The following article was written by one of our members. Personal experience about registration as a Freelancer.

Here’s what it takes to register at GetAFreelancer, commonly known as GAF. Follow the registration link enter your preferred user name, your email address, accept the agreement, state whether you’d like to become a gold member or not and you will be good to go. I was very impressed with the simplicity of its web pages which made it a quick-to-load website as opposed to many other websites that take ages to load.

Although GAF has made the initial registration extremely easy, the things to follow may be a little confusing for anyone as it was for me. I appreciate the simplicity of their style of work however; I feel that certain things did not have a smooth flow. After entering the initial information, there is a standard procedure of email verification. Once you prove yourself to the site that you are whom you claim to be you are… the serious work begins.

Once I passed through the email verification stage, I was taken to a page where I had to enter personal information. The only confusing thing about that was, having to state my company’s name. The common question that many would have at that point (like I did) is “what do I do if I don’t have a company?” It is a mandatory field, so there’s no running away from it. What I figured out was that it is best to come up with any name that you’d be happy to appear to the public. So quite simply speaking, your company name could be the user name you’d like others to see.

As I proceeded with filling in the form, I came across the ’skills’ section which had only four empty slots to list down the provider’s skills. So I had to juggle with my thoughts for at least 5 minutes to weigh out my best skills. I’m not sure why GAF has provided limited area for skills section but I rest with the assumption that it is better to allow free space under the skills category so that providers could state down their skills in detail. Somewhat similar issue applies to the ‘areas of expertise’ section because the site lists out the areas of expertise where the provider is supposed to place checks. What I found was that the list was not comprehensive enough to cover all walks of online working life. For example, I’m a content writer as well as a technical writer, but I couldn’t state down the content writing part under areas of expertise which may leave the buyer with the assumption that I can only write user manuals and not e-books or articles.

However, one thing that I’m really thankful for about GAF is, not having to go through the torture of facing an assessment test like many other websites do. It really eased the tension off my mind and anxiety involved in stepping to a new work at home website.

By the time I finished creating my public profile and concluding the registration process, there were two burning questions in my mind. “What about the finances? And why do they show information about my projects in the public profile?” I was able to resolve the questions regarding finances and means of payment when I stepped in to another area in my personal account, however I couldn’t possibly find a solution to stop GetAFreelancer from displaying my previous project information, the money I made out of it etc. in my public profile.

 

 
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