No matter if you’ve just started out as a freelancer or have been one for some time now, pimping your profile in order to get more jobs is just as important. Yes, it’s not enough to just have it complete, you can also use some tricks to increase your conversions. As this is a two-part guide, I suggest that you start with How to Create a Freelancer Profile Part 1, before reading this (if you haven’t done that already).
Profile Overview Section
Remember when I said not to sell yourself short, when it comes to your hourly rate? Same goes for your profile overview section, only this time you’ll use your words, instead of an amount.
So, what is, in fact, your profile overview section?
It’s the best place where you can promote yourself and tell customers what you can do for them, and why you are the best choice!
Our profile overview section on Upwork has a mixed combination of both direct and indirect selling. Let’s break it into pieces:
- If what you want is just some who will do the work for the least amount of money possible, then you should look for someone else.
Yea, we started our description with a more aggressive line. But we intended it so. The first line, although simple as it may seem, says a lot of things, in fact:
- As we offer quality work we will not accept any low payments for it.
- If you’re a cheapskate, don’t bother contacting us – and this keeps away the low bidders, or makes them increase their offer (one out of two).
- It also says that we have a lot of orders – considering that we can afford to blow off customers right from the profile overview section. And what type of freelancers have a lot of orders? – the ones that deliver quality work constantly.
The thing is that people tend to think that expensive = quality. Although this is not always true, our brain is wired to think this way.
Note: the first rule in selling is to believe in what you sell, in this case – you. Are you confident you can offer high-quality services? Are you sure you can be really professional at what you do and deliver great results? Yes? In this case, why would you say that you work for coins or change instead of asking for real dollars?
Let’s move forward:
- Time and effort are necessary in order to produce the high-quality content that I consistently offer to my clients. The work I put in for these superior results deserves appropriate compensation, in line with the excellent content I am known to provide.
As you can see, we took a more direct-selling approach for this two phrases. I know that we’re even bragging a bit, but if you’re confident in your skills this is a smart move to make. If YOU don’t sell yourself, then who else are you expecting to do it? And if you don’t show that you trust your abilities, then why should people even hire you?
We used three really powerful words in just two phrases: high-quality, superior and excellent. And two of them were followed by the word content. Combined with the fact that we put time and effort in producing superior results, means that we just confirmed the customer what he already thought about us when reading the first line – that we’re professionals who offer quality work and expect getting paid good for it.
I know this may seem pretty complicated for you at first, as it involves some psychology and some selling skills, but, don’t be shy when playing with words and don’t stop testing until you get to a profile overview that really makes people contact you. Our first descriptions were long and boring, and worst of all, they were unconvincing. We changed them a lot of times until we got to this one which we believe it’s been really successful until now.
Just make sure that you don’t jump the horse with the bragging.
After convincing the customer that you’re a great fit for his job, the next logical step is to list all the services that you offer. Don’t limit yourself to just a few broad services, niche everything and again, don’t be cheap on big words. Here’s how we listed ours:
We listed about 7 services, and now that I look at it closely, I think we skipped a few. Not only that you shouldn’t go for presenting only 2-3 broad services, but try to also give them some color, by adding more words to each line. If we were to list our services like I did below, how would this have looked in comparison to how they are really listed:
- e-book writing
- article creation
- proofreading and editing
- reviews
- rewriting
Doesn’t look that cool, does it? Thought so!
This part may not apply to you just yet, as you may not have any reviews. Some customers may still not be convinced, even after the first half of our description. They may just need a small push. There’s no other better stimulator for a client than good reviews! And when you have a lot of them, it’s even easier to persuade customers to contact you. So we sent them there! Just like that.
My Feedback and Work History reflect the excellent content (we used this line again) I’ve generated (…).
Now, the customers will be curious to see if we’re telling the truth, so his next step will be to go and read the reviews we’ve received. And we repeated the same thing again two times after that, just in case we didn’t convince them the first time:
- …and the overwhelmingly positive feedback…
- …my good rating is the best indication…
Bottom line – if you have good feedback, you have to drive the customer to it. You can have the best profile description, the nicest looking photo, the most convincing tagline, but nothing will work as good as 5-star reviews.
Your Freelancer Portfolio Section
Now that I bored you enough with the Profile Overview section, let’s go briefly to the next ones, which are a little bit less important.
My advice for your portfolio is not to add as many items as you can, but to add at least two from each service that you are offering. I’m not really sure how many people even check those samples carefully, as the majority of them ask you to send samples when bidding on their jobs.
But, just in order to have a complete profile, and just to make sure that you don’t leave anything out, add your best one-two samples for each of your services.
Also, make sure that you organize your portfolio categories well, by the name of your services. Here’s a screenshot:
Certifications, Education, and Past Employment – are these important?
Anything that proves your expertise in a certain domain is important! If you even have the dumbest certificate anyone can get, add it there. It may just be that extra factor that will help you stand out from your competing freelancers.
Should I take any tests?
We didn’t take any tests in the first few months. In fact, we believed them to be totally useless. But we were wrong. As I said above, anything that proves your expertise in a certain domain is important. So yes, taking tests, especially when you’re just starting and need to prove yourself to customers is important. In fact, from my calculations, about 20%-30% of the customers are interested if you’ve taken any tests and what results have you had on them.
Creating a complete freelancer profile may be a headache, but it’s worth it if you really want to excel in this domain. Generally, it will only take you about 3 hours to have everything done, so, it’s not that much. After that, you can usually copy paste from the first profile to your other profiles on other platforms. Don’t be lazy! How many times have you wasted 3 hours doing nothing?
And don’t forget – testing is the key to improving your freelance profile!