Up Your Wealth Wednesday | How To Use PeoplePerHour To Its Full Potential

When I first started out on my freelance journey a couple of years ago, I was told about a site called PeoplePerHour – a website where people could list either the jobs they needed doing where people could send proposals for the job or they could list the jobs that they could do for people (called Hourlies) and be hired that way. Having spoken to a few people recently about PeoplePerHour, it seems they are confused about how to apply for jobs and how to create hourlies for people to purchase. I am hoping this guide helps. If you want to sign up to the site and try your hand at some odd freelance jobs, you can sign up here.

I have always had a steady stream of work since signing up a couple of years ago and was recently asked how to use PeoplePerHour to its full potential. Firstly,  you need to sign up and complete your profile 100% with your qualities and achievements – plus add some items to your portfolio if you can. If you can get some endorsements, even better! Once this is done and you are happy with it, you can start searching for jobs or posting Hourlies for people to buy.

This is a screenshot of my home page. Ignore the Cert4 notice – this was just telling me how close I was to achieving it when I took the screenshot and I am now Cert5 – your cert levels increase with each job you complete. The dashboard is fairly simple to understand with options to either buy or sell jobs at the top plus sections for notifications, messages and your profile. All pending jobs and previous job activity are shown in the middle – as you can see, I was currently in the middle of two jobs when I screenshot my dashboard.

Once you click on the Sell Services section, you have a few different options to choose from. Promoting yourself can be done in a variety of ways – via email, social networks or via a widget embedded on your blog. People can endorse you in the topics you are skilled in and you can do the same for them. Let’s just click on ‘Post an Hourlie‘ for now.

Posting an Hourlie couldn’t be any easier – just write what it is you are willing to do and how much you charge; how long the job will take you and if possible, upload some of your relevant portfolio to really pull people in – if they can see your work and they like it, you have more chance of getting the job.

If you want to search the job listings themselves to see if anything takes your fancy, simply click on the Jobs option in the Sell Jobs drop down menu. You can view all the different jobs available or whittle them down by category. I generally whittle them down to the writing category to save myself going through a lot of jobs that I am not qualified for or do not take my interest – I may also check out the social media and extraordinary categories sometimes. I do take a look at all the listing occasionally as you never know what you may find– I have had a few quick jobs from there before which I could possibly have missed and one has become a long term client off the back of it.

What if you’ve found a job you would like to apply for? Then you need to send a proposal.

At the bottom of each job, there is the option to send a new proposal. Remember you only have a select amount of proposals per month unless you want to purchase more so choose wisely. Write about what you can offer the buyer – really sell yourself and your relevant skills. If it is a job to write blog posts and you have written a blog for a couple of years, include that with the link and your specialities. You can also talk about the additional blogging skills you have, like WordPress and SEO, to help you win a job. You can then find the best SEO checker to help you make sure that your posts are optimised as well as they could be. This will help you to do a better job for your clients too. If you ran social media for a couple of months at university, write that down. If you don’t list all the skills and experience you have, how will the seller ever know?

You can also set your rate for the job. PeoplePerHour always make sure to keep a deposit in your Escrow – they generally work out a ballpark figure from whatever figure you propose but I usually choose to ask for a deposit of the whole amount to know that both I and the buyer are covered by PPH. You do get a lot of awful jobs on there where people expect you to essentially work for nothing – I tend to avoid these but there is no harm in applying with your normal rate. I have done on a few jobs now and been successful as they thought me the best person for the job.

There is also the clarification board where potential sellers can ask questions of the buyers. Buyers can sometimes be vague in their listings so if you are unsure about something, ask them! I’ve asked on low budget jobs if there is any flexibility and a few come back and are flexible enough to afford your rate. Once all queries have been resolved, send over your proposal! You can view my profile here

If this post goes down well I am considering writing another, talking you through what to do once you have been accepted for a job. Do you have any questions about PeoplePerHour that I can help you with?

For sites just like PeoplePerhour and Fiverr, check out this post from The Mini Millionaire.