors that you are targeting for your online business.

There are many good web tools available that can be used to check the PageRank of a website. You can do an Internet search for page rank tools.

To find quality sites and to encourage them to want to support your Link Partner strategy, here are some recommended steps:

1) When surfing the Internet, watch for and bookmark sites that you believe are suitable for your purpose. You could also do Internet searches for your keywords, then check out the sites that rate the highest in the search engine results.

2) Once you identify a suitable Link Partner candidate, write a complimentary review for the site and post the review on your website or blog page.

3) Contact the webmaster or owner of the reviewed site, advise them of the review and give them permission to publish the review on their site along with a link pointing back to your site as the review source. As an alternative to publishing the review on their site, they can simply include a link that points to the review on your site.

You can apply this Link Partner strategy to any number of partners you choose, keeping in mind that the more link partners you have, the more effectively you will be able to leverage your efforts and expand your reach.

Productivity is the name of the game. Increased sales are the goal. An effective Link Partner strategy can be the ideal means to achieve the desired end.

Article writing is one of the best ways to promote your web site, it’s free and easy to do. Write articles that are related to your web site, then submit them to different article directories. Free of course is a relative term since you do have to take the time to write the article and then submit it to the directories. Though doing this you can receive an increase in website traffic and possibly more sales.

The article process is a simple one and goes as follows: Write an article, read through and correct mistakes, and then submit the article to the directories.

Articles create traffic to your web site from readers who like what they read and want to know more. The reader clicks through to your web site from a link in your article resource box. Make sure your article contains a resource box with a link to your website as this is one of the most important parts of your article.

Your articles popularity has the potential to grow and become what is termed as viral. Viral marketing is when webmasters from other web sites use your articles as the content on their web sites. Allowing webmasters the use of your article, which includes your resource box, allows you to obtain an important one way link back to your site.

By writing more articles and allowing more sites to use them, the number of one way links to your web site increases. Search engines place important value on the amount of relevant incoming links to your website. This helps determine how relevant your web site is to you particular niche. The more relevant your site becomes the higher it may be placed in the search engine results.

Well written articles build trust between you and your potential customers. Writing articles gives you the opportunity to present yourself as an expert in the field of your niche or as a reviewer of a product people want to purchase.

An article could also be a lead generator. When people are looking for information that you are writing about, they may be willing to sign up to a list or newsletter for more information.

I have listed several advantages to using article marketing on the internet. One of the best parts of article writing is that there is no money cost. It takes time to properly write the article, submit it to the best article directories but, when done correctly, the payoff can be enormous.