How would you like to get back 10 hours or more to your life each week?
As a personal brand, you want to be able to make sure that you’re spending your time wisely, especially if you ever want to go full-time as a business owner. More time to focus on more sales initiatives. More time to focus on building networks and relationships with other people in and around your niche.
These things take time, and running your day-to-day business takes a lot of time as well. So, you need to make sure that you’re not doing everything yourself, finding ways to eliminate tasks that aren’t necessary, automate what you can and delegate the rest.
When you’re first starting out, you may not have a huge budget or you may want to learn how certain things work yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that. I highly encourage you to learn how to get started with doing some of the day-to-day work so that you understand how it works before you outsource it.
However, there is a fine line between understanding how things work in your business and getting stuck in doing everything yourself all of the time. At some point, you want to make sure that you delegate some of that work to free up your time.
This is where hiring freelancers and using Upwork comes in.
Watch the video:
What is Upwork?
Upwork is a freelancing website. Essentially, you can post jobs on this platform and find freelancers and virtual assistants that can help you move your business forward by completing tasks to free up your time.
Upwork is a great platform to use. I’ve used it to hire most of the freelancers that have worked with me in my businesses. Fiverr is another one that’s great. I recommend you try out a bunch of different freelancing platforms, but Upwork is definitely a great place to start.
How can I find and hire freelancers on Upwork?
Now, there’s two ways you can do this.
#1 – Find a freelancer by searching through profiles on the platform.
#2 – Find a freelancer by posting a job.
If you opt to post a job, there’s a lot of details that you have to put in there. It may get overwhelming when you’re just getting started, especially with the number of applicants that you may get all at once. Because of this, I highly recommend, at first, to search for a freelancer. So, for this post, I’ll be focusing on how to find a freelancer by searching through profiles.
In one of the next posts, I’ll cover how to find a freelancer by posting a job and how to create a job post.
How can I search for freelancers on Upwork?
When you log in to your Upwork.com account, you’ll see several tabs such as Jobs, Freelancers, Reports, and Messages. You’re going to want to look at the first two items.
Now, when you hover on Freelancers, there’s a drop down menu where you’ll see the following options:
- My Freelancers – where you’ll see the list of all the freelancers you’re already working with
- Find Freelancers – where you can search for freelancers for tasks you want to outsource
- Work Diary – where you’ll see your current freelancer’s time spent on work and screenshots of their activity
- Bring Your Own Freelancer -where you can invite a freelancer you’re already working with outside of Upwork and sign them up to the platform
You’re going to need to click on the one that says Find Freelancers. It’ll bring you to a page with a search bar where you can type in what kind of freelancer you need. This functions the same way as the search box on the header of the page.
It automatically pulls up profiles that you can look at, but you can use Filters to refine your search.
There are several types of filters that you can utilize. You can filter based on their job success rates, where they’re from in the world, how many hours they have under their belt, and their hourly rate as you want to make sure that this falls within your budget.
There’s also a lot of different categories you can choose from. Let’s say we’re looking for a logo designer. There just happens to be one category specific to this called Logo Design & Branding.
Even without typing anything on the search bars and just choosing a category, it will bring up a list of profiles that you can review. When you click on a profile, it will bring up their information.
What details should I look at in a freelancer’s profile?
There’s several things that you can view from their profile which serves as their resume, such as their overview bio, skills, availability, languages spoken, tests taken, work history, educational background, and their portfolio.
It’ll give you some good information about the freelancers, but the most important thing you’re going to want to look at is, especially with freelancers that are providing specialized work like graphic design work or developmental work, their previous Work History and Feedback and their Portfolio.
This is very important. If you’re looking at someone who doesn’t have a high amount of stars or good comments, you’re going to want to move away. That should be a no-brainer, but sometimes, people get very frustrated and just go ahead and hire anybody just to get the job done because it’s cheap, right? You don’t want to do that.
The little phrase, “You get what you pay for” is usually, 9 times out of 10, true.
How do I hire freelancers that I’ve searched for?
Once you’ve checked out their profile, feel free to invite them to a job or go ahead and hire them. Although, you may want to invite them first since this is a really great way to look and see who’s available. Aside from these, you also have the option to save the freelancer’s profile for future reference.
If you click on Invite to Job, it’ll ask you which job post you’d like to invite the freelancer to. If you don’t have an active job post, the option that you will see will be Post Job to Invite. You will need to create a job post that you will invite the freelancers to apply to.
If you choose Hire Now, you will be prompted to input the details of your offer. You will need to put in the job category, type of contract, rate, and other details of the job.
You can automatically create a job post from searching for individual freelancers who could become part of your team. So, searching for them is a very good way to get started if you’re new to Upwork. This way, you can first browse the profiles and see what the average prices are around the world. Then, you can go ahead and invite them directly from their profile. So, it’s a very, very quick way to get started.
I hope this helps you get started in hiring freelancers and building your virtual team.
Watch out for future posts where I’ll show you how to post a job, so that freelancers can find you rather than you having to find them.
If you have any questions or want to share your experience hiring freelancers, leave them in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you. 🙂
Leave a Reply