Well, here it goes. Like chum to the hungry sharks you are, I offer up that one thing which will turn you from an aspiring freelancer into a competent professional.

Are you ready?

Determination.

lol wut?

It’s becoming a throw-away word anymore, its meaning lost in a sea of motivational posters depicting various animals in precarious situations. However, true determination is the key to being successful in any pursuit.

I’ve said it many ways, but it still doesn’t seem to sink in. I’m asked to babysit people while they apply for jobs or let them look over my shoulder while I work. I don’t have time for that.

Here’s what I do

I follow the advice in this blog, I sharpen my skills every day by reading and practicing, and I apply to jobs. The only difference between me and someone who doesn’t get work is that I do it ten times more. I firebomb the market with my resume, inquiries, and everything else I think may help me find work. I do it for hours on end.

A lot of people think they should succeed because they really WANT to succeed. However, it doesn’t work that way. Just because you really want something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. You can actively work towards your goal and still not reach it. Many beginning fiction writers give up because they wrote a story they think is awesome yet never is published. They don’t edit that story, they don’t read omnivorously to improve their skills, and they don’t write new stories. To be a successful fiction writer, you have to work. It’s not a hobby.

The way to guarantee success is to work harder than everyone else on every application on oDesk and make sacrifices. Instead of going out with your friends, work on your oDesk profile and portfolio samples. Instead of watching another movie, spend two hours working on your career. Instead of (insert mindless activity here), work on finding work.

You don’t have to drive yourself insane by becoming a workaholic. However, you should definitely “feel the burn” when you’re flexing your freelancer muscle. Otherwise, it’s just a casual hobby, and buyers will treat you like a hobbyist.

That’s the one thing you need to find success. It’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the factor that changes everything.

P.S. Feel free (and please do) throw out any topics you’re interested in us covering by posting a comment here or on any post. We’ll be glad to give our opinion, and we’d love to hear yours on whatever topic.

It’s not quite like hitting a brick wall

It was very gradual. I didn’t know I was burned out until it was far too late to do anything about it. In addition, knowing that I was made me even worse. If it had been sudden, it would have been much easier to cope with, but that wasn’t the case.

It all started with having a ton of work. In a professional/career sense, I was doing great. However, I kept piling up more and more work. Then, life interfered with my working schedule. That’s okay because there’s no way to avoid that. The result, though, was that I wasn’t constantly working. I enjoyed having some time off, but I took that time off too far. I never had any time on.

It wasn’t a sudden dropoff, though. I kept working on the projects I had open, finished them up. The bad part was that I stopped applying for new jobs. As a result, I ran out of work. Should that have been a wakeup call? Yes. Did I wake up? No.

Kept going on my merry way. Tried to force the thought of work completely out of my head. I had been under the gun for a long time, and I suppose I was subconsciously trying to keep myself from getting back into that situation.

Pace yourself

I’m recovering now. Taking baby steps. Trying to dispel my irrational fear for all things writing-related. Just seeing an ink pen makes me want to curl up in a ball and wet myself.

How do you keep yourself from crashing like I did? At the risk of sounding like every self-help book to ever hit a shelf, I’ll say this: schedule yourself some “you time.” As corny as it sounds, it actually helps. Treat it like you would treat any project you do on oDesk. If you tell a buyer you’re going to work two hours on something today, it wouldn’t be very smart to go back on that.

Pick a couple hours and stick to them. Turn off the computer. Turn off the phone. Don’t check your E-Mail every 15 minutes. Instead, read a book or watch a movie. Do something you enjoy which has nothing to do with work. The world isn’t suddenly going to crash to the ground if you don’t check your messages. You’ll crash to the ground if you get stuck in work-eat-sleep mode.

Give it a shot. It probably won’t be like you flipped a magic switch which makes life better, but it’s one of many ways to keep you from going crazy.

She couldn’t find the page, which was probably the main oConomy page here which currently shows 248 providers working and 95,545 registered int the system.  I admit that those numbers weren’t calculated to put a new provider in her happy place, but they don’t tell the whole story either.

It isn’t showing how many providers on the network have jobs, but how many people were actively logging time on the oDesk client at the time the numbers were generated.   Given that oDesk is a 24 hour global marketplace those numbers will fluctuate throughout the day and really aren’t anything to worry about.  They certainly don’t reflect the number of providers who are currently employed.  (I expect they’re short by at least one or two orders of magnitude).

Now let’s look at some other numbers from the same page.  There are almost 100,000 providers, and together they’ve earned just under 40 million dollars, which works out to an average of almost U$400/per provider to date.   Since not every provider on oDesk has worked, and that some profiles are so incomplete that the providers are never going to work, the numbers have nowhere to go but up.

When it comes to getting a job, none of those numbers matter.

As I said in the headline:  Chance only matters when it’s random.  oDesk buyers do not select providers by rolling dice. (Well Nelson might, but he’s a special case.)

Buyers select the provider they think is at the intersection of highest quality and lowest price. They go for the most value for money within their budget.

It’s not random at all.  Never has been, never will be.  This is business, not gambling and buyers don’t want to throw their money away.

The end result is that you’re not competing with all 95,544 other providers on the network for any given job.  In fact you’re rarely competing against as many as 10 serious competitors for any given position.  Those still don’t sound like good odds, but that’s just chopped four orders of magnitude off the ratio.

It gets better because they aren’t odds.

It’s not random.

It’s deterministic, and some of the factors are ones you know about and can control and the others are unknowable and uncontrollable.  However even the ones you don’t know and can’t control aren’t random chance.

If you write a great cover letter and your skills fit the job you are very likely to get it.  If you can demonstrate that your skills match your rates you’re even closer.

I’ll go so far as to say that any competent provider with a decent profile (including a picture) and portfolio is guaranteed to be able to find work at or slightly above their category average if they put the time in.  The work is there, and the buyers want it done more than they want their money.

Let me leave you with one other thought about statistics:

While statistics may say only one in ten people can succeed at something, they never tell you whether you’re the one or one of the nine.

I was on another site and someone was hiring members to take and pass the oDesk Readiness Test for them.  Don’t do it.

Just don’t.

oDesk wouldn’t exist if it didn’t make money, and neither would its competitors.  The business model is simple, connect buyers and providers and take a cut off the top.  There’s more to it, but that’s fundamentally how they all work.

It’s much like an agency relationship and it works very well.   Most sites take between ten and fifteen percent and provide various services ranging from escrow and payment through oDesk’s time management software.  The benefit to this method of payment is that it’s performance based and so sites make more money by getting more work for providers.

Some sites have a second revenue stream–

Paid Memberships

Providers pay the site a monthly fee in return for additional benefits over the standard free membership.

On the surface it doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but in practice it does have one major drawback.  It’s a significant change to the business model.  It’s often easier to get a new provider to pay $10-15 per month than to get a buyer to pay $100-150 for a project.  It also extends the site’s revenue stream to include funds form unsuccessful providers as well as successful ones.

Businesses reinforce success.  This means that if they’re getting more money from subscription fees than project fees that’s where they will focus their money-making efforts.

There’s nothing wrong with this from a business perspective, but from a provider’s perspective there is a problem here:  it dilutes the focus on getting new jobs.

Before we go further, let’s look at some examples of membership systems:  eLance and GetaFreelancer both use paid subscriptions, but they take very different approaches.

A free member on eLance gets three bid points per month, and depending on the size of the project it can require anything up to four bid points to put in a bid.  An individual membership is $9.95/month and gives the user 20 bid points and a lower commission percentage rate in addition to other benefits such as a greater number of keywords and more contact options.

A free member on GetAFreelancer has more bid points (I have 25) and pays a 10% commission on all jobs.  The paid membership costs $12 a month, and not only provides more bid points, but also eliminates the commission.  I’ve also never seen a job on GetAFreelancer that required more than one bid point.

Here’s where I see the difference:  GetAFreelancer is rewarding paid members, while eLance is penalizing free members.

I’ve had a paid membership on GetAFreelancer, and only let it lapse because I haven’t been working there lately as my oDesk clients are taking up the majority of my work time.  Should I shift focus back toward GetAFreelancer I will definitely restart my membership.

I haven’t gone for a paid membership on eLance, and part of that is because the free one is so restricting.  My preference is to bootstrap my first job on a site to getting a membership, and with the restrictions on free members, I don’t spend much if any time applying for work on eLance.

That’s the real pitfall of paid memberships, they often make it hard for new providers to get started on a site.

Some might argue that it separates the serious providers from the frivolous but I’m not so sure.  There are other ways to limit bids that don’t involve paid memberships and they seem to prevent frivolous and spam bids just as well as the memberships do.

Alternatives

oDesk uses a combination of skill tests and buyer feedback to limit the number of bid points available to a provider allotting anywhere from five to twenty points a week.  The big benefit of this is that it’s possible to get to the maximum number of bid points right from the start just by taking skill tests, which helps new providers get started.  Once a provider builds up a history it’s all based on feedback, but the skill system really helps get people in the door.

Rentacoder allows people as many bids as they can reasonably make.  I don’t have a lot of experience at the site but I haven’t seen any complaints about spam bidders there.
Personally, I prefer the oDesk approach, but I don’t have a problem with the idea of paid memberships that reward paid members.

Just remember, it’s your time and your money, so be careful.

And for writers remember Yog’s Law.

I often receive questions from freelance copywriters asking me to help them find the “right niche”.

That’s a reasonable request.

Finding the right niche for your freelance copywriting or writing business will help bring some focus to your marketing, and will help your prospects identify you as an expert in that area.

For instance, if you choose to become a specialist in the insurance industry, prospective clients within that industry will be reassured that you know their business and speak their language.

However, there are more ways to “niche” yourself than simply by choosing a particular industry or industry sector as your area of specialty.

You can also create a name for yourself as being the specialist in a particular medium. You can focus just on print, or just on web writing for instance.

Choosing a niche either by industry or medium is often as far as freelancers will go in terms of separating themselves from their competition.

But you can go further than that.

Instead of just thinking about a “niche” to focus on, sit back and ask yourself a broader question…

“What is the best way to position my skills and services in a way that differentiates me from other writers or copywriters?”

Here are a few examples of ways in which you might position yourself:

• The 24-Hour Copywriter (For those super urgent jobs)
• Multilingual Copywriting (English, Spanish and French, for instance)
• Y-Gen Copywriting (We know the 16-24 age group)
• Web-Ready-Copy (Copy plus design plus code)
• Fixed-Price Copy (We stand by our price list. No surprises.)
• Fast Content Writing (Fast content creation for web sites)

The list is potentially endless.

Think about it a little, particularly if your own freelance website simply presents you as a “freelance copywriter” or “freelance writer”.

Unless you’re some kind of celebrity in the industry, it’s not enough just to describe your baseline skill…writing or copywriting.

You have to work harder than that.

Maybe find yourself a niche, by industry or medium.

Or find some other way to position yourself and your services.

But whatever you do, be sure to find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Let’s start with what I consider the three most important factors:

oDesk is a free market

oDesk costs money to run

oDesk only makes money when providers make money.

Understanding those three points is vital if you want to understand how oDesk works.  Yes the oDesk Readiness Test is important, as is knowing how to work the oDesk Team, but there’s nothing really all that hard about either.

So, join me on the other side of the fold and we’ll discuss our three factors:

Glad you made it across safely.

Now, where were we?  That’s right, we were discussing how oDesk works, and to start at the beginning let’s talk about a free market.

When I call oDesk a free market I mean that it is free of artificial constraints on the cost of services.  Every provider is free to set their price and every buyer is free to set their budget.  Providers are not required to take a job if they don’t think the pay is worth it and buyers are not required to select a provider if they think they are too expensive.

I’ve seen people work for $0.50/hr and I’ve seen people work for more than $100.00/hr.  I’m not talking about posted pay rates, but about amounts that people have actually been paid for jobs they have done.

That’s a huge range, and the free market is why it’s so large.

We all know that data entry rates are the lowest on oDesk.  There are a number of reasons why that’s the case.  One reason is numbers, there are just under 33,000 providers who list data entry as a specialty.  That’s second only to web programming with just under 34,000.

At first glance you might think that would put the pay rate for web programmers into the same ballpark, but if you do you’re forgetting the other half of the equation:  Job availability.  According to the most recent oConomy figures, there were 4725 web programming jobs, and only 1035 data entry jobs listed.  That means there are seven web programmers for every job, while it’s close to 32 providers for every job in data entry.

Another reason why it’s low-paying is that for the most part any two data entry professionals are pretty much interchangeable.  Yes there are differences in speed and accuracy, but the final product from two top-ranked data-entry people should be identical.

This means that the only things a data entry professional can use to distinguish themselves from the crowd are quantitative factors, not qualitative ones.

If you combine the fierce competition for a limited number of positions with the interchangeability of providers on a qualitative level you have a recipe for low rates.  That’s how the market works.

It may just be a coincidence, but the average rate for web programmers is about five times that for data entry, and they have one fifth as many providers for each opening.  Data entry is very much a buyer’s market.

The above should show why data entry in particular has such low average rates, but what about other fields?

Providers in other fields have something else to distinguish themselves:  Quality.

Some coders are better than others, so are web designers and writers.  This level of ability gives them something else to distinguish themselves.  They can say that the reason they are worth more than their competitors is because they provide a better product.  That gives them something else to set themselves apart and another way to justify higher rates.

Again, it’s the free market at work, this time in the other direction.  Good providers who are in demand can charge more because people want those providers specifically, and they only have a finite number of hours.

The next thing to remember is that oDesk has expenses.  oDesk Team cost money to write, and the servers cost money to keep up.  Then there are other expenses such as paying the staff and interest on financing.  The details and the amount are unimportant for our purposes, all we care about is that they exist.

Finally, we come to to the point that oDesk takes a proportion of what each provider bills.  Their earnings go up at the same proportional rate as each provider’s do.

These last two give oDesk the strongest incentive possible to drive provider rates up rather than down.  They’re in business to make money.

If you’ve followed the community for any length of time you know that people are always complaining about pay rates.  This is usually followed by a request for a minimum wage.  Unfortunately what seems to be forgotten is that this would simply be the first constraint on an otherwise free market.

Constraining a market is never a step to take lightly.

The first problem is that oDesk doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  If oDesk constrains its market, then people looking for a free market will simply go elsewhere.

The second is that it’s impossible to constrain the bottom of the market without constraining the top of the market as well.  Setting a wage floor makes it harder for people to rise above it.  They can still do it, but neither as quickly nor as easily.

Many of the arguments for a minimum wage on oDesk have to do with questions of social justice, saying that people are worth more than some arbitrary minimum.  Other arguments have to do with people saying it’s uneconomical for them to work for less than said minimum.

In the latter case the answer is simple, don’t apply for jobs you cannot afford to do.  Buyers are not responsible for your financial health.

The first case is a little more difficult:  Questions of social justice tend to move the argument outside the boundaries of pure economics.  Most countries do have minimum wage laws in place, and many of them invoke either basic human rights or the social contract to do it.

Let’s start by making one thing clear:

A minimum wage is irrelevant because we are talking prices not wages.  oDesk providers are contractors selling services, not employees earning wages.  So what people are really discussing are price controls, not minimum wages.

Remember that.

Once people accept that the discussion is about price controls rather than minimum wages, it becomes easier to understand why the various issues of social justice don’t apply to oDesk.

People don’t live on oDesk.  They live in cities, towns, states, provinces, and countries.  All of those places have their own jurisdictions and the right to set minimum wages for people working there.  They also collect taxes to pay for services and implement programs of social justice.

Don’t conflate a marketplace with an employer.

You can make money on oDesk.  If you’re good at what you do and know how to sell your services you can make quite a lot of money.

If you understand how it works you’ll make more.

What they say about us.

The thread started with someone who wanted to sell writing services to Marketing Directors. Marketing Directors, or MDs, are huge users of writing services and in the off line freelance world MDs are high grade targets. What caught my interest was the responses and advice from former MDs. Especially the gripes about freelance writers. Here’s the list:

• Freelancers who focus on money and contracts over a working relationship. “Don’t talk money before we even get the details hashed out. I want to be convinced you are the right person for the job before I have to think about the mechanics. I know you have to get paid, you seem like an amateur if you jump into contracts and payment too soon.”
• Freelancers who aren’t committed. “I managed my local staff, my cross country staff and my overseas staff. If one dropped the ball, I had recourse by going over their head or impacting their salary review. I could manage their behavior because we were on the same team.
  If my freelancer dropped the ball, I had no recourse. Sure, I could deny payment but I still looked bad to my bosses. Since most of them didn’t seem to care if I ever hired them again, I had little power to get the work done…well.”
• Freelancers who lie. “Maybe they need the work, and that’s why they lie. They tell you they have skill X or Y and it’s plain, after you get started, that they just don’t. Samples are a good start, but there’s no substitute for having something done for me directly. And too often, for whatever reason, they just can’t produce what they claimed. Along with this comes the excuses. Unlike ‘real’ employees, freelancers seem to feel they can just stop work or do a poor job if they have any sort of personal or equipment problem- it’s a disease.”
• The Prima Donna Syndrome. “I write, and I hire writers. I have to- there is plenty of work; more than enough. But some writers think they are the be-all and end-all of writing. As if I couldn’t hire another two or three whenever I wanted. I’ve got lots of things in the works, I don’t have the time to deal with wannabe Stephen Kings (if you are Stephen King, I’m not hiring you anyhow). Bottom line: You work for me. So work.”
• Whiny, needy freelancers. “Pretty much the same as above, but presents as: ‘The job is too hard. I don’t have the resources or the time.’ These folks have an endless series of complaints and excuses. And if I have a criticism, don’t take it personally. I can’t stand it when freelancers don’t listen, when they get piqued because I need a change. I’m not out to offend, I just want the final product to meet my expectations and my vision.”

This isn’t me, is it?

I’m a professional. I don’t do any of these things.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Life has a funny way of punching you in the face with undeniable examples.

The very next day, after reading all these comments from MDs, I became the jerk they were talking about. I was due to write a few blog postings for a new client. This client had some clear particulars and objectives in mind, and for whatever reason, I focused almost entirely on the formatting constraints. She wanted certain links and images in each post.

I wrote one to specifications and, being happy with it, sent it off.

The reply included some comments about tone and style. My first attempt wasn’t personable enough and didn’t meet the listed criteria in that sense. The formatting was OK, but the content wasn’t up to par.

Oh boy! I was miffed. Someone hadn’t immediately fallen in love with my writing. That night, I sent off a snide email (oh yes, as writers we do a great ‘snide’) implying that the work was too hard, underpaid, and suggesting they hire another writer. In short, I was being the petulant child. Just the opposite of how I think of myself and precisely the model of what MDs hate.

A happy ending.

Thankfully, and beyond all reasonable expectation, she wrote me back the next day perfectly calm and businesslike. She graciously left me an opening to try again and said she hoped I wasn’t quitting.

Of course, by this time, my Mr Hyde had calmed. I could see clearly what a jerk I had been. I apologized and took up the reins again. I got lucky- I was dealing with a grownup.

The bottom line.

As freelancers, we live mostly with ourselves, mostly in our own heads. We need to be careful that we don’t catch the disease of thinking the world revolves around us and our individual concerns. It takes a bit of self discipline and watchfulness to avoid becoming a jerk. We are kings of our own little worlds, but we have to be good diplomats when we seek to trade outside our small kingdoms. It’s all about relationships. Don’t be a jerk.

I’ve been writing about money a lot lately, and not just because it’s one of my favorite things.   Today’s topic is a grab-bag of tips that can help you make more money for your work on oDesk.

Let’s start with one obvious fact that doesn’t always seem obvious to some of the posters in the Community:

oDesk wants you to bill high

That’s right, it’s in oDesk’s best interest for you to have as high a billing rate as you can manage to pull in.  They don’t want you to get jobs by underbidding everyone else, they want you to get jobs by proving you’re worth more to the buyer than everyone else.  oDesk gets paid by the buyers just like you do.  They want you to make more money because the more you make the more they make.

They have an even greater incentive for providers to raise rates than most providers do because they only get ten percent of the bill rate.  So if I make ninety dollars they make ten.   If I’m working at a charge rate of $1.00/hr they only get $0.10/hr and that’s not really worth it for either of us.

So if someone tells you there’s a conspiracy to keep rates low just laugh at them.  oDesk isn’t going to have anything to do with a conspiracy to make oDesk less money.

Okay, now that we have that squared away, on to the tips:

Tip 1) Don’t Do Data Entry

Lots of people put data entry down as one of their skills, and in some ways it makes sense.  for the most part it’s a job anyone can do if they just take care and pay attention to what they’re doing.

It’s also the lowest paying job category on oDesk

One reason it’s low paying is that it’s essentially commodity work.  There’s no way to put your own unique stamp on data entry so you cannot build a reputation as being the best person for it the way you can with some other fields.

It also doesn’t require any special training or even skill at the English language.

I don’t mean to disparage the job, but if you want to make a lot of money on oDesk it’s one category you should avoid.  The money isn’t there.

Tip 2) Don’t Lower Your Rate On An Invitation

Here’s an example of how lowering your rate can come back to bite you.  A provider with a very high rate (twice the category average and it’s a high average rate category) received an invitation to a position.  When they accepted the invitation, they offered to do the job for about a quarter of their billing rate.

What happened?

They were turned down because they charged too much.

Personally, I never lower my rate on an invitation and here’s why:  Anyone who invites me to do a job has already seen my rate before making the offer.  They wouldn’t have offered if the rate wasn’t acceptable, so why should I drop it?

Also, if I do drop my rate, I’m sending at least one of two messages:  a) I’m desperate; b) I have no confidence in the value of my work.

I don’t want to send either message.  The other thing that might happen is that if I do drop it the buyer may push to see how low I am willing to go.  If I drop my rate by seventy-five percent, maybe I’ll drop it by eighty percent, or possibly even more.  I don’t want to get caught in that trap.

The other problem is that the amount you were paid stays on your profile.  If you quote $50.00/hr and all your jobs are at $15.00/hr there’s no reason any buyer will ever pay you $50.00/hr.   You’ve sent the message that your real rate is $15.00/hr.

Lower rates on past jobs don’t hurt you if they show a steady pattern of increasing rates.  There’s nothing wrong with showing a few jobs at $5.00/hr, then $10.00/hr, $15.00/hr and so on.  That shows a normal upwards progression and doesn’t make the buyer think you’ve been undercharging all along, but rather that your rate has been increasing with time.

Tip 3) Let Your Profile Fit Your Description

Provider profiles are a huge subject, and I could go on for hours about them.  Right now though, I just want to focus on one aspect.

Make sure your skills reflect your area.  If you’re a writer who dabbles in programming, list your writing skills first, not your skills coding Flash or debugging HTML.  Further to that, if you have multiple areas of expertise, list the one you most want to work with first.  That’s the one you should be focusing on.

This doesn’t apply if your preferred skill is data entry and your other is voice-over, since those have the lowest and highest average pay rates respectively.  If one skill is going to pay you much more, focus on that one.

Okay, I’ve started you off.  If anyone has other tips for raising their average rate feel free to send them along.  Everyone wants to make more money and as long as your work is worth it there’s no reason you shouldn’t be working at the top of your category.

I mean you should always try to make yourself look more appealing to buyers. Don’t make it seem like you are better than you really are, though. The key is to actually make yourself better and allow that improvement to show through when you’re interacting with people and working with them.

People in the States are especially bad about this. People of the younger generations are even worse about it. There’s this nasty misconception that people should like you for who you are. That you’re unique, special, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate you is just jealous.

Your Mother Was Lying to You

If you’re a blithering idiot with absolutely no ability in your chosen field, people won’t like you. You’re not special, you’re hardly unique, and the reason people don’t appreciate you is because you’re rubbing them the wrong way in ways you can’t even imagine.

The good news is that you can change that. It won’t be easy, but you should do it.

Being a buyer is a lot like holding the gun in a hostage situation (and we’ve all been there, haven’t we?). That last thing you want is for your hostages to start telling you their name and about their kids. It makes it much more difficult to off them when you’re trying to make the point that you have no intentions of playing around with the law enforcement officials.

In terms of freelancing, if you make yourself more human to the buyer, it will increase your chances of being noticed. That’s the whole reason you’re supposed to write custom cover letters for each job. It’s much easier to deny an application which appears to be submitted by a robot. If you submit a letter to a job which appears to be a cut-and-paste letter sent to everyone else, the buyer will move on to someone else. Working with a robot is a pain because they can’t make intelligent decisions, so you never want the buyer to view you in that manner. And believe me, they will view you that way if they see 30 other applicants with cut-and-paste cover letters.

Once you’ve made yourself appear to be an intelligent person on the other end of the text, you’ll be noticed. However, being noticed doesn’t mean that you’ll get the job. You need to always work on self-improvement. One of the major, cross-discipline skills you need to master is communication. If you’re a native English speaker, you should be able to write with correct grammar even if it’s simplistic. If English is a secondary language for you, the same applies if you’re working in an English-speaking market. It will impress any buyer if you can communicate with them effectively as it’s such a rare skill.

Take time to speak intelligently, professionally, and with great care. Don’t say the first thing that comes to mind when you’re speaking to them. Filter everything you say before you say it. These seem like obvious things to do, but it’s still very rare to actually see these principles in practice.

The same applies for your profile and everything else the buyer will see about you. Your portfolio, profiles on other freelancing sites, and anything else they can find with a quick web-search can affect your standing with a buyer. Run it through the filter and edit it until it is, as far as you know, perfect.

Now, you’re looking as good as you can. Time to improve yourself. By improving your skills in communication as well as your field, you are also giving yourself a chance to improve your profile. Research new technology, read trade journals, and practice your craft tirelessly to give yourself an edge.

Eventually, you will find that you are unique, you are special, and you will stand far above your competition as a leader. If you don’t put in more work than everyone else is willing to, you won’t get there, and your application will get sent to the slush-pile along with all of the others who can’t cut it.