You are biased. Other people saying you are good is more convincing than you saying it.
What you say on your Polywork Profile is biased.
You will always praise yourself. ButI can't really believe your claims, because I simply don't know you. One thing I do know is that you are going to be biased.
However, when I see your customer telling me how your service or skills specifically benefited them, and I see who they are, what they do, where they are, and what their job title is, THEN I can really believe it.
Well, they don't come out of the blue.
Try this - ask for them from your customers or colleagues. Say “I want to add a credible reference to my Polywork profile so that people can see the real benefits that I deliver. Would you please send me your recommendation?”
The worse that might happen is someone might say no, or just ignore you. So you can ask someone else.
Of course, a great way to get recommendations is to give them first.
The power of recommendations is that it's not you talking about yourself - it's what other people are saying. In a word, it's credibility, because it's someone else's opinion. It is social proof, like 359 Twitter retweets or 680 Instagram likes. Just without the 'bots.
It's worth asking people to be very specific and precise in their recommendation, and to do the same when you give recommendations.
Remind them of the project you worked on and see if you can get them to focus on the results - the benefits.
"Jack is a great guy to work with, and gets great results: I'd recommend him to anyone."
That's pretty vague. It's not as impressive as -
"Jack is super friendly and efficient, and explains the technical stuff effectively. He delivers on what he promises. His PPC strategy allowed us to lift our click-through-rate by 129% in a month, reduce spend by 39%, but still increase website traffic by 8.7%. Sales revenue went up 14.2% within 30 days and CPA went down by 47.3%."
It's easy to start — go and recommend someone who impressed you today. Or ask someone to recommend you for your work.
What goes around, comes around.
Would you rather start working with someone you know very little about, or work with someone that you know has delivered the goods for others consistently in the past? Someone who has such a good relationship with their customers that they have been happy to spend time publicly endorsing them?
I know what my answer is - what's yours?
