Elance for Freelancers

I believe I mentioned Elance awhile ago, but never had a chance to really look into them. Since Demand Studios has been extremely slow the last few months, I finally had the chance to work with elance a little bit.


Here's how it works: You sign up and make your profile. You have the choice of going with a free membership or purchasing a membership. The free membership comes with 10 free connects a month. Paid memberships come with more depending on which one you purchase. You can then search through literally hundreds of job offers for various freelancing jobs including ghost writing, blog post writing, article writing, web design, sales, admin support, and legal work. Each job is posted for a specific amount of time, sometimes two weeks, sometimes longer. You can "apply" to the job by submitting a proposal. A proposal includes information about yourself, the skills that you have pertaining to the job listing, and some samples of your work. You will also tell them what pay you are willing to take for the work. Each time you submit a proposal, you use one of your "connects", so if you go with the free membership, you can only apply for 10 jobs. I'm trying out the free membership to see if it would be worth purchasing more connects. The job poster then chooses from the applications who they think would be the best for the job.

Choose the jobs wisely. My advice is to only submit a proposal to a job listing that you truly have the experience and skills to do. You may also want to give them your lowest price possible on the project, because many of the job posters will only look to find the cheapest price for the work. I saw some postings only offering  .50 for a 300 word article. My time is more valuable than that, sorry.

I've already gotten one job offer. I haven't started yet, but I will update here with how it is going. To ensure your payment, you can submit a timesheet via elance so that you won't get ripped off for the services you have given. I could see this having some great potential as long as you find the right job matches for you!

Sign up with elance here.

Anyone else have experience working with elance? Good or bad?

My Memories Scrapbooking Software Review and Giveaway

How many of you love to scrapbook? How many of you like to scrapbook but don't have a lot of time to put into making your scrapbooks? I'm in the second category. I love to scrapbook, but it takes a lot of time to cut and paste everything together, decorate it, crop photos...etc. I've heard of digital scrapbooking but never tried it until now.

I've recently tried the My Memories Digital Scrapbooking software and love it so far! You can pick a pre-made background template for your page or you can design your own. Putting photos into the pages is as easy as double clicking, selecting the photo, and cropping it. You can add fancy text to your pages and even add embellishments. They have a nice choice of embellishments, everything from ribbons and flowers, to buttons and other graphics. You can also purchase additional pages and embellishments to use for a small charge. It's so simple to do, I did these two pages in just a few minutes.

Once you have your pages completed, you can either print them out to put into a scrapbook album or you can share them online.

YOU can have a chance to win the My Memories digital scrapbooking software for free (a $39.97 value)! 

This contest will begin September 2 and end September 16.

Mandatory Entry: Leave me a comment telling me how often you scrapbook!

If you don't want to take your chances with the giveway and are itching to try out digital scrapbooking, you can use my special code to get $10 off your purchase of the My Memories software. When you purchase the software, you will also receive a $10 coupon that can be used towards downloads, so that's a total of $20 savings! All you have to do is go to this link: My Memories Digital Scrapbooking Software and enter this code: STMMMS19110 into the promo code box and you will get your discounts!

Sweepstakes and Giveaways!

The other day, I was watching TV, and one of those new sweepstakes shows came on. It was showing two people who spend their days entering sweepstakes. One man makes a living from it by spending 8 hours a day entering sweepstakes. The things that he wins, he either keeps or sells. He has won trips and even a $50,000 car! This peaked my interest. I like to get free samples, so why wouldn't I like to win free stuff?? I always overlooked the giveaways on blogs because I just thought it was too much work to like this and follow that, but I gave in. I've started entering sweepstakes and giveaways. I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to it right now because I am doing my externship for school, but I will be done with that at the end of this week and then will have some time to put into entering sweepstakes. The things that I don't want, I will attempt to sell on ebay or craigslist. Well, that's assuming that I win something, haha. I have to admit, it is a bit tiring entering so many forms, but if I start to win some things, it will hopefully be worth it. This is just something I'm trying out; if nothing comes out of it, I will give up, but I will never know without trying.

My first suggestion is to make a separate email address for the giveaway and sweepstakes entries. You will most likely get a lot of spam mail from signing up for things, so if you don't want your regular email cluttered up more than it probably already is, make a separate address.

Do any of you enter sweepstakes and giveaways? I want to hear your story! Have you won anything? Tell us about your experience!

Here are a few of the websites I am using to find giveaways. Feel free to add your favorites in a comment and I may eventually make a big list for everyone.

About.com Contests

The Buck List

Giveaway for Prizes



Also, be sure to follow me on Twitter as I will sometimes post about specific giveaways I am entering, and you can enter, too!

Oh, and I may be hosting my own giveaway soon, so keep coming back, especially if you love to scrapbook!!

Strange Travels

Thanks to Wm Rowe

I like going on vacation but I especially like it now that I’m married! My honeymoon was my first real foray into international vacationing but now that I’ve got a taste I can’t imagine anything else I’d rather do. This year my husband and I are going to go to Croatia which I’m so excited about but it’s going to be an expensive trip so we’ve been saving for quite a while! I went toHttp://www.home-alarm-systems.COM/to get a system for our new house before we left and I made sure I could pack in a small bad so we don’t get charged flight after flight for a checked bag (we’re flying three times once we get over there) and other than that and one last hotel I think everything’s booked. Flight prices to Europe right now are just outrageous but this is somewhere we’d always wanted to go so we figured we might as well go ahead and check it off the list. Afterall, you can’t take that money with you, am I right?

*This is a paid post