When your freelancer profile is optimized for Upwork, you'll likely show up in more searches from clients who are looking for exactly what you offer. The more job offers you receive, the more selective you can be in your work and, of course, the more money you earn. It is always more lucrative for freelancers to receive job offers than to go looking. In this article, we'll go over the best ways to optimize your Upwork profile so you can work smarter, not harder.

Spend Extra Time Writing Your Profile Title

Your Upwork profile title plays two important roles:

• This is part of SEO that affects search results where your profile appears.
• It's the first impression you make on a potential customer.

If you are contacted by a new customer who belongs to your target group, ask him how he found your profile. Specifically, find out what search terms they used to get there. Also, do your own SEO research to find out what terms people are searching for. A quick way to do this is to review the job descriptions of the projects you're interested in, then extract those keywords and play with them in your title.

Leave Yourself (Mostly) Out of the Description

When you're ready to describe what you do, you should be referring to the customer, not yourself. Start with a sentence that gets right to the heart of your ideal client's biggest problem. For example, "If you're training puppies to be model pets for their owners, I can help you grow your client list with engaging landing pages." Then, for the rest of the description, talk about your approach and philosophy, always focusing on how what you're doing will help them.

People don't care how the sausage is made, they care about the outcome. If they want to dig deeper into your strategies later, they will, but you don't have to focus on that.

Those keywords you discovered in your title search? Sprinkle them in your description as well.

Treat Your Profile as Your Resume and Portfolio

Your profile also serves as an overview and testimonial page. Essentially, your Upwork profile is a one-stop-shop where prospects can find everything they need to know without having to visit a separate website, online portfolio, or LinkedIn page. The more information you fill in, the more "complete" Upwork will consider your profile, which means it will appear higher in search results.

Pro Tip: Your portfolio doesn't need to include every project you've worked on; it is not exhaustive, it is overwhelming. Instead, limit yourself to the best examples in your portfolio and focus on recent work. And if your work isn't visual enough to speak for itself, include a description with each sample portfolio to explain the challenge you faced and how you overcame it.

Fill Out the Work and Education History Sections

These headings may seem secondary to you, especially if you have already filled them out on LinkedIn, but even if many clients do not exceed your description, it is so convincing that they already know that they want you for their project, we do not never know. if the information here will be useful. Adding information to these sections is pretty much a one-time effort, so get the information there and leave it at that. You never know when someone has a connection to a past employer or when a potential client attended the same college. In addition, programs, positions and activities that you consider educational can be part of your educational journey, even if they are not part of traditional school-based learning.

Regularly Update Your Skills

Upwork has a skills section where you can select the skills that best reflect your strengths. You should regularly swap and reorder your skills as you progress through your career, specializing and improving in what you want to do (and what you're best at). Rank skills by importance and, as suggested above, look at how clients describe their projects to get an idea of ​​what to include in your skills section. For example, they may focus more on the services they need, like ad settings or landing page design, than on the tools you use.

Set an Attractive Hourly Rate

An attractive hourly rate does not necessarily mean a low hourly rate. Quality clients want quality freelancers, and they won't hire you just because you're the cheapest. The clients you want to work with don't want the cheapest labor available. If you're doing a great job that deserves a bonus, your salary should reflect that.

Check out Upwork to see what other top-rated freelancers in your industry have set for their plans. So competitive price. You don't want to be so above the competition that you can't justify it to a client, but you also don't want to be below what you deserve.

Optional: Create an Intro Video

Upwork lets you add an intro video to your profile, and while that's not necessary or common, it can be very effective. Many freelancers go through this stage. So if you're that freelancer who took the time to create a video, you'll immediately stand out from the crowd. Worried it's not perfect? It's not that important. It just needs to be genuine and professional. Talk about who you are and your areas of expertise, talk about your background (briefly please!), and discuss projects you'd like to work on.

Final Thoughts

Optimizing your Upwork profile is one of the best strategies you can use to attract your ideal clients and start earning a stable income. Doing the work now in a way that part of your job becomes passive, i.e. letting clients come to you, is what every freelancer is looking for.