please evaluate my profile

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Submitted Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:32pm GMT
amukherjee1985 3 posts

Hii...I am a new user on Odesk..and have been regularly using it for the past two weeks. I have worked a lot on my profile and was wondering if you folks could give me some feedback on my profile. Although I have tried my best to write better cover letters each time, I havent been able to attract any buyers.

The permanent link to my profile is :

http://www.odesk.com/users/~~4d0abb0c48d077bc

Also I am thinking of moving to a freelance writing career, rather than remaining a admistrative assistant throughout, since it seems to be higher paying job. Could you give me some advice as to how I should start out.

How you you rate my English Writing Skills as evident from my profile and from this post itself.

Arindam

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amukherjee1985 Submitted Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:30pm GMT
daverobinson 227 posts - Canada - Joined Sep 12 2007

amukherjee1985 wrote:

The permanent link to my profile is :

http://www.odesk.com/users/~~4d0abb0c48d077bc

How you you rate my English Writing Skills as evident from my profile and from this post itself.

Arindam

I would describe your writing skills as being at least competent, and definitely above the average on oDesk.

There are two main benefits I can see from a switch to writing. First, your test scores do support writing at least as much as data entry, and that would move you to a field where your current rate is below the category average not above it.

Your profile is generally solid, though I would recommend re-writing it if you want to focus on writing.

You might also want to consider moving to web development as that category also pays more than Administrative assistant does. However if you do move into other fields I would look into raising your rates relatively soon as an underpriced provider is as likely to lose jobs as an overpriced one.

Keep going and you should get a job. It's always the first that's the hardest.

Thanks a lot for your reply. Submitted Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 8:27am GMT
amukherjee1985 3 posts

Thanks a lot for your reply. I was wondering if you could give me some tips, about how to start off. I have decided to do the following for the shift:

a)start a blog on the Olympics

b)start learning PHP/AJAX(I already know PHP to some extent, although I wouldnt say I am very good at it. So is it better to remain focussed on PHP, and learn it better depth, or learn both AJAX and PHP to a moderate depth? Do customers look for knowledge of both PHP and AJAX or similar languages or is one enough?)

You say that I should revise my rates. I do believe that its true, for even here a real time job would at the very least get around 15 $/hr. The only reason why I kept such a low figure is because I am looking for my first job, and I fear that if I dont keep such a low figure, I mightnot ever get a job here at all.

Comment on wage Submitted Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:42am GMT
blogstudios 448 posts - United States - Joined May 20 2008

Hi Arindam,

I would just like to comment on your remark about your wage.

I just signed up as a provider (about a week ago), and while you are correct in noting that while hourly rates outside of oDesk tend to be higher than a lot of what you see here, there's a lot that an impressive cover letter and a decent portfolio can do here.

Like I said, I just became a provider (started off as a buyer), and within a week, I've landed my first job @ $12/hr. While this is still lower than what I would normally make outside, it's considerably higher than your profile hourly rate. So don't sell yourself short!

What I did was 1) make sure my profile was as complete as it can get (although, I'm still test-shy), 2) make sure I uploaded examples of my work in different areas to my portfolio (i.e. photoshop, coding, video, etc), and 3) made damn sure I took the extra time in my cover letters to prove I looked over their job description carefully, showed external links to jobs I've done that were relevant to the job, as well as explained to them my selling points and why they should hire me.

In a week, this has earned me 2 interviews with one them becoming a job.

I admit that, at first, I was a little nervous about the same thing - with a lot of low bids (as I've seen as a buyer), it could potentially be hard to compete. However, I think if you just put forth the effort, it shouldn't be too hard.

Granted, I still got beat out by the lowest bidder on some...but the fact that I
was able to land a job at a decent rate has kept me optimistic!

Also, I do want to add: proofread, proofread, PROOFREAD your cover letters! You can have perfect content in your cover letter, but if you typo a word, it can possibly reflect badly on you. Although, I tend to be more forgiving of honest typos as opposed to misused words (i.e. your vs. you're).

Anyway, I apologize for my novella, but I just wanted to share my $0.02.