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How to Engage More Clients from Freelance Marketplaces

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Freelancing becomes an exciting career when you know how to acquire new clients. The customers who value your efforts are ready to pay a premium for high-quality work and excellent customer service.

Freelance Writer

Acquiring such clients is becoming more difficult due to stiff competition from freelancers across the world. While new freelancers face credibility issues, experienced professionals find it increasingly difficult to convince potential clients to pay well for quality service. However, some freelancers have maximized their earnings by positioning themselves strategically on various freelancing sites such as PeoplePerHour, Freelancer and Upwork.

You too can significantly increase your client engagement in freelance marketplaces by making minor changes in your approach as explained below.

Tweaking Profile Details

A freelancer’s profile consists of five broad sections:

Profile Image – Put your smiling face as the profile picture. The image can depict your profession, but do not include your company logo, group photographs, or selfies.

Profile Summary – Your profile summary should be brief, concise (no more than 150 words), focused, and error free. The write-up should compel potential leads to start a conversation.

Portfolio – A portfolio is a chance to showcase your attitude, aptitude, and the best work you have done so far in your professional career. Write helpful descriptions about each portfolio item. The content should highlight your unique selling points.

Education and Work Details – You should provide complete information that is relevant to your freelance niche. Don’t describe additional certifications or work details that are not related to your current job profile.

Skill Tests – For new freelancers who have done less than ten jobs on a particular freelancing site, the skill tests play a critical role in you getting new projects. Try to maximize your score in the relevant skills and then highlight them in appropriate bid proposals.

Bid More and Bid Early

On Freelancer, you need to place 45 bids to win one job, whereas on other sites such as Guru, Upwork or PeoplePerHour you need to place 10+ bids to get a new project. Moreover, you need to be quick and place your bid as soon as the project is active on the site. The reason why is because many projects get awarded within an hour or so of being posted on the sites.

Placing bids on old projects will be a waste of time since most of the clients choose the winners within 24-48 hours of creating the job. If required, do subscribe to a suitable membership plan to acquire more bids (or connects). However, never sponsor your bid for a higher bid rank, as doing so rarely helps. It is advisable to plan your bidding and working time to maximize your productivity.

Custom Proposal

Writing a custom proposal for every job you bid is painful, especially after knowing the low project award rates. However, a thoughtfully written proposal will instantly differentiate you from 90% of the bidders. Therefore, it is necessary that you spend some time on writing a winning proposal. You must read the entire project description carefully and look at the attached files before writing the proposal.

The plan should include:

  • A proposed solution to the problem stated (2-3 lines)
  • Queries, or more information requests that will be helpful in completing the project
  • The price you will charge to complete the project
  • The timeline

Due to lack of adequate information, at the time of bidding you might not be able to estimate the right price and amount of time you will need to finalize the project. In this case, you should specifically mention that the timeline and cost will depend on more information provided by the client.

Pricing Strategy

Most of the clients on freelance marketplaces are entrepreneurs who are very price sensitive, so the pricing strategy will have a long-lasting impact on your freelancing career. Your pricing will also decide the project-award rate and, to an extent, customer satisfaction.

You should be transparent about your quote and the factors that might affect the final budget of the project. You must clarify your stand on the number of revisions you do for free, how you charge new requests, etc. If you charge on an hourly basis, you must be able to estimate the number of hours needed to complete a project.

Conclusion

Certain endeavors take their own time irrespective of how much effort you put into them. Freelancing is one such endeavor. There are no short cuts to real success, and you need to work hard to achieve your goals.

Over time, you also need to grow in your understanding of clients. Not all customers are equal. There are some difficult clients who will never be happy with your work, no matter what you do. It is always better to identify such people and say goodbye to them, even if you lose a payment.

Last but not least, you should always remember that “Patience is the mother of all virtues.” So have patience and enjoy the bumps that come along the way of becoming the owner, manager, director and hero of your life.

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Hlib Nikk

CEO at UDeePi
Hlib Nikk is the founder and CEO of UDeePi digital marketing agency. His main goal is to build powerful brand through content marketing and search engine optimization. Feel free to connect with him on social media for a free consultation.
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Comments

  1. Hey there,

    This post How to Engage More Clients from Freelance Marketplaces have full of good contents that gave a clear vision of freelancer.

    Thanks for Sharing!!!

    Reply

  2. Engaging more clients from freelance marketplace, it is important as well. There are various tools used for the purpose of marketing, sales, advertising, SEO, web development, used by various people for growing there business, tools available at https://betapage.co/ check them out.

    Reply

  4. Hi Hlib…

    Thanks for this naurished post that would be helpful for the new frelancers . Its pretty to learn many tips from your post . One thing i want to share is that proper client service is very important to be a successful freelancer and also one should complete skill test.

    Reply

  7. Freelancers can also add some video in their portfolios to personalize it.
    You can share the video of your daily life or at least some list of tips to keep in mind while doing whatever you do.

    Thanks a lot, Hlib.
    Great thoughts. Keep it up!

    Reply

  10. Thank you guys for the feedback.

    I think that we need to keep in mind that all factors are important and we should always work on their improvement. Developing and analyzing new prices strategy, experimenting with the client in negotiations and to try to use different techniques and so on.

    Also I can add that the good communicational skills will be useful too if you want to engage your client for the long term relationships for example.
    Hlib Nikk would love you to read ..How To Stand Out In A Crowded MarketplaceMy Profile

    Reply

  13. Hey Hib,

    When we find ourself in this position, our main objective should be building our reputation, rather than getting paid. This will help us to gain some experience, make some new contacts and begin to build our portfolio. Testimonials can give us reputation as a freelancer a major boost. After we used to complete a project, make it a point to get a testimonial from our client.

    Marketing plays an important role when it comes to landing projects. We need to make ourself known in places where we are likely to find potential clients. To succeed as a freelancer, we need a expertise, a good portfolio and a strong network. Fortunately, we can get started without these assets and build them up over time. Eventually, thanks for sharing your worthy thought with us.

    With best regards,

    Amar kumar

    Reply

  14. Thanks for sharing the information. It is very useful for my future.keep sharing. you can find us on.undergradtech here you can get all solutions related to Technology.

    Reply

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