We’re excited to announce the launch of the oDesk Store!

We’re featuring three awesome designs to celebrate oDesk love:

The store is still in beta, but you can browse through the designs and make purchases today. All of the purchases are handled by Printmojo, who will process and arrange all of the shipping through their secure site.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Wow, those are some pretty cool T-shirts. I wish I was a savvy graphic designer and could come up with something like that for my company.”

We’ll let you in on a little secret. Our marketing department didn’t design all of those T-shirts — we outsourced it! We posted a job on oDesk and browsed through provider profiles (particularly those who specialize in graphic design). We found Ivan A., hired him, gave him an idea of what we were looking for, and then let him get creative. Ivan also designed the look and feel of our oDesk Store (he used a customizable PHP script from Printmojo).

So even if you don’t have an ecommerce or design background, you can still put together a pretty cool T-shirt store

We’ve releasing a new feature that allows you to create custom RSS feeds for your RSS reader or site!

Looking for high-paying copy editing jobs to advertise on your forums? How about programming jobs that demand specific skills? Don’t waste your time wading through job posts — have them sent directly to you.

How does it work?

1. Select your job search criteria. Let’s say you’re a PHP developer interested in only long-term projects that pay per hour.

Head over to our job search page and enter in the criteria that fits your project. In this example, we’ve entered:

* Keyword: PHP (only in titles and skills)

* Hourly Jobs only (Full Time: 30+ hours/week)

* Buyers with at least 1 job (this will include buyers with some experience)

Click “search” and you get jobs that fit that specific criteria. To have those jobs sent to your RSS Reader, right click the RSS link on the right hand side of the screen to copy the link. Paste it into your RSS Feed Reader and when those jobs are posted on our site, they’ll be sent straight to you!

Ready to optimize your site so that you get a notable increase in traffic? Here are some ways to boost your SEO. Want to learn more? We’ve also included a list of resources if you want to delve deeper.

1. Links! Links! Links!

– First, do your research. Use this cool backlink search tool to find out who is linking to you and what kind of anchor text they are using.

– Next, hire a provider to compile and organize a list of sites your competitors are linked to. Have the provider find the contact information for those sites.

– Finally, the pitch. Find a provider knowledgeable in SEO who can pitch your site to the owners of your competitor’s sites. SEO Moz, a blog on all things SEO has a great post on link building. Beware of spamming, though. Nobody likes that.

2. Blog Away. Write content that is interesting, controversial, or funny and people will link to you. Not the best writer? Find a blogger on oDesk. Find bloggers you like that talk about your industry and link to them. Most bloggers religiously check their backlinks, so they’ll link to you too if they like your site or product.

3. Make Your Anchor Text Relevant. Missing valuable keywords on your pages? Do you have a lot of “click here” and “learn more” links on your site? Hire a copywriter to get rid of them and include anchor text that is relevant and descriptive about your company and product.

4. Do Some On-Site Cleanup. Crawlers read text only, so make sure your text is positioned properly on the page so that it is easily read by users and crawlers. Use Semantic HTML and CSS to make sure crawlers have no problems finding the right content.

We’ve included only a tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO, but here are some resources to check out if you’re interested in learning more:

• Google Secrets
• SEO Moz
• SEO for Firefox
• Matt Cutt’s Blog (Google software engineer who works on search)

Does this all seem a little overwhelming to you? Don’t have time for SEO? There are SEO consultants on oDesk who can help you with many of these strategies. Or, submit questions to the people at SEO Forums to get some clarification.

We’re already excited for the new year!

We’ll be hosting the first meeting of the Silicon Valley Outsourcing Group on January 9th at 6:30 p.m.

Join us for this Outsourcing Roundtable and share your outsourcing experiences. We’re looking to gather IT professionals and business leaders in the area to discuss the benefits, challenges and best practices of outsourcing.

Never outsourced anything in your life but you just finished Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week and you’re curious about the buzz? You’re welcome to attend, too!

RSVP on our Meetup.com group or check out our event on Facebook. We’ll be serving food and drinks, so come by and learn a little about how outsourcing can improve your company’s performance.

Hope to see you there!

Check out
The Silicon Valley Outsource Group!

When people think of outsourcing, they often think of India. Or Russia. Perhaps the Philippines, or Bolivia.

When oDesk was founded, the idea was to connect small- to medium-sized businesses around the world with providers worldwide who could provide IT services at competitive rates. All around our site are images of globes and mentions of the words “global,” “international,” “worldwide.” Certainly a great number of our providers are international.

So it came as a surprise when we looked at recent data and discovered that U.S.- and Canadian-based providers are the fastest growing group on oDesk (when these two countries are added together).

How did we measure this?

We looked at the number of providers working over a set time period grouped by country. When we last looked at this data, the U.S. held spot number two in terms of the number of timesheets submitted by providers. Add the U.S. and Canada together, and bam, you’ve passed India.

What’s interesting, though, is then to look at the number of hours providers worked each day. Our providers in Asia continue to log in over 50% of the total hours logged each day, while U.S.-based providers log a lower percentage. What this suggests is that while providers in the U.S. are quickly joining our network, they are likely supplementing their incomes with jobs from oDesk (and thus not working a full workday on our site), while providers in Asia, including India, are more likely to be working full-time for oDesk projects.

Still, as U.S.- and Canadian-based providers continue to accrue feedback and work history on oDesk, I wonder whether they will slowly begin to switch to becoming full-time freelancers and we’ll thus see a growth in the number of hours logged by North American providers. We’ve already got some full-time North American-based freelancers on our site — take Keith S., for instance — who’ve left typical jobs and have never looked back.

What do you think? Do you see U.S. as the next outsourcing hub?

Geeky guys in blue shirts and khaki pants? Silly made-up domain names? 23-year-old CEOs? Twenty-somethings flocking to Palo Alto to strike it rich in the land of opportunity?

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“Here comes another bubble” has got it all. We stumbled upon this hilarious video from the Richter Scale blog about the sheer ridiculousness of Silicon Valley. It opens up with Peter Thiel (of PayPal fame and an early investor of Facebook), who states:

“There’s absolutely no bubble in technology”

and takes us through the crash of the last bubble to now, where companies like Facebook are being valued at $15 billion (Ford, by comparison, is worth around $16 billion, the video informs us).

If you’re in the Valley (and even if you’re not), you’ll definitely enjoy this clip.

We did want to note one thing: Several media outlets have been buzzing about one bubble indicator: made-up, off-the-beat domain names (the Wall Street Journal calls it the Goofy-Name Index). The video even pokes at several names currently in use (Meebo, Flickr, WikiYou)… etc.

But there is value in having a unique name. For one, people remember it. They associate that word with your company, and your company alone. And when they search for your company, you’re easy to find. Try doing a search for “oDesk” on Google. You’ll find us right away. (And if you’re curious about the origin of our name, check out the oDesk page on Wikipedia).

And after you’re done Googling us, watch the video again. I did, and couldn’t stop laughing (despite weird looks from cubicle-mates).