Create Your Own Freelance Bidding Site With WordPress

Need to outsource some work to contractors? If so, it’s fairly simple to create a job bidding site for freelancers, using WordPress as your CMS.

The ‘reverse auctioning’ model of outsourcing has surged in popularity over the last decade. Most of us will be familiar with sites like Elance, OzLance, Freelancer, oDesk, Guru – the list goes on.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, freelance bidding sites are the easiest and cheapest way to outsource work these days.

If you’re not content with hiring through one of the major freelance sites and want your own piece of the action, you can create your very own job marketplace on WordPress and customize it ’til the cows come home.

How does a freelance bidding site work?

If you haven’t encountered one of these sites before, the process works like this:

1. The client posts a job advertisement on the site, detailing the work they need done (be it web design, copywriting, programming or whatever).
2. Freelance contractors search through these job listings to find gigs they are qualified for.
3. Contractors engage in a process of ‘reverse auctioning’, where they place a quote, or bid, on how much they are willing to do the work for.
4. The client can then compare the quotes, look at the skills and experience of the bidding contractors, and choose the freelancer who they feel is the best value or most appropriate for the job.

So why bother creating your own bidding site when there’s a million out there already?

For starters, it’s free! You might shell out come cash for plugins and themes to get your bidding site off the ground, but once it’s up and running you can hire contractors without paying a commission to anyone.

Make your own rules. The major freelance sites like Elance have strict conditions governing the hiring and payment of contractors. Want more flexibility? If you own the site, you make the rules.

Niche it up. If you’re hiring for one particular type of work, it’s much easier to attract talent with your own niche website.

Instead of burying your job ad in an enormous freelance website that gets 5,000 new listings per day, create your own exclusive space and advertise directly to the freelancers you need.

So how’s it done?

There are a couple of different ways you could approach this, depending on the kind of functionality you need from your bidding site.

Use an auction plugin

A plugin like WP Auctions or Prospress (both free) can convert your WordPress site into a fully-featured bidding marketplace, where people can sign up as members to either post ads or bid on jobs. Both these plugins integrate with PayPal, to send and receive payment for work completed.

These plugins are used primarily to auction the sale of goods, eBay style. Yet it’s just as easy to run a reverse bidding process where you advertise jobs instead of physical items.

This is a video tutorial for installing the WP Auctions plugin and setting up your bidding site, courtesy of eHow. It doesn’t address reverse auctioning specifically, but gives you an idea of how the plugin works.

If you want to go the whole distance and create a bidding system with the same features as the major freelance sites, using an auction plugin is generally your best option.

Alternatively, create a basic job board with contact form

If you want to go for a more bare-bones approach, you can create a freelance bidding environment with a simple job board plugin and a contact form.

There are plenty of plugin/theme combos that allow you to advertise jobs on your WordPress site, both free and premium. Just search for ‘job board’ on WordPress.org.

Including a contact form will allow interested freelancers to get in touch with you and place their quote for the job. There are more free contact form plugins than you can shake a stick at, all of which perform the same basic function.

If you’re willing to pay $40 or so, with Gravity Forms you can create a highly-customized and professional contact form, to elicit the exact information you need from the freelancer, such as:

• Their price quote for the job
• Timeframe and schedule for completion
• Previous experience and qualifications

Gravity Forms allows you to create a custom field for each piece of information you need, ensuring that every freelancer gives you a complete and accurate quote.

Earn some passive income at the same time

Once you carve out a healthy niche for your freelance site and start getting a lot of interest from good contractors, there’s an opportunity to make some easy passive income.

If you’ve created the site primarily to outsource your work for yourself, you could charge a fee to let other clients post their own job ads. Once your site develops a reputation as a good place to find talented freelancers, people will be willing to pay something for privilege of using it.

Have you tried this yourself?

If anyone has created their own reverse auction or freelance job site on WordPress, we’d love to hear about it.

Thanks to Luke Martin and Nic McPhee for the photos.