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If you have a small business or want to start one, conducting marketing research is vital to making informed business decisions. It’s a critical process that involves taking the time to understand your market, customers, and competitors to ensure your business is successful. Let’s take a closer look at how market research can help you make better business plans, develop products, and beat out the competition.

What is Market Research for Small Businesses?

There are two main types of market research strategies:

• Quantitative Research: This research style involves collecting measurable data in the form of numbers, survey responses, and similar statistics. Quantitative data offers the ability to objectively analyze the information collected.
• Qualitative Research: In comparison, this style of research is based on more subjective data gathered in focus groups, interviews, and social media interactions with customers. 

Ideally, you should conduct both quantitative and qualitative research for your small business to get a complete understanding of your customer’s needs and the overall market.

Why Small Businesses Need to Conduct Market Research

Small business owners can greatly benefit from proper market research in a variety of ways:

• Reducing your risk: Investing in your business can be risky, whether it’s developing expensive new products or expanding your staff. By completing research and learning more about your customers and competitors, you can reduce your overall risk and make more informed decisions.
• Identify trends: The marketplace is constantly changing, and it’s a good idea to know what types of products or services your customers are looking for today. If you know about current and upcoming trends, you can adjust accordingly.
• Test product viability: Part of conducting market research involves reaching out to your customers to see what they think. If you have a new product or service idea, market research can help you decide if it’s worthwhile.
• Tailor marketing: Completing market research can give you information about what media sources your target audience consumes so you can choose where to advertise in the future.
• Get funding: If you plan on seeking outside investments in the future, conducting market research is a must. It’s far easier to make your case to investors with hard data rather than hunches or speculation. 

6 Tips for Conducting Effective Market Research for Small Businesses

It’s not enough just to do market research. To find the best insights, it’s critical to do it correctly.

Define Your Goals

Before you decide to start, take the time to clearly spell out your goals. This includes writing down the questions you want answered when you’ve gathered all your data, which can help streamline the process and give you direction.

Some examples include:

• Who are my customers?
• What is my target demographic?
• How large is my market?
• How much are my customers willing to spend?
• What do my customers need and want?
• Who are my biggest competitors?
• What types of data collection methods will give me these answers?

Create a Budget

Market research can be time-consuming and expensive, especially if you want to have focus groups or conduct extensive studies. However, there are also affordable options, like asking for opinions on free websites such as Quora or Reddit. If you have an email list, a Facebook group, or an Instagram community, you can send out surveys or ask for feedback.

Regardless of the path you take, it’s essential to create a budget ahead of time. Market research is supposed to help you give insight into your customers, not create bad spending habits that might prevent you from hiring key staff or developing new products.

Identify Your Target Customer

Finding out data about your target customer is important. Once you learn things such as how old they are, where they live, and the types of products and services they need, create a buyer persona.

This means creating a detailed profile of your ideal customer. You can even give them a name, hobbies, specific pain points, and an age. After all, millennial marketing will be different from marketing to Gen Z. 

Use this persona whenever you think about building something to help your customers. You can use one (or several) buyer personas and ask yourself if you think it’d be a good fit for them. Even better, look for opportunities to find your customer’s unmet needs so you can develop ways to help them.

Research Your Competition

Researching your competition is an excellent way to determine what works with customers. There are likely companies with products and services similar to yours. Once you identify them, do what’s called a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Look at your competition’s social media profiles, their marketing tactics, how they price their products or services, and their reviews. Use this information to see how you can better serve your customers, whether it’s with more competitive pricing, better customer service, or something else.

Collect Several Types of Data

When you’re completing your research, gather several types of data using multiple data collection methods. Here are some examples of the types of research you can try: 

• Primary research: Send out surveys and questionnaires to potential customers or your email list. Keep your results in a spreadsheet. If you’re unsure how to use spreadsheets, this is a great time to learn Excel.
• Secondary research: Look at existing data like academic studies, reports, and online resources. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already published hard data that can help you.
• Online tools: Install analytics-tracking software, create social media profiles, and conduct keyword research.
• Focus groups: If your budget allows it, set up focus groups to help give you feedback on your products or services.
• Customer feedback: If you already have customers, make sure you solicit their feedback so you have real-time reactions to their experience with your business.

Regularly Update Your Research

Last but not least, regularly update your data. The market changes rapidly, and there are a variety of factors that can impact a business’s success. Once you take the time to conduct market research, make it a point to refresh it periodically. Look to see which products or services are performing best, and regularly read through customer feedback to see where you can improve.

Although running a small business can be challenging, being open to new ideas and staying on top of your industry can go a long way in ensuring you can keep growing your business for many years to come.

Featured Image by Arlington Research on Unsplash

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Your company’s sensitive data is at a greater risk than ever before. Modern cyberattacks rarely look like questionable email attachments. Sophisticated hackers disguise malicious programs, hiding them deep in systems. Or they might create fake accounts that mimic real ones to fool your employees.

No matter its size, you must protect your business against cyberattacks on your systems, devices, and websites. In addition, a data recovery plan is necessary to recover after a potential breach. 

Assessing Your Company’s Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities

Every company is vulnerable to attacks. The key is determining if any data threats are unique to your business. To understand this, you must assess all data risks in your company’s functions. 

Any breach in financial, legal, and confidential data can put your company underwater or out of business. This is even more critical when customer data is compromised, which could be a primary threat for e-commerce and digital advertising projects. Data protection affects your company’s marketing efforts. Areas of concern include:

• Email: Phishing is how many hackers steal data and get into critical systems. Have your IT provider secure emails with backups, mail licenses, multi-factor authentication, anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-phishing filters. Educate employees on how to avoid phishing attempts.
• Customer Data: A breach in customer data poses a threat to your client’s security and your brand reputation. Privacy and security are at the forefront of customer transactions, so it’s crucial to be upfront with your clients and have a plan in place if disaster strikes.
• Disasters: When a breach occurs in any area, a crisis management plan helps you address the issue immediately. It includes data protection policies, employee training, and enlisting a secure IT company that specializes in cybersecurity and disaster recovery. 

Additionally, smart cameras pose cybersecurity and privacy concerns. Any device that transmits video over the internet, like security and doorbell cameras, employs AI so that users can use footage. Some of the vulnerable functions these AI-powered cameras perform include:

• Facial recognition;
• Object delivery tracking;
• License plate identification.

When transmitted across the internet, this data is vulnerable to hacking, malware, and other data breaches. Since it’s password-protected, easily cracked passwords pose a risk. Some of these devices also lack encryption, which protects transmissions sent over the Internet. Finally, unauthorized users may illegally access these lines, providing them with a view of your facilities.

These security challenges aren’t impossible to overcome, however. Protect critical data by working with IT firms that have a solid track record in cybersecurity. Use secure cloud services to protect your data. Additionally, select smart cameras and other devices that use encryption. Your management teams should also write comprehensive security policies and train your staff on them.

There is no greater risk to your data than breaches. However, there is another area that is critical to safeguard: your website.

Keeping Your Website Safe From Data Breaches

Websites are especially vulnerable to data breaches since they are often the primary point of contact for customers and consumers. It takes investment to website data breach-free, but the alternative is much more destructive.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of standards adopted in the European Union in 2016 to regulate data that can notify you of a breach. It is meant to protect customers, and companies worldwide often comply with these standards.

Beyond that, it may be difficult to assess if your systems have been breached without the best monitoring and prevention systems. Essential security elements include:

• High-quality and comprehensive firewalls to secure data;
• Multiple authentication protocols, such as two-step authentication, to ensure security;
• SSL protection to protect data during transmission;
• Periodic security audits to assess vulnerabilities and ensure systems are functioning properly;
• Installing malware protection software to scan devices before allowing connectivity.

Management can take additional steps to protect sensitive data by creating policies to safeguard against cyberattacks, such as banning social media and putting corporate data on personal devices. Take the time to educate employees on these policies, as well as topics like GDPR and secure password creation. 

Be sure that your IT department is following safe data protocols, too. Software and plugins must be up to date. If a system is too old to update, consider replacing it. Take any such recommendations from your IT department seriously and adjust your budget accordingly. Finally, have a reliable data backup system to restore lost or corrupted data.

Preventive measures are necessary but even so, you may still experience a cyberattack. That’s why every company should have a data breach recovery plan. 

Recovering from a Data Breach

When a breach happens, a data breach recovery plan will help you spring into action immediately should something go awry. It provides a recovery process to quickly solve the breach and secure your data. It can also help your company weather legal ramifications, reduce consequences, and regain trust.

Start your preparations by defining a breach so that you can take the right actions at the right time. These plans should document the steps to contain and manage a data breach, including staff assignments and the chain of command. They should also cover various approaches to secure the breach and the requisite staffing to deal with the problem.

Assign a point person to manage notifying the affected stakeholders, including customers. It’s crucial to define the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the recovery process and to document and track any incidents. This can help you refine the process and potentially implement additional security procedures.

How do you recover from a data security breach? Take action as soon as you know about the breach. Time is of the essence. It can take an average of 200 days to become aware of the security issue and over two months to resolve it. Once discovered, you must report the breach to the required regulatory authorities, if any, to safeguard your company from additional legal ramifications. Notify your legal team right away. You will need their guidance to steer through the crisis. 

You also must step up security around all your systems, especially in affected areas. This may involve budgeting for a systems overhaul and hiring a cybersecurity specialist. In addition, the parties who had their data breached will need your support with resources like credit monitoring and identity theft protection. The more you can offer, the faster you can reclaim your reputation.

Conclusion

The only way to protect data from cyber threats is to build comprehensive data protection systems. Assess your vulnerabilities, defend your systems with protective measures, and have a plan for potential data breaches. Together, these preparations will safeguard your firm and see it through any crisis.

Featured image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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Creating and managing forms are a crucial part of gathering information and streamlining workflows, whether for collecting data, registrations, or feedback; but the process can sometimes be complicated, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Traditional methods of form creation and data collection can lead to inefficiencies, missed details, and repetitive tasks that take up valuable time.

Fortunately, the landscape is changing. With advancements in AI, form builders have become significantly more intuitive and efficient. Modern AI-powered form builders simplify the creation process, allowing users to design, customize, and deploy forms with ease. These tools not only expedite the form-building process but also enhance accuracy and data quality.

At Noupe, we’ll explore the top AI form builders of 2024, highlighting the features and benefits that make them stand out. Discover how these cutting-edge tools can transform your approach to form management and help you stay ahead of the curve.

Jotform AI Form Generator

Jotform’s new AI Form Generator is an advanced no-code tool designed to make form creation easier by allowing you to describe the form you need to create and making it for you. The tool offers extensive customization options, letting you specify the number of fields and pages, select the form’s language, add conditional logic and choose the types of input fields you want.

If you need to make changes to a field, the Jotform AI Form Generator can automatically adjust it for you. You can also personalize your form further by adding or removing fields as needed, integrating with various helpful widgets and payment gateways, and more. Once your AI-generated form meets your requirements, you can easily share or embed it to start collecting responses efficiently. The generator’s intuitive features ensure that form creation is not only faster but also aligned with your specific needs and preferences.

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Features:

• Seamless integrations
• Real-time data collection
• Advanced organizational tools
• Flexible form design and customization
• Multi-language support

Involve.me

involve.me‘s AI Form Generator brings a new level of efficiency and personalization to creating forms. Developed with an emphasis on user-friendly design, this tool allows you to enter simple prompts or your website’s URL and turn them into branded forms. The AI integrates your company’s fonts, colors, and logos automatically, ensuring that every form you create is aligned with your brand identity.

With involve.me’s AI Form Generator, you can easily customize forms by adding or removing fields, conditional logic, or other elements like videos and images. The drag-and-drop editor makes fine-tuning your forms simple, even if you have no coding experience. Once your form is ready, it can be shared or embedded on your website.

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Features:

• AI-powered customization
• Interactive content creation
• Drag-and-drop editor
• Conditional logic integration
• Advanced analytics and reporting

Fillout

Fillout is a no-code form builder designed to streamline the creation of forms with ease and efficiency. The platform allows users to generate customizable forms in a few minutes, making it a good choice for an AI form tool.

With Fillout, you can drag and drop elements to build forms without any coding knowledge. The platform supports many customizable question types, integrates with popular tools like Airtable, Google Sheets, and HubSpot, and allows you to accept payments via Stripe. Whether you’re looking to gather feedback, process registrations, or collect payments, Fillout’s features make it a solid choice.

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Features:

• No-code form builder
• Integrations
• Secure payment processing
• Flexible pricing plans

Forms.app

Forms.app offers an intuitive platform for creating forms. With its user-friendly drag-and-drop builder, it simplifies the process of designing forms, making it possible even for those with no technical expertise. The platform supports a wide range of form fields and templates, allowing you to collect various types of data, including payments via PayPal and Stripe.

One of its best features is the ability to create multi-page forms with conditional logic, displaying only relevant questions based on previous answers. The platform also integrates with tools like Google Sheets, Slack, and HubSpot, making it easy to automate workflows and manage data. 

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Features:

• Drag-and-drop form builder
• Conditional logic and multi-page forms
• Integration with popular tools 
• Customizable templates and form fields

Feathery

Feathery is a no-code platform designed for creating custom forms and workflows. The platform offers a range of advanced features, making it a good choice for businesses looking to streamline data collection and automate processes. 

Key features include a visual form designer that allows for easy customization, conditional logic, and integrations with tools like HubSpot, Stripe, and Salesforce. Additionally, Feathery’s Document Intelligence can extract data from uploaded documents, and its automation capabilities allow for easy workflow management from form submission to final processing.

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Features:

• Form and workflow builder
• Visual designer for easy customization
• Conditional logic
• Native document intelligence for data extraction
• Workflow automation tools

Makeforms.io

Makeforms.io is an AI-driven form builder designed to streamline the creation of custom forms across various industries. The platform offers a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to design forms without coding. With built-in security features, Makeforms.io ensures that sensitive data is handled securely, making it a good choice for businesses that require strict data protection.

Makeforms.io also integrates with third-party applications like Google Drive and Salesforce. Users can take advantage of templates, multi-page forms, and advanced logic features to create forms tailored to their needs. Whether you’re processing payments or collecting detailed information, Makeforms.io offers the flexibility to meet a wide range of business requirements.

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Features:

• Security features
• Integrations
• Conditional logic

Conclusion

Forms have become essential tools across education and business, serving as a means for data collection and engagement. As the demands of daily work increase, creating forms can often become time-consuming and repetitive, leading to missed details or overlooked important fields. However, the advent of AI-powered form generators has offered a more efficient and streamlined approach.

With modern AI form generators, you can now design, customize, and share forms easily, without the need for extensive manual effort. We hope you were be able to choose the best tool that fits your specific needs from our curated list.

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The designing of a website should always be done keeping in view the perspective of users. It is one of the key UX principles that stands valid for all types of websites. If the user experience of any website isn’t up to the mark, then its chances of holding incoming attention are said to be very minimal. It is therefore advised to design websites carefully and avoid mistakes that are detrimental to their layout. There are a few specific things that often ruin the user experience of a website. These mistakes should be strictly avoided so that you can build a user-centric web design effectively.

In this blog, we will point out all those things that can negatively affect the user experience of your website. By keeping these things in mind, you will be able to design websites that are visually appealing having zero UI/UX errors. Let’s take a look at them in detail below. 

Key Mistakes that Affect the Website’s User Experience  

There are some specific things that often bring a negative impact on the user experience of a website. Due to not being overly prominent, they aren’t noticed by web designers most of the time. If you don’t want to ruin the experience of your website due to these mistakes, pay attention to the points defined below.  

Disappearing Menus

Dropdown menus that disappear quickly often make people frustrated. This usually happens when your cursor quickly hovers in and out from the dropdown menu. Feature like this should be avoided in the web design, because people want to see the whole menu options briefly. If they keep seeing the menu disappearing frequently, they will become irritated and might leave the website quickly. 

So, try to create dropdown menus for the website with better response time. These menus should also display sub-page names clearly, so that people can easily understand all the options defined in the menu. 

Slow Loading Images

When a user comes on to a website, he generally wants to see everything on the landing page quickly. This is a normal experience that should be provided to the people who are visiting the website to get some information. If somehow, the images on the landing page will take time to load, then visitors will perceive it as a slow-loading website. This will create a bad impression that will force people to leave the website. 

The problem of slow image loading can happen due to a variety of reasons. It is best recommended to find those fixes quickly, so that people can stay on your website for a brief period of time. 

Irritating Pop-ups

Using pop-ups on the main landing page is a good strategy to showcase your core offerings to the visitors. But, if these pop-ups keep appearing on every page, then they become a bit irritating for the people. It is therefore recommended to strike a balance while using pop-ups on the website, because no one wants to see sudden promotional alerts on every page. 

When using pop-ups on the website, make sure to design their banners creatively. You can use different shades of blue or any other color to design these banners, keeping in view the core theme and branding identity of your company.  

Unwanted Advertisements

When a user comes on to a website, he wants to explore every required information smoothly. While scrolling down, if he sees any irrelevant advertisement displayed in the middle of the page, then his attention will be quickly distracted. It can build a negative impression of the website in his mind, which will force him to leave the website in frustration. 

So, always try to keep your website clean and free from all sorts of irrelevant advertisements. They can not only distract the visitors’ attention but could also spoil your web content flow pretty badly.

Broken Links

If someone is coming to your website to find a specific set of information, make sure to facilitate him properly with the right info that can become useful for him. Creating your website with proper internal links is termed very important in this regard. Always make sure to check these links from time to time, so that it can be confirmed that they are working properly. 

Websites with broken or invalid links always present a bad impression of the overall platform. It irritates people when they click on the broken links, as they don’t perform any kind of action. So, keep a practice of checking your links regularly, as that will allow you to fix broken links timely. 

Non-responsive Layout

Due to the convenience and flexibility, many people prefer to use smartphones instead of desktops to surf the internet. This is the core reason why many websites are continuously witnessing surging traffic from mobile devices. To manage such traffic on your website, you need to create a responsive layout that can facilitate the mobile app user experience. 

If your website is built with a non-responsive layout, then it will lose a huge chunk of traffic that is coming from the mobile channel. So, try to create a responsive layout for your website, as that will make your platform accessible to everyone. 

Broken Search Bar

Another thing that presents a bad image of the website is a broken search bar. Whenever a user wants to search for anything on the website, he always heads over to the search bar. If that search bar is broken and unable to process queries, then people will immediately leave the website. They get the impression that the website does not have the relevant information, and hence it is pretty useless.

To avoid having such a situation, try to regularly check the working status of the search bar. It should always work properly as per the best practices. The time to process such requests should also be monitored smartly so that users won’t have to wait to see the required results.   

Continuous Scrolling

It is generally noted that websites with precise and to-the-point information always score more conversions. People these days don’t want to waste time reading irrelevant content. They need crisp and accurate information, one that could drive their final decisions. If they have to scroll a lot more on the website to find specific information, they will certainly feel annoyed after some time. 

This is a small but important point that is often ignored by web design companies. They need to understand that too much scrolling on the webpage only ruins the user experience. This thing should be precisely avoided by keeping the page small with to-the-point user-centric information.

Excessive Call to Actions 

If you place too many call to actions on your website, it will confuse the visitors. This is one of those mistakes that often increases the bounce rate of a website. It makes the visitors confused about where they should click next because there are a lot of CTA banners being displayed on the website.

Ideally, a website should have one big call-to-action banner describing the trending promotion or discount offer. It makes the decision-making process simple, giving visitors exact knowledge of where they should go next to find the required information.   

Final Words

That brings us to the end of this blog in which we have discussed different factors that ruin the user experience of a website. Having a clear understanding of these things is pretty important because they often break the overall impression of the platform. It is best recommended to avoid these mistakes by designing the website with the right UX strategy. These little mistakes can cause a lot of harm to your website, so always make sure to address them correctly by working with the correct layout optimization methods.

Featured image by macrovector on Freepik

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If you’re a freelancer, marketplaces like Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr might be all too common to you.

Upwork had a golden star reputation in the past, known for providing freelancers with steady, high-paying, and quality gigs.

However, after its acquisition and rebrand in 2015, many freelancers have wondered if the platform still has any potential or if it’s just another mill for low-quality, highly competitive work.

On that note, let’s dive in and:

1. Understand some of the pros and cons of Upwork in 2024.
2. Find insights from actual freelancers who have operated from the platform.
3. Learn some practical tips and tricks to succeed on Upwork.

How Upworks Works

Upwork operates as a marketplace where social media freelancers, agencies, consultants, etc., can provide services to global clients from the comfort of their homes.

The platform stays viable by charging freelancers and clients a service fee to operate on it (the fee is much larger for the freelancers than the clients). In return, the platform handles all the finances, invoices, verification, and job satisfaction.

If you need to apply for any jobs as a freelancer, you need to pay for “Connects” to send your proposals. If your job proposal is accepted, the client must invest initially (which Upwork protects until the job is completed).

Pros of Upwork

A majority of freelancers who we spoke to said the biggest pro of Upwork is that it’s easy to get started on the platform. You don’t need to pay any registration fees—all you need to do is fill in your profile details and get verified.

Says Raquel Gonzalez, a freelance SEO consultant and translator, “Upwork is great if you are starting as a freelancer and find it challenging to reach potential clients. You can apply to many job opportunities, and your payment is protected through them.”

Aside from this, some of the other pros of the platform are:

• You can pick and choose projects to your convenience, cadence, and liking; there are no specific limits to anything.
• You’re also not restricted to any particular area. Upwork allows remote freelancers to connect with clients and work on projects from around the globe.
•  It supports plenty of services, so regardless of whether you specialize in writing, SEO consultancy, designing, marketing, web development, etc., there are plenty of readily available gigs for everyone.
• It’s extremely easy to navigate and added features like work tracking tools, talent badges, customer ratings, job search filters, etc., can improve your efficiency and portfolio.
• They’ve also got a thriving community wherein you can get help from Upwork professionals and other freelancers and agencies operating on Upwork.

Cons of Upwork

Unfortunately, these days, the cons of Upwork far precede the pros.

Amongst the list of cons, one of the major complaints most freelancers have is that the platform now has way too many low-paying gigs, which is creating a race-to-the-bottom situation for many.

In addition, they charge a hefty service fee (5-20% of the project value).

Peace Akinwale, a freelance writer who used to operate from Upwork, says, “Before I deleted my account in 2022, I noticed that most of the jobs on my Upwork feeds are always low-paying jobs (with jobs paying as less as $15 for 1500 words for technical writing).

They also charge a flat 10% service fee on all new contracts regardless of my lifetime billing with a client. If my client ends a copywriting contract and opens a B2B case study writing contract with me, I’ll still be billed 10% of my income.

I rejoined Upwork recently and found that the service fee for hourly projects and fixed-price projects is now 20% of total earnings. 

Aside from the service fee, withdrawal to payment platforms like PayPal/Payoneer attracts significant charges, with Payoneer incurring extra bills from my local bank, too.”

Raquel also agrees with Peace’s opinion by saying, “It’s hard to find a decent-paying job on Upwork (at least at the beginning when you don’t have much portfolio to show your experience), and sometimes the job can be scammy.”

She adds to this point by stating, “The other con is that as a Spanish citizen, we must include essential information on each invoice according to our client’s country, like the Business Registration Number or the TAX percentage. But Upwork automatically creates an invoice in your name and doesn’t add those things, resulting in burdensome bureaucracy.”

These are not the only cons of Upwork, however. Here are a few more cons of the platform according to seasoned users:

• Upwork is extremely competitive and doesn’t have enough great gigs to fulfill the requirements of all freelancers on the platform. Due to the increased competition, it’s also more difficult to get noticed.
• You need to purchase “Connects” to connect with a potential lead. These Connects are paid and cost 15 cents to purchase every Connect. The kicker is that the number of Connects you need to use varies depending on the gig you’re applying to, and you may very well end up using 8-10 Connects per job.
• Upwork is more favorable to clients than users and always considers their side of the story before providing a solution.

Tips for Succeeding on Upwork

Use these four simple tips to get the most out of Upwork. 

1. Be crystal clear in your offer

The best way to stand out on Upwork is to be as specific as possible about your offer and what makes you qualified enough to be trusted with the job.

For example, the top freelancers increase trust in their profile by using professional images, highlighting reviews and testimonials, offering a sustainable rate that works for them, using a strategic offer that hits on customer pain points, etc.

As a reference, an ideal freelancer profile (a boosted profile) on the platform looks like this:

2. Keep track of all your expenses

Another tip would be to create separate accounts as a freelancer to segregate all your business and personal expenses.

For example, you could consider opening a business account and using your business credit card for all your freelance-related expenses to earn extra rewards, cashback, and other perks that would otherwise not be possible.

3. Manage your freelance finances

Adding to our previous point, it’s important to keep track of all the finances associated with Upwork and not just money going out of your business (aka expenses).

As your freelance career grows on Upwork, you might consider opening a joint checking account with a partner or spouse. This can help you manage your increasing income more effectively. 

You can use it to set aside money for taxes, track business expenses, and give your loved one visibility into your freelance success. It’s a great way to organize your finances as you build your business on the platform.

4. Enhance your service offering

A freelancer’s rule for providing exceptional client service is to always go above and beyond when it comes to the simplest of assignments.

On a platform like Upwork, where you can access a worldwide network of peers, leads, and clients, you need to set yourself apart by using tools to improve your service offering.

For example, you can use project management tools to keep track of deadlines, AI translators to converse with leads who use a different language, time-tracking tools to increase productivity, etc.

Next Steps

In this guide, we discussed some of Upwork’s pros and cons and a few tips for making a maximum impact as a freelancer, boosting your hourly rate, and landing prospective clients.

If you wish to gain more such insights, especially as a designer or developer, the Noupe blog has tons of them and expert-led articles for you. Head to the Noupe blog to get access to this information! It’s time to stand out from the millions of freelancers out there.

Featured image by Iris Wang on Unsplash

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