New guy needs advice about cover letter.

[2012ed3e]

Hi all, Tim here. Wrote my first cover letter today for my first job propsal. In that cover letter I mention some of my accomplishments and talk about my skills. But did not include any links out. Trying not to violate any terms of service. Because I don't know if including links in the cover letter is okay. Is it? If so, what is okay and is not? If not where can I see the procedure on this?

Tim

[NikolaS · Accepted solution]

Hi Timothy,

Yes, you can share your external portfolios. Portfolios are an important part of a freelancer’s bidding process to show off their past work and their potential to complete a future project. That is why we are not prohibiting the sharing of external links to personal portfolios or other websites that provide examples of past work. We recognize that some of these links might include contact information and ways to identify and contact you outside of the Upwork platform. When you share these outside links, please remind potential clients to only communicate with you through Upwork until a contract is in place.

You can find more information in this help article. 

[gilbert-phyllis]

Tim, the most important thing to understand about cover letters on UW is that they represent short attention span theater. The client only sees the first couple of lines unless they click it open, so forget everything you ever knew about how to open a business letter cordially and just jump right in with how you can solve their problem. The goal is to get them to click it open and read the whole thing, and be sufficiently engaged to go to your profile to get your full story, then contact you. 

As you may have realized already, most UW clients don't provide enough deets in their job post to offer them a binding quote, which creates the opp'ty to use the cover letter to ask questions that help them realize you're the expert they need. Nine times out of ten, mine includes a version of I'm using $xx [whatever budget they indicated] as a placeholder budget pending further details. 

I rarely send one that's more than 200 words and often 100 or fewer. 

Welcome to UW and good luck!

[jay_ss]

Thank you!