Importance of Writing Good Proposals on Upwork

Recently I needed a bit of help to finish a freelance project withing a tight deadline so I decided to outsource a part of work.  I've been using Upwork in the past few months as a freelancer, but outsourcing some work gave me a valuable insights on how the whole things appears from a client's perspective.

I need a few WordPress pages completed,  as I do freelancing  myself I know how frustrating it can be when a job has unclear or misleading requirements. So I made sure that job requirements are short as possible, concise and easy to understand. Despite all that more than half of the proposals I received contained questions that would not have been necessary if the applicant had read the job description. 

That being said it was obvious that most freelancers that applied were just using templates for applying as most of the cover letters looked very similar. I used to make this mistake when I first started freelancing and I know with certainty that when clients spot that a freelancer is copy/pasting a template they will most likely completely ignore that application. 

The applications that I did review in detail were more personalized, they did not include an overly detailed cover letters with portfolio samples, since clients see your Upwork profile which should already have your portfolio and work history displayed there, so there is no need to duplicate this.

A good application should start with a greeting that is somewhere in between being warm and professional, but not to formal. Also an application that has potential should get straight to the point, freelancer should just attack the problem and propose a solution. Using list for bullet-points explaining each step is a very good idea. Also using shorter paragraphs instead of writing a novel.

After about three days, I noticed that some of the freelancers were taking a very long time to answer a few simple questions so I declined their proposals, naturally. I decide to hire a guy who seemed to have done a lot of WordPress work and was more prompt then most when replying to messages.

After the all was done I had some mixed feelings about the freelancers work: I noticed that I need to supervise every little detail, even though the job requirements were crystal clear. I guess the freelancer was a little unpleasantly surprised when he realized that I knew what I was talking about, he used images instead of simple text columns even though he was using a page builder which makes working with page layout extremely easy.  After all was said done I had to make a lot of the corrections myself due to the approaching deadline that was set by the client who hire me. It was a valuable learning experience for me.

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