As a freelancer, it’s one thing to have relevant skills and experience in your industry. It’s another thing entirely to acquire clients and keep them coming back while referring their colleagues to your exemplary services. Here’s how to make a good freelancer profile clients will notice and click.

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Freelancer Profile Must-Haves

With up to 57 million Americans entering the gig economy in 2019, standing out as a service provider or fractional executive is crucial to winning loyal clients. Your online profile can boost your visibility and reach, or it can get lost in a sea of competitors. 

Here are the key elements of a good freelancer profile:

Start with a clear headline.

Keep your headline simple and brief. Include your title, experience, and target clientele. Here’s an example:

 “John Smith, Senior graphic designer, 10+ years helping small manufacturing businesses create SEO websites that get reliable traffic and conversions online.”

Showcase your value.

If you helped a business owner launch four successful service programs in one year, that’s part of your value. Same if you increased another company’s warm leads by 30 percent in six months.

In this section of your profile, list your key accomplishments along with a description of the “how.” (And, it’s not just because you’re brilliant.) Focus on how you curated tools, the leadership tactics you employed, or the precise innovations you introduced and their results. 

A few shining examples of your value will suffice in this profile section. They should be your proudest moments, always emphasizing the value of results through your work experience.

Back up your accomplishments with experience and learning.

Include a brief history of how you came to your genius. Showing a willingness to learn continually in your career means a potential client can rely on you to bring the latest innovations into your service. Letting customers know the depth of your experience in the field shows that you have wisdom only time and practice can grant. 

Going about 10 years back in your history is a good timeline. Age discrimination is sadly still a “thing,” even if it’s not intentional. There’s no need to state the year you graduated college if it’s longer than a decade past. 

Emphasizing your current and continuing education to reflect that you embrace industry changes and technology evolution will help you get noticed. You can also include links to your writing portfolio, project work, or other samples in this section.

Problem-Agitate-Solve.

In any successful freelancer profile, you should tug at the emotions of your ideal clients. Painting a picture of their pain points, stirring the emotional pot a bit, and then positioning yourself as the solution is a good freelance profile strategy. 

Begin by calling out your clients with a general label, like “hard-working start-up CEOs.” Then, describe the top 3 challenges, goals, or headaches they face. Connect those pain points to an emotion (frustrated, annoyed, overwhelmed, bewildered, etc.). 

Then, describe what you’ll do for those clients and how they will feel after working with you. Like: “After I boost your lead generation, you’ll relax knowing you always have new potential customers in your pipeline. I make lead generation easy, so you can end the struggle and focus on product innovation instead.”

Provide clear and simple contact info.

Choose a professional-sounding email address, provide your website, and include a phone number. This information should go on all your social and professional channels.

Photos make a difference.

Though it’s okay to change up your shots a bit for the channel you use, always keep them neat and professional. For instance, LinkedIn is the place for a professional headshot. On Instagram, you might include a more casual profile picture, but it should still look pulled together and professionally made. 

You’ve created a good freelancer profile. Now what?

Storing your profile in a document you can edit and manipulate will make freelancer life a bit easier. You can select sections of your profile to post on several different channels.

• Website: You can post a pretty robust profile on your “About” page. It’s okay to have a higher word count here because users click this page precisely to get more information about who you are, what you do, and how you do it. You can also pull out key bullets from your profile to use on your Home page and service description introduction.
• LinkedIn: As the consummate channel for professionals looking for work, your LinkedIn profile requires deeper time and consideration. You can include all the profile points above. The Problem-agitate-solve piece can go in your LinkedIn “about” section.
• Instagram and Pinterest: If you have a visual service area like design, Instagram, and Pinterest are your best friends. You can fill your feed with relevant photos of your designs.
  Do your best to stay “on brand” with your image posting, and check your feed for symmetry and composition. You want to have a pleasing representation of your visual work. Your visual feed should flow, along with clear pointers to your profile points in the captions.
• Facebook: This channel allows more detail with your profile. Plus, if you launch a Facebook client or professional audience group, you can also include your full profile details in the group description and purpose statements. (Of course, you’ll pick and choose which of your profile points feel the most relevant for the audience at hand.)

Let Your Good Freelance Profile Evolve

It’s paramount to update your profile regularly. That’s why it’s smart to keep your profile doc somewhere you can access it whenever you’ve had a huge client success story or massive project completion with favorable results.

Plus, if your services grow and expand, you’ll want to shout it from the rooftops as well. 

Voyageur U is in every freelancer’s corner with relevant resources, a supportive professional community, and valuable networking opportunities. Visit our website today to discover how membership can lead to your success.