Contra Freelancing Masterclass: Build Your Profile, Services & Client Presence

1. Welcome to the Contra Freelancing Masterclass: Welcome to the Contra Master Class. Contra is a modern freelancing platform, which is meant for individual professionals who want to showcase their portfolio, work more transparently, and connect directly with clients. In this class, you're going to be setting up your Contra from the ground up. Before we begin, let me quickly introduce myself. I'm Jose Kachii a freelance graphic designer and digital designer. I've worked with many clients across the globe with independent contracts, and over the years, I have learned firsthand how important it is for you to best present yourself as a freelancer and know how to sell yourself. So this is especially important for platforms like Contra, because the way you show yourself is the way you're going to be getting jobs and getting those clients. This class, I'll be sharing with you some practical steps based on real freelancing experience. We're going to start with an overview of Contra in case you've never heard of it before. Then we're going to see how the platform works and how it's different from the other freelancing platforms. By the end of the class, we're going to be focusing on getting clients, how to set up your resume, how to use templates, how to show up more in research results, and what you can do to get closer to that first project. This class is designed for complete beginners. You do not need to know any freelancing principles or even how contra works. I'm going to be showing everything to you step by step so that by the end of this course, you'll be a lot more confident in both areas. Let's begin. 2. Introduction: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Contra course. We're going to look over this amazing new platform that allows you to flourish as a freelancer by having everything available to you on this one page. Not only can you have an account and declare your skills, but over here, you get to create your own separate portfolio, manage projects, send invoices, and collect payments. There is obviously a lot more to that as well, and we're going to explore all of that in the next couple lessons. So let's get started first by making an account. 3. Account and Overview: Welcome back. Now we're going to go over to the front end. So on the left side menu, just head over down to profile. Click at once. So in profile, this is what the people are going to see. Obviously, they can't edit stuff, but the first thing they'll see is your picture, your name, get in touch, and they will also see your recommendations. You set your rates right here, your skills, badges, a little bit about yourself, time zone, and links to social media. On the right side, they can see your work, which we'll see how we can add them later. Can see your services, and they can see your recommendations. Previous clients and all that, you can request a recommendation, send it to their email and announce that you have a new contra profile, and their feedback would really help you get more clients. Let's go over here, go to work. And this is your profile. Let's look at the portfolio, which is this icon right here. So if you click it once, it's going to be about the same thing, but the templates that they have are actually really cool. It closes for a second. So it just brings in your information from your profile, has a nice animation. You work is listed this way, and they get to click on it to learn more about your project. So this right now is called a case study. I'll elaborate on that in a different lesson. But essentially, you have a case, which is this project, and you're basically going into every nitty gritty detail. To tell them how you did the say logo, the website, any photos that can help them visualize the process, that would all be here. So again, we have the same things that we saw on the profile. You get to share this with potential clients, so they get to click this and they will type in what they need from you. They can also share your profile, and it's a pretty easy situation. No, I was only able to do the stuff that we saw, but if I want to take it a step further, I would have to buy the Contra Pro that I mentioned earlier. These are the stuff that you can do. You can change the font at a logo and make it a custom domain because right now it's going to be your username.contra.com. However, you saw that even with a free version, I have a pretty decent portfolio, and I don't really the pro version. But you can, of course, go for it if you want. Down here, we get to edit the content and explore other themes and templates. If you want to share it with anyone, you just press this copies the link, and you can just put it on other platforms. Okay, the plus button is for adding a work or service. So another one of these, if you just finish the project either on Contra or outside, you can put it right here. Now, for the projects that you find on Contra, they're just going to be added here are easier because all the information has been within your project management tap. But if you've done external projects, it's a pretty easy process. You just press on this, put in your title, skills, the tools you use, clients, et cetera. And then they have this new thing which imports content in seconds. You click on that, you just put in your project link. This could be a website, it could be a presentation and other stuff. You can see that if we go over here, doesn't accept stuff from FEMA, Notion, Google Docs, and there are some limitations. But again, if this doesn't work, you can just add it manually. All right. Let's go back over here and take a look at the lead section. So first thing is discover. This is where you can find other freelancers, look for them via the program they used or their name or the service. So let's search Logo designer under skill. And there we go. I can see this is also what people will see when they search for something you have. So your rate, what you do, the three main things, it could be more. This person has 13 more, 18 more. You could have less. The tags that will show up here, your photo, this green thing means your online, your rating, and your latest project. We can also customize the animations that people see. So it could be a photo, stop motion, and other stuff. So over here, you can just click on them. You can get in touch with them, look at the stuff they have, and it's pretty straightforward. You can also make a hiring account if you want to hire and be a freelancer at the same time. It's a pretty easy process. And if you just go over here, you can see that you can easily switch between the two. So you can just do that here. The next thing is jobs, which is what freelancers would have to do eventually. Over here, you have jobs and the jobs that you've applied for. You can filter through them, look for the roles, see if they're Contra jobs or community created jobs. So there are other jobs listed from different platforms, but that's if the creators allowed them to be here. So if you're not interested in things on Contra, you can also search for this or just search for all of them. So I'm going to go for AL Jobs in finance, and I can find job like this. So this is the monthly payment. It's still ongoing. The text, I can click on it and I get more description and learn more about the company itself. Now, when you apply, if this pops up, this means that you're applying for a contra job. But if it's another platform, you're going to be directed to there. So that's the only difference. The good thing about applying via Contra is that you get to link the projects you already have on your portfolio, and that just saves you the time of uploading your portfolio separately, sending out links, explaining your work because it's already there. And your profile is linked when you apply on Contra. So first, it's essentially a cover letter, calendar link. And then here, when you click on it, it brings all the projects that you currently have on your portfolio. You would have to choose the top three that match this job description, so you can't have all of them on there. You just select them like that. You link them, and then you submit. The person who gets your application can click on your profile. Take a look at your certifications, your education, recommendations, et cetera. Now, let me show you what the other type of jobs are going to look like. So let's go over here. When you hit Apply, it takes you to this company's preferred method. Now this is no problem, but as I mentioned, you would have to add in all this information yourself. On the top right, we have Contra Pro. You can share your profile, copies the link. There are messages. People want to contact you for a project, a question, collaboration, all of that will show up here. You have a notification center, and here I can see that I've been matched with a few jobs. If you allow Contra, they will do the same for you based on the tags you put on your profile and how advanced you are in your profile development. So you're going to get these messages. You click over here, you can mark them as red, and we also have some new features. Now the last place is the projects and payments. So let's go to projects and invoices. Right now it's clear, but if you start a project or get accepted for a project, you're going to show up here as little boxes. You get to change your status to maybe finished, pause, canceled, and filter through them. Your clients will be listed here, the companies they work for. And you can sort them out as well. If you're not doing it via Contra, you can put in an external project. So start a project. You can send a proposal. So this is where you get to tell the potential client who may not be on Contra. If they are, that's okay. What you hope to achieve for them, your prices, the amount of time it's going to take, your work, a contract for them to sign. And other stuff. So who are you working with? You put in your client's email address, the name of your project. Next, we have payment detail, escrow payments, invoice billing. This is with Contra again, Project Scope, your deliverables, and you can add them on like that. Can't show you the whole thing. I do have a sample project that I'm going to be proposing, and then we'll go through that together. Let's go back over here and look for the last thing, which is wallets. Basically, what you can do is add in your payout accounts. This could be an e wallet, your bank, paypal or whatever. You can make a keep your payments here. I'm not sure for how long, but you essentially have a wallet, and you manage your payments this way. I did forget to show you guys the invoice, so let's go back, go over here, and you can make invoices. Custom branding is pro, but again, you can do perfectly fine with the free version. First things first, invoice number, your email to who you're sending this to, the date. You can select your project here. So you would have to add a project there to be able to send an invoice the items you made, how many the rate, can add more items, and you can even tax them according to whatever country you're on. And lastly, we have a memo. Do you have any notes or anything? You can add them here. You preview it. Then you send it. And then all the invoices that you make are going to show up over here. So as you can see, it's really an all in one platform for freelancers. And it makes everything a lot easier. You don't have to go over several platforms. Not even fiber or Upwork have reached this level. So if you are starting out with freelancing or you're struggling with it, I highly recommend looking at this platform. And as we saw from the filters, it's in almost every category. So there was finance, there was crypto, there was web design, copywriting, anything you can think of. At that we've seen an overview of everything. It's now time to start building our profile. I'll see you guys in the next lesson where we do just that. 4. Contra Tour: Welcome back. Now we're going to go over to the front end. So on the left side menu, just head over down to profile. Click at once. So in profile, this is what the people are going to see. Obviously, they can't edit stuff, but the first thing they'll see is your picture, your name, get in touch, and they will also see your recommendations. You set your rates right here, your skills, badges, a little bit about yourself, time zone, and links to social media. On the right side, they can see your work, which we'll see how we can add them later. Can see your services, and they can see your recommendations. Previous clients and all that, you can request a recommendation, send it to their email and announce that you have a new contra profile, and their feedback would really help you get more clients. Let's go over here, go to work. And this is your profile. Let's look at the portfolio, which is this icon right here. So if you click it once, it's going to be about the same thing, but the templates that they have are actually really cool. It closes for a second. So it just brings in your information from your profile, has a nice animation. You work is listed this way, and they get to click on it to learn more about your project. So this right now is called a case study. I'll elaborate on that in a different lesson. But essentially, you have a case, which is this project, and you're basically going into every nitty gritty detail. To tell them how you did the say logo, the website, any photos that can help them visualize the process, that would all be here. So again, we have the same things that we saw on the profile. You get to share this with potential clients, so they get to click this and they will type in what they need from you. They can also share your profile, and it's a pretty easy situation. No, I was only able to do the stuff that we saw, but if I want to take it a step further, I would have to buy the Contra Pro that I mentioned earlier. These are the stuff that you can do. You can change the font at a logo and make it a custom domain because right now it's going to be your username.contra.com. However, you saw that even with a free version, I have a pretty decent portfolio, and I don't really the pro version. But you can, of course, go for it if you want. Down here, we get to edit the content and explore other themes and templates. If you want to share it with anyone, you just press this copies the link, and you can just put it on other platforms. Okay, the plus button is for adding a work or service. So another one of these, if you just finish the project either on Contra or outside, you can put it right here. Now, for the projects that you find on Contra, they're just going to be added here are easier because all the information has been within your project management tap. But if you've done external projects, it's a pretty easy process. You just press on this, put in your title, skills, the tools you use, clients, et cetera. And then they have this new thing which imports content in seconds. You click on that, you just put in your project link. This could be a website, it could be a presentation and other stuff. You can see that if we go over here, doesn't accept stuff from FEMA, Notion, Google Docs, and there are some limitations. But again, if this doesn't work, you can just add it manually. All right. Let's go back over here and take a look at the lead section. So first thing is discover. This is where you can find other freelancers, look for them via the program they used or their name or the service. So let's search Logo designer under skill. And there we go. I can see this is also what people will see when they search for something you have. So your rate, what you do, the three main things, it could be more. This person has 13 more, 18 more. You could have less. The tags that will show up here, your photo, this green thing means your online, your rating, and your latest project. We can also customize the animations that people see. So it could be a photo, stop motion, and other stuff. So over here, you can just click on them. You can get in touch with them, look at the stuff they have, and it's pretty straightforward. You can also make a hiring account if you want to hire and be a freelancer at the same time. It's a pretty easy process. And if you just go over here, you can see that you can easily switch between the two. So you can just do that here. The next thing is jobs, which is what freelancers would have to do eventually. Over here, you have jobs and the jobs that you've applied for. You can filter through them, look for the roles, see if they're Contra jobs or community created jobs. So there are other jobs listed from different platforms, but that's if the creators allowed them to be here. So if you're not interested in things on Contra, you can also search for this or just search for all of them. So I'm going to go for AL Jobs in finance, and I can find job like this. So this is the monthly payment. It's still ongoing. The text, I can click on it and I get more description and learn more about the company itself. Now, when you apply, if this pops up, this means that you're applying for a contra job. But if it's another platform, you're going to be directed to there. So that's the only difference. The good thing about applying via Contra is that you get to link the projects you already have on your portfolio, and that just saves you the time of uploading your portfolio separately, sending out links, explaining your work because it's already there. And your profile is linked when you apply on Contra. So first, it's essentially a cover letter, calendar link. And then here, when you click on it, it brings all the projects that you currently have on your portfolio. You would have to choose the top three that match this job description, so you can't have all of them on there. You just select them like that. You link them, and then you submit. The person who gets your application can click on your profile. Take a look at your certifications, your education, recommendations, et cetera. Now, let me show you what the other type of jobs are going to look like. So let's go over here. When you hit Apply, it takes you to this company's preferred method. Now this is no problem, but as I mentioned, you would have to add in all this information yourself. On the top right, we have Contra Pro. You can share your profile, copies the link. There are messages. People want to contact you for a project, a question, collaboration, all of that will show up here. You have a notification center, and here I can see that I've been matched with a few jobs. If you allow Contra, they will do the same for you based on the tags you put on your profile and how advanced you are in your profile development. So you're going to get these messages. You click over here, you can mark them as red, and we also have some new features. Now the last place is the projects and payments. So let's go to projects and invoices. Right now it's clear, but if you start a project or get accepted for a project, you're going to show up here as little boxes. You get to change your status to maybe finished, pause, canceled, and filter through them. Your clients will be listed here, the companies they work for. And you can sort them out as well. If you're not doing it via Contra, you can put in an external project. So start a project. You can send a proposal. So this is where you get to tell the potential client who may not be on Contra. If they are, that's okay. What you hope to achieve for them, your prices, the amount of time it's going to take, your work, a contract for them to sign. And other stuff. So who are you working with? You put in your client's email address, the name of your project. Next, we have payment detail, escrow payments, invoice billing. This is with Contra again, Project Scope, your deliverables, and you can add them on like that. Can't show you the whole thing. I do have a sample project that I'm going to be proposing, and then we'll go through that together. Let's go back over here and look for the last thing, which is wallets. Basically, what you can do is add in your payout accounts. This could be an e wallet, your bank, paypal or whatever. You can make a keep your payments here. I'm not sure for how long, but you essentially have a wallet, and you manage your payments this way. I did forget to show you guys the invoice, so let's go back, go over here, and you can make invoices. Custom branding is pro, but again, you can do perfectly fine with the free version. First things first, invoice number, your email to who you're sending this to, the date. You can select your project here. So you would have to add a project there to be able to send an invoice the items you made, how many the rate, can add more items, and you can even tax them according to whatever country you're on. And lastly, we have a memo. Do you have any notes or anything? You can add them here. You preview it. Then you send it. And then all the invoices that you make are going to show up over here. So as you can see, it's really an all in one platform for freelancers. And it makes everything a lot easier. You don't have to go over several platforms. Not even fiber or Upwork have reached this level. So if you are starting out with freelancing or you're struggling with it, I highly recommend looking at this platform. And as we saw from the filters, it's in almost every category. So there was finance, there was crypto, there was web design, copywriting, anything you can think of. At that we've seen an overview of everything. It's now time to start building our profile. I'll see you guys in the next lesson where we do just that. 5. Profile Building: General Information: So there are certain factors to consider when you're filling in your profile. Remember, that's the first thing people see, so we want to make sure that it's rightfully optimized. It has the correct information and the right information. So in this lesson, we're going to focus on the left side of the profile, which is your photo, your rate, your skills, a little bit about you. And other stuff. In the next lesson, we're going to go over how we can fill in projects from start to finish. So when you go over and hover onto any of these, you can change them. The first thing is your photo. Be sure that you have a professional headshot, and it's a photo of you alone. A lot of people have photos where they're all the way in the back and right off the bat, the client can't really connect with you through the human interaction. So make sure it's a headshot where your eyes are visible, you're professional. And you can just take that photo anywhere. That's the first thing. If you have a photo where it's not of you or if it's a pattern, landscape, chances are that the client will not find you that trustable when compared to a photo of yourself. Next, we have this button down here, we spoke about briefly, but it's basically whether or not you're and I haven't come to this platform in a while, so as you can see, it named me as Unavailable. And if I want to get that back, I just have to press this button. And now I'm available. If I'm not, I'll just go back in here and click on Unavailable. The next thing is your full name. Just type it there with the pencil on the side. We have the get in touch button, which basically you're letting people contact you with questions, with projects and all that stuff. But if you don't want them to contact you, you just turn that off, and I will also no longer appear in Discover. So I'm not sure why they have that option. You should definitely have that turned on. Next is your recommendations, which we looked over here. But essentially, when you click on them, you have the option to ask for recommendation. So you type in your client's first name, last name. If it's a company, you just put one right here, person's email, someone that you can contact. Can add their LinkedIn profile if you want to if you have access to that. The company, it's optional, and you can also add in your collaborator. So if you're just starting out on this platform, I highly recommend going back to your previous clients or collaborators and just ask them to fill this up for you. It won't take that long, but it's going to help you tremendously. Even if you have one recommendations, you're already above the people who don't have any, you will show up on the discovers or when someone searches for a skill that you have. So it might seem a bit tedious, but it's actually very important. Write a message. There's one already there for you, but of course, you can change this up. This will be telling us that there's going to be a link. So once you have all this and you fill this up, you simply request recommendations. That person is going to get an email and there's a link for them to click on. Once they go in there, they will get a box where they get to write about their experience with you. And that is going to show up, as you can see, right underneath. Let's talk about your rate. Depending on which industry you're in, the starting rates will differ. And a lot of times you can't have flat rates, and you got to have hourly rates. So for those that don't know, flat rates are a certain amount that you're going to take regardless of how many hours you put into that work, whereas an hourly rate is for every hour that you worked on that project, you will get X amount. So here I have 25 to 50/hour. This is industry standard for graphic design, web design, and all that stuff, but I believe I kept mine for graphic design. But if you're not sure of how to calculate your hourly rate, there is this tool, clockifidtM slash hourly rate Calculator. Basically choose your industry. Let's go for a gain programmer, your location. Let's do United States experience, say I'm one to three years. Now it's going to tell me the average of 45/hour. This is based on my experience. If I say I'm an expert, that's going to go up. And if I have no experience, it's going to go down. And this is, of course, different for every place. So former Soviet Union $21. If you don't trust this, you can also just type in, How much should I charge for a senior or junior game programmer in the United States or in Canada? You're going to find tons of articles guiding you through that process. Once you have that figured out, you simply go over here, type it in, or actually, you would choose it here. You can also say, I prefer not to say, but it's better to have that upfront just so the client knows what they're signing up for. So choose that, it's safe. Next, we have skills and tools. The first three are what's going to pop up on the client view. So make sure you choose those wisely. The top three that I went with for the following, I'm sure that for a lot of you, there's more to it than just three skills, but think about a very specific thing that you want to focus on because the more you concentrate on a niche, the more likely it is that you're going to get clients. So instead of, say, being a graphic designer, try being a startup logo designer. So that's very specific. You're targeting a certain audience, and people can find you easier, and in a way, you're telling them straight up with that title that you are experienced in that startup field. So you can do that. Just delete it, put in. I'm going to put it in Logo Designer for now, and that is more specific than graphic design. After that, we have the tools. So type in the stuff that you are familiar with or an expert in it's safe, and there we go. The badges section is basically things that you do and contra rewards you for it. So we saw in the previous lesson someone had people's choice or something. Those are stuff that you're going to gain eventually the more you are on this platform. But the first two things that you should get after this lesson is getting your payments active and verifying your identity. If you don't have these two badges, you can't even be trusted because the client will eventually have to pay you and they don't even know if you are who you say you are. So after this lesson, take the time, verify it. I believe with the identity verification, it takes a few business days, but it's totally worth it, considering that you're going to actually show up on your search results. Next is your about section. You can choose any tone of voice or any perspective that you want, but try to sound friendly and approachable and not so much like robot. Remember, this is not exactly your resume. This is a profile for people to come onto and trust you as a fellow designer. Some people like to do this type of writing in third person. Some people like to bring in a lot of numbers. Others like to just say that they're passionate. Maybe they'll list a few of their hobbies and all that stuff. But just take the time to write a good about section. You can also use the help of ChatBT if you're not sure how to get about it or view other profiles on Contra to see what's in demand. So we can actually do that. Let's go to Discover and type search for someone in our field. So logo designer, let's go for this person. And so they're having this pitch that she's going to give them an increased clarity and confidence in their brand and a question near the end, which most likely the answer will be yes. Let's look at some other stuff. So this person chose to introduce themselves. So passion, confidence, and something near the end to just pump them up for a potential project. All right, this person is saying their title, a different approach. But as you can see, there's a ton of ways to do it. There isn't like one standard here. But the main goal is that you are a personality on this platform. So try to match that and keep it consistent across all your designs, all your writings and across your entire profile. Let's go back here. Next is your location. You can type it in. This actually helps, especially in regards to time zone. Time zone and then the languages that you speak, you can add as many as you want and choose your fluency. Down here is the links to your social media. You can put in your portfolio, another portfolio, if you have it listed as a website. You have B hands, LinkedIn, dribble, and all that stuff, you can add new links like a YouTube channel, anything you want, and people can further explore your creativity and just be sure of their decision. That is the profile section. In the next lesson, we're going to make a new project and see how we can make a great first impression and basically convince the clients that we are right for their job. 6. Projects: Alright, let's go ahead and make our first project. This is an example of a project. The first thing people will see is the title, the photo and a description. Down here, we have tags regarding this project that you're going to have to add. And if you just press on the Plus button, you're going to be brought onto this page. And the first thing we want to do is to give a title, and that's going to be about the company. So company name, and then you can put a dash and talk about exactly what you did. So mine would be a logo and brand design. Okay. The formatting could be different. You could just mention what you did without the company title, especially if the company did not give you permission to share what you did for them. Make sure to clear that up with them before you do this. Next, we're going to add in the skills that are associated with logo and brand design. So graphic design, brand design, visual design, and that's it. Now, the suggestions are from our profile. Those are the things that we kept in earlier. You can add in other stuff. So let's say start up. Brand design. There's going to be a bunch of other options, but if you can't see them here, you can just create one yourself. Add it in the design category, and there we have it. You can still go ahead and add more. With projects, there isn't a limit, so you can just go ahead and do as much as you want, but the ones you add first are going to show up immediately on the client side, so bear that in mind. Next we have the tools. What did you use to make this project happen? Just add that in there. It's that framer in there, and I believe that is it. Add Photoshop as well. There we go. Lastly, it's the client. It's going to look for clients on Contra, but a lot of times you can't have that possibility. If you just type them in, should be able to see them, but if not, you can just leave it B, not have a client. But try so my client is not Contra, and I can't add them here, but I did mention them above. Alright, now we're going to do something called a case study. So you're going to bring the client with you from start to finish, how you went about this project, how you got started, if there's any challenges, any sketches you want to put in there, you can do that immediately. Now, I am going to try this because there's a website for this project. So let's let's try it and see what we get. Let's see if it can import it. Okay, so it's not supported. That's fine. But let me see. The supported versions. So if I go to Bhands and grab one of my projects, copy that, paste it here. Let's see what that's going to look like. So there we go. I brought it in from Behance. The name of my project, it matches, didn't change this that much, but it brought in my image and those with it, and then there's a link for the original project. All right, I'm just going to hit Cancel, go back to profile. I think we have to start again. There we go. Change the name. Get rid of the pictures. Okay, let's just do this ourself. I'm going to start in by adding the photos relevant to this project. So let's click on Plus and get ourselves an image. All right. Down here, I'm just going to add in a text box so I can start talking about what's going on here. And I'm just going to use chat GPT real quick just so we don't spend a lot of time from the lesson crafting these things. So write a case study for an app design, study process at Inter. Let's do the same thing. A Plant tracker app called antifi so Chat CHIPTs just going to give you a nice outline. Of course, it's not going to be exact because the project is different from this. But you can see how it's giving you the basics, and I'm just going to grab this real quick and pretend like we wrote it together just to save time. So general overview of what this whole project is. There's a text here. You can skip the first photo, and cool thing is that you can keep adding stuff to it. Let's say I want a divider, hit Enter. Add a divider, make sure it's on a different line. Hit Enter again. Now I can separate everything. Let's add a heading for project goals. And maybe we can do a little bullet point, go back here. Let's go with project goals. The first one being built a minimal and modern logo for the plantifi brand. Number two, design a brand identity that fits well into the startup and agritech industry. Third, let's do have application mockups ready for developers for test application and deliver final version. All right. So now, usually the client gives you project goals. I just wrote these myself. But when you send a contract to your client, and of course, prior to that, a proposal, you are going to agree on a mutual project goals, and you're going to get deadlines for those. So most of the information that you're going to add here can be found in that initial proposal that you sent. So let's assume the stuff I'm writing is from that proposal. Going to learn about writing proposals in another lesson. So let's do project goals, and then I'm going to add in hit Enter twice to get out of this. Let's add in another image for, like, the actual logo. There we go. Now I'm going to just type in about the process. I'm going to see if Jad JBT wrote something about that. Okay. I didn't write about logo. I think I didn't add that in there. But let's put in a logo has smooth edges and follows leaf patterns. Across each letter, the color is rich and when sood against a white background has high contrast for visibility. For better visibility. Alright. Any other stuff if you have a sketch of your logo designs, this would be a time to put it. Something inspired you. Put that in there. If a client asks you to design a logo like the Airbnb logo, that's something that you do want to mention here because it shows that how you took a very famous logo like that, changed it up a bit and made an awesome logo yourself based off that style. So that's an achievement right there, sketches. You can add those in there, too. Is there were multiple versions of a logo that you had to go through with your client, that's something you would want to put in here. A lot of people choose not to put the challenges they face in projects in their case studies because they feel like it makes them look maybe not as competent. But on the contrary, having a lot of challenges and showing how you go through them is a great way for the client to see you as a problem solver, and that's exactly why they're on this platform. They have a problem, which in this case, could be a lack of logo, and they want you to solve it and seeing how you went after all the challenges. You took all the feedbacks and implemented them. That is a huge bonus. So at those over here, I saw that Chat GPT did write some lessons learned, okay? I'm just going to copy these two and put them in. Let's hit Enter get another text block, paste that. If you dabble click, you can change your style for the text. Clean this up a bit. I'm going to put outcome after lessons learned. There we go. Hit Enter again for our other section. And I will add another photo as the last thing. All right. So there is our case study. There's also image captions. Let's type in finalized logo. Put in here buyers interface within the application, and then home screen for Growers interface. And then I would have to define these two over here, so have application mockups ready for developers. Define crowers and buyers when designing a. All right. So a bunch of stuff like that. Let's hit the next button, which is the preview. Okay, so I'm just going to delete visual design. It's kind of irrelevant. Preview. And now it's going to bring me to this place where I get to decide how clients see my project. So over here, you can see that it added that first photo, but that's only because we uploaded them to this project gallery. So if I just change that to this, it's going to switch. You can also add a new photo if you don't want any of that. Get something from Osplash, get something from templates, connecting these two. This is not even ready, but I'm just going to go with this one. It looks pretty nice. And here is the project description. So let's just head over here to make things faster. Write a project description for Decas study above. Let's do let's see what the maximum is 160, write a 150 word project description. There we go. Let's just copy that, put that in there. I always want 60 characters. Let's do that. Again, 50 character limit. Project description. There we go. Let's put that in there, and then we can go ahead and publish. And now I have my project. So all the skills, the tools I used, the exact same order that we did. It's all over here, and if the client likes it so far, they can immediately go and get in touch with me. All right. Now, this is where the recommendation part comes in. So you can see the thing popped up above. Did you complete this for our client? If so, you can request recommendation. So the company Plantfy you made this for their email, and you can just link that to the project to make a stronger case, basically. Let's go to our profile, and there it is. There we go. We also have the option to reorder. If you don't want this to be the first thing people see, you can just click and track it. And move it around. Over here, you can edit or delete. So pretty straightforward, and they rehab it. That's how you can make a new project on Contra. Please do this with every project you've done. Even if it's a passion project, it really helps showcase your skills to clients, and it just takes a lot of time, but it's definitely worth it. Now that we have some projects, we're going to move on to how we can add services with those projects, and we're going to take a look at that in the next lesson. 7. Services: Now, we're in the services section, and over here, you're going to list out the things that you want people to find you for. So I have some over here. We got web design. If you click on it, I have the title, some of the work I've done, and I'm telling them what's included about the service. Here are some examples and recommendations. And then down here, they get to contact you and also view your other services if you've listed any. So let's close this and create our new service. I'm going to make one for logo design, just because we have some here already. So click on that. And first, we're going to type in what we're doing. So there's a logo design right there. Next, we're going to pitch our service. So let's go ahead and write something like modern and minimal logos for startups. And then the search tags. These are what the people are going to search for in order to find your service. So let's put Logo designer, Adobe Creative Suite. Let's go down here and be graphic designer, typographer and all that stuff. Next, we have the tools, sketch, Figma Illustrator. I mean, we won't be using Figma for that. Actually, I think design was pretty good. And there we go. Next we have industry. So see if they have start ups here. Okay. Let's do local business, see what other business stuff we have. Maybe we can go into the field we're looking to design stuff for. So let's do agriculture, finance, a bunch of other stuff. Next is the deliverables. So what will you be giving them exactly at the end of the project? It's to finalize logo. And here I'm going to explain that in different formats, let's give them PNG, JPEG, and SVG. The next thing, let's do a brand Guide, a PDF, including the different go styles, typography limits, and let's see, color guide. Well, let's add a third one for brand icons. And I think these are pretty good. Let's just add something extra logo motion. A ten second showcasing the new logo for your social media page. So there are the deliverables. Once I'm done, I'm going to hit next, and now we have to add a summary. So let's go ahead and type in something like turn your ideas into professional and modern logos for your business, the freedom, have the option to showcase your rebranding in a fun and engaging way through the provided resources. All right. Next, we have additional details. These are optional, but I do recommend that you put them. Again, if you've used fiber or Upwork, these will be rather familiar to you. If you want to let the client know your exact process, which you should going to add a plus and outline your process. First one, let's do sketch or actually Let's do an idea call where we talk about the rebranding or the look of the new logo. Secondly, let's do initial sketches. Next, we can do logo drafts. Four, let's put in feedback call and five final delivery. Something like this. Then we have this thing for a Calendly link or any other platform. But basically, if you are in the type of industry where communication is important, which is most industries, you would want to make an account on either Calendly or other spaces and just put the link here. All right. Next, we're going to go for the pricing. So fixed rate is a certain price that the client is supposed to pay to you regardless of how many hours you spent on it. So fixed rate, then we have ongoing rate, which you can do hourly or per hour that you work on this per week that you work on this. Per month. So if you want something like a salary and it's going to be a really long project, you would want to go for an ongoing rate. But usually with logos, you want to go with something fixed because it's doesn't take that long, and once a client's done with it, they're done with it. But if it's something to make a website and maintain it, then that's going to be going on for as long as a client needs that website. So that's when you would go for ongoing. Next, we have a quick hire, which is an accelerated version of this service. But when you turn this on, it's going to disable this because it's going to be a really fast project, like an emergency. So that's just going to be your fixed rate. And I'm just going to put it in a price right now, whatever you want. It does help to look at other profiles and see what the standard is so you don't put a price that's way too high or way too low. You can also check out the calendars, the calculators that we looked at a few lessons ago if you're not sure what to put on here. Next, we have the duration. So let's go for two weeks. You can go for months as well. For days, let's go next. And you can highlight your service with a photo. Okay, so I'm just going to add one of the logo we made previously. So there we go. Is save so they can get an idea of what I'm going to be providing for them. And let's publish. Alright, so this is my service right now. This is what the client will see a nice photo descriptions about the service recommendations, and, um additional information. If they go down here, there's also other stuff that we made. There is the contact for pricing option as well, which I've said here. If your project is going to take a long time and you're not exactly sure what the client is looking for, like, it's something that you have to be in constant communication about, then you would want to put in a quote option. So after you've spoke to them, they've told you exactly what you want, then you give them a price. So there's that option as well, and those are your services. Got some per hour, and these are starting at. So if you felt like project took longer than intended, you can just change that. And that is how you can make a service on Contra. It was pretty straightforward, and I do recommend at least having the services that you've listed over here. So, it makes sense. And there's a consistency amongst your all throughout your profile. So now that we have made our services, we kept in our project, it's now time to make a proposal and actually start a project from scratch. We're gonna do that in the next lesson, and I'll see you guys there. 8. Making Your First Project Part 1: Now that we have all aspects of our profile ready, it's now time to actually start a project and request to a client to allow us to do their work. So what we're going to do is head over to the menu on the left and go into projects and invoices. Right now it's empty, but we're going to make our first one right here. Alright, so there are four steps to this, as you can see. What we're going to do is have a client that is looking for a sort of service. But first, let's go to Chat GPT and get a fake brief that we can pretend is our client and then use that brief to fill in the proposal. So, write a fake brief from a client. For a web design project. Alright, so Cha JPTs going to give us everything that we need. And this just saves us time for writing stuff. Of course, you can take time and write all of these yourself. But if you're not sure where to begin, you can refer to something like this to see exactly what the order is and what the standard is. All right, so I have that ready. First thing, who are we working with. The name of our client is Urban Echo Living. Pasted of here. Hoops, actually, that'll be here through email. All right. So then it's going to ask us to put in their full name because they're not Contra. Once we're done with that, let's go for the payment details. We can do either invoice or escrow payments. This just depends on your project and the relationship you have with that client. Basically, with invoicing, you can either ask them to pay every month or just pay once at the end of the project or pay them they pay you upfront. With escrow payment, they pay it upfront, but you don't get it until you're done with the project. So the funds are held in escrow. Until project completion. If it's a new client, a lot of people rather do this just to make sure that they end up paying you. But if it's a client that you've worked with before or you just trust them, invoice billing could be a good option. So I'm just going to go with this one just to show you, let's do both. So first, we have fixed payments. This is a certain amount that you request once from your client. It could be a fixed payment of 300 per month per year for two months, up to you. But then we also have hourly rates, which is basically per hour that you work on that project. So it really depends on your procedure. A lot of people rather do hourly when they have big projects that they have to spend a lot of time researching, brainstorming, prototyping, and all that stuff. But some stuff like I've seen illustrations do this a lot, Illustrators. They just take a fixed payment at the end of the project, or if it's very long with monthly intervals. So fixed payments, you get to decide the frequency weekly, bi weekly or monthly. Then you put in your amount. And then we have the start date. So when is this project starting, you can click on this to get the calendar, and then you can decide when the client will get an invoice. So is it since we said weekly, Thursday's first invoice is August 8, you can add an end date if you know when this is ending. Say it's going to be six weeks long, and it will just calculate the end date there. But notice how it's not letting me put that in there, and that's because if there's anything that comes up mid project, your end date will be delayed. So until you declare that the project is finished, the client will be getting invoices. So we can't really put an end date because we are not sure how long the project is going to take, given that the client will have unpredictable feedbacks. Then we have first invoice payment. Do you want the full amount, or do you want to adjust it to maybe half the amount and get the rest later? We have invoice due. Do they have to pay it as soon as they get it within 15 days, 30 days, or you can customize it for however much you want. And that is the fixed payments. Now, hourly payments is something different. You can again choose the frequency and then put in a per hour rate. So I'm going to do 60/hour. And the estimated hours that I plan to work for this project, you can put it here, the start date, and you can put in an end date. So with this one, because you're getting paid hourly, if the client is like, Oh, I need this and that, nothing really changes. There's just going to be more hours. And you've already said that over here. So let's say the project ends October 30. Invoice do, let's do upon receipt. Funds are not secure, paid instead once a freelancer submits hours for work completed. Here you can see that it is recommending an escrow payment for new clients, but I just wanted to show you what each of these look like. Let's try the escrow payment now. The first thing is the structure. Milestones are basically the steps that you complete that you would like to get paid for. If you don't have any of those milestones, it's just a one time payment. Let's take a look at an example. With web design, there's going to be milestones. There's the first prototyping, then there's a development, there's user testing, and then there's the finalization. These four things, there's going to be more in different cases. These are called milestones and they take a while. So you would identify these as the milestones and then ask for payment as you go along these steps. So once you're done with the prototyping, the client has to pay you X amount of your undeclared full amount, and then you will only continue if they pay that amount. They don't pay you, then clearly there is a problem, and you obviously don't want to spend time on something if you're not going to be paid for it. In other cases, there is a one time payment option. So say someone is asking you to draw a caricature of them. This is a one time drawing. Hopefully, so you would just say that once I'm done with this drawing, pay me $600. Milestones, you would have to identify them. So let's go for let's see. Okay, so we were doing a website. And say, these are the milestones. So I'm simply going to copy them and then put in design logo, topography and color palette. I say, this is it. And then for this thing that I've done, I want $200. And the date in which this will be completed is kind of like a deadline for this particular step. That's going to be, let's say, 8 August. The next step is the enhanced user experience. Actually not sure if these are these steps. Okay, so that's a step. Let's just do branding and just put in prototype and for this, I'm on 500. Let's put a random date. The initial look of the website. Let's add another one. SEO. So SEO improvements and automation. Let's put $300 random amounts for now. And finally, we do final delivery. Alright, so right now, I'm just putting really simple and short descriptions, but in your case, you definitely want to be more descriptive. You don't want to have the client guessing anything because that could be a problem later on, where they will tell you that, Oh, I'm not going to pay you because I thought this meant that. So even if there's some obvious stuff that you think the client would know, still put that in there, it's better to be safe than sorry. You're talking about a logo, mention how many logo versions you're going to get, typography, what styles, and how will you be doing that? Color palette, how many colors are in this palette, and what options do the client get? With a prototype, you can mention what they're going to get in this draft website, so you can list down the pages. ChatPD did have them here. So let me just copy that real quick. I'm basically promising them this, and they should expect exactly this and not anything extra. Let's put that there. 500 SEO. How are you going to optimize it? If you're going to be using plugins, third party stuff, list them all here. Final delivery. What are they getting exactly at the end of this whole process? Just put that in there. I'm just going to put $100 here. And then we have the tax inclusive tax. You can put it here, choose a tax here, put in ID and the rate. This is, of course, optional, but definitely look at the freelancing tax requirements in your country and list them here, just so you don't get into trouble with payments. Alright, I'm just going to put that. Let's put a bunch of numbers for now. 20% at next, and now we're going to describe the overview of the project. So let's put this over here. This should be what I think the overview of the project is based on my understanding. I put it here, and then the client reads it. If there's anything wrong, they should be telling you that upon seeing it, and you really want to confirm that you got everything right. The signature that we're going to get to in a bit is just going to confirm that they agree with your understanding. So let's stop here for this lesson just to keep it short. I'll see you guys in the next part where we continue with our project creation. 9. Making Your First Project Part 2: Welcome back. Let's continue with the project. All right, once we're done, select a contract. There's this standard Contra service agreement. You can preview what that looks like. And the cool thing is that it's going to input everything you've written so far into this contract. So let's take a look here. So it's mentioning Contra, but here are the stuff that we wrote for the deliverables. There's a brand, SEO and stuff. The timeline, it listed all the milestones, and the end date, there's the payment terms, it's describing everything, the taxes which you put in there ownership stuff. These are just standard freelancer stuff. However, you could upload your own. So if you hit Cancel. Let's go back, actually. You hit that go contract. You can just upload a PDF. Maybe you have a contract that fits your services or your requirements. There's tons of them online. If you just search for developer freelancer developer contracts or graphic design contracts. They're going to show up, put in your information, and upload them here. Also put in additional terms to put terms or special scenarios. Let's say if there is no, your laptop crashed and everything gets lost. You want to put a term over there. If you're in a place that has strict copyright laws, you want to indicate that here and anything else that comes to mind, again, better safe than sorry. I'm just going to use a standard contra agreement and a preview. So there's this option to sign on the behalf of a company. That's if you are a agency or something, and it's not just you, but if you're just a regular freelancer, this should be enough. I'm going to put in my name here and make sure I check this box. And let's go to sign and sent, and there we have it. So your proposal or projects will go under review each time. It shouldn't take that long, but essentially they're looking to make sure that everything is correct. You didn't miss any information, and everything is legit. So it sounds good. And once we have a project, say, it's been approved, we have the activity, which is the steps that are happening. So if the client signs it, there's going to be a circle here that leave Sarah Green. Signed this contract. We can also see that at this time, this project was created. Over here, we can see the information we kept in, and there is a progress bar for this whole project. It's great to keep track of what's left. Next, we have the scope, which is the stuff we wrote for it. So start date, end date, the client, the total amount, the steps that we put in there, and a project scope text. Then we have invoices, so we did indicate four different milestones. So by the end of this project, there should be four separate invoices. They will let you know if it was paid or not. And you can make a new invoice here. If there needs to be something extra, your milestones will be automatically invoice. But say the client asks for a whole new thing separate from the stuff you've written before, you would just add an invoice like so. Now, invoicing, since we're in here already, is pretty straightforward. You put in a number, make sure you start from something that you can keep track of the issue date. Do received or if you want to give them extra time. The project, you get to choose it from here or just choose a new project, the item that you did. So let's say, new page. Take it for $80. Just an example. Add as many as you want. Add a text if you want to write in some additional notes. So for the new landing page, let's see. And then this is what the preview looks like. If you want your logo there, you can upgrade your P. It's going to show up right here. I'm not going to send a new invoice, but you can see that our project is ready to go. So I did another project just to show you that they do refuse stuff. I made a project for myself, and it was a brand design for this much. And you can see that if they sense that your project is not legit like mine here, they will reject it. If it was a problem, if you think they made a mistake, you can just duplicate the proposal and change something up. It will copy everything so you don't have to start from scratch. And if they still refuse it, you can just contact them over here. Alright, so say that this is my project, and I'm just going to go in there. It's evading Sarah's signature, but Sara is not real. So only once the client signs this proposal, will you be able to have an active project? So you can see the checklist for pre launch and all that. You can download the contract if you want to email it to them and just be more secure. Let's go back here. So our project right now is not active. As you can see. But it's a really fascinating way how they can allow you to manage all your projects, all your clients in a really simple way. This didn't take that much time. They already had a bunch of templates, and I didn't have to do that much stuff. And that concludes our project or proposals. Once you get paid, as we mentioned, it's going to go in your wallet. You can go over here, and then you send the payout amount to an account that you add over here. So they have the bank account, debit card, PayPal, and USDC, whichever you prefer. And everything is pretty secure. All right. So we have our profile ready. We have a project ready. Now let's go and see how we can get more projects with real clients. We're going to see how we can write decent proposals for a project that's already listed on Contra by community members and even check out external links and try to get those projects as well. So I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 10. Getting Jobs: Now that our profile is ready, we can go ahead and discover jobs and see what the lead section has to offer. So we looked at Discover already, but just a refresher, this is where you get to see other freelancers, look at their rates, what they do, and perhaps you can hire them, do a collaboration with them. And as you can see, there are no paywalls or anything. You can just click on any of them, get in touch with them, and this is letting us know that they're rather active. These are the project and the recommendations. So a profile like this is what you want to strive for. We kind of have that going, but there was the services that we made, and then there's the different projects and recommendations. Over here, he has a nice about his location, the languages he speaks, and another big thing that I don't think I talked about is having social media or external links on your profile just so that people have the option to research you further and see if you're right for the job. So be sure to put those there as well, and you can also open them in a new tab. Now, over here, there's a section where you can basically hire freelancers for anything. You can look based on people services. That was people previously, but now their services is coming up and you can see they're different people. And they have that quick hire option that we looked at previously. This means that they get to hire you with a flat rate and in a shorter amount of time. So if you said that you're going to design a website for them for 100 an hour, there is a quick hire option for them to hire you really quickly for, let's say, $2,000. So you just put a flat rate for them. But as you can see, not every person has that, so it's an option that you can look for. Services, you can look for the skill that you're looking for. So let's go for business consultant, and there is the tool option. You would want to choose something in relation to business consultant, and they're just going to pop up. Let's go for Microsoft Excel, one of the tools, and this person shows up. They have a starting rate because this is a service. If you want to see the per hour, that would be a people search. So people search. Next, we also have a project. If you ever want to just brainstorm and take a look at what other people in your field are doing. You just go to projects and look for a skill that you have. So let's go for brand designer. And I want to see what people are doing with end design. There we go. We got some pretty nice print work. I can look at this for inspiration. Let's search for something. I'm going to clear everything. Go to projects, and let's search for stamp. Design. And now I can get different things that I can look for inspiration. So I'm just going to go over here and look at this person's process. Pretty nice. Here, they're sharing their work from Bhands. You can also just link it down here if you prefer. So that is the Discover page. Pretty cool stuff that you can do. Now, let's go to the jobs page and see how we can find jobs. So as mentioned previously, this is all jobs and all categories, and these are the jobs that you've applied for. So let's close that. There's a filters option, and let's just go for something in our field. So design all jobs, results. And I definitely want the newest ones and not the old ones because I want them to be available. So this one has been matched to me based on my skills and experience. Contra does that for you. That's really helpful. So let's just go ahead and open this up and see what we're working with. So they want brand content stuff, telling us about the position, what I'll be doing and a little bit about their company. There's also a linkedIn that I could explore. As for the tags, make sure they're related to what you do. So look at that. The language that you should be speaking, sometimes they have that available. And it's from June 20. It's a little late, so it's still open, though, so let's just try applying and see what we can do. So if this is going to be a graphic and motion designer, I want to go for something that includes motion and some sort of, like, minimal graphic design. Now, what should you put in this top bar? A lot of people start by introducing themselves and saying that they're passionate about something like that, but try to imagine yourself as the hiring person, and that's not really helpful. They're going to get a lot of these requests, and the first thing they want to understand from message is, what can you do that the others can't do? So that's how I would start a sentence over here. So if you have 20 years of experience in graphic design, that's something you want to put in there. If you've worked with Airbnb, you would put that in there. Something impressive. If that is not the case for you, you can mention the amount of programs, you know, so expert in ten plus programs. You can talk about timelines, anything that can impress them and set you apart from everyone else. As always, we can use the help of Chat GPT to write something pretty decent for us. So let's go over there. For a graphic and motion designer position include a good hookline and keep it under 1,500. So I didn't quite understand that. Let me go here, write a strong proposal for a position, make a good first impression. And I'm just going to add this so Cha GPT got us this bulky text of what we are doing and how we're unique and stuff. But you can see that in each paragraph, there's a way to open this introduction. So you can go in, like, as a skilled graphic and motion designer with 20 years of experience, that's your hook line. You can mention the stuff that you know, the programs and the high number of programs that you know be impressive to that client. You can talk about a challenge that you've experienced in your previous job and how you overcame it. That's another way to do it. You can also just write something general, but those don't usually set you apart. So choose the approach that is most suitable for you and put them into the request. So I'm just going to grab something like that. Post it here. I have my Calendly link and, of course, the linked project. Let's submit this application, and now this message was sent. This now goes into the applied section, and they're going to be in review until the other person will either accept you or reject you. And those can sometimes take a while because Contra, as I mentioned, is a new platform. However, if you go for the jobs that are not on Contra, let's go over here. It does take a bit longer to apply to because there's no automation going on, but you can see that there are more recent. So let's go over here. I got a nice description, remote work from Europe and UK, but we're just going to look at what happens. So let's it apply. It takes us to their page. It's no longer available. Let's try something else. Community created. Let me see if this one is available. Alright, so we have a Google Doc, pretty straightforward, but you would have to put in this stuff yourself. So here, if it's asking for a link to a portfolio, you can just share your contra page. You just go over here, share profile. I copies it, and then you paste it like so. And then we have the references. You just go over here to your profile. And copy these recommendations, and there we have it. So you can go both ways and just go for things that suits you best. This is another Contra project. It's pretty recent. I would recommend just looking around. And if you're applied to a bunch of, say, animator jobs and you're not getting anything, it could be that your profile does not have the suitable information. So that's why it's important to go to Discover, look for animators and see what they have on your profile. If they put the way they showcase their work is through the animation itself, the sketches, the challenges, then that approach is obviously working. So look at how they are showcasing themselves and expressing their creativity and try to replicate that in your own style. So that's how you apply to job. It's rather simple. We had the Contra jobs and off contra jobs. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at further templates and contract styles for freelancers just to set you up for a bigger business scale and allow you to do more stuff outside of contra. I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 11. Freelancing Templates: Being a freelancer can be a very exciting and unpredictable journey. But one thing that you need to bear in mind at all times is that you want to make sure you're consistent with the amount of clients you get, with the amount of revenue you get, and, of course, to have that creativity always flowing. Now, what we're going to talk about in this lesson will mostly cater to the freelancers in the creative industry. So whether you are a motion designer, web designer, graphic designer, illustrator, et cetera. But some of it can apply to, say, if you're a business consultant, finance manager, and other positions. So Contra lets you do a lot of things automatically. There's templates for contracts, there's templates for services. Your portfolio is already made for you. May think that you don't have to do much. But in order to take this a step further, it's important to understand the whole concept of being a freelancer. So you cannot rely on just one platform like this to basically make a living. If this is a part time situation for you, then Contra may be enough. But I'm going to be talking about cases where you also have external clients whether from word of mouth, your own personal website, a friend or something, you want to make sure that you're able to not only document everything like Contra does for you, but to make sure that there's evidence of all the transactions, of all the agreements and basically set yourself right for the job. Obviously, we cannot ask the external clients to come on contract before working with you because they have to make an account and that whole tedious process may just make them go for something else. So in times like that, we want to have certain templates ready to provide to them via email and get the business going. Are standard templates all over the Internet, but, of course, you can download and tweak them to make it your own. And I do suggest doing that just so it's more cater to your personal identity because at the end of the day, you are freelancer and that is a business. So you want to make sure everything's cohesive. Everything is communicated well, and that starts with a strong foundation for documentation. So HobSpot has a lot of templates out there. Most of them are free, and there is this one page that has 17 different templates for freelancers. Now you can just choose your agency over here and get the stuff that's suitable for your need. Let's say, let's see. So you can go for Google Docs, just so you can edit them. There's mind maps, there's a Business one pager, but there's a lot of organization stuff that can help you communicate how you're going to make your project work to the client. So there's this decision tree. Say, you're proposing two different things to your client, but they're not quite understanding what the main difference is, you can break it down like this and basically document that you've told the client to different outcomes depending on each decision, and this will just set you up in case something bad happens. We have job estimates, we have marketing proposals, and a lot of other stuff. There's also stuff for invoicing that you can look if you want an invoice separately out of Contra, there is another platform that is fairly easy to use. So invoicla.com, it's free up to three clients, but you get to just delete one at a new one, and so on forth. The way it works is that you make a template like this. You put in their address, your address, the date, the currency. You list the items below, total comes here. And then there's usually a memo section down here where you get to put in your banking information for them to wre that amount to you. Invoice is great because you can see all of the invoices you've sent. You can label them as paid, paused, canceled, and just see how much you're making in a month in a year or in a week. You can also upgrade, and it will let you do more things. First things first, is that it lets you customize the way your invoices look with a logo. And there are other stuff such as unlimited clients, tracking your work. And it's a really handy platform for freelancers. So there are templates for invoices, but I recommend using something like that just because there's automation, and you get to keep all of your invoices in one place and refer back to them if you need to. Voice also does let you email a copy of that invoice to the client on the platform's behalf, so it looks more professional, but that sums up the invoice section. Now, on Contra, you were able to make case studies free hand. You get to add a text block, an image blog. But if you want to build case studies on your own, you're going to need a handy template. So there's stuff like this, but this depends on your industry. If it's something design wise, you obviously want to have a lot of pictures with the process that. But you could start with something like this if it's in a separate industry. A great place to have K studies outside of Contra is Bhands, which great thing about it is that you get to basically link it to your Contra. So whoever goes on Bhands for your Kase studies can come to Contra for some other stuff, too. So I'm going to look for design. Just to show you some case studies, let me take a look at this one. There we go. So this is a great example. We have the name of the company, the client, a little bit about them, the assignment that they had to do. There's solution, there's a team. You could also do this solo. And here are the pictures. So they have some animations. Engaging. So package designs, mockups and logos and a lot of stuff. So this is what you want your case studies to look like both on Bhands and on Contra. We also saw the other day that someone linked their entire Bhands profile on Contra as a project. So that's another good thing that you can do. Basically, the way that would work is that you go to your just import content in seconds. So you copy your link and then you paste it here. It's not going to let me do it because I'm a viewer. And that's not my project. But if I do it with one of photos, which is not a case study, it's going to have a similar result. Copy that, import content, paste. There we go. So it's going to let me do that because it's my project. But if you do it with your own design stuff that you've uploaded on Bhands, all of them are going to show up here. You can title this project, my BhansPortfolio, and just link these two platforms. Hans is another place where you can also get clients. You can see there's a jobs section. You have your own profile. You have to share your work. But I would say that it's not as concentrated as Contra is. So Bhans is more on the community aspect where designers and creatives can just, like, communicate with another, have sort of like a feed, where they see different works to get inspired, something like a combination between Instagram and Pinters basically. They recently added a job section, but it's obviously not as good as Contra. So hopefully it does improve. Alright, so that's for case study. In terms of proposals, I would share templates, but the best thing is hat GPT, we used it in one of the lessons, and you can tell it to give you a certain proposal within a certain word limit. If there's a niche, you can edit your response, and that's pretty straightforward. By the end of this lesson, I do want you guys to take the time to create certain things for your freelancing business. The first one is a contract for a design job. So I actually didn't how that. Let's go with freelancer contract template. So there's tons of stuff out there. It really depends on which one you prefer. I see even wise has one. Download the one that looks the best to you, make sure that you are able to edit them because you're going to need to add new pages and all of that. And over here, I want you guys to say this is the contract that we chose. I want you guys to put in your terms within this template. If you do things a certain way, you have different pricing methods, different compensations, add those in there and have it ready for a potential client. So define your address, your full name, your company name, and have a template ready for each service that you do. That would be a separate contract for every service, so you can't really use one for all of them because that would be a lot of editing. So if you do multiple services, have multiple of these ready and have them ready to sign. You can use Adobe Acrobat for that. It's pretty easy to change things around, and it does a great job for getting signatures from that client. So you send it via an email. It sends it via an email and you'll get notified once they signed it, and then you have proof that they've agreed to your service. Having your freelancer contract your very own, one for each service. That's the first thing you should be doing. Secondly, is having case studies for the different works that you've done. If you haven't done any works before, it's a great idea to go and look for fake clients just to have something to showcase your skills. People are not going to know that they're fake unless they ask you and they look them up, which doesn't happen very often. But take the time to do that. If you have existing clients, be sure to make case studies for them either through the free freestyling method that we had previous lesson by adding the blocks ourselves. You can go on the Discover page and look at how other people are doing it, get inspired, put them in the right order, generate a lot of mockups if you're working with something in the creative industry and have case studies for all of your best projects. If it's not a project you're proud of, then it's better to not put it on there. As we saw, you can also put them on B hands and then just link them to your Contra. Third thing you want to do is to have a bunch of proposals ready to send to the clients. So if you're looking for jobs on Contra, there was that box where you had to kind of sell yourself and convince them to choose you. You can formulate a bunch of engaging proposals, especially the first sentence has to be engaging and have those ready in a Google Doc or something where you can just copy and paste it and then just personalize it for that client. So three things. First was the freelance contract. Second is case studies. Third is proposals. Sure you have all of that ready before you get into any sort of job, just to save yourself time and ensure that you're doing everything in the right order. 12. Building a Good Resume: On some cases, we saw that we were able to attach our resume in order to get a job on Contra. So I'm going to touch on that topic a bit and guide you through what makes a good resume and what makes a redundant resume. So I'll be introducing you to some tools that can make this whole experience easier. If your jobs are not found on contract, chances are that those companies are probably using some bots to filter out the good resumes and the bad ones. Now, these bots are usually placed before a hiring manager even sees your resume. So you want to make sure you have the right things in there in order for it to get past this first evaluation. So there's this platform called Osulting AI. It's fairly new, but they have a lot of stuff that you can use to build your career. So there is resume AI. Cover letter AI and network AI. There's also job trackers and other stuff, but these are the three that would be relevant to Contra. The first one is a resume. So over here, you can create a new resume or upload an old one just to tweak it up a bit. And essentially, it's going to take your old resume and change the wording, contract it into something that's easy to detect for the bots that I mentioned. So I'm just going to create a new resume, but you can just upload it if you already have. When you scroll over, first, it has your information, which is from your user, we have education degree. But over here is where I want to draw your attention. The AI comes into play when you want to put in your bullet points. So the way this resume is structured is that you have your company, your job title, and 123 bullet points where it specifically states how you made an impact. Instead of saying helped team design website, it's going to be talking about what were the results that website of your input? Was it increase in sales by X percent, X times more visitors, et cetera, et cetera. So if I just click on one of this, it's going to open this new place, and I'm just going to put my role here. Let's say I was a web designer, and I just need to put it in one sentence. So I built an ecommerce website for a fashion company. Alright, let's generate. And it brought me these bullet points. Now notice how what I put in was very general. It could be applied to anyone. But over here, it's bringing in numbers. So 40% increase in site visitors, 20% increase in online sales. These are the type of things that can set your resume apart. Now, you might be wondering where you get these numbers. You just need to do some calculations in order to get them. If it's about websites, there is the analytics that you can look at compare the amount of visitors before you contribute it, and then with the number after you contribute. You can find the difference between those two numbers and just put that in your resume. Other industries have their own methods, too, so there's always a way to get numbers showcase your impact. So let's say these numbers are accurate. I could change them, of course, I want to put them in. So let's add all three, and you can see that I can edit them. So if it wasn't by 15, let's say's ten, I could just change that. And with the free version, you have some restrictions down here. You can see, these are the stuff that I can do. But essentially, that's how you fill in your resume. So with project experience, let me just close this real quick. You can do the same thing with project leadership and your own custom sections. This is a great place to either upgrade your resume or build a new one. This company is always talking about how their resume design and AI bot is based off hundreds of case studies and they're very experienced in it. All right, so this is how you can easily get a top notch resume. Some factors to keep in mind, if you have an old resume is that there are some things that you shouldn't put in there. Those are usually things like a big headshot, some information about your hobbies, the fact that you have a driver's license. I've seen people put these As. Not that they're completely irrelevant. They do talk about you, but for this particular case, the hiring manager just wants to see what you are capable of in a technical way. So if you are accountant, how good are you at that job? That's what they want to see. So this resume right here is a great example. You can see that it just has the information about my experience, education, and down here, there's some additional stuff, but there's nothing extra over here. Other thing that you want to make sure you have in your resume 100% is a LinkedIn link. It may seem kind of pointless, but through your LinkedIn, people can see how engaged and passionate you are about what you do. Do you have an active voice in the community? How often do you share stuff with other people? What are your accomplishments? Who do you follow? And what groups are you a part of? These things may seem irrelevant to the job title, but there has been a lot of studies that LinkedIn is one of the main things that people look for when they're hiring. Just go ahead and make one, put the link right here. Email is right over there. Then we have phone number and your job title. So go ahead and make your account in onsalting.com. AI and build yourself a resume. If you already have one, upload it and use this AI feature to generate points. Okay, let's go back. There are some other stuff that we're going to look at. The second one is cover letter AI. Now, with Contra, if you're applying on the platform, they don't ask for cover letters, but the external links might. So if you don't know how to write one, just come over here and create a new cover letter. So it's going to ask you to upload a resume. But if I did, it's going to automatic put in my resume experience into a written format, and I could just copy that and put it in my job application. There's also Chat GPT, of course, but this is another way that you can do it. If you want to use Chat GPT, a trick to do it is to get a resume. I just went over here to get a sample resume, and you basically grab you copy your experience, basically your resume. Let's copy all of this and type in turn this resume or turn the resume Bloom into a 500 word cover letter for a interior Design job. Put a call in, quote, paste, quote. So this is the resume, and you can see that it's bringing in exactly the stuff that we pasted. So this was one of the experiences integrated design solutions, solutions. There we go. That's one of the first stuff that this resume had, and it made a full cover letter. Just copy this, put it in the company name, address, your name, and you are good to go. You can also use this as well. Third thing, which is actually pretty cool is called Network AI. This is great for LinkedIn where you want to meet your potential boss and network with the people that are in your industry. So let's choose one of the reasons. Let's say I want industry connections, my target role. Let's pretend we're the interior designer. All target company. Let's say I want to work at Tesla, current job, let's just say I'm a designer. Never going to generate. It's going to basically give you a message where you can chat with other people as this is going to be your connection request, basically. So let's say this is what I want to do. You can also load more messages. You go to LinkedIn and it's going to bring up a bunch of interior designers. At Test lab. So they're not exactly interior designers, but close enough. So I just have to copy this message, try to connect with these people and get more connections, basically. So it's a pretty cool thing. You can have a favorite spar if one message is working great, and it's automating everything. Just remember that you do have these restrictions, but again, you can use chat GPT to help you out with these type of messages. So write a connection, hold on. A LinkedIn. Connection request for a developer at Amazon. See what happens. So there we go. I'm impressed by who work as a developer at Amazon. This is just my input. You would have to put their job title, especially in this project. This is really important, eager to connect with you and all that stuff. So you would go in their LinkedIn, see what specific project they've worked with, put that in there, and put in their full title, and you've got yourself a nice connection request message. Can also use those type of messages when you're on the Discover page, you're trying to connect with different freelancers. You put in their job title, so product designer and no code developer. Put that in ChaGPT, use that when you want to get in touch. So you can use these for multiple purposes. The fact that it's all run by AI makes it a lot easier because coming up with the right message can be a tedious task. So now that we saw what ways we can use to get a decent resume cover letter and networking tactics, I want you guys to take some time and build those stuff yourself. If you have a resume, tweak it using resume AI. If you don't have one, make one from scratch. Try to connect with at least 20 people on LinkedIn within that area that you're trying to freelance in, either use the Network AI for the request message or Chat GPT or just yourself and get those connections going because you never know if your next client is going to be on LinkedIn or it's going to be on the Contra job page. Hope you guys enjoy this lesson. Now we're going to look at one last thing, and that is your online presence. 13. Online Presence: Welcome to the last lesson. We're going to be talking all about online presence today. Now, freelancing is considered to be usually an online business because you're connecting with clients all over the world while you are just somewhere on your computer. The thing that gets you clients is how reliable you seem on the Internet, because that is eventually where people will find. Having a good contra page is, of course, of need, especially if you're going to be applying to jobs. But like I said before, if you plan on doing this full time and fully rely on freelancing to pay the bills, you may want to expand your business onto other platforms as well. I'm going to be talking about your online presence on different social media platforms and how you can best utilize those platforms to show yourself as a skilled and trustable freelancer. So I'm going to show you guys a case study. Basically, this person is very famous in a design world, and her online presence is something that aspiring designers or freelancers should take note of because not only is she in a lot of places, showcasing her skills in different ways, she's also educating designers on how to get clients, how to do this design task, and other stuff. This person is Abby Conic. Some of you may know her, but just from searching her full name, notice what comes up first. So that is her personal website. Now, having a personal website can be a bit costly. So if you can't invest that much right now, just profiles on platforms like Contra, B hands, and et cetera. So her website, if we open it up, if you do choose to go on there, it's all about her, and straight up, she tells you what she can do for you. There's some testimonials and all of that. She also sells some stuff on her website. Now, there are platforms that can build your portfolios in a rather quick manner, such as Skillshare and WIX basically no code website, web development platforms. You can use those if you want to invest in them. That is to showcase your work, have contacts, and instead of people having to come to another platform to find and just type in your name and get to your portfolio. She also has a YouTube channel where she shares, basically tutorials or her workflow on certain things. So I'm just going to show you guys real quick. So she's a brand designer. If you go to her videos, she is sharing tips, her strategies, some stuff about logo design because that's her niche, and there is plenty of stuff to go around. Now, when you come across someone like this, you will find them trustworthy because they're open about everything that they're and they're very much active online. So anyone who looks her up can immediately find her great work, trust her, and hire her as a freelancer. Now, on Instagram, you usually share your photos and whatnot, but it's actually a great place for freelancers to find clients. And with the recent addition of reels, that work became a lot more easy. So the way you want to do it is make a professional Instagram that's just catered towards your freelancing, so nothing personal. And over here, you want to share all your work, have the right hash tags in the bottom, and it's a great thing to share the process of how you got to that outcome as a real. So this is a real right now, so if you go over here, so the design process when a concept gets rejected, it's a workflow video, maybe a sped up of her designing this and printing it. If you show yourself working on something, the struggles you faced and all of that stuff that is adding to your personal brand. Now, it does take time to get as big as her pages, but it's something that you should start considering if you want to do freelancing full time. So have your portfolios on different platforms, eventually your own website, and have a strong social presence. You want to do longer videos, you can do YouTube as well. And since there's YouTube shorts, what you post here can be posted on YouTube as well. Facebook is another great place to go to. There's a lot of communities for freelancers on there, especially if you search within your niche. Over there, you can share your Contra page, your website, your Instagram, put in a contact info, and there is a lot of demand for freelancing service because obviously it's going to cost less than them having to go to a company. Next thing on your list should be having a strong online presence. Go ahead and make your professional accounts on these different platforms. If you don't want to do all of them, make sure Instagram is the minimum, and then you can decide whether or not you want to have Facebook, YouTube, or Tik Tok on there, too. Look for famous freelancers in your field, see how they're doing it, just as we saw how this person's doing it, get inspired and try to replicate it with your own work and your own style. And just by doing that, you are a step ahead in the freelancing game. 14. Class Project: Build Your Contra Profile & First Project: Now it's time to work on your class project. For this project, you're going to be building and refining your profile and a service that you have listed. That way, you're going to be able to apply everything that you have learned so far in the class. Your project submission should include your profile header and a short vo, the project or service that you wish to offer, a description on how you plan to show that to the client, and finally, any sort of resume or templates that you would like to attach to your submission. You're not ready to publish that information publicly, screenshots or drafts are completely fine. The goal of this project is for you to build a clear and professional freelancing presence on Contra. And once you're ready with your drafts or full work, you can go ahead and upload them to the Class Project Gallery. I'm going to be reviewing that from time to time and provide you with individual feedback, and that way you can continue on learning and trying different things for your future. And another plus is that you can see how the other students are doing in the class. This project is going to be the first step towards your confident profile, so I wish you all good luck, and I can't wait to see what you guys make. 15. Congratulations! What’s Next : You've now reached the end of the class. Congratulations. You know how Contra works, how to set up your profile, create new projects or services, how to best present yourself to clients, and finally, how to have a strong presence on this freelancing platform. Contra becomes especially powerful when you're treated more than a job board. When you look at it as a place where you can showcase your skills, build credibility, and build long term relationships. Your next step is to finalize and further refine your profile and projects. You can refer back to the older lesson, see what you would want to change, and ask yourself if what you see on the screen is what best represents. If you haven't already, make sure to upload your class project to the class Project Gallery. I can't wait to see what you guys create over there. Thank you so much for learning with me, and I hope to see you guys in our other classes.