New to Upwork and would really appreciate some tips!

[alexisscholtz]

Hey everyone,

My name is Alexis and I'm from South Africa. I'm freelancing as a translator , and I'm finding it quite hard establishing myself on the platform and getting jobs. I'm quite new to upwork still and I've even gotten one job that went really well, but I was wondering if anyone here would be so kind as to give me a few tips that could help me get more jobs?  I would appreciate it even more if someone would be willing to have a look at my profile.

Basically, I have a lot of educational experience translating, and quite a lot of professional experience, but other than a few examples of past work that I've included in my profile, I don't really have acess to a lot of the older translations I did for clients in South Africa.  This is due to a bunch of reasons, but mainly because I didn't have the foresight to keep records of all the work that I did. I got all of my clients through one company that I worked with on a semi-permenant basis, which has since disolved, and I no longer have acess to the company email that I used. 

I have also watched a lot of videos and read a lot of posts about how to write better proposals, how to set up your profile etc. But getting some personal input would just be really helpful. 

Anyway, Thanks in advance for any help!

[yitwail]

Alexis, if you want input on your profile, you should set it to be publicly visible, at least for the moment.

[alexisscholtz]

Hey John,
Thanks so much for the reply. Yes! I realised it was on private. I’ve since change my seetings and it’s now public again.

[gilbert-phyllis]

To start with, clean up the spelling and grammatical errors in your profile and in the captions of your portfolio items. As a FL who also occasionally hires for small projects including translation, typos and other errors on the profile page are instant deal-killers for me.

[yitwail]

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Phyllis G wrote:

To start with, clean up the spelling and grammatical errors in your profile and in the captions of your portfolio items. As a FL who also occasionally hires for small projects including translation, typos and other errors on the profile page are instant deal-killers for me.

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Two typos in this sentence, for example: Even the smallest, most trivial seeming translation has it's tricky bits, and therefor also its rewards.

[alexisscholtz]

Hi Phillys and John,

Thank you so much for your replies and your advice. I completely see how having typos in your introduction is a turn-off. I've gone and completely re-written my profile, and edited my portfolio captions as per your advice, and I would be really appreciative if you could provide me with some more feedback. 

And thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to help!