Upwork Review: What Top Rated Freelancers Don’t Want You To Know (The Truth)

Are you considering using Upwork to get contracts for your freelancing career or agency? Well, in this video, you're going to get an unbiased review, because I'm not affiliated with Upwork. And I'm not here to show you my amazing lifestyle. I'm only here to give you value and answer your question. Is Upwork worth it? And how do you actually use it.

I'm going to furthermore share the secrets with you that top-rated freelancers in Upwork won't tell you. So what I'm about to tell you is based on the more than 200 agencies that I'm working with, that are making millions of dollars combined on Upwork, and other such platforms.

So before we begin, hit the subscribe button and the bell notification (in the video above) )so you get future updates on this topic.

So top-rated freelancers on Upwork don't want you to know is that Upwork is essentially a database driven by a search engine for jobs. And it's an amazing place to get those types of jobs. However, you need to look at it as a way to generate leads for your business. It's a database that you can leverage for your business, because it's an amazing place to rank your profile and rank yourself. So you can get more leads from them in exchange for you know, paying them their fees.

And the more you know about this, and how the algorithm works in how the website works, the better you can rank and the better you can do in terms of lead generation. And I have some videos in the description that you can check out afterwards on how exactly the algorithm works, according to my research. So the second thing that top-rated freelancers don't want you to know is you can do research on what to sell and get incredibly valuable data before you even start before you do any lead generation.

Before you even write your profile, you can do this research essentially could go in Upwork. and type in various keywords related to the services you would want to sell, and find out if there's volume and quality of leads in any niche in any industry. And by doing this, you'll be able to determine if it's worth your time building out to profile and proof and everything else you need on Upwork to succeed.

So you can do the research at zero cost. Before you even start to type into keywords, find out if there's 10+ proposals on a daily basis with new leads, you can send within that niche to leads who have money if there is no such thing for that niche for that industry, perhaps you should check out a different industry.

The next thing top-rated freelancers don't want you to know is a lot of them are developers and developers have the largest marketplace on Upwork. Because according to my very detailed research, here's a screenshot. Developers are the most in-demand freelancers on Upwork. So the rules that apply to them don't necessarily apply to you as a beginner who sells something else. So if you sell anything but development services, it is likely that you need to follow slightly different rules, because things work a little bit differently for them.

And they don't want you to know that because they're giving you all this advice on how over quirks. But it doesn't automatically work if you sell a marketing service, for example. So the next thing to know is Upwork really loves it when you bring new clients to them. If you refer new people to Upwork, you get special rates from them. And you know, you preferably refer people to Upwork. Already your clients who are already happy with your service. And of course, they'll leave you positive reviews, a five-star review is incredibly valuable. And it will allow you to get top-rated status on up work faster.

And there's a video description about how to do it as well, by the way, so what you can do is bringing in all your old clients to the platform and pay a low fee, because there are new clients to Upwork as well Upwork wins because they get more fees and more buyers, you win because you bring your good clients who are likely to leave you five-star reviews, and everyone essentially makes more money.

So it's very much worth it. Because your profile is also going to rank higher if you do all this. Okay, so bringing clients, your clients, so brick is huge. And don't worry about the fees, they're not actually that high, you can google the fees. And especially if you bring in new clients, the fees are lower. Now the next thing, top-rated freelancers may not even know but they definitely don't want you to know that if they know. So Upwork is just one of the players in the marketplace.

The other one of the two big players is Fiverr. Fiverr is actually a much bigger company than Upwork in terms of how much money they make and stuff like that. And what you need to know about Fiverr is it's not just for $5 projects, there's actually a lot of big projects on there that you can close similar to what Upwork is doing. They're also switching part of their business model to offer a similar service to what Upwork is doing right now. So Fiverr is really stepping up their game. And they're really competing on high-end projects with Upwork right out. So Upwork used to be the place for expensive projects and Fiverr for cheap projects.

Not so anymore, Fiverr is really catching up in a huge marketplace for expensive projects as well. It just takes a little bit more time to get started in Fiverr. You really need to know how Fiverr works and play the game right, just like on Upwork. But it is very viable to run both funnels because essentially, as I said before, these are lead generation funnels for you and your agency. They're not just magical playgrounds, the next thing you need to know is you can templatize and create perfect answers to any question that clients ask you.

Because the questions or clients or leads ask you on the platform before they buy from you get very repetitive, and you tend to come up with good answers after a while after testing them out for a bit. And then you could write them down in an Excel sheet and then use them repetitively to shorten how long it takes to get a sale. Now once you do this, you have a lot of automation, you can build into your freelancing career or business.

So I highly recommend to templatize and automate that part of your business, namely lead generation on Upwork. So the next thing, top-rated freelancers definitely don't want you to know is even the ones that are doing $100,000. and above, on platforms like Upwork, they have a good idea of how it works, they've obviously achieved something, however, they're very limited in what they can actually achieve.

Because ultimately, they're freelancers and a freelancer goes from project to project, there's a lot of small projects for a lot of them as well. And they're always stuck in the delivery process in between doing lead generation. So they're never able to fully realize their potential by scaling. Because they're freelancers, they're not running a business, they're freelancing, and it is okay.

You know, lots of people want it. And if you want, it's fantastic as well. However, there's a better way of doing things. And that is by building a business. Automating parts of lead generation and such doesn't mean you have to switch your profile to an agency profile necessarily. But you can definitely run your profile and run an agency at the same time. Right. And that way, you can automate lots of parts, the parts of your business like delivery, and really scale and not just go from project to project like an employee.

So essentially, you want to be very careful when someone says they're a freelancer, and they're giving you advice on Upwork. Because that advice is going to get you to the level of a freelancer, it's not going to get you to the level where you're able to automate and build a real business necessarily, right, because those are two very, very, very separate ways of approaching things.

And I highly recommend listening to business owners, and not just to freelancers, because you want to listen to people who have become more successful than the freelancer as well.

So to summarise, building an agency can be a lot more scalable. And more interesting than just being a freelancer, you also build more assets, you're able to sell an agency eventually, if you want, you can work at scale and on more interesting projects eventually, because some bigger clients don't really want to work with just freelancers don't want to work with a serious agency.

So the next thing top-rated freelancers don't want you to know, perhaps again, because they may not notice yet is that you don't want to get stuck with those small projects, that's really not a good idea. The only reason to do a small project is if a bigger company is testing you or your agency to see if you can work on a bigger project as well. If it's a test project, which leads to a big project, good if it's just a bunch of very small projects one after the other, and it just drags on and on. Not good. You want to get your hands on those big high paying clients who perhaps best yet first and then keep paying you thousands of dollars per month, recurring over a period of months.

That way, you need to do less lead generation to make the same amount of money or if you keep doing more lead generation, you always make more money every month. And in a business that means you're more scalable, it means you're making more money. So the next thing that top-rated freelancers don't want you to know is you can keep things very, very simple. There's hours and hours of content and how to do all this complicated stuff on platforms like Upwork.

But listen, you can just pick a niche that's been proven based on your market research, there's enough demand, you know, the clients are not super broke, and then send 10 proposals or they get people on sales calls, preferably, and get projects that are not too small. If you do that and get those five-star reviews by doing that, and bringing in your own clients to Upwork you could really grow that funnel and build a real acid in your business that brings you leads for a very long time.

These platforms are really cool for that. So next up, let's talk about how to use the Upwork algorithm to your advantage, and how to play the game that Upwork wants you to play to rank higher and get higher-quality leads. For that, click on the video right here and we'll go through how my current understanding works of their algorithm. So click on the link.

And if you have any questions, any comments, comment below. I usually answer the best comments personally.