The first tip is – be 100% professional during the bidding and interview. Make sure that your messages have no mistakes, that you are polite and that you are posting information required for taking the project (like samples of your work and some ideas about how to complete the project.)

Pay attention to the buyers profile. If the buyer has a lot of serious projects running or already spent like $20.000 on this marketplace – pay extra attention to this project and his projects in general. You can offer him to do the job for a small rate. If you impress him it is possible that he will offer you work on some of his upcoming or current projects, or will contact you in a while to offer some work.

Stick to the buyers that have no problems with paying you the money that you consider okay for the completed work. There is no need to waste your time on some poorly paid job if you can earn more. Still defining the appropriate sum requires a skill that will come after five six completed jobs.

It is important to remember that this is all real life and while the buyers may be looking for cheap top quality freelancers, they understand that a real professional will work only for some serious rates. There is nothing wrong about bidding more that a buyer offers and argument this with good quality. It at some point the buyer will understand all the negative sides of low-quality work or simply gets tired of low paid unreliable workers (especially if he provides work in some serious areas like mobile devices or large web development projects). So it is possible that you will be the one who will rework or finish the project for the price that you set.

It is important to remember that a project is lost only when it is completed by someone else. I had some situations when I wasn’t selected during the interview, but due to some problems with the selected provider, I ended up as the one who finished the project and was paid for it.

And the final tip – don’t be upset if you lost the job especially if you were interviewed. It means that the buyer was interested in you and you already have some chances to get his next project. So try ending the negotiations with something like “Thank you Mike, feel free to contact me if you need some of my services.”

1. Examine the rules of the website concerning the profile and the profiles of the top freelancers in your field. This will help you with some basics of how a good profile must look on this website.
2. If you already have a resume use it as a basis, if not take some time and make a document with your complete work experience and skills. It is important to remember all your previous work experience before filling out your profile.
3. Try to choose a general strategy of yourself as a freelancer. For example if you are good in SEO focus the first lines and words of your resume on SEO skills and experience. Try not to present yourself as a do-all guy.
4. Try to highlight your main skills in the description and make sure that the client will immediately see these skills when he goes to your profile. There is no need to mention all the programming languages you know if you use only PHP or JAVA. You can make a list of these languages in some secondary information fields.
5. Avoid bright colored elements and any additional creative stuff, focus on the main thing – presenting information to the client.
6. Post samples of your projects if you have done some outside the website that you are working on. It is also good to post the offline working experience, especially if you worked for some serious companies.
7. Check the project sample links from time to time, especially if you are in search of new projects. It might happen that the website with your work is down or the URLs were changed. Also be honest about your work, if the work was done some time ago and it was done not very well, better drop the link from your resume.
8. Be sure to have everything clear with the copyrights of the work that you’ve done. If you are not listed as a developer it is better not to present the project in your portfolio. It can lead to some misunderstanding with your previous clients.
9. The best thing in a profile is a list of projects already done on the website. So if you are a newcomer try to get three-five properly done projects, it will show that you are a trustworthy person.
10. If you are a writer – get a blog. If you are a web-developer or a SEO guy – get a website. And give your best effort to keep this website good looking and properly coded. Be sure that it presents you as a professional.
11. Make a small downloadable and printable version of you portfolio.

That’s all for today, folks :)

Keep in mind that you are advertising yourself to the buyer and use the most effective strategies of advertising. For example everyone knows that buying a larger pack of snacks for example is economically more effective than buying three small packs, but not everyone can use such ideas in freelance. In negotiation with the client you are selling your time and skills, so try to show that you have good quality and most important flexible and negotiable prices. It gives the client a feeling that he has an influence of the situation, while you are the one who will define the price in the end.

Another good pricing strategy are bonuses. Don’t hesitate if you see that a part of clients website for example is poorly coded or needs additional search optimization, offer to fix the problem for a bonus fee. In one of my latest projects I easily raised the article price by %5 with simply offering additional meta tags for each page. Of course %5 won’t give a huge sum but for a 200 articles project it will already be a difference. So remember to grab as much extra work as possible especially if the buyer pays well.

The most important thing that you need to know about pricing is: don’t be afraid to loose the project because you wanted too much; there is always another project nearby.