What is the best freelance online work?

What's the best place to find high paying freelance work in India: Freelancer, Elance, oDesk, or somewhere else?

• I want to look for some freelance/part time work involving advanced excel, vba, data mining, statistics (SPSS,Stata etc) in India. I have never worked independently before. So which of these platforms should I go to and how do I get hold of such a job. I checked out freelancer but it just looks too much cluttered to do anything useful. How safe/reliable are these platforms. In terms of payment. How do they track if it's on hourly rate?

• Answer:

  Go with Elance, its clean and robust. I am into it for more than a couple of years. You will find more serious people playing around there. No problem with payments as long as you understand the basic rules before getting into bidding and proposals. I have earned more than a $1000 via Elance and I am working from Home in India as a full time freelancer. While Freelancer(dot)com site is really messy and cluttered as you said. But the support guys are good behind it. Note: I am not an affiliate partner to Elance.