Enhancing Your Elance Profile

February 8, 2009

Enhancing Your Elance Profile

Polishing your image.

Freelancers all over the world are wondering what it takes to land some of the projects that are available to them on the Elance website. Many people choose to take a very serious approach to this while others choose to entice clients to come back to them because of the lightheartedness that they offer making the clients feel as if they are a real person and not a mechanical machine that solely exists to produce a massive amount of articles.

The first thing one will need to do is to connect with the buyers by placing a fabulous picture of themselves on their profile. A profile that does not have a picture will leave the client feeling as if they are somewhat disconnected to the person that they are considering hiring.

On the Elance profile that many freelancers use there is an area in which they can post some of their samples for anyone to view. A great way to land many projects is to offer many samples that are in a variety of writing styles. Search engine optimization articles are going to be different than newspaper articles or excerpts from a book. Therefore if you can place snippets of these various types of articles that have a variety of topics, then your potential clients are going to see that you can research and write about many different topics in a variety of writing styles.

Selling your skill set.

Elance offers what they call the Elance University. Taking advantage of this University and completing the skills tests is vital in terms of being able to land projects. Potential buyers can look at your profile and see where your levels are in each of the various skills. For example, you will be rated on your use of certain computer programs such as Microsoft Word or Excel plus various other types of skill sets. This will also allow you to see the skills that you may need to work on so that you can land more work in the future.

A great profile is also going to consist of background information on yourself and or your business that you are trying to promote. This is a very important area for a freelancer to really connect with a potential client. If you have a writing team then this is the place where you want to discuss the attributes of your team in a way that is going to convey to the buyer that your writers are professional and expedient. This same concept should be utilized if you are an individual as well.

Buyers love to know what your background is and how well you performed in other jobs or on other projects. This is the place where you can ask people who you have worked for before to give you recommendations and to promote your craft. These clients do not even have to be buyers on Elance. Keeping this area professional, lighthearted but not tacky, may quite possibly prove vital in obtaining the projects that you are bidding on. In fact, if you have a great profile you may find that buyers are requesting that you bid on their projects, giving you the upper hand.