Newbie portfolio: how to arrange, what to show?

09.09.202121.04.2022 Sam

A freelancer’s portfolio is a business card and a chance to get a job. Almost all customers pay attention to the presence of examples of completed tasks. Therefore, it is more difficult for beginners to compete with experienced freelancers. If you are just getting started on the Internet, read this article to the end. We will teach you how to draw up a portfolio and get a profitable order.

Create an account on the exchange

Many people are convinced that clients pay attention only to the portfolio – a list of completed orders with examples, links to the site and colorful pictures. In fact, the customer evaluates your account as a whole. And if he does not like your photo or nickname, he will not look at examples of work. The image of a freelancer on the exchange is formed by:

Name;
Photo;
Description of services;
Portfolio.

As practice shows, employers trust people with real names more. Believe me, Misha Ivanov is much more likely to get a job than webmaster123. Keep this in mind when registering and do not invent fancy names. If there is an opportunity to confirm your identity on the exchange, confirm it! This will show the customer that you are serious about your work and are not afraid of responsibility.

An equally important element is photography. Many freelancers use pictures or stock images of a man/woman with glasses as their avatar. Experienced customers do not pay attention to such images. But the real photo, for sure, will not go unnoticed. If you want to be remembered, show your face.

On almost all exchanges, you will be asked to briefly describe yourself. This is your chance to introduce yourself to a future employer. Never leave this field blank! Write what services you provide, what areas you work in, what you are better at. If you know several languages, have a higher education or a certificate of completion of courses – talk about it.

The more you write about your achievements, the higher the chances that you will be noticed and chosen among a dozen competitors. This is especially true for copywriters. If you can’t “sell yourself”, then how are you going to sell the customer’s product/service? It is also worth writing about your working conditions. If you agree to work only on a prepaid basis, indicate this. But you don’t need to write prices for services.

Creating a portfolio

The main question for beginner freelancers: how to fill out a portfolio? It is this question that puts newcomers in a dead end and a stalemate: “no examples → no work; no work → no examples.” But it is possible to break out of the vicious circle. We offer 3 options.

Start small

Remember how they used to say at the institute: “First you work for your credit card, then your credit card works for you.” The situation is the same with portfolios. At first, you have to work on your own image, performing small, inexpensive orders that will be the first evidence of your skills and abilities. Choose interesting orders with a low budget. There you will not meet competitors with a huge rating, but you can prove yourself.

Free creativity

Don’t want to waste your potential on small projects? Then show your imagination and show what you can do. Create some bright works: business cards, logos, texts or websites. If you are engaged in SEO promotion, show optimization on the example of your site. This is the only way you can skip the initial stage of inexpensive orders and take on a serious project. If you want to write student papers, show clients your thesis, good essays, labs, or term papers.

The fish method

In freelance circles, this method involves doing a project that doesn’t exist. For example, you view orders on the exchange, choose a task for yourself and complete it according to the TOR. If you don’t want to search – come up with a task yourself. For example, a logo for a non-existent company, a website layout, or text about a fictitious company. “Fish” projects can always be taken as the basis of a real order, finalized and get a well-deserved payment.

Formatting rules

When choosing a contractor for a project, the customer examines the portfolio of several candidates. As a rule, he does not have time to read, watch, download or follow links for a long time. Your main weapon in the fight for the attention of the employer is visualization. How to achieve this?

Take screenshots. It doesn’t matter if you write texts, create websites or design milk bags – show the result. Take a screenshot of several paragraphs of text or the main page of the site. You will see for yourself that a screenshot of text from a real site looks much more attractive than in a Word document.
Leave a link to the project. If the client wants to see the site or read your text in full, he will follow the link. Do not attach documents, be it text, an image, or a presentation.
Write a few words about the completed project. What has been done, what is the peculiarity of this work. A screenshot and a brief description are enough for an experienced customer to assess your competence. He will most likely not follow the link.

You can see examples of professional portfolios from TOP freelancers. Each exchange has a rating of performers. Study the accounts of the first 5-7 participants, look at examples of work and features of their design.

Sort, edit!

Don’t be afraid to delete obsolete projects. The professionalism of the performer is measured not by the number of works, but by their quality. Your portfolio should be compact and convenient. Imagine yourself in the place of the customer. Would you like to open 20 or more screenshots? No. You will go through the list, open 2-3 pictures and, based on what you see, form an opinion about the artist. But what if a potential employer comes across not your best work?

Do you want to receive orders? Leave only the best! If you work in several areas, sort projects. We recommend that copywriters indicate what type of text the text belongs to: informational, selling, about the company, etc. You can also sort projects by topic. This will make it easier for customers to evaluate your abilities in a particular area. Don’t forget the main thing, a portfolio is your business card and it should reveal and show your best sides. Therefore, create, edit, delete.

When, after many sleepless nights, the diploma is finally ready, I want to pass it and forget it. But the university will not lag behind the student so easily. After all, the full text of the diploma was read only by the supervisor, and a whole commission will gather to evaluate it. Therefore, in many respects, his assessment depends on how a student defends a diploma.

So what is a successful defense?

Competent protection text
positive diploma review
confident answers to commission questions

In the introduction to the course it is necessary to indicate many important points. One of them is methodology. The student is required to indicate what methods he will use in the study of the topic. This is not the easiest task, and often students cannot cope with this task themselves. In this case, you can contact us. Our experts will write you a paper of any complexity, and you can discuss the price with them personally.

Speech structure

Of course, what exactly to say in the defense depends mainly on the topic of the thesis and on what exactly is written in it, but there are general recommendations that are suitable for everyone.

First, we need to say hello to the members of the evaluation committee. (“Dear members of the attestation commission! Your attention is presented to the final qualifying work on the topic …”)
Introductory part. Here you need to reveal the topic and identify the issues that are raised in the work.
Relevance of the topic. At this stage, it is important to prove the relevance of the chosen topic and the degree of its development in other people’s works. Indicate the subject, object, objectives and purpose of the study.
Theme disclosure structure. Here you just need to list the paragraphs that are in the work and briefly describe them.
Problem statement. To confirm the relevance of the topic, it is necessary to state the problem and indicate debatable opinions on this matter.
Conclusions. At the end of the speech, the commission should hear the conclusions that the student came to in the course of writing the diploma, in which there are ways and methods for solving the stated problems.

On the one hand, it seems that it is much easier to write a graduation speech than the diploma itself. However, high-quality speech is a skillful squeeze out of the work, as well as its competent presentation. And it often happens that a diploma is written with the highest score, and a student gets a worse grade. Therefore, if there is a lack of self-confidence, you can order a speech on our website. And then the probability of failure due to bad speech will disappear. After all, we give a twenty-day guarantee for the work, and if something does not suit you, you can demand that the author finalize the order for free. We make sure that students are satisfied, so if the final version of the work does not meet the stated requirements, you will get your money back.

Formal requirements

When writing a speech for a thesis, you must also take into account that there are purely formal requirements.

Time. Do not forget that there are many students, but only one commission. Therefore, the time for a defensive speech is regulated and ranges from 5 to 7 minutes. At the same time, you should remember about the time that will be spent on commission questions.
Intonation. Where, no matter how on the defense of a diploma, is it important to win over listeners? Therefore, it is better not to read the speech monotonously, making accents with intonation.
Style. When presenting a speech, it should be remembered that the main goal is understanding on the part of the commission. Therefore, you should not be too smart, but you can’t switch to colloquial speech either. In this matter, you need to observe the golden mean.
Pronouns. As in the diploma itself, it is important to remember during the defense that although the author of the diploma is clearly spelled out, there are a lot of true owners of knowledge reflected in the work (the authors of all the sources the student relied on plus the supervisor), so first-person pronouns are not appropriate here.
Questions. After the end of the speech, questions from the commission will inevitably follow, and you need to be ready for them. Suggested questions should be written down in the course of writing the thesis, work through all the questions that arose during the pre-defense, and you can also look at the questions at the end of chapters from textbooks on this topic.
Pre-protection. In such a matter as defending a diploma, it is better not to be presumptuous and neglect pre-defense. On it, you can practice giving a speech and write down possible questions from the audience. This will allow you to feel more confident in the official defense.

Of course, these are only recommendations, and no one forces you to strictly follow them. However, the rejection of some positions during the defense will create additional questions from the certification committee, which is not always loyal. Therefore, it is best to think through all possible questions and answer them in advance in a defensive speech. Then the teachers will have a minimum of questions, and they will be grateful for the saved time.