How to Become a Top Rated Upwork Freelancer and Generate Your First $50k
By: Deepak Shukla
Tags: Freelancing, Creativity, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Freelance

How to Become a Top Rated Upwork Freelancer and Generate Your First $50k

Photo by Anna Auza on Unsplash

This is how Upwork has changed my business (and continues to):

I promised the guys I would write this content — so I’ll go through a couple of strategies that have worked very effectively for me (and briefly explain what Upwork is).

Upwork is a freelancing/agency platform you can use to grow your business.

I’ve used it to generate $50k on the platform as well as generate $100k off the platform and I’ll walk you through how.

Let’s talk about my profile initially:

I’ll run through some obvious things –

I’m smiling, I have a title that demonstrates what I do and the result you will get. I then have long(ish) form a narrative that builds a personal dialogue with the reader. Furthermore, I use emojis to make the content stand out.

As we continue I subtly include my expertise (7+ years), my education ($12,848 spent on SEO training).

I’ve got a video there also so people can watch it:

This is the popout — pretty powerful (and on-brand with Pearl Lemon again)

Here’s me in the video with a professional background and introducing myself w/some light background music and the Upwork logo top right (I can’t remember if that’s something they put up or we do)

I think I did it actually as it’s on the Pearl Lemon channel — but it feels like an Upwork endorsed video.

Furthermore, if you know me, you’ll know I work out of a café mostly or hotels, so I got myself into an office for this video.

As you’ll notice I have a 100% job success rate (It’s never gone below 90%) — so I’m going to assume you’re damn good at what you do.

Furthermore having a top rating means that you are favored by the Upwork algorithm, appear more in searches, and consequently, end up often being contacted independently as well:

This was yesterday — I approach Oliver on Upwork — he approached me on Facebook!

Sometimes people approach me without me ever sending an application on Upwork at all.

As we expand to read more of my profile I always make sure to include some top-line professional credentials but also some personal ones that make me as an individual impressive:

I’ve also got Upwork approved qualifications:

As well as some cool ‘other experiences’:

And most importantly of course — my work history is good:

Collectively all of this means my profile is very strong — thus allowing me to often:

COPY AND PASTE IN PROPOSALS

There are some things I need to keep an eye on:

As an Indian SEO, you get negatively stereotyped because of the abundance of spammers

As an Indian SEO, you get negatively stereotyped because people assume you can’t write English natively

My actual SEO delivery team is in India, so I need to manage various objections; you charge too much, English will be poor, you’re outsourcing, etc.

So it’s important you –

Learn/know how to sell (take sales training?) Prepare for all objections Have good, legitimate responses (e.g my content team is in the US)

If you’d like me to put together an Upwork-specific program let me know as well.

Upwork has definitely been a ‘go-to’ ‘fall-back’ for me at different times of my business growth.

I’m using it now less than I’ve ever used it because I have 4-people in my sales team aiming to bring in sales.

Furthermore, my network has grown significantly enough through referrals and old clients that I get maybe 5–8 leads per month that are good through this process –

Right now though I’ve just seen my third client cancel because of the damn Corona Virus and my daily inbound bookings have fallen out of the sky so I’m back smashing Upwork in my 6-minute per day routine haha.

The frustrating part, of course, is that I often need to get onto the sales call — and it’s obvious I don’t want to be on them so I try and defer to my team as often as I can.