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Are you saying that you plan to use Facebook as your main website? That is all well and good but I would question whether you will gain much traffic via the search engines where you will be competing with websites that will have a lot more control over content for SEO. Your best method for gathering traffic on a Facebook page will be through effective engagement with the Facebook community... you might find that difficult if you are not familiar with how Facebook works - I would recommend reading a guide first.

If you are doing client work then the pricing structure is barely an expense. 5 reasonable clients should make $99 insignificant - if not you need to increase your rates.

Elance can be pretty good but be wary of the exceptionally cheap providers and be very specific in your brief about what you want.  If you are specific and you try providers out with small jobs to begin with you will find one you are very happy with.

We've had contractors that were an absolute joke and others that exceeded all expectations so it's certainly worth taking a look...

If FB shares updated with the rest of linkscape then it may just be that you have had more shares since the latest update. I'm sure somebody from SEOmoz will confirm if this is true or not. You can see the update schedule here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule