Freelancing

Let’s look at how to get clients for digital marketing services. One time I pitched an Australian business on Upwork. He was ready to start and promised to hire me right away… Only to never be heard from again.

Another time I worked with a company that got sanctioned and shut down by the government for illegal activity. I got paid but imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning and saw that all over the news.

If we work to land clients, eventually, these stories will happen to all of us. It’s just part of the game.

Avoid these four popular tactics

Search for how to get clients for digital marketing services and there are listicles everywhere offering a thousand tactics.

It’s one of those things that seems nice on the surface but turns out to be counterproductive since it is costly to try something new. 

Even if we are not spending any money, the cost is that when we master one way to land clients, it becomes easy because we get good.

When we move on to try a new approach, we are beginning from scratch again and so it will take time to see get good and see results. In this case, our most important asset is time and because it takes more time, it becomes expensive.

You’ll see results much faster by picking one approach and mastering it before even considering anything else. The challenge is that without experience it is difficult to figure out which one to pick. That’s what this article is about.

Underneath it all, everything is the same. We need to understand the client’s problem and get them to trust us to be the right person to solve that problem for them.

All the tactics we see are ways to do that but the challenge that many of us face is that we focus on making the process easy and quick too early, even if we aren’t landing clients just yet!

For some reason, we’ve gotten into our heads that it is better to have a quick and easy way to pitch, even if it doesn’t really work, that one that is slower but works.

The worst thing about a freelance business is the confusion we sometimes experience when we are unsure what to do and which direction to go in.

Here’s a list of tactics that are often suggested to land digital marketing clients but will take forever to actually get you paid:

• Blogging and SEO
• Online ads like Facebook, LinkedIn or Google ads
• Discuss stuff on Reddit, LinkedIn or Quora
• Use online directories

A list is great but how do you pick just one tactic to start with? Let’s dive deeper into each one.

Blogging and SEO

The difference between blogging and guest blogging is whether we are writing blog articles on our own blog or on someone else’s blog. The tactic does work but it usually takes months if not years to get this to work seriously for your freelance business. 

Tasks such as finding and pitching the right blogs to be allowed to write for take longer than you might think. And even when we get something published, there is no guarantee that you’ll see any visitors from it.

I’ve written a number of guest articles that did zero for my business except allowing me to practice. The idea does work but doesn’t underestimate the energy it requires to find, pitch, and write the right articles in order to get clients and traffic.

When we write on our own blog, are people just magically going to find it? How?

They have to be exposed to it somewhere either because you’ve shared articles on e.g. your Facebook profile or because you hooked it up to Google, so people can find it when searching for relevant keywords. Readers don’t just come on their own, instead, we have to promote ourselves.

Understanding if people are searching for your topics in the first place can be tricky not to mention that it takes a long time for it to show up in Google – if it even does at all. There is no guarantee and because of competition, you might rank so low that no one sees the article.

To give you an example, it took me years before I started seeing meaningful traffic. I’m not saying it isn’t possible to get results faster but if you don’t know what you are doing with this tactic, it might take just as long.

Online ads like Facebook, LinkedIn or Google ads

Online ads have a special place in my heart since that’s where I started my career in digital marketing.

There is nothing like starting an ad campaign and seeing it convert like gangbusters. It’s exhilarating but it took me many campaigns and lots of money burned in order to understand how it works.

Usually, the first thing that new advertisers realize when launching their first few ad campaigns is how stupid we are since most of the things we expect to work totally flops.

It does work and it can even be a fast approach, too, if you know what you are doing. But be prepared to burn money at first if you don’t have any experience.

Discussions on Reddit, LinkedIn, or Quora

This can also work if you know that your clients are looking at specific discussion boards. Often, clients are not, and most of those seeing it will be freelancers having the same idea as you, also working to land clients.

Similar to guest blogging, it takes work to figure out which forums and topics work well to get clients.

Use online directories

Online directories are usually similar to the yellow pages and there are just not that many clients that go there to find freelancers anymore.

For many clients, they might as well just go to Upwork if they are looking for freelancers (and they do). It is often less about finding someone to help and rather about finding the right fit that they can trust.

You could test these out if you find some that you are confident your client type browses from time to time.

How to get clients for digital marketing

Tactic #1: Befriend your heroes

The first approach, that to my surprise worked out well, has been emailing people that I admire and would love to work with. The trick lies in not asking for anything and being flexible with when you can work with them. Check this email that landed in my inbox one morning:

In an attempt to befriend a particular expert that I wanted to learn from, he offered me a copywriting project without knowing my past experience. It proves that hard skills become a commodity, and our likeability and being easy to work with make a difference.

Here’s my entire list of correspondence with him. There were no phone calls or anything else, just these emails.

Is this extra work?

Heck yes!

It requires more work than the bare minimum and it pays off dividends. It turns out that busy people get so many emails from people wanting something that it stands out when we approach them without asking for anything.

This approach doesn’t make sense with businesses or people you don’t care that much about. To make this work I suggest listing out ten businesses you dream of working with. Those were you think HOLY SHIT that would be amazing.

Then email them once a month with a friendly comment on something they are interested in. Do your research in advance to make sure you find just the right topic with mutual interest. For example, by looking at what they share on social media or what they talk about in interviews. Some people barely share anything and I’ve found that we are better off avoiding those with this approach since we can’t stand out. It’s easier approaching those that are visible in the landscape.

I suggest keeping track of this in a spreadsheet and your calendar so it becomes systematic. If you’ve picked ten, that comes out to 2-3 emails per weekend.

When I’ve found an exciting business, I like to go on LinkedIn to figure out who the person in charge is and then use tools like snov.io, hunter.io or voilanorbert.com to find their email address. Sometimes I just try to guess it by sending the email to firstname@brand.com or firstnamelastname@brand.com. You’ll get an error message if it doesn’t work, so if you don’t get one, it might be correct.

Here’s an error message example:

I’ve found that the more invested we’ve been, the more it stands out. For example, if we’ve bought an online program and we reach out to the creator, we are in a totally different group of people than just any random person because by spending money, we show that we are serious.

It doesn’t have to be a monetary thing, it can also be taking action on someone’s recommendation and showing them the results we got since most people don’t. Here are a few script examples to get you going. Remember to tweak them to be your own.

Script 1 – this email can be used both as a first email introduction but also to build the relationship later on

“Hey NAME,

I’ve been using your technique on TOPIC for a new project. After a few tries, RESULTS/METRIC went through the roof! Check this out:

SCREENSHOTS

Pretty awesome, huh? You don’t need to respond, I just wanted to reach out and say thanks!

-NAME”

Note: Notice that I wrote “you don’t need to respond”, it’s a delight for busy people not to feel the need to respond when everyone else is asking them for something.

EXAMPLE

“Hey NAME,

I’ve been playing around with your technique on customer research in Facebook groups for a new project. After a few tries, responses went through the roof! Check the number of comments in these screenshots:

SCREENSHOTS

Pretty awesome, huh? You don’t need to respond, I just wanted to reach out and say THANKS!

-NAME”

Script 1 – alternative

“Hey NAME,

We exchanged a few emails via COMPANY NAME where I am a student. I was sad to see that you left the company because I enjoyed the course you taught, COURSE NAME. At the same time, I’m also curious if you have more material about TOPIC available somewhere else?

Thank you for your work,

-NAME

EXAMPLE

Hey NAME,

We exchanged a few emails via COMPANY NAME where I am a student. I was sad to see that you left the company because I enjoyed your course, COURSE NAME. At the same time, I’m also curious whether you have more material about growth available somewhere else?

After roaming around for a bit I found your new website NAME, but when I opened the URL I got the following error. Anyway, I thought I’d give you a heads up in case you didn’t know.

[SCREENSHOT]

-NAME

Script 2 – building the relationship

“Hey NAME,

I read this article [add link] in MAGAZINE and thought of you. The overarching point is POINT.

MY BRIEF COMMENT OR INSIGHT.

Anyway, I thought you might find it interesting considering your background. I know you are busy so no reply is necessary.

-NAME”

EXAMPLE

“Hey NAME,

I read this article [add link] in the NY Times and thought of you. The overarching point is that Apple is focused on privacy in the west while handing over customer data and following censorship in China because of their dependence on production there.

I can’t imagine how Apple might leverage that in the future but it makes me think that businesses sometimes have to make difficult decisions in order to advance to a new stage down the road. I can only imagine that they’ve thought it through.

Anyway, I thought you might find it interesting considering your background. I know you are busy so no reply is necessary.

-NAME”

Tactic #2: Piggyback off of agencies

Another great way to land freelance projects is piggybacking off of agencies. One of the hardest things for an agency is juggling the demand from clients as it usually goes up and down depending on the season.

It’s easy to over-staff and not have enough client projects or have too many projects and not enough staff. That’s where we as freelancers come in. We are the perfect solution for them to keep things flexible.

Many readers have seen success by approaching other freelancers and agencies for work. Many sub-contract for special projects or perhaps need specific expertise for just a few projects where it does not make sense to hire someone full time.

If you’ve worked for an agency, you might even have experienced that first hand. The easiest way to go about this is simply to email them, briefly explain what you do and ask if they keep freelancers like you on file or hire from time to time.

You’ll probably need to check in with them once a month. You may find some that are looking for help right away while others may contact you with work down the road.

Script 1 – first contact

“Hey NAME,

[If you can find an interview they did and point out something you liked and find common ground via that, that is a huge advantage as you’ll leave a better first impression!]

I’m NAME and I work with YOUR SERVICE, often on freelance projects. I’m curious if your team keeps a file of freelancers you work with from time to time. If you do, I’d love the opportunity to prove myself as I totally understand if you are not ready to work with some stranger just because I happened to send an email.

Would you be open to a quick five minute phone call? It would be great to hear what is important to you when working with freelancers, so I make things easy for you.

-NAME”

With this script, I’d prepare a couple of questions to ask them on the phone and then keep it brief to respect their time. For example:

• Have you worked with freelancers before? How was your experience – what did you like and what could be improved?
• Besides deadlines, what is the most important to you when you work with freelancers?

They will probably ask you about their past experience and I’ve found that the most effective thing is to give them a brief overview e.g. by saying “I’ve worked with X for Y years and a project I was especially excited about has been.. PROJECT” and then highlight one or two examples of past client or projects, and tell them that you’d like to send some case studies or examples after the call, so they have it on file for their convenience.

Monthly check-ins

Use the script from the first tactic earlier in this email to build the relationship.

Tactic #3: Offline referrals

The third tactic that worked well has been getting referrals from friends in real life. It can feel intimidating to get friends involved and the good news is that we don’t need to involve most of the people we know, as they will be irrelevant.

Once we know which type of client we’d like to work with, we can casually tell friends working in that industry about it. When they have a problem at work within our field of expertise, they might come to us for advice. For example, my friend is the CFO of a startup and came to me with a problem about their advertising, as he wanted to help the business even though it wasn’t his department.

I’ve found that this works especially well with friends that are serious and career-oriented or those working at startups. Letting friends know is not something we can script out as I’ve found it to naturally come up in conversations as we catch up here and there. We might say that we’ve been working with X for a while and really enjoy it.

The best approach I’ve found has been to offer our expertise and advice for free. Work to understand their problem over lunch, offer them advice and recommendations they could try out. Either it will solve their problem and we become a hero or they will be interested in us executing, and we might have a new freelance project on our hands.

I’ve gotten several offers and earned thousands of dollars with that approach because there is an inherent level of trust that is already established between us. It’s a great idea to make sure we can do an amazing job before starting and setting expectations as we want our friends to look good. If we mess up, it can affect their reputation.

Like this:

A good way to incentivize them is to offer them a cut to recommend you. For example, by saying that your average project is $1,000 and that you offer 20% as a finder’s reward.

How pitching digital marketing services is different from other services

There are generally only two ways to approach pitching digital marketing services. 

Either the client knows what they want done and usually how as well, or they don’t know that they want something at all and we have to persuade them as to why they should invest in a particular idea for their business.

The first type of client is often a great place to start if you are somewhat new to digital marketing and don’t feel extremely confident. They will often teach us their methods and show us the best approach because they have already experimented and made it work, and now need to remove themselves from the task.

In the other scenario, we are driving everything including the experimentation of the campaign to drive results.

This type is better suited for experts since we also need to show them that the idea is worth the investment in the first place and the best way to do that is usually to break down the potential gains of the project. 

For example, if someone is pitching Facebook ads they might show a calculation that breaks down the estimated profit or extra sales as a result of the campaign along with how much the client stands to gain after the investment in the freelancer and the ad campaign. 

I like to walk them through each step of the calculation, so they know that I haven’t used unrealistic numbers.

In the example of the client who knows everything and needs help implementing, we can focus on our experience driving results for the same type of project if we have any.

We can also focus on our reliability as a freelancer since clients like these often want long term help if we are trustworthy and reliable. Something most freelancers are not.

For a more in-depth look at how to get clients for digital marketing, look at this guide to freelance digital marketing.

After working at several outsourcing companies and trying my luck freelancing on different websites, it’s time to show you how Upwork works from both the client’s and freelancer’s perspectives.

I’ll show you step by step how I posted a project as a client, evaluated the proposals and ultimately who I picked to work on my project. 

I’ll also show you the same process from a freelancer’s perspective along with case studies with winning proposals.

If you are new to freelancing and considering Upwork, seeing how clients hire will be useful for you. I usually recommend putting up a project for hire — even if you are a freelancer — to get a feeling for what it is like to be a client. The first section of this short guide shows what happened when I did just that.

How Upwork works if you are a client

First, we’ll briefly look at how Upwork works if you are a client with an overview of the hiring process followed by a step by step walkthrough.

An overview

Steps

1. Sign up for an account
2. Post your project
3. Look at freelancer proposals
4. Pick your favorite and agree on terms
5. Get your project done and pay
6. (Leave a testimonial)
7. Repeat and get on with your life

Upwork does have other products for businesses looking to hire freelancers such as their project catalog, managed services for enterprises, etc. 

Since the standard product of hiring a freelancer seems to be the most popular, I’ll show you how it works step by step below by posting a job and documenting every step of the way along with looking at proposals from freelancers.

Watch me post a project and hire a freelancer step by step

After creating my client account on Upwork.com, I click Jobs > post a job.

The first thing we need to do is decide on the job title and category.

Next, let’s click update and write what we think is a good and descriptive project description. 

Let’s select a one-time project and click next.

There are many different skills we can pick between but I’ve found that it doesn’t make that big of a difference since we have the text to explain as well. Let’s pick quantitative research and get on with our lives.

We also need to pick the experience level that the freelancer should have. It’s difficult to know, so I’ll pick the one in the middle.

Next, we have to select if we only want to invite a specific freelancer or make it public, and how many freelancers we need. One freelancer will be fine for this project. 

Let’s keep it open and get some bids so the freelancers can show us what they got, shall we?

Next, we have to enter the budget. A fixed price seems like the right choice but I don’t know how much this should cost. Especially, since we don’t yet know how many leads are out there and we want to pay what’s fair without getting ripped off.

Let’s say $1 per lead and add $200.

A quick review of everything and we are ready to publish the project.

The project is live! We are taken to this page to invite freelancers but since we don’t know any, we’ll let the freelancers come to us.

Fast forward two days… we got 20 proposals! This is what it looks like when we browse through the proposals:

Somehow Upwork has decided for us that 14 out of the 20 options are the “best match”. I have blurred out personal details out of respect for each freelancers’ privacy.

Let’s look at the other proposals…

This is a long proposal.. Interesting.

This next proposal is long, so I had to bite it up into two screenshots.

Besides the fact that this is very long and a good chunk of it feels like rewording of the project description, this isn’t too bad either.

This next one has attached an example from a similar project. For privacy of the people in the doc, I’ll not add it here but the formatting looks like what you and I are looking for. The proposal is nice, short and not bad at all.

The rest of the proposals are quite similar… except for these two:

Nice! Look at this doc:

The freelancer showed a sample of what our project would look like. There were only one other candidate that did the same thing:

The proposal itself doesn’t feel that relevant to the project but based on the sample below it feels as if the freelancer understands what we are looking for. Right?

There are plenty more, similar, proposals. Since you are busy and don’t have all day to look at this, let’s leave it with those highlights. I decided to go with the freelancer who sent the last proposal we looked at based on the sample.

Next, let’s look at how Upwork works from a freelancers’ perspective.

How Upwork works if you are a freelancer

First, we’ll look at an overview of the process from creating a profile to getting paid and spending your money (I hope you don’t need help with that last bit), followed by a case study showing how a reader landed a project on Upwork. 

We’ll also discuss common pitfalls to consider as a freelancer using Upwork and if it is a good choice for freelancers.

An overview of how Upwork works if you are a freelancer

Steps

1. Create a profile
2. Get approved
3. Find relevant projects
4. Send a proposal
5. Agree on terms with the client
6. Complete the project
7. Get paid and withdraw the money
8. Buy cool shit with the money you earn

Case study of a freelancer landing a project – example 1

Let’s look at a few examples from readers who landed real projects on Upwork.

Project description:

The cover letter:

He landed the gig at $35 an hour.

Case study of a freelancer landing a project – example 2

Here’s another example. The project description:

And the proposal:

The reader won the project at a $250 flat rate.

Is Upwork a good choice for freelancers?

To figure out if Upwork is a good choice for freelancers, let’s first look at common pitfalls that are difficult to anticipate before starting.

Common pitfalls that cause problems for freelancers

The first and most obvious one is that we might not get your Upwork profile approved in the first place. 

There are things we can do to help the process but there is no guarantee to get the profile approved but without it we can’t apply for jobs at all. Some freelancers end up trying to get approved over and over again with no luck and get stuck there.

The thing is that the reasoning is often vague and polite, so the one we are given might not be the whole truth (there is no way to know), so if you are interested in Upwork my best recommendation is to give it a try once or twice and if you don’t get approved move on to other options so you don’t get stuck.

This might come across as trashing Upwork, which is definitely not my intention. It’s a great website to get started working small freelance projects but it is easy to get distracted by their “gamification”.

By that, I mean all the arbitrary metrics we as freelancers have to adhere to such as the Job Success Score (JSS), top-rated badgers, etc. They are meant to separate the quality freelancers from the scammers and make it easier for clients to find the right fit.

In theory, it’s great since these metrics *should* help us show how good we are and clients would hire us based on that but the reality is quite different. It’s difficult to accurately determine how these metrics should be calculated, which now leads to situations like if a lazy client doesn’t leave a review it can lower the JSS quite significantly even if the project was completed successfully and the client was happy.

I figure it is difficult to calculate accurately but either way, that tends to lead us freelancers to focus on those metrics more than finding and helping clients. In short, it is a major distraction from earning money — kinda like how inbox zero is meant as a good productivity tool but in reality, it makes us feel busy instead of impacting the important results such as how much we earn.

Another thing worth considering is that it is very likely that you’ll feel frustrated sending proposal after proposal and not hearing back from clients until you learn what works. I’ve noticed that more than half of the projects I’ve sent proposals for never hire anyone and I’m unfortunately not alone with that experience. 

This happens everywhere else too, so it is not Upwork’s fault but perhaps the difference is that clients appear like they are ready to hire on Upwork since they post projects with help they need and it only requires a few clicks to apply.

Another thing I’ve noticed when speaking to Upwork freelancers is that it is easy to look at competing freelancers with more experience, better case studies and feel overwhelmed and wonder how we can ever win projects when competing with those freelancers unless we offer a dirt cheap rate.

And looking the other way, how can we ever compete with freelancers offering a dirt cheap rate and turn that into a living and, for example, quit our job.

People talk about Upwork’s holy grail being the project invites we can get from clients. It often sounds like clients will send us projects left and right. In reality, we might get a few invites but usually they are generic mass invites sent to lots of freelancers at once which is pretty much the same as not getting one (that is not to say that it is impossible).

When is Upwork a good choice for freelancers?

There is lots of negativity about Upwork online especially when we look at reviews. I want to emphasize that Upwork is not a bad place to take the first step towards earning money on the side and quitting your job. After lowering my living cost, I quit my job using Upwork!

If you can overcome the obstacles above, it can be a good choice and if you are in a country like the US that is important to Upwork (with many clients looking specifically for freelancers from the same country), you might even be able to clear $100k a year or more.

Upwork is tricky in that the market inside and outside the US appears to be totally different. Basically, we can divide it up into two different types of clients: those looking for international freelancers and those looking for high-end expertise in the States.

The latter appears to be USA-focused since Upwork is putting its efforts into getting big companies there and helping them find the right clients

Those looking for international freelancers tend to want someone with strong expertise but without having to pay several hundred dollars per hour. In fact, many are looking for freelancers charging $50/h or less in my experience. 

It’s not that it is impossible to find high-paying, great clients, looking for international freelancers but rather that it requires us to go through A LOT of projects to find them. It is truly like looking for a needle in a haystack in my experience.

Look at all these angry Upwork reviews I found in the wild…

Example 2

What do you notice?

I don’t doubt they are true in terms of the experience they’ve had but notice how emotional these Upwork reviews are. We never see anyone weighing the pros and cons against each other.

Some claim that they bid on a hundred jobs and earned like $50, and somehow that is Upwork’s fault rather than their own for not learning how to send good proposals. I also noticed that most of these bad reviews are never backed up with proof.

If we compare the attitude we saw in those comments with someone successful (maybe someone you admire), how do you think they would react in comparison?

My bet is that they probably felt the same as described in those comments but instead of writing angry comments on the internet, they made a plan for how to move forward anyway.

Unfortunately, as people, we have an unattractive trait where when something goes wrong we tend to focus on blaming the world or other people. Anything to make us feel like it was not us who did something wrong.

Of course, if we get scammed we do feel emotional but how come there are lots of freelancers and clients with seemingly no problem using Upwork at all?

Every day there are 8,219 projects posted on Upwork with plenty of freelancers and clients using it without problems. Is it just a matter of time before they get scammed as well? Or is there something those reviewers above aren’t telling us?

Honestly, I don’t know. There is no way to know. Surely there are some bad apples in every bunch but there is no way to know if Upwork is for you until you try it.

Comparing Upwork with other sites, scams also happen on Freelancer.com, Fiverr, and even with clients and freelancers working without all of these freelance websites. When that happens there is no big corporation to blame so we don’t hear about it.

Does it make sense for Upwork to tolerate scams and bad Upwork reviews? 

Is Upwork profiting from that as some reviewers claim?

The reality is that Upwork makes most of their earnings from the fees they charge off of completed projects – not all the other fees. 

That means that Upwork makes more money if the freelancer AND client have a good experience together. 

Unfortunately, there are a lot of retards in the world and now Upwork is looking like the bad one because there is an outlet where there was no one before. 

On top of that, Upwork doesn’t want negative PR since it isn’t good for business, so of course, they are trying to make things good for everyone.

Interestingly, I’ve seen examples from almost any other online platform of similar things e.g. Paypal freezing your money and account, Facebook banning your ad account, Facebook group or page for no reason, etc.

What other freelancers (who aren’t anonymous) say about their experience on Upwork

Several freelancers in the industry have made great money on Upwork and they are backing it up with their own face and reputation. I know that some people claim that they are scams too and it is hard to take them seriously. 

Often, when people proclaim a scam it is because they couldn’t figure it out and so blaming it for being a scam is easier than accepting that we aren’t that good at it yet.

My own experience as a freelancer 

Upwork is a great platform for starting out as a freelancer in my experience and I’ve earned a nice little chunk of money there. 

The challenge begins with the distraction of their gamification. They’ve created metrics like the Job Success Score (JSS) and badges that make it seem like we will get more work as freelancers by focusing on improving them.

The reality is that we have no proof of that and we have plenty of examples of not needing this outside the platforms while actually earning more. The problem begins when we focus more on those metrics than pitching and working with clients since that’s what truly matters.

I’ve also noticed some clients leading freelancers on, thinking they want to hire them only to steal their ideas but I guess that could happen anyway. Overall I’ve had a fine experience with Upwork as you can read more about here: is Upwork worth it?

Next, let’s look at the experience on Upwork as a client.

Upwork reviews: what clients say about Upwork

As a client, I’ve hired a bit on Upwork and I’ve only had a good experience.

As I’ve spoken to some of my own freelance clients that have hired more on Upwork than I have, one point that came up is that they were still confused about how to find the right fit, even with all the information they had about the different freelancers.

They still found it difficult to choose the right freelancer no matter the Job Success Score, the top-rated badges, profile text, etc. That shows us that if a great and experienced client like that is still confused and finds it no less easier to hire with all the extra bells and whistles available, it can’t be that important for us as a freelancer.

What to make of all this…

The reality is that we can always find reviews for what we want to hear whether that is for Upwork or something else. Think about food delivery. Say, we look at a popular restaurant with hundreds of reviews. There will always be some positive and some negative.

There is no way except trying it out. We tend to look towards what fits what we already expect and think.

The best example compared with Upwork is mobile apps. How do you decide whether to try an app like this one with so many 5-star and 1-star ratings?

This is for the dating app TInder. Look at what people say:

Someone here is totally misunderstanding the very concept of the app and complaining because they don’t get any matches…. Just like the reviews about Upwork above.

The reality is that the person might just be using a shitty picture and profile text. If you went on there with a great profile you might have an entirely different experience than they with no changes from the company’s side.

My point is to not take the reviews too seriously when you see a bunch on both sides of the argument. Fake reviews not only exist but are common even on Upwork. Here’s an example of someone selling reviews that I could within a few seconds of a google search:

Maybe scams are just a cost of doing business. Would you rather get scammed once, learn and then become successful or not get scammed and not get successful at all?

How to decide if Upwork is right for you

Here’s a simple way to make your decision. Look at two different people:

Person one wrote an angry review about Upwork somewhere on the internet and goes back to flipping burgers at McDonalds.

The other got scammed for a project, revised their thinking, learned from it, and later became successful on Upwork and earned thousands of dollars.

If we assume both are true for the moment, who would you rather be in the future? That’s the one you should listen to.

If Upwork reviews scare you, there are other alternatives. By other alternatives, I don’t mean other freelance websites – they all have the same challenges.

What is the best way for a new freelancer to get clients?

If you’ve searched for “how to get freelance work”, you’ve probably come across lists like “101 places to find freelance work” and felt overwhelmed. Where do we even start?

Let’s simplify things. I have prepared four points that are important for new freelancers to consider when looking for clients:

Contactability: We will benefit from being able to contact as many businesses as we want, especially in the beginning as not every business we contact will be a good fit.

Marketplaces typically offer a limited number of great projects, so you might feel like you need to pitch any project (even the ones that aren’t a fit) to earn money. On some platforms, you can only send a certain number of proposals – not ideal.

Researchability: Being able to research the business to understand what they do, what kind of customers they serve, and what kind of challenges they have, is crucial if you want to get their attention.

Time to results: This is a representation of how quickly you are able to get in front of potential clients. Some channels require more work upfront because they are long term focused (e.g. getting people to find your website vs. you reaching out to them).

Competition: When we start out, most of us don’t feel that confident so having a swarm of competitors can feel overwhelming.

There are a number of ways to decide which approach is the best fit for you. I like to score the items on a scale from 1-5 (1 being worst and 5 being best), based on the points above and then rank them by the total score.

Below I’ve listed seven popular channels and scored them each using the points above. 

The seven popular channels are

• Freelance marketplaces (like Upwork)
• Job boards
• Cold outreach (cold emailing or cold calling)
• Networking events and speaking gigs
• Social networks
• Referrals and collaborations
• Inbound marketing

As you might notice, cold outreach has scored the highest with social networks, job boards, and networking events coming in second and third.

The perhaps most important reason is that when we begin our new freelance business, we need to practice connecting with potential clients.

There is nothing worse than if we feel motivated to go for it but we are blocked by limitations that aren’t up to us.

This changes as we get more experience and by then other options might become a better fit. For example, if we have no clients and network, we have no business working on getting referrals. That will come later.

With that out of the way, let’s dive deeper into each channel.

Freelance marketplaces

On freelance marketplaces like Upwork, freelancer.com, and Fiverr we usually don’t know who the clients are. 

Links in project descriptions are often not allowed as the marketplaces fear that freelancers will be taking work off of the platforms. 

They often attract newly started businesses with limited hiring experience, so they are not aware of how much information we need as a freelancer to do a good job.

Usually, you’ll be allowed to send proposals for a limited number of projects monthly and you can pay to send more. While it makes sense that they want to avoid spam, it doesn’t help you. 

One of the major benefits is that you can land a new client within hours if the timing is right. And there is a higher likelihood that you will hit the right timing as potential clients are out there looking to hire paid help.

There appears to be a lot of competition for the projects but there are also less competitive niche projects you can bid on. Perhaps the difference is that the competition is more visible compared to e.g. a job board or cold calling where you don’t know if anyone else is in contact with the client.

Job boards (e.g. craigslist or Flexjobs)

Sometimes you’ll be able to see which brand created the job ad and other times you don’t – the researchability depends on the job board. Some will ask you to buy an account to access the job board whereas others publish the projects for free.

Both have their benefits. For example, Solidgigs is a platform that limits the competition by asking people to pay to join which I consider a major benefit.

There is usually less competition than on freelance marketplaces but more than if you cold call businesses.

In some cases, you will get hired quickly but often the turnaround time is longer than with freelance marketplaces (for good or bad).

Contactability depends on the job board and how often they show new projects.

Jacob McMillen, a six-figure freelance writer, shares his approach to landing gigs with job boards here.

Cold outreach (e.g. cold emailing/calling)

With this approach, you pick who you’d like to contact, so you can, for example, choose only those that are easy to research. You simply search for another company (or 10, 20, etc.) and you are off to the races.

How fast you’ll land a project depends on the company itself but there are no limitations. You could land a project right away if they are looking for your type of services. 

However, it is likely that you’ll have to contact more leads than on a marketplace to land a client.. unless you find a way to segment for businesses looking for help.

The competition depends on your industry and services, but generally, there is less competition as people are either scared of reaching out or coming across as spammy.

Networking events and speaking gigs

Unless you are a magician, you probably can’t spot someone from across the room and guess where they work. However, doing research shouldn’t be a problem as people tend to love to talk about themselves and at events, there are usually sponsors, visible online registration, name tags with logos, etc.

While you have the ability to connect with other attendees as much as you like, there are only so many people at each event and if you’ve ever been to one, you probably know what it feels like when people are machine-gunning name cards at us.

You could land a gig right on the spot because it is easier to build trust with someone in person.

Many people hate networking events, so they might stay at home. On the other hand, many of those that go there might be ready to pitch the same leads as you.

Social networks (e.g. LinkedIn)

Researchability depends on the businesses themselves as they typically have to fill in their own information. Many do so to get more exposure but it isn’t guaranteed.

Social media platforms tend to have a limited number of daily interactions and not everyone you’d like to target is on there. Some platforms offer you to pay to connect with more people while others don’t.

The time to results depends on the business but there is no limitation from the platforms’ side.

Competition depends on your services and industry but more and more are using social media platforms to drive business. It is still less than the job boards and freelance marketplaces as you still have to do the hunting most of the time.

If this might be a channel for you, Michal Eisikowitz and Tyler Koenig (both six-figure freelancers) discuss how to build a freelance business using LinkedIn here:

Referrals and collaborations

Researchability and contactability: You are at the mercy of whoever is sending you the referral but you can prepare them by telling them you only work with a certain type of client.

Time to results: It depends on the situation but especially if they know someone is looking, you could land a deal fast. And referral leads are usually of higher quality than other platforms.

Usually, there is little competition but you never know.

Inbound marketing (SEO/Guest posting, etc.)

Researchability: As they are reaching out to you, it is up to them how many details they share with you and usually you have to ask them questions to get the knowledge you need.

How many you can pitch depends on how many people reach out to you and unless you already have an established site, it won’t be many.

Time to results: It takes a long time to build this up but it gives you a lot of power as businesses come to you for help rather than you having to do the work to reach out.

Competition: Since they are coming to you there will be little to no competition unless they also reach out to others.

Now over to you: did you get a better idea of if you should use Upwork? Comment below.

When we look for Upwork jobs for beginners, many of us feel inadequate when we look at other Upwork freelancers with more experience, better testimonials, case studies and more confidence.

It makes us question why a client would ever hire someone like us… and the most popular answer? It is only possible if we discount our rates.

That feeling is near and dear to my heart. When I began freelancing, I had no clue what to do and I didn’t believe that I could do it but somehow I convinced myself to give it a shot. 

It changed my life as I began to discover a different way to live. One that didn’t include a traditional 9-5 job but instead, the freedom to live and work in paradise with no boss and nowhere to be. The same can be true for you — wherever your paradise is!

After failing to win jobs, I landed my first client by looking for projects from the same country as I, thinking they would prefer someone speaking the same language. It worked and I earned my first $30. 

In this mini guide, I’ll show you how you can get the upper hand and win jobs against more experienced freelancers on Upwork — and without lowering your rates. 

First, we’ll look at examples of specific Upwork job ideas that are great for beginners followed by how to beat out more experienced competition with three examples of leverage, you can use that they might not have access to. 

Last, we’ll look at what to expect if you have a little bit of freelancing experience from random projects and now want to land projects on Upwork.

3 examples of great Upwork jobs for beginners

Let me start by saying that of course, if you have your own freelance idea by all means go for it. 

The ideas I’m about to show you are if you don’t have any ideas or don’t know where to start. They are particularly good for beginners since you can often avoid a phone call because the projects are small. 

Upwork beginner job example one: Lead gen research

Lead generation research is pretty self-explanatory. As the words say, we help businesses find information about other businesses, influencers, etc. usually used for partnerships or sales by the client’s team. It often includes finding the company name and email.

Example job description

What is required to land this type of project

The short and sweet version is to offer the client a free sample of three leads put together based on the client’s requirements in a spreadsheet.

Some freelancers choose to attach them directly with the proposal while others tell the client about it in the proposal and ask them to reply something simple like “yes” before they start to make sure they are interested.

Either way is fine and you can fine tune it as you go but the key is to offer the free sample. I’ve hired for lead generation projects several times and offering a free sample stands out so much that it even beats a better proposal without. EVEN if the rest of the proposal is somewhat garbage because the client gets to see the work first hand before they make a decision.

Project requirements

Of course each project is different but in general, these projects tend to focus on gathering correct emails and contact info for certain businesses, influencers, publications, etc. so someone can reach out to do sales or partnerships. 

Sometimes, we also need to qualify the leads, meaning that they have to fulfil certain criterias such as yearly revenue or monthly traffic. That means it is key that the leads and information we find is accurate.

Tools that might be relevant for these projects are hunter.io or Rocketreach for finding people’s email addresses. We can also use sites like similarweb.com to get an idea of the website traffic for a certain site.

Upwork beginner job example two: transcription or translation

Transcription can be relevant for interviews or podcasts for businesses that want to publish a written version on their website next to audio or videos of the same content as it can help them show up on Google search.

Translation from one language to another is a great choice as well. Especially, if you speak an obscure language that isn’t that popular since it can be difficult for clients to find help. Of course, that requires you to speak two languages so if you don’t, you can ignore this example.

Example job description

What is required to land this type of project

Since this is written work, we’ll often need to show examples of similar projects we have transcribed or translated before. 

If for example you find a transcription project you are interested in, I suggest doing a small project that is similar so you have a highly relevant sample to show them. It can be as simple as transcribing a small section of a relevant interview. 

After having applied for a few of those jobs you’ll have examples to cover most projects on Upwork and you won’t have to continue creating new ones.

The same goes for translation. You can simply translate a small portion of a relevant video or audio interview and use a sample taster.

Project requirements

These projects often don’t require much except good language skills and attention to detail. Sometimes it is possible to use Google doc’s Voice Typing tool but it is definitely not perfect.

The same is true for the Translate Document feature as shown just above the Voice Typing button in the screenshot.

Upwork beginner job example three: Write blog/SEO articles

Writing SEO articles means to write articles with the purpose of having them show up on Google and drive traffic to the client’s website. Usually, you don’t need to know anything about SEO in advance as they will often train you based on the way they prefer to have it done.

Example job description

What is required to land this type of project

For blog/SEO articles, we definitely need to show relevant examples. We can use the same technique as above to quickly put together a portfolio by creating a small sample that is relevant to the project we apply for. For example, 300-500 words on a similar topic.

It’s challenging to land projects writing articles without samples but they can help you avoid the phone call during the pitching process because they tend to want to do a small test project of a few articles first to see if it’s a good fit.

Project requirements

Clients looking for help often know SEO well and will provide a checklist or basic framework for how to structure the article so it works well for Google.

That means you have to focus on writing correctly in the language and follow their guidelines for structuring each article.

The benefits of all of Upwork jobs for beginners

Some of the benefits across all of these projects are that we tend to be able to avoid getting on phone calls, which many new freelancers are afraid of (and with good reason). Often because they are either writing-heavy or smaller projects that don’t require that much communication.

Be careful with jobs that say “open to beginners” since the price is often low. Also, ignore the beginner level (beginner, intermediate, expert) since clients don’t know what they need so that selection is often random.

Now that we have a few ideas of what kind of projects we can go after, let’s dive deeper into how we can win them as a beginner without experience.

How to beat out more experienced freelancers and win Upwork jobs as a beginner (without lowering your rate)

Now to the big question. To land a client when we are competing with other freelancers, we have to be different. Everyone does.

Most established players set themselves apart by showing off their testimonials and attractive case studies. 

It can feel overwhelming, like slaying a Hydra, when we are starting from scratch. And most new freelancers chose to compete by lowering their rates in exchange for testimonials. 

That is not the best decision, especially if we have experience freelancing off of Upwork as those case studies and testimonials count too. We are not starting from scratch just because we are joining a freelance website. Pricing is usually the laziest way to try to be different.

It’s one of those things we tend to do because everyone else does it. The problem is that it lowers our motivation to continue and trains the client to get a discount. Lose-lose.

Instead, being proactive, overdelivering on your client’s expectations and impressing them with specific details in the proposal gives the client a great impression and makes them want to speak more with us.

It works well no matter the project but in particular with the project examples I shared above since any beginner can do them without much training.

The key is to show that we are trying hard and are motivated to do a good job for the client. To many’s surprise, most freelancers don’t do that and so even if you are a beginner you can win by showing that you go out of your way to do a good job – even if it isn’t perfect.

Past experience, testimonials and case studies are just one way for clients to judge if we would be a good fit to complete their project because they don’t know how else to judge it. To mitigate that, we can give the client other ways to judge it by – for example, our drive and excitement.

Hollywood superhero movies are not popular because we can’t relate to what it is like to be Batman or Superman but because we can relate to the struggles that they face. 

Similarly, clients tend to be able to relate to the effort we put in to impress them, even if we are a beginner and make a few mistakes. Often because they have done the same in the past when they first started out.

I didn’t believe it the first time I heard it, so I imagine most people reading this won’t either. It sounds too easy and simple. 

Look, I get it. It is hard to believe that there can be a place for freelancers to earn money while not doing a good job. The thing is that clients sometimes don’t have any other options.

One way to look at it is this: I love middle eastern food and in my city there are no particularly great choices. So if I want a middle eastern dish, I can only pick between a somewhat ok solution or none at all. Sometimes I pick the somewhat ok solution but if I had better options, I’d switch immediately.

Clients feel the same way about freelancers. As soon as a great one comes around, they’ll make the switch. And a portion of clients will prefer it even if it costs more.

For example, next time you speak with a client or send a proposal, end it with a question like this “have you worked with freelancers on a similar project before? How was your experience?”

I bet that you’ll quickly see a pattern somewhere along the lines of “we got the job done but communication was not great”.

Best of all, most freelancers don’t ask that so when we do, we show the client that we are mindful of them and their project.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into three examples of things you can leverage to find Upwork jobs for beginners and beat other freelancers with more experience.

3 ways to beat more experienced freelancers and win Upwork jobs

Example one: take urgent projects 

One of my favorite tricks is taking urgent projects since more experienced freelancers often think that adhering to crazy deadlines are beneath them.

Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t matter but it allows us to swoop in and help out last minute. Particularly on weekends where many other freelancers are off.

Example two: leverage your language or country skills

As mentioned, I used my language skills to land my very first freelance project online so I know how well this approach works. 

Of course if you are from a large country like the US or India, you might want to narrow it down even further by either language, state or perhaps even city.

Example three: timezone

Another idea is to leverage your timezone. It is often seen as a disadvantage but I can think of two examples where we can benefit from it. 

One is that we can paint a picture for the client where we can work on the project while they are asleep, so they can wake up to a fresh project update in their inbox. I’ve noticed that clients tend to love the idea because it feels sexy.

Another one is to offer customer service help across uncommon timezones. For example, if a client has a digital business in America with customers all over the world and the nature of the products means that they benefit from offering help 24/7. 

Few freelancers in the US want to work nights to cover that shift but guess what, it is perfect for someone in Asia since they will be awake when the US is asleep anyway.

Recently, I had a great experience with one of the business tools I use. I needed help with something and I got a response within an hour because they had service reps in the Philippines ready to help me with the US and Europe were asleep.

All of these ideas should be plenty for you to take a stab at and win Upwork jobs even if you are a beginner.

What to expect when applying to Upwork jobs for beginners

Sometimes I hear from people that have had a freelance project or two fall into their lab. Maybe they had an uncle who needed some help for his shop or something.

That worked out pretty well and now they are looking for more work and think about freelance websites like Upwork. The most common question I see is what the expectations are and if they are any different from the projects they know.

How the expectations on Upwork are different

In my experience, Upwork clients expect more case studies or proof of results, they hire faster and the projects available tend to be more hobby-related projects than real businesses.

Let’s break that down.

Upwork clients expect more case studies and proof of results

This seems totally counterintuitive and was confusing to me at first. I’ve found that Upwork clients are WAY more focused on case studies and proof of results in past projects than clients that I simply emailed out of the blue. Even though the Upwork projects were smaller and the hourly rate was lower.

…What?

It seems almost ridiculous — totally backward — since I earned significantly more money in my experiments with cold emails compared to Upwork.

My very unscientific guess is that many of them are afraid of scams or unqualified freelancers and so they are trying to verify that the freelancer is good based on past history.

For marketing projects, I’m guessing that’s why many switched some years ago from wanting screenshots of ad account performance (something I’ve never seen bigger businesses outside Upwork ask for) to wanting to see the same on a live video call.

I imagine it might be because there have been a lot of one man agencies popping up that hire Upwork freelancers to do the work and then use their case studies to sell it. A ridiculous business model.

In my experience, the more clients are concerned with past results, the smaller the business is and the more likely they are to be spending their own money rather than their business’. I’ve found that it is a good telltale of an inexperienced client.

In comparison, bigger and more established clients tend to be easier to work with since they are used to contractors and staff making mistakes from time to time, as we are all human and that is unavoidable.

Many of them also treat it as an experiment and rightly so, whereas new founders tend to feel more desperate and that the project has to work at all cost. A surefire way to fail in any business as it is normal to try a bunch of things to figure out what works.

Upwork jobs tend to be hobby-related projects rather than real businesses

That brings me to my next point. My guesstimate is that 90% of all the Upwork projects I’ve been bidding on are hobby-businesses. The way you can tell is if they don’t have any customers yet. With no customers, there is no revenue and so there is no business.

They are either straight up someone’s personal project where they don’t make any money yet or it’s a tiny business that makes a little money.. Nothing that would be able to get us enough projects in the long run to quit our job.

Those are good clients to start out with if you feel afraid of pitching bigger businesses. They are generally less professional (for good and bad) because they have less experience hiring. That also means that they are less experienced in managing teams and being organized.

Upwork is focusing more and more on bigger businesses but keeping them in their private talent cloud that we have to be invited to join. 

It makes perfect sense. They (and the freelancer) earn more money because the projects are bigger and so they want to make sure that whoever is working on those projects does a good job. 

If I was Upwork, I’d probably do the same. That leaves the rest of the freelancers to fight for the scraps along with the occasional bigger client that somehow found it’s way there.

They hire faster

That being said, Upwork clients do tend to hire faster in my experience. One part is that the projects often are smaller (so less decision is required) and another thing is that they put up the projects ready for hire, whereas when we reach out to businesses cold, they haven’t.

About this time a year ago — in the middle of the pandemic — I challenged myself to reach out to businesses in order to land freelance clients.

Once I got the hang of it, the results were terrific. In fact, they have been better than expected particularly in the aftermath because I haven’t had to pitch any new clients for months. Instead, I’ve been able to suggest new projects to my existing clients and earn money that way.

I noticed that the results were better than on freelance sites like Upwork while I put in about the same amount of work.

The big takeaway has been that I switched from working with many smaller clients to a few select, bigger, clients and as a result, I’ve been earning somewhere around $15,000 per client instead of about $650.

This has been a result of a number of things such as pitching clients that I pre-verified were of a certain size, so I knew that they could afford to pay me compared to picking between what’s available on Upwork on any given day.

Upwork is a great choice starting out but as we get ready to grow to the next step and prepare to quit our jobs, I notice that it becomes more and more challenging to land serious work on Upwork consistently. 

People located in the US appear to have the main advantage here since it appears to be Upwork’s key market according to their study from 2019. It shows that 38% of the clients hiring for the top 100 most popular skills are non-US companies, meaning that 62% must be US clients.

Sure, there is competition for clients but I’m more so referring to the projects ONLY available to freelancers in the US. Many are hidden if you are not in the correct location.

This makes perfect sense from a business perspective but most of us need a more stable way to increase our earnings both in terms of raising our rates, getting more clients, and more or bigger projects.

That being said, if you can get your account approved on Upwork, it is a great place to start freelancing especially if you have a job and focus on doing it on the side at first.

But, the big difference in my experiment came from something different: actually reaching out to potential clients in the first place. 

Committing to a certain number of pitches and following through on it, is really what works. The “one secret” if there ever was one.

Don’t underestimate it though. It is hard. And that’s why I’m reopening the challenge for students and readers this April as well.

The April challenge

Before we jump into the challenge conditions, let me point out that these are recommended ones. You can tweak them to fit your week but I strongly recommend that you keep the conditions at least at the same level, since they are designed to fit into a weekly schedule with a full-time job.

In other words, I suggest that this is the minimum you do throughout the challenge month. If you want to beef it up and pitch more clients, by all means, go for it!

The idea and result

The idea of the challenge is to land your first freelance client and perhaps even more!

Duration

The challenge is meant to last for a month – all of April.

How to

Just setting a goal of landing a client is not a great goal in itself because it isn’t clear what we are supposed to do when we are in the thick of it. Instead, to make it easy every day we can focus on what we have to do to nudge ourselves in the direction of completing the goal.

One student earned $30,000 in his first year freelancing and shared the same technique in his case study but for the purpose of this challenge, I’ll simplify it a bit.

We know that not every single client we pitch will end up working with us. We might guesstimate that if we send 30 pitches (1 per day for a month), we get five clients if we use Upwork and one or a couple of clients if we cold pitch via email outside of Upwork.

It might seem obvious to pitch on Upwork but I’ve found that we are actually more likely to earn more by pitching businesses outside because we can better target a specific type of client of our choosing and thus will be more likely to get repeat work as we can bake it into our pitch.

Whether you choose to use Upwork or not, the challenge I recommend is to spend 1h/day to send one proposal or email per day for 30 days.

Depending on how large the project is, we can expect that it might take a while to get hired. I’d expect you to be able to land Upwork clients pretty quickly because they are often ready to hire but if you go outside, it can take longer.

Since that’s the case, we can’t count on completing the work and getting paid during the challenge month but instead, we can target proposals sent or clients closed instead (of course if you do start some projects, that is awesome).

If you want to use Upwork, follow this guide to earn your first $1,000 with Upwork. If you want to go outside of Upwork, follow this guide to earn your first $1,000 via emailing businesses. 

I’ve used digital marketing services in the example but you can use any service you like. I recommend doing research in advance but it is all explained in the guide.

If you are not sure if you should pick Upwork or not, here’s a guide to give you a better idea showing the pros and cons.

Upwork tends to offer smaller hobby projects from clients whereas with email, you can get both that and work with established businesses of any size since you get to pick who you reach out to.

My example challenge

To give you an example, let’s start with my challenge.

I don’t want to use Upwork simply because it is much harder for me to earn what I want there compared to if I reach out to businesses on my own via email.

I commit to sending one email per day for all of April and I anticipate that I’ll dive deeper with five potential clients and probably land one or two of those. I’m actually not particularly looking for more work, which makes it the best time to pitch since it allows me to say no to projects that aren’t a perfect fit.

To make this more fun, I’ll target a new niche that I haven’t worked with before. I’ll reach out to online coaches in the sports and fitness industry offering ads services or marketing automation.

Of course, just working with that industry is not specific enough, so I’ll dive deeper and target businesses that are also earning somewhere between $300K to $1M per year. The reason I picked that size is that I know that they can pay for my services and based on my research, I’ve found that this is when they really begin to need the help that I provide.

I urge you to do this same research yourself since you’ll be able to hit them much better because you’ll truly understand a) what they need help with and b) how to respond/think about your type of services.

I also suggest that you use this template to track your emails (or Upwork client pitches) so it is easier for you to follow your progress (create a copy of this template by clicking FILE > make a copy).

Are you joining? Comment below or send me an email.

In many ways, writing a professional overview for Upwork is similar to writing a cover letter for a traditional full-time job.

We try our best to tell our story on a single page and explain why we are a good fit for the job.

The Upwork overview is the same. One of the most annoying challenges is that we tend to get stuck writing it and tweak it forever.

In this mini-guide, we’ll first go through different examples of professional overviews for Upwork that have gotten more than a hundred job invites. We’ll look at examples of Upwork services like graphic design, web development and more. 

Last, we’ll dive into how you can quickly create your own Upwork overview with the template script I’ve prepared for you and what is important to consider throughout the process.

Data-backed Upwork overview examples

Allow me to share a quick note with you before we jump into the examples. I’ve used the “recently invited X times” indicator to find examples for each service. 

That might not be the perfect way to judge it by but this is the only data we have available from Upwork on how many invites other freelancers get.

Professional overview for an Upwork graphic designer

Photo editor

Marketer

Copywriter

Professional overview for an Upwork web developer

Upwork professional overview sample for data entry

Why they are good and what we can take away from them

These Upwork overview examples are so different from each other yet all of them got more than a hundred invites recently.

That means that there is no sure pattern as to what makes a profile overview text attract more invites. The important detail here is that we don’t know the quality of any of the invites. For example for those freelancers with lots of invites and low rates, the clients can’t be that great.

As I compared the Job Success Score (JSS), I noticed that it does not seem to have an impact to be at 100% among those that I looked at. All were 90%+ except for one at 83%.

Next, I compared the top rated banners. Except for two, the rest had some form of a top rated banner but both that and the JSS likely determines that they show up early in my search more so than they seem to lead to more invites. 

I imagine that they might have tested those metrics internally at Upwork and found that they tend to lead to more interest from clients and that’s why they’ve set it up in this way.

But even if we do a good job on our end, the platform is optimized for clients. So if a client doesn’t leave feedback, even if they’ve had a good experience, it can destroy e.g. our JSS. 

That means factors like badges and JSS are largely out of our control. Sure, we can follow up and ask but if lazy clients won’t do it, we are out of luck. The point is that we can’t worry too much about external factors like that because we can’t control them.

The takeaway here is that there is no clear correlation between the different details in the Upwork overview and how many job invites we get. Nothing that we are able to clearly measure and isolate.

The trap of the Upwork overview

Most articles on the topic give generic advice such as “you know people will read the profile text so a good headline is important” and “include a call to action”.

The best part is that no one really argues for why it’s important to spend all this time optimizing our profile. Especially, since many Upwork freelancers don’t get any invitations until they’ve completed jobs for months and even so, most are low-quality, garbage invitations.

Regarding what really works when creating a profile, we know a lot less with certainty than you’d imagine. 

The only thing we have to go by, beyond if clients actually send us invites, is the “my stats” area that shows how many people visited our profile. 

Last week I had a potential client respond that she had read my articles. 

At first, I was confused as to how she had found them since we hadn’t talked before. I was sure she wouldn’t just be able to find them since I’m not famous and I wouldn’t have been able to send her the links. 

Then it occurred to me that she found them in my Upwork portfolio where I had uploaded them. Yet, my account still shows 0 views in “my stats”. 

That must mean that people visiting our profile from a proposal won’t show up in the ‘my stats’ area.

Since we want invitations, that doesn’t seem to matter. But it is easier to test changes in your profile text via the visitors from proposals we send out because we have more control and insight into what we said in the proposals (e.g. “look at my profile”) and how many proposals we sent out.

Without this data, it makes it harder to figure out which of our overview changes had an impact since we don’t know what’s going under the hood of the Upwork machine and why we get more invitations at one point than another.

Confusing, I know.

That means that we can’t run tests to create a better profile based on a data-driven approach, since we can’t learn the results of our experiments properly. Hence no one technically knows how well each change is performing.

That means that unless someone goes by the number of invitations, no one really knows how well our “optimized” professional Upwork overview really works for us — including me.

Since when we start out we usually don’t get any invitations, we are going in blind. Meaning that we can spend A TON of time optimizing it without any real result.

It’s like applying for a bunch of traditional jobs and never hearing back — not even a no. We have no clue why we are not getting hired or what to improve.

It’s hell.

But we still need a profile text on Upwork, so let’s create a quick and dirty one that looks professional, shall we?

How to create a professional overview for Upwork in an hour

One of the most powerful things we can do to attract the right clients is to speak their language so they feel at home when they see our profile. 

We can’t speak to everyone at the same time but by specializing we can speak to just the right type of clients. Specializing has so many benefits that it only makes sense to do such as commanding a higher rate and making it easier to land clients. 

Specialization is challenging on Upwork because there often isn’t enough work to sustain us if we specialize our services as much as we might elsewhere. 

We can create several specialized Upwork profiles but when the client can see each one with a single click, it sort of defeats its purpose.

In some cases, we can specialize such as if we are a programmer and optimize WordPress sites to load faster but often, it simply becomes too broad.

For example with a service like Facebook ads, there are only a few options such as working with ecommerce businesses if we want to be sure that there is enough consistent work on Upwork. 

The challenge is that when every other freelancer offering the same service is “specializing” in Facebook ads for ecommerce services, it’s not really that useful anymore. Not to mention that e.g. an online pharmacy might count as an ecommerce shop but it has little to do with other stores like one that sells sports shoes.

A note on job invites

Invites are not made evenly. We can get plenty of generic invites that are clearly from a template script mass-sent to lots of freelancers at once. That is not the same as when we are the only ones invited for a project and the message is personal and clearly meant for us.

They tend to depend highly on the service we offer and our specialization. For example, a programmer might get more invites than an archaeologist because clients tend to know that they can get programming help on Upwork.

It is unclear exactly how Upwork ranks freelance profiles when clients are searching and no one truly knows except those building it. All the rest of us can do is a guesstimate based on the limited data we have available from the website.

On top of that, there are all the tactical details like if we have a top-rated badge, our job success score, how well our profile matches the keywords the client is using when searching, how much we’ve earned, and if we fit the search filters they use.

Since we can’t control those, let’s ignore them for now and instead, focus on what we can control.

Write a professional overview Upwork – example

Let’s break down what one requires into different sections within a professional overview:

• Headline/title
• Intro
• Explanation of what we do
• Social proof
• CTA

There are many ways to structure it and the most common one is to follow the intro with the explanation of what we do and then the social proof. 

If you don’t have any testimonials yet, you can still follow the same process without adding those in.

The reason I like to put testimonials almost at the top is that they tend to sell well no matter on Upwork, for freelancing, or for any other purpose. 

It has been known as a good sales tool for many years no matter the situation because it is other unbiased people saying the service is good rather than ourselves.

I know there is talk about keywords especially in the title of the overview and how it can help people rank higher in Upwork’s search results. As I discussed in the article on Upwork titles, it may work but we have yet to see any proof so don’t worry too much about it for now.

Keywords have another beneficial factor: they help the client feel that we speak the same language–that we are one of them.

Instead of optimizing the overview for search results, make sure that the language is relevant to your clients based on your expertise.

In the intro, I typically just write a slightly longer paragraph than the title but as an extension to it with the purpose being just to get them to make sure they are in the right place. Here’s a good example:

Next up is the explanation of our services. I like to break it down into a few short examples of the most popular services but there is no one way to do it. 

That might be 3-5 sections with ideas of what the client might help with including a simple sub-headline and a few paragraphs as a description or what you’ve done in the past — the point is that the reader can recognize it and thinks “that’s exactly what I need!” For example:

“Get more customers with Facebook ads

I’ve helped a bookstore get 21% more customers each month with Facebook ads. I’ve also helped a skin clinic increase bookings by 30% per month at $46 per booking.”

If you don’t feel as if you have great case studies to show off, I like explaining the process and benefits instead. For example:

“I help clients get more customers with Facebook ads by A/B testing different elements in the sales funnel so we can understand exactly what works based on data. There is an unlimited number of things we can test and I’ve found that there are just three that make a big difference: the offer, the targeting, and the ad copy.”

Heck, even with good case studies we might combine the two! The key here is to focus on what clients want and show off our knowledge.

In this case, clients don’t care about Facebook ads. They care about more customers and revenue. One of the concerns that clients have is that there are many freelancers on Upwork claiming to be an expert but is really learning the robes at the client’s expense. 

We can mitigate that by sharing our knowledge and experience with the clients so they can feel that we know what we are doing.

Some freelancers are afraid of giving away the farm thinking that clients will just steal the information and do things themselves. I understand if you might feel like that but the reality is that those would be shitty clients that would kick us out after we’ve done some of our work anyway. 

By giving it away, you are saving time that would otherwise be wasted on them and it attracts better clients that see your value and knowledge.

Finally, I like to end the text with a call to action (CTA) like “send me a message and tell me about your project”. People tend to overthink the CTA but clients are smart so in most cases, just make it simple and tell them what you’d like them to do next.

Upwork professional overview sample template

Here’s a complete template based on the points above that you can copy and use for yourself. All you need to do is fill in the blanks based on what you do.

“I help [your type of client] get [primary benefit that the clients get by working with you e.g. earn more revenue] with [your service].

My clients say:

[Testimonial 1] [Testimonial 2] [Testimonial 3]

This is real feedback I received from real clients here on Upwork.

The value of the relationship I have with my clients is more important to me than making a quick buck. I take great care in satisfying my clients and providing high-quality work – even if that means less work for me. It’s just good business.

Below are examples of the most popular projects clients have asked me for help with:

1. CHATBOTS (ManyChat, ChatFuel etc.) [exchange with your own example]

I build affordable marketing chatbots to increase sales or decrease cost. A chatbot requires very little work for you after it is set up and can also work as an automated customer service tool.

2. TURN RANDOM FACEBOOK USER INTO CUSTOMER BY BUILDING A SALES FUNNEL [exchange with your own example]

Sometimes it just requires a bit more than just linking from the ad to the sales page to make sales consistently.

Generally what I’ve seen is that the higher the product price the longer the funnel you need. The funnel can consist of the Facebook ads, email, retargeting etc.

If you are new to Facebook ads I can help you hit the ground running because I’ve seen what works before.

If you already run ads I can help you improve the funnel by split testing each part of it to lower your cost per sale.

3. [YOUR OWN PROJECT EXAMPLE TITLE] [Description of the project]

Whatever you choose I can also:

-[Example of tasks that the clients tend to be interested it in but isn’t their top priority e.g. write copy for ads]

-[Example of tasks that the clients tend to be interested it in but isn’t their top priority]

-[Example of tasks that the clients tend to be interested it in but isn’t their top priority]

Why choose me

-[Reason why clients would like you/your work e.g. that you’ve never missed a deadline]

-[Reason why clients would like you/your work]

-[Reason why clients would like you/your work]

-[Reason why clients would like you/your work]

Hit the green button and let’s talk!”

Feel free to use this template. I’ve kept a few examples within the template here and there to give you an idea of what it might look like from someone offering a service related to digital marketing but you can use it for anything. 

The trick is to focus on what the client needs rather than what we feel is important. For example in the “why choose me” section, the reasons we give have to be important to the client otherwise they are meaningless. 

If we know that clients are concerned with freelancers’ communication and if they are flaky, we can show examples where we have been the opposite so the client has more reason to trust us.

Using an advanced tactic: the offer

The above is a good starting point for getting something quick and dirty down so you can move forward but if you are serious, a bonus option is to craft a small offer that they can take you up on when reading your profile.

If you’ve ever been traveling somewhere with a tour guide, you might have noticed how they tend to offer a little something to whet our appetite.

For example, they might take us to a nearby hill for free, one that doesn’t require a lot of effort but has a great view. And at the top of that hill, they show us a more beautiful mountain in the horizon, one that we must see.

The idea is that instead of asking the client to buy one big item and make one big decision, we can make that decision easier by breaking it up into small chunks and show them a little bit at a time.

If we continue the example above with Facebook ads, that offer might be a brief diagnosis of their existing ad account with the benefit that they will get concrete ideas on how to make the ads perform better. 

Or perhaps that there is no room for optimization and the client is already doing well (the secret benefit for us freelancers here is that we didn’t waste time taking on a client that we couldn’t help).

Here’s a fun little example. I wish it was more specific but it might still intrigue some clients to reach out:

The most common one is the offer of a free consultation, and that is a good enough place to start.

To create your own, research and speak to the type of client you want to work with, so you have a list of common problems they tend to have.

Of the things they want, pick something small. Ideally, something free or at a low cost that you can do quickly and easily but offers the client great value at the same time. Here’s an example:

I like to speak with businesses first to understand what kind of problems they have and then keep the insights in a document before I apply for jobs. That way, I know what’s important to them and I can tailor my pitch around that.

I know that most people won’t do that, so instead here’s a trick you can use for quick results: go look at ten relevant jobs and note the similarities in what they are asking for.

For example, if you are a photo editor working with sport and fitness you might notice that they tend to want before and after photos showing results. So talking about that and showing examples of related work will go a long way because they can instantly connect what you’ll be able to help them with.

This is all you need in order to get your Upwork profile overview ready. The reality is that betting on job invitations with a new Upwork account is not a good one since we can’t control the outcome.

A more predictable approach is to send Upwork proposals proactively.