7 Steps To Get Your First Jobs On Upwork

SUMMARY:

Hi, this is Aleksander Vitkin. What I’m going to do for you today, is teach you how to get your first client on Upwork. Now Upwork is the world’s number one freelance platform and it’s three or four or five multi-billion dollar company, depending on when you watch this video in the future. And as it’s growing the marketplace is growing. It’s a new way of doing business, and getting clients online. And for me, it’s an absolutely perfect way to get people with absolutely no business skills to get results online. It’s a perfect place to start your freelancing career, that can turn into a real business, a business where you employ people, where you don’t deliver the work yourself.

So if you’re interested in building your Upwork career, if you’re interested in getting clients in Upwork, here are some steps you can take to get your first clients. So a lot of people say that it’s very hardto get on Upwork, and to get your first client. I tend to disagree, so I run an online school for business and a lot of my students, they start their business or freelancing on Upwork. And in the beginning they struggled because they don’t know the basic principles.

They don’t know how Upwork is or how to treat Upwork, how to get the algorithm to work for you to get your account ranked higher, and to get people to actually message you, and reply to you and hire you within the first few weeks of you being there. Because if you look at other videos on YouTube they say you need three months. So three months to get your first client at Upwork, it’s not true. You don’t need three months to get your first client at Upwork. You don’t need to become a slave to someone and do anything they say, and get jobs in Upwork to become successful in Upwork.

Upwork is not a platform to get jobs. I know it says work, and I know a lot of people are there to look for work and for jobs and whatever, but what I’m going to teach you today, the main thing is you’re not there to beg for some entries. You’re not there to eventually get a review or something like that. So the most important thing that you do need to do is you need to make sure that you get your first review, between one and five reviews. Five is preferred, the closer you can get to this number the faster, the better.

So if you have clients, if you have any type of clients, anyone you can get from outside of Upwork, to give you reviews on Upwork, just bring them to Upwork and have them give you reviews for whatever it is you’re doing for them. Okay, that’s the number one strategy. Get those clients on Upwork. Upwork wins from this, because you’re bringing them new clients, and you win from this, because your account is going to get ranked higher, much higher, okay. You need to be choosing the right thing to sell on Upwork.

So, if you go into the categories, you can browse the categories, and you can choose what you’re good at, and you can choose what’s in demand. Make sure there is a lot of job posts in the category that you choose, with at least 20 people you can message on a daily basis and send proposals to. The proposals that you you’re sending have one single purpose. The proposals are there to get people on calls.

You’re not getting a job. You’re there to get sales. And you’re there to grow a business. You’re there to consult your future clients on how to buy from you and to give them value so they understand that you’re an expert. You’re not there to beg and whatever for jobs. Make sure also that when you’re applying to the gigs that are posted on Upwork and the opportunities, that there’s not too many people applying. If there’s 40 or 50 people applying, then maybe it’s not a great idea for you to be in that category, for you to apply to a job or whatever you want to call it.

So, it’s better to wait to find categories where it’s not overpopulated. The category that’s the best right now is development. If you’re any type of developer, this is perfect for you. If you’re any type of marketer, this is perfect for you. There’s a lot of opportunities on Upwork where people are paying tens of thousands of dollars to freelancers and to business owners. So it’s your opportunity to leverage their lead generation like Upwork is a platform, they generate leads, and they basically sell them off for a percentage of the sale. This is your opportunity to get in on this. It’s like the Ebay or the Amazon of services.

And it’s really important that business owners are on there until they get to a certain revenue number. If you’re doing 40K and most of that is no longer Upwork maybe it’s time to move off Upwork. But to be honest, once you are doing a lot of money in Upwork, it’s totally worth it to just leave your work out there, ranked high and process a payment or so per month in Upwork to get your account on top of the list all the time.

Keep it ranking higher and you get a bunch of leads every week coming in, basically for free. So you can do all these things, but first let’s keep talking about how to get your first sale. So the next part is you need to write your profile as a sales letter.

You can look at many profiles that are written like sales letters. The process is get them on a sales call. Okay, that’s the outcome of this sales letter. You’re selling the phone call. So people they write about themselves as if it’s like some kind of resume or something like that. Forget all that.

First, you write about the client. You’re like here’s what you’re probably looking for and here’s potentially what you’ve been struggling with, and here’s potentially how we can improve that. Is this correct? If so, keep reading.

Here’s a bunch of proof, second part, here’s a bunch of proof about who I am and why I am qualified to talk about this. Here’s why me and my team are qualified to talk about this, but write about yourself, of course. So the third part, here’s all the stuff that we could be doing. Here’s the types of projects we could be running.

And, of course, make sure you’re in a single category, you’re doing a single service, not just anything for anyone. You’re not a freelancer, hopefully. You don’t want to be a freelancer, forever at least. So you want to choose a very well-defined service, based on what’s currently in demand, and where people are actually actively looking to hire people, dozens of people are looking to hire people. Like in web development, for example. Make sure you have a well-defined service within that, not just any type of web development for anyone. Then you make sure that you have a call to action.

The call to action is of course, let’s get on a call. But you can’t post links or anything like that. So make sure, hit me up in the inbox, click the hire button, and send me a message so that we can communicate and we can figure out what’s best for you. This is not to get people off Upwork or anything like that, like don’t break your terms of service or anything like that. You can do calls in Upwork. You can schedule meetings and everything and then you can show up and guide them through the process of buying. People don’t understand this. They think they’re on some kind of job interview and in reality, the clients, they don’t really know what they’re doing.

The clients, they’re just, I need this website, or I need this marketing stuff done. They don’t really know what that is, or how it will get done. You’re there to consult them on that. You’re the expert. You’re the doctor they go to, and if you don’t behave like the doctor, if you don’t behave like the trusted consultant, they will go to someone else.

So, you don’t have to be a world class expert for this by the way, just knowing more than your clients and choosing clients that you can actually help, that’s enough already. So if you spend a couple of weeks learning something relatively easy, like social media management, you can become an expert and you’re gonna be more qualified than the most people on Upwork looking for experts. So you’re an expert to them.You’re slightly above them. Maybe you won’t charge a hundred dollars an hour, but you can certainly charge good money.

A lot of people say, Upwork is for low ticket sales, like for small sales and you just start with $5.00. Forget all that. Forget the $5.00 or $50.00 or $500.00, forget all that stuff. Don’t even try that stuff. Once you start doing low-ticket ones, you start trying to charge people $500.00, something like that, you’re just going to get the cheapest kind of lousiest people to work with. You want to be choosing people to work with based on their credentials.

You’re not there to be interviewed. You’re there to interview, as the service provider. Believe me or not, that really is the case. If I have students doing tens of thousands of dollars in Upwork, they’re choosing the clients, and they’ve been in business for not very long. They don’t have that much experience.

How did they do this? They created an awesome profile. They have an awesome service. But also they don’t charge $500. They don’t charge less than a thousands dollars. So a complete beginner should be charging a thousand dollars. If you’re not charging a thousands dollars, you’re going to get cheap people usually.

Now this is, of course, a very arbitrary number. Like if you build a massive website in magenta or something like that obviously, it’s going to be more than that. But whatever you do, never charge for anything under a thousands dollars in Upwork. And as a general rule, this works, but it kind of depends on service, on the service that you’re selling.

So we can’t have a full list here. I’m just telling you, just stick to this rule as a general rule, but whatever you’re doing, don’t sign contracts, don’t agree to do stuff unless it’s going to end up being a thousand dollars. And it’s going to change your life. It’s going to force you to learn sales proper leads. You’re going to force you to build a real business, and to take freelancing seriously.

Whereas, most people they’re just going to complain how hard it is to get your first client, and how hard it is to deal with people that are reasonable in Upwork and so on and so forth. Well they’re just not doing the right thing. They don’t have the right attitude. They’re not approaching as a funnel. They’re approaching it as some kind of platform for jobs.

If you approach it as a platform for jobs, this is the fourth time I’m saying this in this video probably, then you’re going to get burned, because people looking for jobs are going to get jobs. And jobs are not great. I’m sure you’ve noticed that.

So you maybe wondering what if I don’t have clients to take from outside of Upwork and bring them to Upwork and introduce value to the platform and give reviews in exchange, well that’s perfectly fine. You can go into Facebook groups for the type of service you’re looking to do and offer something relatively cheaply, and then you can tell them, I’m doing this cheap, but in exchange, I would like you to hire me in Upwork and everything goes through there. And once the service is delivered, you go to Upwork and you do it like that, and you get the review in Upwork. Perfectly fine. Upwork wins to get a new client. You win, you get your payment on Upwork, and you get your review on Upwork.