How to Hire Freelancers from Upwork?

Many people thing blogging is an easy task. However, in reality a blogger needs many resources to run a website successfully. After certain period, it is not possible to handle all the tasks independently. The best and only solution is to look for outsourcing your work content. The clever strategy is to outsource the content writing to external freelancers or agencies while you can focus on proof reading and optimization.

How to Hire Freelancers from Upwork?

When coming to freelance content writing, you have few outsourcing platforms to get your work done. Upwork is one of the popular and most productive ways to get freelance writers from all over the world. In this article, let us explain how to hire freelancers from Upwork for your content writing job. The process remains same if you are looking for other tasks like logo creating, web development, etc.

1. Create Account

First step is to register for a client account and verify your details. This is necessary to have your original name and verified country details before start hiring freelancers.

2. Creating Your First Job

After verification, login to your account and click on “Jobs” tab. You will see a “Post a Job” button as shown below. You can also see the option for posting a job almost everywhere on the website.

Now, you need to follow a lengthy process to fill up the job details. However, you can reuse the previous job postings from next time onwards.

3. Filling Up Job Details

The posting wizard will take you through all the details of job description. If you are creating a new posting, select short-term or dedicated job based on your need. As per the definition of Upwork, short-term is less than 30 hours per week or < 3 months and long term in more than 30 hours per week or > 3 months. You can modify these details any point of time during or after posting the job.

3.1. Title

First step in posting is to create a title for your job. You can provide a simple title like “Content writer required for technology blog”. Select the job category as content writing or ghostwriting.

3.2. Job Description  

The description is the most important thing for the freelancers to bid for your project. Therefore, ensure to provide clear details of what you need. Below is an example of a clear proposal.

This job description gives all the necessary details of your expectations. The bidder can also clarify with you if he / she still has clarifications on the posting. If you notice, we have included a verification question in the description. This is to filter out the spammers who will bid without even reading your job post. You can simply archive the bidders who responds without answering your verification question.

3.3. Details

Under the details section, you can select your project is one-time or ongoing. Select the screening questions and need of cover letter in this section. We recommend asking for cover letter and select some predefined screening questions valid for your project.

3.4. Expertise

Here you can select, industry, language and skills related to your project. Frankly, we don’t see the selection here has any impact in the selection process.

3.5. Visibility

Select who can see your project and how many freelancers you need. You can also direct invite any Upwork freelancers and fill out your preference details like hours billed, talent type, etc. We strongly recommend selecting individual as talent type to avoid bidding from agencies and choose your preferred country for geographical related topic.

3.6. Budget

Here is the money part of the job posting. You can either select fixed or hourly jobs depending on your need. Upwork has a desktop recording app for freelancers to monitor the time spent on the work. We recommend starting your first job as a fixed pay to understand the entire process.  

Select the budget and the experience level of the freelancer you need. This will impact the quality of freelancers bidding for your post.

3.7. Review

Final step is to review the entered details and post your job. You will also have additional options to invite your co-workers for improve the job’s visibility by paying more.

4. Hiring Freelancers

After posting the job post, freelancers will bid for your project. As mentioned, this depends on the attractiveness of the job in terms of budgets, payment and experience level needed. You can review the cover letter and interview them through calls or messages before hiring.

5. Payment Process

You have to follow one more lengthy process after finalizing the candidates.

• First you need to create a contract and assign milestones with deadline by blocking the amount in escrow.
• Send the offer to the freelancer.
• Freelancer need to accept the contract / offer and start doing the work.
• After completion of the work, he / she can send the details by requesting payment.
• You can review and accept or ask for rework.
• When the rework is done, you can pay for the amount of the milestone as agreed in the offer.

You should create the first milestone for the smallest amount like $10 or $20 to evaluate the quality of the freelancer. Let’s say, you have a $500 project for 3 months’ time, then you can plan your activities like below for single hire.

• Create first milestone for $20 for a small amount of work.
• Review the work and verify the freelancer’s quality.
• Continue of reject the freelancer based on the quality.

Upwork will generate an invoice for all your payments and you need to pay the transaction charge around 3% for each transaction. This will be deducted when you make payment, however you will not see the exact amount paid to the freelancer.

Final Words

Now, you know how to hire freelancers from Upwork. You can get services like non-disclosure agreements for additional payment. The big problem with hiring of content writers is that most of the time you will end up in finding stolen content submitted by freelancers. Therefore, ready to spend lot of time and money before trying to hire freelancers from Upwork. Alternatively, you can have separate proofreading employee as internal or another freelancer to make your task easy. It will be easier to hire for other type of jobs like logo creation, website development, etc.