Elance.com and oDesk.com both provide freelancers a great opportunity to showcase their skills and find work. The sites work as a marketplace for freelance work – allowing “buyers” to submit job openings and “providers” to bid (apply). Buyers can also find providers to fill their needs by searching their profiles to find the best match. Each site has no shortage of openings posted but, there are a few differences between each.

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By now many home business owners has ventured their way onto Twitter to help market their company. Marketing is the key to success for most small businesses and Twitter can indeed be a great, free way to promote any product or service and gain customers.

However, how you “tweet” really determines how successful the microblogging site will be for your home business. Here are some of the things that may get you unfollowed just as quickly as you were followed:

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If you have a home business website and do not offer an email opt in function then you are potentially losing out on an awful lot of business. Spam is a big no no in the world of successful internet marketing so building an opt in email address list is priceless.

You may have spent days, weeks even months building your home business website. Your analytics tell you it is receiving a steady amount of traffic, yet your actual sales are not going up too high. Before you blame the product look at the way your site is set up. You have no guarantee those who surfed to your site will ever return again, so you may have only one shot at capturing their long term interest in your company by grabbing their email address.

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Taking the leap and starting your own at home business takes fortitude, strength and determination. However, all of things can be bolstered with a mentor to guide you along the way. A mentor is an individual who serves as an advisor, an example, a sometime sound board and possibly a friend.

Finding someone who has already walked the path you intend to tread can prove invaluable, both from a business and a personal standpoint. Finding such a person may take a little while but making the effort to do so will pay off big dividends for the newbie home business owner.

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As blogs and article marketing have become essential for home business marketing many people who haven’t really put pen to paper since high school find themselves faced with writing fresh and engaging content on a daily basis. If you are one such person there are a few easy steps you can follow in order to become a better writer, whether you are writing a daily blog post or just trying to come up with 140 engaging characters on Twitter:

Step 1 Just Write! – Many people get stuck because as they are trying to write a creative and intelligent set of sentences they get bogged down, by editing each line as they go along. When you first sit down to write, do just that. Don’t worry for the time being about spelling or comma placement, get your ideas down first.

Step 2 Edit – After you have all your thoughts down and your draft is completed is the time to begin editing in earnest. Read your piece through once and immediately make note of any required changes that are glaringly obvious. Consider your initial choice of words too, could the prose be better, does what you have written actually make sense?

If you rely on a spellchecker to catch your errors be careful. The average program will catch most of them but if you wrote “your” when you really meant “you’re” it won’t correct you, the word is spelt right and this a computer, not a literature professor.

Step 3 Read it Out Loud – Read your piece out loud, either to yourself or to a friend. This will help you catch what you may have not by just visually reading the piece through, especially when it comes to proper punctuation. If you are not under a huge deadline put your work aside for an hour or so and then go back and read it through again. Does it still sound as good as you thought it did?

Follow these simple guidelines and you should find that writing for marketing purposes becomes easier every day, until one day you wake up and its almost second nature.