How To Get Good Results When Hiring Freelancers
When ever I get a project done by a freelancer whether it be articles on Elance or coding on Scriptlance I always get the contractor to sign and send me a 'Work For Hire' agreement by post. I wait for it to arrive before making any payment is made.
I tell freelancers that if the agreement is taking a long time to arrive and they complete the project before the agreement arrives (has never happened this way yet) that they can have the option of scanning in an image of the signed agreement and emailing it for a quicker payment. Even so I still require a posted version of the Work For Hire agreement.
Nowadays I use a free legal agreement that can be seen in the link below which was recommended by Frank Kern, he says he has used the same document for his own ebook projects on Elance.
http://www.copylaw.com/forms/Workhire.html
I've only just relatively recently started getting into hiring freelancers for writing and even though the costs can mount up it is really worth it. I have used some ok and some pretty poor writers along the way but have now found a couple of sources who I use regularly and are great.
In my opnion, if you just keep trying new people you will eventually find someone that works well for you.
It helps to be very descriptive and precise in your project descriptions and also mention that, depending on the quality of work, there may be repeat business – this can add an incentive for them to do a better job and just possibly make them bid a tad lower than they might otherwise have done.
Make it very apparent you want to build a relationship with them, make the process more personal and less cold/distant, especially if you are talking to one individual and not a group of writers.
At the start I was tempted into going with one of the very cheap bids from a non-English speaking country, took a bit of a gamble, and well, it didn't pay off. They got the job done in the end but you could definitely tell the articles were written by either someone in a big hurry or whose English was most not their native or daily spoken language! Go for writers who speak English as their primary language, it well may cost a little more but you can expect more natural writing. That said, there ARE writers who are from places where you would not expect to find top quality English but it is much harder work tracking them down and that should be reflected in the price that you pay.
Filed under Blogging Tools, Internet Marketing Training, Making Money by on Aug 11th, 2008. 
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