Four things a buyer looks for, in order

A buyer browsing for someone to commission is not reading your profile. They are scanning six of them, discarding five, and the discarding happens in seconds on a small number of signals.

Knowing which signals, and in which order, is worth more than any amount of rewriting.

The order

One: does this person do the specific thing I want. Not "does this person do ratings". The buyer arrived with a format in mind - written, recorded, scored, compared - and they are looking for it named. If it is not in the first line, they assume the answer is no.

Two: is there evidence they have done it before. Completed job count and reviews, read as a single blur rather than individually. Nobody reads twelve reviews; they read that there are twelve.

Three: what does it cost and how long does it take. Both of these being absent is the most common self-inflicted wound in the trade. A buyer who has to message you to find out the price mostly does not message you.

Four: is this person going to be normal about it. This is the tone judgement, and it is made instantly. Professional and plain beats enthusiastic and vague every time, because the buyer is already slightly worried about the transaction.

Everything else - background, personality, how you got into this - is read by nobody until after they have decided to book you, and sometimes not then.

Writing the first line

The first line does one job: match the buyer's intent in their words.

"Written assessments, scored across five axes, returned within 24 hours" tells a buyer whether to keep reading. "Passionate about giving honest feedback" does not tell them anything at all, and it is what most new profiles open with.

Use the noun the buyer would use, not the one you prefer. This is the single cheapest improvement available on a profile, and it is available today.

Price and turnaround belong on the page

There are two arguments for hiding your price, and both are wrong.

The first is that it lets you quote per buyer. In practice it filters out everyone who was not going to negotiate, which is most people, and leaves you with the subset most inclined to haggle.

The second is that a published price anchors you low. It does, slightly, and the traffic it buys more than covers it while you are new. Rate cards and how to defend one is the longer version of this argument.

Turnaround matters as much as price and is mentioned half as often. A buyer with a deadline picks the person who states one.

The sample problem

Buyers want to see the work and you mostly cannot show it.

The workaround is to publish the structure rather than an instance: the headings a written assessment contains, the axes a score covers, the length, the format it arrives in. This answers the real question - what will I receive - without publishing anything a previous client owns.

If you can produce one genuinely public worked example on generic material, do it once and link it forever. It will outperform every other element on the page. It also does the thing free work is supposed to do without the costs that come with actually working for free.

What buyers are quietly checking for

Underneath the four signals there is a background check running: is this person going to disappear.

Response time, last-active date, whether the profile looks maintained, whether the wording matches the platform's norms. These are proxies for reliability and they are doing more work than anything you write.

Keeping a profile current is unglamorous and it beats rewriting it. A profile that has visibly been touched this week reads as a person who is still doing this.

The mismatch worth fixing

There is a persistent gap between what earners emphasise and what buyers are looking for. Earners write about their judgement and their standards. Buyers are looking for format, evidence, price and reliability, and they infer judgement from the fact that those four are handled competently.

The buyer's own account of how they choose is worth reading in full for exactly this reason - it is a short education in what your profile is being measured against. Where your offer includes measurement, saying which convention you use signals more competence than a paragraph claiming accuracy does; the conventions are documented here. And if part of your offer is being better than an off-the-shelf rating tool, be specific about how, because what those tools already produce is now common knowledge among buyers rather than a mystery.

Once the profile is right, the constraint moves to volume, which is a different problem covered in the cold-start post. For how profiles are structured and surfaced on the platform this site is published by, see Rate Cock's judges directory.