Hello and Happy Monday! I’ve been in contact with a person at Upwork, formerly oDesk, who brought to my attention that my profile is going to be featured when prospective clients search terms like ‘graphic design’ and ‘writing’. But I had to tweak some things. I also read an article linked in the email, and it led me to some things I might be able to elaborate on for newbies to freelancing. Here’s the article if you want to check it out . But this post can stand alone if you want to just get your basic info here. First of all, Upwork is getting rid of the 5 star rating and basing rankings on job success rates. I’m one of the profiles with a high success rate, making me ‘top rated’. I think this is a good thing, since sometimes job will end and people just put a 5 star rating without any comment. I’ve also had to hire people, so I think on both the client and contractor side this is much more helpful. As an independent contractor, Upwork is really helpful. But I also get clients from past projects that come back off of Upwork. Word of mouth and cold emails from the website, even random people on Twitter. But there are some key things I do just to ensure that the project runs smoothly and I get paid.
To Google Search their company online. Always google them and check out the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, etc just to make sure they aren’t sketchy.
Interview the Client Ask a lot of questions in the interview process. Some of my first questions are the following:
What is your budget and what is your deadline?
For your flat rate, what do you expect?
If it’s per hour, how many hours are you willing to budget for this?
What file formats do you need?
What are your preferences? If they have a branding guide or a specific number of words that’s helpful. SEO keywords that they want included, etc…
Can you show me examples of what you’d like? Who are your competitors?
Know Your Contract Law Get it in writing! Don’t start work until you get a contract, preferably some amount of money in an escrow hold. That’s why I like Upwork so much. But I have other clients outside of the site who I’ve had a long working relationship with. As long as their account with me is in good standing, I’m comfortable working with them.
Get a Deposit I bill my clients who are not on Upwork via Paypal. It’s fast, it’s easy, and even if they don’t have a Paypal account they can pay with a major credit card or debit card. I also like the format for making invoices. And at the end of the year I can just print them all out and get my taxes done.
Communicate Often Touch base often with clients during the job. If it’s pretty straight forward there really is no need to. But if I have a question, I don’t hesitate to fire off a short email or even a text. Skype is really useful for this. Even the Facebook Messenger app is really useful. I like it because you can see when someone saw a message, when they’re online or on their mobile phone.
A Note About Social Media Of Course, if you are going to converse with clients via Facebook, make sure you create groups like friends, close friends, acquaintances, people I work with, so when you go to post your political views or what you had for lunch it doesn't always become a public post. Definitely make these changes in your preferences, and choose your audience for every post just to be sure. Happy Clients Make Me Happy, But… I am by nature a people pleaser. But I have my limits. If I need more money, I ask for it directly. I’m not an ‘I’m sorry but I need insert thing here’ type of person when it comes to my business. I make my needs clear at the start, and I usually don’t budge unless it’s a not-for-profit group. And even then I’m very clear about what I’m comfortable with doing for them.
More Information About Working Smart
I have some tips about writing resources here. I actually posted something like this on Tumblr, mostly as a student resource. But in addition to this, I recommend we all backup and backup often. I use three cloud storage places just to make sure if one fails at least there are two others. I definitely have backup plans for backup plans. So nothing is ever really lost forever, if a client has a mini heart attack if they lose a file, it’s no big deal.
My big three are: OneDrive (via my windows phone) Dropbox (also via phone but also on my tablet and desktop computer) Google Drive (basically anywhere, phone, tablet, pc)
Originally posted on Tumblr:
I’ve been writing for clients for a while now. I think since 2002-ish. A lot of them want certain formats and I honestly haven’t opened textedit or word since maybe 2000. So here’s how I work just for anyone who’s interested. Probably helpful for students mostly.
First, I do everything in Google Drive. It’s free and all my stuff is in one place. Also, I can access anywhere, even my phone. But for some reason it won’t work on my kindle fire, but maybe there’s an app for it. I just haven’t really looked.
If your professor or a client wants something specific like a word doc or a pdf, you can just save the file as a different format. You don’t even have to download it to your device, just save it to your google drive, you can make a folder if you like but I don’t really do that. I like to be able to see everything in chronological order, so the last thing I worked on is first in the line up.
And I still use the Longman Writer’s Companion. I checked on Amazon and it’s like $17 but I’m sure you can find it online in a pdf form or an ebook for much less or even for free. It’s just helpful if you have to look up something specific like how to cite multiple works in the text and random things like that. But of course the internet can probably answer all those questions too.
But honestly this works really well. www.easybib.com/ just makes your citations but in a bibliography form. It won’t format stuff that has to be cited within the text of your paper. But definitely helpful.
Okay, so my grammar stinks. And English is the only language I speak so you’d think I would eventually get better at this but nope. I often copy and paste my papers into the free version of Grammarly. I like it because it picks things up that the google drive spell check sometimes doesn’t. And it helps with sentence structure, run on sentences, etc… which hello I am so guilty of.
For plagiarism detection I go to multiple places on the web. I used to use Small SEO Tools but I found it to be glitchy over the past few months. So I go to various places that will ckeck things for you FOR FREE www.plagtracker.com www.paperrater.com www.thepensters.com/free-plagiarism-checker-for-students-online.html www.plagscan.com/seesources/ It’s good to go to multiple places to check for plagerism just so you can show proof that it wasn’t just one place on the web that checked your work. AND you can make videos and slideshows in Google Drive! No need to buy expensive software. Just go to create new and pick 'Google Slides'. There are a bunch of pretty templates, and when you go to save>save as> you get the option to save as a powerpoint presentation or even save as a pdf if you need to print out a booklet. Saved my life on multiple occasions.
