Upwork — Why I Can’t Get My Profile Online?
To succeed in the freelance world, you must have a valid service to offer and Upwork is not an exception. My reasoning why your profile doesn’t get approved.
It took me 8 months to get a profile approved on Upwork and I spent countless hours analyzing, fixing, correcting, polishing, editing, changing the profile. Additionally, I read every single guide ever published on the Internet on “How to get your profile approved on Upwork” and used every single trick to make things happen.
I didn’t use the black hat tricks that many people use as that is against my ethics and I will not share any dark or suspicious trick here as well.
What I want to share is my conclusion and my personal experience to help people not waste time and get approved quickly.
First things first, every single article that I ever read suggested that you need to have a strong profile. This is true, a strong profile will take you a long way and I am not trying to avoid that part.
I wrote a whole guide on how to start freelancing and you can see it here.
But, before even starting to work on Upwork, you need your profile to get approved and you can see jobs in the system and sometimes this appears to be mission impossible. Here is my story.
I wanted to create a profile for my friend to get her into freelancing and help her get some extra income. I tried for 8 months to find a way and get her into the system. That story includes tons of trial and error and is rather boring so I am not going to share that. What I want to share today is the one thing that helped me get that profile approved.
At one point in my struggle, a friend of mine came to me and asked me to create a profile for him. I explained to him the chaos I was in at that point and he agreed not to have high hopes so we sat down he told me all his info, gave me his portfolio and we made the profile. He got approved in 24h. Whoa!
I was surprised and shocked and that is when I realized what I have been doing wrong this whole time. You need a niche!
Yes, it’s that simple. My friend was a photographer and photo editor and these skills are not that common on Upwork so that is why he was approved that quickly. On the other side, I was trying to get approved a general profile which was Data Entry, Virtual Assistant, and Travel Planner. The skills I was going after were so common that Upwork was oversaturated and simply rejected these types of profiles.
After coming to this realization, I still went after the same niche but I went into extreme detail. The title I went after was Creative-minded assistant | Travel planner | Schedule manager.
Why this profile was approved and the other didn’t?
Because it was specific. It was detailed and it pointed out what I offer exactly.
And there you have it — To get approved on Upwork you need a specific niche. You need to think creatively and describe in detail what are you exactly going to offer to the client and what he/she can expect from you.
So whenever creating a new profile try to be specific as much as possible. Insted of “writer” write the area you specialize best, instead of “IT specialist” tell the internet what is your expertise and knowledge. This will open the gate and get your profile approved quickly.
Do you have a tip or experience to share? Write it in the comments below.
