Okay guys, so what we're going to do in this part of the course is we're going to learn how to set up your accounts for success. So we're going to start with the basic fundamentals of how to craft your account that put you in the best standing to get top rated status as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So we're going to go and touch on the basics of crafting your account in a way that is a tractive to your potential clients. So I'm here on upwork.com on the main homepage, and what we're going to do is I'm just going to start an account from scratch. I'm going to walk through the entire process that I would take now. So we're gonna go to sign up.

I'm gonna put in first name and last name. Alright, so once you've had a data type email address, we are going to fill in some basic information here. So as we already talked about, I am a designer video editor. So that's the category that I'm going to choose here. But as you can see, their categories are quite vast. So pick the one that is most relevant to the skills that you currently have, if you make begin to do design and creative, so I can do animation I do art and illustration, graphics and design.

And video production would be my last one, what skills do you offer clients. So I'm just going to type in some skills and what they're gonna do is they're gonna offer some suggestions that they think are relevant to what you're trying to say. So I typed in branding, they've got branding as it is or branding strategy. I'm gonna go for branding, select the Adobe Creative Suite. So now I'm just going to enter in a few more skills that I have. So these skills are going to be that top skills that clients save currently offer.

And you want to do anywhere between three and 10. And that's kind of what Upwork recommends. So I'm feeling pretty confident with the ones that I've typed in. Now it's gonna ask what is your experience level. And we've got entry levels starting to go to experience in my field of work intermediate, a few years of professional experience in my field, or experts, many years of professional experience doing complex projects. So what I'm going to do for me personally, I'm going to select the experts as I've had many years of professional experience in my industry, but you would have to select whichever one is relevant to you.

Now, the reason this is important that you don't just automatically put expert is expert tends to put you in a different price bracket. So how it works is when potential clients submit a job, they choose what bracket they want to hire from, whether that's from the entry level pool, the intermediate level pool, or the expert level pool. entry level pool tends to be Lower paid jobs, which is essential for building up your portfolio. So even though my experience level for desk is in the expert, I will select the expert that if we were building up my portfolio and my account from scratch, we would select expert, but we would still apply to entry level jobs. So it's important to know the difference between why you would select entry level even if you felt you were in the intermediate field, I'm just going to go ahead and select experts.

Now Save and Continue. Now we're going to add a photo. Now the photo is going to be seen by your client. So it's important that you use a professional photo doesn't have to be professionally taken, but it has to look professional, so it wouldn't be necessarily a selfie. When you take a selfie, the angle and the way the front facing camera on phones tend to work because it gives a little bit of walk to your face. So just have someone take a photo of your face.

So that's where the phone or the camera it doesn't matter. Just have someone take a photo of your face, preferably against a white background to it. I've actually got one saved, I tend to use quite a lot, which is this one here, it's quite old now. So I should probably get a new one, it's going to expand it over the sap of my face. And we're going to say, right, now we're going to choose a professional title. Now, this is important because this is going to be the title of your profile, and what clients will see.

So it has to be a good enough title that it catches someone's eye and has to be relevant to the skills that you're currently offering. So what I'm going to type in is creative designer and video editor. So here's how I would type in my overview, this is one that I've used in the past, and it's a little bit modified now, just because I've put some more relevant experience, but this is a good example. So I took my name, my job is my experience in this job. Here I talk a little bit about what I can do, and a little bit about what my in depth knowledge is kind of just to give them a little bit more of an overview Say when you're looking at your overview, the first maybe three or four paragraphs are going to show the rest is kind of hidden by an expandable cast out that clients can need to click View more to see your whole overview, it's really important that you get the bulk and meat of your information in the first couple of paragraphs of who you are, what you can do your experience and what you're really good at.

So now I talk about the skills that I have and what services I'm able to offer. And that would be anything from the Lego design, business card creation, photo retouching background removal, color correction, and so on and so on. I then talked about how you can have a look at the few of the videos in animation that I've edited, directed or produced. Or you can have a look at my Vimeo channel where which I link to in the product section below. I then finish by saying no job is too small for me to tackle and I look forward to working with you. So just a nice little way to close off the a review directly address the Client without calling them a client or without calling them sir or madam.

Just a nice little positive reinforcement and that no job is too small because we want to let clients know that no matter how big their jobs are, that they feel important, if their job is a $20 job or a $2,000 job, it doesn't matter. We want them to feel important from start to finish, because that leads to great reviews and reviews on Upwork. I wanted the most powerful thing that we can have other than being a top rated freelancer. Moving on, we're going to talk asks us for education, so we're going to click the plus. And it's just going to ask us our school days attended degree area of study and a description there just to keep things nice and quick. I'm gonna type in a brief description of what I actually studied.

So in this description box, it gives you kind of a chance to show off what you learnt at your school, whether that was a degree or a Master's or whatever school You went to even if you didn't do a degree, put your, whatever qualifications you have in your country for your high school or secondary school and fill out that information as much as possible use bullet points. Use this opportunity to type down as much information as you can think of why that was good. Now the reason we do that is because when someone's flicking through your Upwork profile, they're gonna want to see as much information as possible. Even if they don't read it. Just having that bulk quantity there makes you look like a more well rounded freelancer. So now here is just going to be where you add your employment.

Whether you've had 100 jobs or one job, get at least three to four and that it's always good for clients to see that you have had different jobs, freelance jobs, corporate based jobs or self employed jobs. It doesn't matter. Just put them in here so I'm gonna do mine. So once we've filled this out as much as we can, I've just put it in a suit. Quick, super rough, little description about me being a full time freelancer, it is a very good obviously I know. So you would really take some time to fill this out if you have any kind of online CV or online resume that you can just copy and paste, and that's totally fine.

So when we're done, we could either click save and add more, and we can continue adding our employment or we can just finish up and hit save for the employment section. Next up is our English proficiency. So we have a few different options. So for me, obviously I'm native or bilingual, so I would select this one, they're more if you are not native or by bilingual, you can often get hired hired if you are fluent or conversational. However, if you are only basic English proficiency, I would suggest trying to either get better or better at it, study it, maybe take a course on it. And you do just want to be in that conversational bracket just because it is going to show in your profile.

And clients aren't always inclined to hire people whose native language is basic If the client themselves are English speakers, which the majority of them are, at least move up into the conversation bracket, because that is going to give you a better opportunity to work with more clients because they are going to want to be able to communicate effectively. If you are native or bilingual, that means you can just hit okay, but that one, now, an important part is setting your hourly rate. So right here on the workspace where that b is, and that key is 20%. For each job that you do that is under $500. For one client, they're going to take 20%. So I know that is a little bit steep, but it's okay.

Because without Upwork we wouldn't have access to apply to all the different jobs and that itself is worth 20%. So it took me a while to swallow that pill. Once you understand that it's a small price to pay for the potential to connect with all of those clients, you realize that it balances out in the end. So we're going to set our hourly rate for me, I'm just going to be $25 an hour. So for the army, right, they're gonna take $5 now for me personally, I don't like to do hourly based jobs anymore. Do project based jobs because for me, one of the biggest things about being freelance was the ability to stop trading, specifically trading my hours for dollars.

So I wasn't limited to the nine to five type of job routine, I could freelance and set my own price for a project. So I knew what I was going to get at the end of that project. If I did it faster than what I thought it would take, or even slower, it didn't matter as long as dollar amount at the end of that project. So I try and stay away from hourly rate jobs, I have done them in the past, but I prefer fixed based jobs, where you set your own price, and you're not restricted to a certain hourly rate, and you don't have to be monitored the entire time. But for this, I'm gonna do 25 and your availability and location, how many hours do we have? So I'm going to put less than 30 hours?

What type of projects are you interested in? This one doesn't affect how or when you're going to display your profile to clients. So I'm just gonna write longer and shorter term projects, then it's going to ask For your address, so I will type my address. And then once we're done with that we can hit Continue. Alright, so here we are, and we are at the screen where we can submit our application to Upwork. And we have a chance to go back and edit any of that information.

So what that means is once we've filled everything out as best as we can, we submit it to Upwork. If they're happy with everything if they believe you're lying or anything, or if they have any issues with something that you put on your profile, they'll reject it, but normally they're just going to approve it within about 24 hours that they state