One of the things you need, in order to be successful as a freelancer, is a good profile. Most clients will want to have a good look at the profile (examining even the ‘minor’ details), before awarding you projects. Thankfully, your freelancing profile is something you have control over, and with the right effort, you can progressively build a solid freelancing profile. Worth mentioning is the fact that some bits of the profile can be created at the time when you embark on your freelancing career, whereas others take some time to build up. Some of the measures you can take, at the initial stages, towards building a solid freelancing profile include:
Selecting a Professional Sounding Username: Ideally, this should be descriptive of what you do. If, for instance, you are a programmer, and you come up with a username like ‘code-master,’ you will impress clients more (at first impression) than another programmer who opts for the username ‘white-lily.’ If you are an essay writer, you can opt for something like ‘essay-bot’ or ‘best-essayist.’ True, all the best names may have been taken, but you can win by using a combination of letters and words: like if ‘code-master’ is taken, you can opt for something like ‘code-master1’ or ‘code-master411’ and so on. Just ensure that your username is attractive and professional-sounding. It can make a lot of difference.
Coming Up With a Nice Tag-Line: This should describe your freelance service provision business in a sentence.
Coming Up With An Elaborate Description: On most sites, you have to write a description of what you do on the profile page. Make this truly descriptive of you as a person, the services you provide, what sets you apart from other service providers and so on.
Attaching a Professional Looking Photo/Logo: Don’t just put a random graphic there or, worse still, leave the picture/logo space blank. Attaching your own photo here enhances trust (on the part of the prospective clients, at a subconscious level) and it is something you should consider doing.
There are other aspects of profile building that may require more time (but which you should nonetheless pay close attention to, knowing that these are the elements that make all the difference). Those include:
The Skills Aspect: The nature of most freelancing sites is such that your skills as a freelancer are listed on the profile page. In some sites, you declare the skills by way of simply clicking on check boxes. On other sites though, you have to take exams, and the exams you have taken as well as your scores in the respective exams are listed on the profile page. Whichever the case, you will have to know that your skills are paid close attention to by clients, and see to it that you have the right skill-sets.
The Portfolio: You need to figure out a way of getting a good portfolio fast, especially if you are in areas like graphic design, website design and so on.
The Feedback Aspect: The feedback you get is a function of the number of projects you bid for, and how well you execute them. If you over-deliver on what you promise clients, and you bid for a decent number of projects, you should soon build a reputation. That reputation would manifest on the feedback: for example, the number of positive reviews you manage to accumulate.
