Online Business Ideas

Build your own local freelancer site

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Freelancing was once considered as a part-time affair. It was hard to believe that one can earn his living through freelancing. But things have changed over the years with the revolutionary changes in digital technology. Freelancing is now a full-time profession for many people across the world and they are earning a hell of a lot of money from freelancing.

Many employers now prefer to get certain jobs done by online freelancers through a process of bidding not only because it costs less but also because it’s easy and less bothering. Freelancers working under certain global online marketplaces were also proved to be dependable in terms of timely delivery and quality of service. Sites like Elance, Freelancer, oDesk, and 99designs are the examples of this type of successful model.

So why not develop your own online freelancer marketplace – if not for global but for the freelancers of your own country? You don’t need to know coding and design works to develop a powerful freelancer site. Developing a freelancer site has been made easy by a WordPress theme called ‘HireBee,’ which was developed by Appthemes.

hirebee

HireBee is a freelance marketplace theme for WordPress. Employers post projects and freelancers start the bidding. You setup the pricing plans and take a cut of each project. It’s easy to monetize any niche by providing a crowd sourced project matchmaking service.

HireBee offers a flexible, but powerful pricing plan system. It gives you plenty of ways to generate income through creating multiple pricing plans. You can assign plans to categories, and offer featured projects on home page and category pages. You can also monetize on freelancers proposals via “Credit Plans”. These are similar to pricing plans but they use a credit system that enables freelancers to send and/or feature proposals. Credit plans can be set to be sold as single or packs of credits.

HireBee is escrow ready and for each agreed project you can hold the money until work ends (via PayPal Adaptive Payments). On completed projects, the money held in escrow will be automatically transferred to the freelancer adter deducting site commissions. For non completed projects, employers are automatically refunded.

You can also customize the project form using HireBee’s powerful form builder and add your own custom fields.
Other key features of HireBee are as follows:

Foundation Framework
Foundation is one of the fastest and best responsive design frameworks out there. It’s easily accessible from any browsers or mobile device and very popular amongst developers and designers by virtue of being so easy to work with.

Clean & Simple Modern Design
HireBee follows the current trend for a clean and simple modern design. Choose from five built-in color schemes or customize using the WordPress tool.

Notifications
Every important action in HireBee triggers a notification that will be immediately visible on the users dashboard and is also sent by email so users are always up to date. Notifications can be managed from the users dashboard.

User Dashboard
The dashboard is the nerve center for your site’s users – a single page where they have access to all their notifications, projects, proposals, purchases, reviews, contact info, site stats and favorites. Each project is clearly marked with their current status.

Monetize Your Site
Creating a marketplace for employers and freelancers can be a great source of income. With Hirebee, you charge for posting, featuring and mark projects as urgent, and for posting and/or featuring proposals.

Separate or Shared Roles
Usually employers posts projects, and freelancers apply to projects but sometimes employers can also be freelancers and vice-versa. You can easily give this flexibility to your site users by enabling “Shared Roles Capabilities” so each role share capabilities.

Participants Workspace
After a project is assigned to a freelancer, both participants, employer and freelancer, get access to a unique workspace where they can manage the project. It acts like the core hub for a project where all the related information can be accessed and managed.

User Favorites
With so many projects available, users need to choose the ones that better fit their skills. Users can mark projects as “favorite” so they can view them in their customer dashboard.

Terms Negotiation
After an employer chooses a project candidate, it’s important that both parties agree their terms for the project before the official assignment. At this time, employers and freelancers can negotiate with each other until they are both happy or unhappy with each other terms.

Choose Candidates
Employers can easily access their projects proposals from within their dashboard and from there analyze and choose the winning proposal. At this time, the proposal author becomes a candidate to work on the project.

Save Filters Widget
Frequent users should be able to browse through their most relevant projects without going through all the categories and subcategories each time they need to find projects. HireBee provides a simple solution through the use of a widget that allows your registered users to save any filter for later use.

Fast and Easy Project Matching
Through skills, category or location type filters your site users can easily find the most relevant projects for their skills.

Credits Perks
Give something to your users to make them coming back to your site. Perks in HireBee are represented as free credits for freelancers. Site owners can offer free credits for each new registered user.

Besides you will get a dedicated blog in HireBee which you can use for publishing marketing contents. It’s part of the theme, yet completely separated out using the native WordPress posts module.

The theme is SEO friendly and is built to instantly take advantage of SEO best practices. You can also change the look of your site with a 3rd party child theme and add additional functionality with an aftermarket plugin. You can also easily customize functionality without having to modify the original code.

You can purchase HireBee for as low as USD 99 with facilities, such as lifetime license and free update and support for 12 months. Once purchased, you can use the theme for unlimited sites.

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