How to Optimize Your Freelancer Profile on Upwork
By: Brian Meert
Tags: Business, Remote Working, Entrepreneurship, Job Hunting, Freelancing

Nordwood Themes/Splash

When your freelancer profile on Upwork is optimized, you’re bound to come up in more searches by clients looking for exactly what you offer. The more invites to jobs you get, the more discerning you can be about the work you take on and, of course, the more money you’ll earn. It’s always more lucrative for freelancers to have work opportunities come to them than to go out there and search. 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 big roles:

It’s part of the SEO that will influence which search results your profile appears in. It’s the first impression you’ll make on a potential client.

When you’re contacted by a new client who’s in your target audience, ask how they found your profile. Specifically, find out the search terms they used that got them there. On top of that, conduct your own SEO research to figure out what terms people are looking for. A quick way to do that is to check job descriptions of projects you’d be interested in, then pull out those keywords and play around with them in your title.

Leave Yourself (Mostly) Out of the Description

When you’re ready to describe what you do, make it about the client instead of yourself. Start with a sentence that goes straight to the heart of your ideal client’s biggest problem. For example, “If you train puppies to be model pets for their owners, I can help you grow your customer list with irresistible landing pages.” Then, throughout the rest of the description, talk about your approach and philosophy, always focusing on how what you do will help them.

People don’t care how the sausage is made — they care about the results. If they want to dig into your strategies later, they will, but you don’t have to put that front and center.

Those keywords you uncovered when doing your title research? Sprinkle them throughout your description, too.

Treat Your Profile as Your Resume and Portfolio

Your profile also serves as your elevator pitch and testimonials page. Essentially, your Upwork profile is a one-stop-shop where potential clients can find out everything they need to know without going to a separate website, online portfolio, or LinkedIn page. Also, the more information you fill out, the more Upwork will deem your profile “complete,” which means you’ll show up higher in search results.

Pro Tip: Your portfolio does not have to include every single project you’ve ever worked on — that’s not thorough, it’s overwhelming. Instead, keep it to your very best portfolio examples, with a focus on recent work. And if your work isn’t visual enough to speak for itself, include a description with each portfolio sample to explain the challenge you faced and how you met it.

Fill Out the Work and Education History Sections

These sections may feel secondary to you, especially if you already filled them out on LinkedIn, but even if a lot of clients won’t get past your description — it’s so compelling that they already know they want you for their project — you never know when the information here is going to be useful. Adding information to these sections is pretty much a one-time effort, so get the information in there and then leave it be. You never know when someone is going to have a connection to a past employer of yours or when a potential client attended the same college. Also, part of your educational background can be programs, positions and activities that you feel were educational, even if they don’t fall under the umbrella of traditional, school-based learning.

Regularly Update Your Skills

Upwork has a skills section where you can pick and choose the skills that best reflect your strengths. You should regularly swap out and rearrange skills as you grow in your career, specialize, and get a better handle on what you want to do (and what you’re best at). Arrange the skills in order of importance, and, as suggested before, look at how clients describe their projects for a sense of what to include in your skills section. For example, they may focus more on the services they need, like ad setup or landing page design, than the tools you use.

Set an Attractive Hourly Rate

An attractive hourly rate doesn’t necessarily mean a low hourly rate. Quality clients want quality freelancers, and they won’t be tricked into hiring you just because you’re the cheapest. The clients you want to work with don’t want the cheapest worker available. If you do great work that deserves a premium paycheck, that should be reflected in your rate.

Poke around Upwork to see what other high-rated freelancers in your industry have set for their rates. Then, price competitively. You don’t want to be so much higher than the competition that you can’t rationalize it to a client, but you don’t want to be lower than you deserve, either.

Optional: Create an Intro Video

Upwork lets you add an introductory video to your profile, and while it’s not necessary or even common, it can be highly effective. A lot of freelancers brush by this section, so if you’re the freelancer who took the time to create a video, you’ll stand out from the crowd right away. Worried that it won’t be perfect? That doesn’t matter so much. You just want it to be authentic and professional. Talk about who you are and your areas of expertise, go into your background (briefly, please!) and discuss the projects you want to work on.

Final Thoughts

Optimizing your Upwork profile is one of the best strategies you can employ to attract your ideal clients and earn a steady income. Doing the work now so that part of your job becomes passive — i.e., letting clients come to you — is what every freelancer is after.

Brian Meert is the CEO of AdvertiseMint, a Hollywood based digital advertising agency that specializes in helping successful companies advertise on Facebook. Advertisemint has managed millions of dollars in digital ad spends in entertainment, fashion, finance, and software industries. Brian is also the author of the best selling, The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising, and the innovative The Complete Guide to Digital Advertising Policies infographic. He is a 15-year digital advertising executive and a member of the Forbes Agency Council. Prior to founding Advertisemint, Brian built and sold Gofobo.com, an online ticketing system that revolutionized the entertainment industry and is now utilized by Warner Bros. and Disney.