Getting started with your digital marketing freelance marketplaces
An introduction to Upwork, Fiverr and a couple more…
Freelancing is not a walk in the park: one of the most difficult parts of being a freelancer full time is that you won’t get a steady income every month. One of the best ways to counter that issue is by diversifying your income streams to make sure that if you do not get any leads on your own you have a fallback plan.
And that’s just what freelancing platforms do: providing you with visibility and helping you reach new customers against a commission on your work.
In our previous articles, we covered a few basic introductions for digital marketing freelancer beginners: from setting up your prices (here) to perfecting your sales pitch (here) and now we will focus on a quick introduction to those platforms to get you started and get your customer base growing.
Pssst …. There are thousands of these platforms, and I recommend you do your research depending on your line of work. However, to get you started we will discuss the two arguably biggest ones — Upwork and Fiverr — as a general guideline.
UPWORK
Undeniably one of the biggest and most famous marketplace for freelancing, Upwork is a marketplace for freelancers from IT and development to customer support with all fields in between in the digital marketing scope.
The process is pretty simple: you will be able to find projects that you can work on, contact clients and get paid through the website. You will then receive a satisfaction score each time you complete a task and that will help build up your profile viability to other potential employers.
PROS
What is really a standout point for Upwork is the diversity and volume of projects available on the platform. The visibility that it gets you is not comparable to a lot of platforms as it has now become a “go-to” platform for potential clients. The grading system of your work and being able to share your portfolio straight on the marketplace are also great ways to create that extra value in the eyes of the client.
There is access to a wide variety of digital services which will attract bigger projects in need of several freelancers helping to gather the different talents to make the project a success. It is also available to anyone, anywhere in the world, thus creating volume for both customers and freelancers.
Users generally report that this is an easy platform to get started with, and it also has the swiss knife of integrated systems like tracking time, collecting payment or filtering systems to make sure you can easily find what you are looking for.
In terms of prices, there is no minimum rate which helps in terms of flexibility. The commission is 20% for relatively small jobs up to $500, 10% up to $10,000 and 5% for bigger jobs of more than $10,000.
CONS
Of course, with a platform as widely known, you will face a very high number of competitors. Those competitors might also be living in different countries with lower living cost allowing them to have lower prices.
The volume of freelancers might also be a barrier to beginners. Clients will most likely go for a contractor with feedback already available.
Prices are pretty low compared to other platforms for bigger jobs, however, there are a few hidden fees such as a client commission on top of your prices which might drive potential customers away.
The job success rates are also all really high, which is great for the Upwork brand and initial attraction of the client. However, this might be devaluing the individual work of each freelancer making it a standard high rate, this means that quality will be hard to define for the client.
FIVERR
“Fiverr is a platform for outsourcing small, easy jobs without spending a lot of money.”
On the other side, a strong competitor to Upwork is Fiverr. Fiverr is a platform that is representative of the gig economy, the concept is that freelancers post their services so that clients can browse or purchase. It is known as a better platform for smaller jobs. Giving the power to the client to find the right person for their project.
PROS
Freelancers are able to give their set prices for specific services or bundles: this allows an easy message for the potential client removing the barrier of unsure end cost. Unlike Upwork, you will have a limit on a minimum and maximum price per project. This is a great selling point for potential customers with set costs as well as getting some of the cheapest prices on the market (Fiverr is even making it its motto).
Just like Upwork, Fiverr is international which gives you maximal visibility with a wide range of digital services available. Fiverr is particularly good for the SEO scope: from a higher level of specialized freelancers and content creators to its own service for backlinks.
On Fiverr, you can limit the number of projects you will be working on at a time. This can help you not get overloaded and spread your work capacity. This limit is also removable, so once you have built up your ranking scores, you can offer a “quicker” offer to prioritize certain projects and up your value.
CONS
The commission is a flat 20% on all transactions which does tend to mean only smaller transactions are happening on Fiverr instead of a whole project like UPWORK (as it will be much cheaper).
The sellers also appear by ranking with the level of quality of their services: beginners are not as promoted and it might be more difficult to start with.
Finally, the downside of the platform is that the overall quality of the freelancers’ work can be really hit-and-miss with such low prices: in the long term, this might not help you with positioning yourself as a high-quality freelancer.
As a recap of the introduction to both of these platforms, and if you only had to remember one thing for each: Upwork is a big machine platform that will be a more difficult platform to exist in but long term will have great pay off, and FIVERR is a more budget digital marketing platform making it easier to make a “quick buck”. The major difference is in processes and the way you have to go to the client for one or have the client come to you for the other.
There are a lot more interesting platforms out there depending on your expertise. Toptotal for example has a selective freelancers market strategy having the “top 3% of freelance talents”, meaning that entering such a platform will make you recognized and add value to your skills in the eyes of potential clients. For content creation, a platform like Contently is where you want to be found. For project management, Torchlite is one of the best ways to get digital marketing project management jobs. Finally, don’t forget about social media channels like Linkedin that can help you reach more customers easily looking for freelancers (and for free!).
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
