Is Upwork Blog Helpful?

Is Upwork Blog Helpful for Freelancers?

Before we talk about Upwork Blog, let us discuss a brief introduction of Upwork. Upwork, Inc. was formed in 2015 after the merger of two famous pioneers of freelancing: Elance and Odesk. Founded in the United States in 1999 by an Indian MIT graduate Beerud Sheth, Elance was one of the early freelancing platforms in the world. Odesk is relatively new freelancing platform, and it was founded in the United State in 2003 by two Greek entrepreneurs living in the United States: Stratis Karamanlakis and Odysseas Tsatalos. Odesk is now working as Upwork while Elance is so far working as Elance but soon it is going to completely merge with Upwork. Odesk.com redirects to Upwork.com and Elance.com continues to work as before.

Upwork blog has a nice user interface and its design is spectacular. But the question is, is Upwork blog serving its very purpose? Upwork blog is not regularly updated. It is a well-established fact that Upwork is one of the top freelancing platforms in the world. And more than a billion dollar of work is a done on it annually. They charge whopping 10% commission on all jobs. In return, they are not guiding freelancers about the best practices. Their new policies are also creating problems for new freelancers. And the situation gets worse when they freeze the account of freelancers who have low customer rating for a specific time period.

There is no denying the fact that Upwork is earning good profits despite very low investment. They manage to easily get their commissions from the money of clients and due to the work of the freelancers. But, are they investing in their future? No. After spending decades in this business, they have never been able to stop negative things such as scams on their freelancing platform. Their new aim to enhance the quality of the freelancers is making different problems. Their new rules and regulations discourage new freelancers to start work as a freelancer on Upwork. Due to drawbacks in Upwork, relatively new freelancing platforms such as Fiverr and Freelancer have made massive progress in the recent years.

It is due to the reason, that they have strictly implemented their ‘customer ratings’ related policies. They freeze the accounts of the freelancers who continuously have less than 4 (out of 5) rating for a specific period of time. They also send a message to freelancers that their account balance should be zero after a specific period. In case a dispute arises, their decisions sometimes favor clients, rather than the freelancers. In some cases, they freeze the accounts of freelancers, no matter how much balance is in their account. And the worse, they would not let that freelancer get his or her balance back (which is the money of freelancer). If a person works for a client and tries his or her best, then his or her client do like the work and never gives time to improve; it is not only the fault of the freelancer but also the fault of the client. My question to Upwork management is, why only punish freelancer?

It is true that Upwork and other freelancing platforms are facing so many troubles due to plenty of freelancers from all parts of the world. Therefore, they are making new rules to cope with these issues. Their rules sometimes favor clients, whereas, sometimes they favor freelancers. Being the top freelancing platform in the world means a big responsibility. So far, they are not performing well when it comes to supporting new workers. Some issues arise when new workers start work on Upwork without proper training because some black sheep kind of people are there to take an advantage of new freelancers who do not their rights and the rules to be followed.

These scammers ask you to start work immediately and then they would not pay you. Sometimes, they would make an excuse by saying the work quality is not good, and sometimes you will end up knowing that the client was fake. That is why always abide by the every single rule of the freelancing platforms to keep yourself secure and to have access to your account all the time. Always use the tracker software of that particular freelancing platform for hourly jobs. Else, you will have no record to claim that you have worked for so and so hours. In order to keep you updated on new issues and trends, keep reading this blog and other similar blogs that write about freelancing.

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