Microsoft Task Market is a “no listing fee” service that’s in technical preview. The concept of the site is very similar to elance.com. Freelancers make themselves available to answer/assist with questions in their area of expertise. Buyers looking for a little extra help on a project post up their job descriptions and await bids. A screen shot, site link and a few tips from my past elance.com experience are on the next page.

Current examples of some projects posted include: writing advertising copy, designing a brochure, translating Chinese.

To get started, those looking for help post their projects along with the price they are willing to pay.

If you’re thinking of using the service, here are a few tips based on my use of the similar eLance service in the past.

- List your project at less than what you think you should pay (many people bid on these from overseas and the pricing is much less for overseas work).

- For critical projects, consider accepting more than one vendor – assuming that at least one of the submitted jobs may be “sub par”.

- Handle ALL communications and changes via the site and document any and all fee changes.

- Submit as much detail as possible. In the past I’ve made a lot of assumptions. When I listed my web site for re-design on eLance the winning bidder took the existing site (ugly fonts and all) and plopped it verbatim into a new template – resulting in mis-matched colors, fonts, etc. It took me an extra week to explain in detail that a web site design should include matching the fonts and colors. In the end I abandoned the project and did it myself.

Presently Microsoft does not charge a transaction fee to those who use the site — though buyers pay an agreed fee to the freelancers (and Paypal of course charges their own transaction fees). There are only a few listings as of now, and many contain rather vague descriptions of the work to be performed. If you use the service, be sure to spend a lot of time specifying EXACTLY what task you want done.

Link: Microsoft Task Market

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