I’m registered on oDesk since 2004 and can say that know almost everything about this wonderful service for freelancers.
During my activity I faced many interesting people around the world, participated in amazing and challenging projects and earned some money of course.
I gathered a baggage of knowledge which I would like to share with those freelancers who just started their long way on oDesk or similar site and want to be successful.
Tips for Contractors, Freelancers and Freelance agencies
- Carefully complete your profile, add about section by relevant up-to-date data, upload positive photo
- Add previous experience, describe your role and achievements
- Add portfolio items, list technologies used and mention about your role
- Check competitors, analyse their profile and hourly rates
- Start your career from minimal hourly rate
- Use search function for job postings
- Use email notifications by keywords and tags
- Work on your reputation first
- Try to gain reputation from small tasks for less money or even for free to get positive feedback
- Working on tasks always consider possible client’s feedback
- Be positive, polite and motivated
- When applying for job, check client’s profile for reliability: number of projects and feedback from freelancers
- Be aware that new clients could easily cancel the job any time and give you negative feedback
- More patience. To succeed you need to be patient and apply for as many relevant jobs as possible
- Try to find your own job niche, if you possess some rare or unique technologies it would worth to promote it widely in your profile
- Keep in mind about competition, for jobs postings with popular technologies like HTML, PHP, MySQL it is almost impossible to win contracts
- Try to make from new clients long term partners, think about it when negotiate the prices
- Don’t forget to add 5 star feedback and few words about the client when job is done
- Be in touch with your client even if the project was completed.
Hopefully our suggestions will help you successfully working and achieving desired results, remember the main rule: never give up!
If you have any questions on this article or web design & development outsourcing in general feel free to contact us.