8 Upwork Secrets to Get More Job Invites

1. Trailer: Hey, John Morris online.com. Upwork is still all these years later, one of the greatest opportunities for new freelancers to start getting clients and build a thriving freelance business. To this day, there's still $2 million a day in client work that goes through Upwork every single day. And those clients come their credit card in hand, ready to hire someone, they're looking for freelancers, That's all there. Therefore, of course, that also means it's competitive. And so in order to compete, you have to know the ins and outs of how it works and how to go about getting clients on the site. And there's a lot of courses including some of mine that'll walk you through that step-by-step, through every detail of setting up your profile. Maybe you've done that and you've kind of got the baseline down and now you're ready to take it to the next level. So what I'm going to share with you in this course are eight secrets that I've learned over the years, a decade plus a bean on Upwork, nearly two decades of being a freelancer. Eight secrets that I've learned that can help you to take that Upwork profile to the next step to help you get even more results from what you're doing on Upwork and be able to get even more clients and job in bytes and so forth. So that's what we're gonna do inside this course. If you're someone who's on Upwork and you've already built your profile and you're ready to make some tweaks that can help you get even more results than this course will be for you. 2. Optimize Your Title: Secret number one then is optimizing your profile title and optimizing it for both clients. And the algorithm, which can be a bit tricky. And the reason they call this a secret is because while a lot of people will, everybody on Upwork fills out their profile, a lot of people tend to just rush through it or overlook it and don't really spend the proper amount of time on optimizing their profile, considering just how important it is. And you can look at the examples that I have on the screen here as an example of that. So if you look at the top one, you'll notice that the profile title here is actually cut off. And so again, that's just sort of an indicator that that person isn't really looking at how this shows up in the search. Because if they were, you would hope that they would create a title that doesn't actually get cut off in the search. And then if you look at the second example, these are profiles that still perform well. So it's not like you can't perform well. But the more you think about this stuff, the bigger advantage you're going to have. And if you're not getting clients now than some of the stuff to look at. But if you look at the second example, it's a really generic title. So it's just WordPress developer which is super generic. And then you'll notice that the word WordPress is actually spelled wrong. It's supposed to be a capital P. So again, I call this a secret because I'm showing you two examples of people who even though they're getting clients on Upwork, really aren't paying attention as closely as they should to their profile title. So again, that's why this is a secret. And the reason that's so important is because your profile title is one of the big ways that you're going to rank, rank in search and the suggestion engine over on Upwork. So the more optimized your profile title is for the keywords that you're targeting and the kind of clients that you're targeting, you're going to rank higher in search. You're going to get more impressions, more people looking at your profile, more people actually clicking through and ultimately leading to more clients when you couple that with everything that we're going to cover here. So it's really, really important. It's one of the main ways that Upwork is going to analyze your profile to figure out how it should rank it, where it should rank it, what keywords you should show up for, all of that. So you want to really take the proper time to dig in and think through your profile title. Now, I'm going to, of course, cover the things to look at here. And there's three ways that you can do this. So the first one is purely for the algorithm, and this is kind of an example. The second one that we're looking at here is an example of this. And you just use your keywords like they're doing here. Wordpress developer, graphic designer, transcriptionists, et cetera. So that is one way that you can do it. The second way is purely for clients. Now, I don't recommend that you do this because Upwork is such a search, such search based, it's really a search engine. A lot of people don't understand that really is a search engine for clients. And so if you're not optimizing for that search, you're not going to show up in front of those clients anyway. And so optimizing your titles just for clients isn't going to really do anything because you're not showing up in front of those clients anyway. And so then the third option, of course, is both, and that's what we're going to do ultimately here. So there's a few parts to this. The first part is focusing in on your niche or including your niche kind of calling out to your niche. So this is your main keyword, whatever that happens to be, whatever you happen to be targeting, WordPress developer, landing, page creator, brand copywriter, I've seen people use, etc. So you just want to call out to your niche. The second part of it then is your positioning. So how you're unique and different from everybody else in that same market. So you're calling out to your market. Now you're positioning yourself as unique within that market. And then the final thing is proof. How can you prove your position? Because everybody is this skeptical. Nobody's going to believe that you're what, however you position yourself is true unless you can prove it. So let's take a look at some examples. So this is an example of a profile title that you could use if you're a graphic designer. So let's say you're a graphic designer. You put 12 hour turnaround time and you write 300 plus logos created. So the first element there is the market that you're calling out to your niche, that you're calling out to. The second piece is your positioning. Positioning is essentially how you unique and better than everyone else in your market. Why someone should hire you over everyone else? And that has to be based off of research. Now I put 12 hour turnaround time here. But that would be something that you look up and you figure out based off what everybody else in your market is doing. And positioning is really about finding the gaps in your market. So I always recommend anybody that goes on Upwork. They they get a client account. And then you use that client account to look at other freelancers in your niche and not copy them. You don't, you don't want to just copy what everyone else is doing because then you're going to look like everybody else and you don't stand out. But to kind of find the gaps and find the positioning. So 12 hour turnaround time. This isn't based off research is just an example I came up with, but you would want to base it off or research that a turnaround time is really important in your market. And then be, maybe everyone else is offering a 24 hour turnaround time. You want to be better so it's unique and better. And so you're offering a 12 hour turnaround time. So that's the idea here. Then the proof is you've created over 300 logos. So that gives some indicator of how you're able to do that 12 hour turnaround, turnaround and proving your positioning. And then you're going to do more of this in your profile. But your profile title is real short so you can't put all the proof in there, but you need to give them something. Next, here's another example. So WordPress developer, instead of just stopping there, you might say something like five day billed and 100 plus sites built. So you can see it follows a similar pattern as the first one. And then here we have transcriptionists, 99.9% accuracy, 1 million words processed. So those are some examples of how you might write your profile title. But ultimately what matters with this is that you take a little bit of time to research your market and look for those gaps and how you can position yourself in a way that's provable. And then you put that into your profile profile title. And really that's gonna become the basis for the entire angle of your profile and we're gonna go through that. But that initial research is important to sort of figure this out. And then again, this is just a bigger look if you had trouble seeing it at the two examples that we were looking at. So again, you can see they're not necessarily paying attention to their profile title all that much. Or they are and they're just ignoring it for some reason. So you then can create an advantage over people like this who aren't paying attention. So that's the first secret. Optimize your profile tidal around those things, around positioning so that you stand out, you show up for the correct searches. That's why you need to do the niche thing at first. So you show up for the searches. But now you have something that makes you unique and different. You have a little bit of proof. And that's ultimately what's going to get someone to click on your profile. 3. Optimize Your Portfolio: The second secret then is optimizing your second title, and that's really your portfolio. And optimizing it specifically for your card that shows up in search because it does show up there and it acts like a second title. And what I mean by that is it's the second maybe even the first thing a client is going to look at. So it's a sort of a balance between your profile title and your portfolio item in your card. But it's one of the first two things that a client is going to look at you again, I want to optimize that portfolio item for search. If you look at the example we have here, It's not a great example. It doesn't look all of that, all that great. And it probably doesn't instill a ton of confidence in any clients looking at it. So it's not optimized. And so that's something where you can create an advantage and help you to get more clients clicking on your profile because of your portfolio item that shows up. And if it doesn't reinforce your title and demonstrate your ability than client is gonna be less likely to click. And it sort of goes back to the proof thing. We put in the title or niche or positioning in our proof, our portfolio item really should backup that proof, not necessarily specifically, but if we say we've created over 300 plus logos. And so we have a 12-hour turn around time. And then the logo that shows up in the card looks atrocious. That's not going to instill a lot of confidence. That's not going to want to make me click. So you want to analyze that and you want to look at it to make sure that the right thing is showing up in your card that makes people want to click through. So we want to make sure that first item shows your best work. Make sure it's relevant to the profile title because you want congruent. So if you say you created over 300 logos and there's a picture of a website in there for some reason. That's not going to be congruent, etc. That's a bit of an extreme example, but you can kinda think, think that through and then make sure it's easy to see and, or read so it's not too small. Again, that's a problem with this particular title or this particular portfolio item, is you can't really see it all that well. And not only does it not look maybe the best, but you can't really see it. So again, you just want to optimize all of this. You want to stack everything in your favor to get someone to click through to your profile. And this card is all they have to go on when they search for freelancers in the Upwork search engine. So optimizing every bit of it is really, really important. 4. Optimize Your Search Snippet: So that brings us then to number three, which is optimizing your snippet. So your snippet is this little piece kinda down below, down below your profile title. Now I'm not showing the card here. I'm showing actually from the profile title, from the profile page itself. So you can see the whole snippet here. But you want to, again, make sure it's relevant to what your title and your portfolio item are. You want to make sure it's congruent and then you want to try to hook them. And so it's the same as what we said with everything else. This is part of your first impression. It's one of the first things that they're going to look at to decide whether they're even going to click on your profile in the first place they can't hire if they never click on your profile. So you want to optimize it for that and you really want to expand on and reinforce your title. So if in your title you said 12-hour Turner, your graphic designer with the 12 hour turnaround time and over 300 plus logos created or graphic design is created or whatever. In your snippet, you're going to want to reinforce that. You want to back that up and say something like I'd been a graphic designer for 12 plus years. I've created over 300 logos for companies of all sizes. Have one of the fastest turnaround times on Upwork for graphic designers, 12 h, et cetera. You're just going to want to expand on what's in the title to make it congruent. And that's gonna get people, if you're positioning is right, and you may have to play with your positioning. You may try one thing and it doesn't really, it's not hitting, so you'll try something else. But you wanna think of it as a, at a conceptual level, a lot of people think of it like I'm just going to change a few words in my title or my snippet. And they start mixing concepts where they're talking about speed and the title and experience in the, in the snippet. Or they're just changing small words that don't really matter, matter, it's a conceptual thing. So 12 hour turnaround time speaks to the concept of speed, whereas you could speak to the concept of experience. Bunch of different things that you've done or you've been doing it for 12 plus years or whatever. You could speak to the concept of talent, or you could speak to a number. There's all sorts of different concepts. Ultimately, things that matter to your client. Speed matters, experience matters, talent matters, except friendliness matters. That could be an angle. If you're a web developer, that's probably a good angle you could take, etc. So again, you just want to look at your market. And if everybody is talking about speed, maybe you don't want to talk about speed, maybe there's another angle you could take, or maybe you do want to talk about speed and just position yourself that's faster than them. So you got to play with the concept. But once you try a concept, you want everything to be congruent from your title to your snippet, to your portfolio item, everything on that car to be congruent and oriented around that concept. So again, that's why it expands and reinforces your title. And then you want to set your hook. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But you want to set a hook and your snippet that gets them almost. They have to click, they have to click through and see what this is all about. So you want to set that hook. So you want to get a client account again and you want to look at other up workers profiles, as I've mentioned, find that unique angle. Like I said, don't copy. That's a big mistake that a lot of people make. Her like, Oh, I'm just gonna go on Upwork and I'm a look at what the people that are really successful are doing. I'm just going to copy them. The problem with that is if you just copy them and do similar to what they're doing or the same as what they're doing. If you have a client looking at your profile and their profile side-by-side. And they have all of this experience and you have no experience because you're new. They're just going to hire that other person. So you have to do something different than that person in order to get hired. So you have to find a unique angle. So the way to do that is just what would stand out to you. What would get you to click? What would matter to you if you are hiring someone to build you a website or graphic design or whatever the case may be, and start there, you aren't necessarily going to get this right the first time. You're going to have to do some experimenting, but you have to start somewhere. So just look at all of these other up workers in your niche. Look for a gap that you think, hey, people would, people would think this is important. This is something that they should care about. Or if I were them, this is something I would care about. Nobody in here is talking about that. Let me talk about it and see how that works. That's what I mean by finding the gap and finding a unique angle to position your card, your title, your snippet, and ultimately your entire profile around. 5. Create a Positioning Hook: Secret number four then is developing a strong positioning hooks. So we mentioned the hook earlier. That's what this is really all about. And you want to develop a strong positioning hook and set it in the first paragraph of your overview so it shows in your snippet and you want to state it clearly and sustain succinctly. And you want to make it a bit dramatic. So you want something that just catches people by the eyeballs at, grabs a hold of them and makes them want to read what you're talking about. So because nothing you say matters if they don't actually read it. If they don't click through and read your profile, It's not going to matter what you say. So you have to get them to read it. So grab them by the eyeballs and almost forced them to read it. But it also has to be practical and relevant to hiring you. So you just don't want to just put out some crazy thing. It has to be relevant to actually getting hired. So we go back to your title. One example was WordPress developer, five-day build, 100 plus sites built. How can you expand on that in a compelling way? That's what we're trying to do with the positioning hook. So you might write something like, how would you like to have your dream WordPress website launched in live in just five days from now. Because I've built over 100 plus WordPress websites. I can do that. So again, you can see that that's your painting, a picture for them. How would you like to have your dream WordPress website launched and live in just five days from now. That's sort of a compelling pitch. You're not just saying, Hey, I build WordPress websites and five days and then assuming that they're gonna get excited, you have to bake the excitement into it and sort of paint a picture. And the best way to do that is by actually describing the situation or the vision of what's going to happen. So that's what you're doing here. And then you sort of backing it up with proof. Because I've built over 100 plus WordPress websites, I can do that. So you'll notice it speaks to the title, so it's relevant to the title. Everything's still congruent, but you're saying it in a compelling way. Another way you might be able to say it is what is building over 100 plus WordPress websites teach you? So that's a, that's an interesting question. That's a question. Even some someone who maybe isn't looking to hire someone, if they heard that question, they're somewhat related to this space. They might go, Oh, yeah, what, what do you learn? So it's an interesting sort of question on its own. And then the answer is how to build beautiful, fully functional websites and less than five days. And so now you're going back to your main benefit, your positioning, etc. So I'm not saying that you should copy. These are, these are the most genius ideas here that you can use. But the idea is, is when you find that positioning, then you want to create a hook where you state, you kinda cut to the heart. What really the benefit of that positioning is a 12-hour Turner for our turnaround time. What's the benefit of that building a website and five days or less, what's the real benefit of that? The emotional benefit to the client? What is that? And then speak to that in your positioning hook and include that in your snippet. That really is what your snippet becomes. Because that's going to grab their attention and get them to read your profile. So that's the idea here. Again, what are their key emotional triggers? As I mentioned, that's really what you're trying to get to is the emotion of it because you have to understand a lot of these, a lot of these clients that are hiring freelancers. This is a big deal for them. Now there's, there are savvy clients out there. They hire tons and tons of freelancers. And they're not as emotional about it. They're a little bit more cerebral. So those people are out there. But a lot of these people, this might be the first project that they put out on Upwork. Or if it's not their first one, that might be their fourth or fifth. They're not doing it at a ton. And you're helping them build something that's really important to them. This could be their pet project, it could be their business, how they feed their family, all of that. So this is emotional for them. And so you want to figure out what those key emotional triggers are and then you want to push on them. You want to press on them in your positioning hook. So if I want a logo, maybe for me, I want something that others say, Oh, that's cool. They look at it and they go, Oh, well that's really neat. Where did you get that done, et cetera. So that's kinda what I'm after. And I imagine a lot of people are after. When they have a logo, I want something that properly represents me, right? I want something that my friends and family look at and they don't laugh at me. They don't go, Oh, that looks crazy or weird or dumb. That looks unprofessional. That makes you look like an amateur, et cetera. I want something that people look at and it makes me feel legitimate, et cetera. And then of course, I also want it done quickly. So again, those are some emotional triggers you might look at when it comes to being a graphic designer building logos. I want a website. I want something that looks great. So again, I want it to properly represent me. I want it to look professional. I want it to legitimize me and what I'm doing. I also want something that isn't buggy. I want something that's fast and I want something that's not going to take six months to build. And so that's where those positioning hooks that I talked about earlier, those positioning statements that I talked about earlier really kinda come from, are these emotional triggers here. So positioning is maybe the most important thing that you can do to stand out and at 100% needs to be the first thing a client reads on your profile. That's why your title is built around it. That's why your snippets built around at your portfolio item should reinforce it. That's why these are the first four secrets, because getting this angled down, this positioning angle is really the most important thing. It's how you're going to stand out. The biggest problem that people have on sites like Upwork is there's millions of other freelancers, probably thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of other freelancers on the site who do something similar to you. So the number one thing you have to do before anything else stand out. And what a lot of people rely on is rank, ratings, job success score, that sort of thing. And they don't really ever put together a strong marketing angle, a strong positioning hook. And it's really hard to rely on those things as it's impossible if you're brand new to the site because you don't have any of that stuff. So this positioning hook that flows back up through the first three secrets, your snippet, your portfolio item in your title is really the core of everything. They're the most important secrets for you to get right. 6. Featurize Your Service: Secret number five then is feature rising your service. So you want to feature azure offer by specifying exactly what people get. And just as a quick side note here, you'll notice that it says on his profile overview here I specialize and it's kind of funny to me because I first started talking about that probably ten or so years ago. And at the time, nobody even talked about specialization, let alone using that specific phrase. But I started talking and recommending people use that specific phrase. It's funny to see now, these up workers using that phrase anyway. Again, you want to feature eyes your offer by specifying exactly what people get. And if you look at this particular one, there's a lot of things that are in here and it doesn't really mentioned a lot of different services and they're kind of all over the place. Wordpress, Shopify, Squarespace, academic papers, SEO, blog post, articles, assist sort of all over the place, all of these different services. And really doesn't specify what you get with each one. So actually recommend that you stick to one, maybe two. And we'll talk about using specialized profiles is really what he should be doing here. But you don't really know what you're getting and it confused mind never buys. So the more confused someone is, the less likely they are to buy. So that's what feature Ising does, is it helps you to get rid of that confusion by stating specifically what people get because services are vague, they leave room for uncertainty and uncertainty kills conversion. And you could probably get clients to hire you over others purely because they understand your offer better because you've taken the time to feature. And to just give you an example, let's say you are trying to hire me to build a website for you. And I said I offer WordPress website building services. What are the questions that immediately come to mind for you? You might ask a question like, Well, how many pages do I get that are you going to build for me? Are you going to upload the content for me? What plugins and themes do you use, et cetera. There'll be this whole list of questions you might have if I just said, I offer website building services. And that's essentially what he's doing here and then not answering any of the questions. And that leads to a confused mind. They don't know exactly what they're getting. So that's what I mean by feature rising this. And again, you can probably get people to hire you just by doing this. So as I mentioned, think of the common questions that you do get if you're already doing this or that you think you will get things like how long will it take? Can we jump on the phone? Is it a custom design and then things that are specific to what you do? So if you're a graphic designer, There's probably questions. So you could sit down in the next five to 10 min that you think most clients would probably ask you are they are asking you now, you could probably list those out and probably get to five or ten questions pretty quickly. Or if you're a developer or a writer or whatever you do, you could probably sit down and just figure those out very, very quickly and probably already have a sense of what they are. So that's what you wanna do. You wanna think of those common questions, and then you want to turn those in two features. So five-day turnaround times that answers the question of how long is it going to take? Weekly progress calls during the project that answers the questions. A question of can we hop on a call custom-designed built in Elementor? That answers the question of is it a custom design? Now, when you're looking at these questions of how long is it going to take and this and that and the other. All the answers to those don't have to be yes. So to the question of are you going to if I'm building you a WordPress website, is it going to be accustomed designer, custom theme that you build from scratch? The answer doesn't have to be yes, it can be no, no. And then the way that you would feed your eyes, that is to say, instead of saying a custom-designed, built an element or you could be, it could be something like use Astra Theme, et cetera, or standard design for using the Astra Theme, et cetera. So the answer can be no, but you just need to specify that the answer is no in a way where you're not just saying No, I'm not building a custom design. You're saying it's a standard design. That's essentially the same thing as saying no, it's not accustomed design, but you're stating it as a feature. So again, this is what you wanna do to make clear and answer all of those questions beforehand. So now when I look at your profile and it says, Hey, I build WordPress websites and then it lists the features. Now I know, oh, it's a five-day turnaround time. I know how long it's gonna take. I know that we're going to do weekly progress calls. I know that the design is going to be custom-built using the Elementor, plug-in, et cetera. I know all of these questions I have are answered and I don't have a confused mind. That's the idea here. It also then set you up to offer stack, which is our next secret. 7. Create a Superior Offer: Secret number six then is to create a superior offer, meaning create an offer that's better than others in your niche. And it gives them a hard reason to choose u. So to understand that we have to talk about hard and soft reasons. So soft reasons are subjective. You wrote better copy or more talented. I looked at your portfolio and I liked it better. Those things that are, are all subjective. There's no objective way to analyze them. Each client might view it differently. One client might love your portfolio, one might hate it when my love your coffee while might hate it, et cetera. So those are soft reasons because they're subjective. Hard reasons, our objective. So you offer a faster turnaround time. If everybody else in your market is offering a 24 hour turnaround time and you offer a 12 hour turnaround time that is objectively better. There's no disputing it. So that's what a hard reason is. So hard reasons are typically more effective because they can't be denied. Someone can't say, Oh, a 12 hour turnaround time is worse than a 14 or 24 hour turnaround time, that it's longer right now, they might be able to pick apart at it in other ways like, Hey, that's not gonna be as good a logo, et cetera. That's a different discussion, but objectively, they can't say that a 12 hour turnaround time is longer than a 24 hour turnaround time, it's just not. So they tend to be more effective because they're just obvious and clear. And if you make yours better than all your competitors on all of your features, that we just feed your eyes. Now you have a clearly superior offer. And again, can get people to hire you, even if maybe you don't have the ratings and reviews. So again, all of this is the positioning, this period offer. All of this is about making, giving clients reasons to hire you over other people who might have more ratings, who might have more reviews. And then as you get those ratings and reviews, you're going to have even more of an advantage because you understand how to actually market yourself. And so that's what we're doing here. And of course, ultimately what we want to do is combine soft and hard reasons to maximize your results. So we do want to try and have a better portfolio. We do want to write better copy like we're doing with our positioning. But we also want to feed your eyes and have better features than our competitors. So that's the idea here. So again, going back to having a client account, start by analyzing others in your niche and then looking for trends. So the trends you're looking for can take two forms. One, it's a, what features. Are others in your niche talking about? Are they talking about turnaround time? Are they talking about number of revisions? Are they talking about pages of the website, etc. What are the features that they kind of are tending to talk about? And you're going to have to do a little bit of reading between the lines here because you're probably not going to find too many where they actually just list them out like you're going to. So you have to kind of see, Oh, they're talking about turnaround time here. This one over here is talking about number of revisions. Start of sort of start to pull different ideas or different features from the profiles you're looking at and get a consensus of. These are the things that people tend to talk about. So that's the first thing, what features they're talking about and then the values of those. So if they're talking about turnaround time, well, most people are doing a 24 hour turnaround time for graphic design or a five-day turnaround for websites. And most people seem to be doing three to five revisions, et cetera. So you only figuring out what features, but also what the actual offer is for each feature. And you just kinda want to list those out so you have an idea, you can't create an offer that's superior to others in your niche if you don't know what others in your niche are doing. And so then once you've identified those trends than the way to create a superior offer is to beat them to make yours better if you can. So if they have a five-day build time for a website, you do a four-day bill time. If they offer three revisions for some sort of graphic design, you offer four, et cetera, and just make your offer better where you can maybe you can't do a four-day build time. Maybe that or maybe everybody else is doing a four-week bill time or whatever, or maybe you don't want to offer for revisions, et cetera. But where you can and where it fits for you to make your offer better, make it better. And again, these are objective, these are hard reasons. So afford a bill time is superior objectively to a five-day build time for revisions is superior objectively to three revisions. So now yours is just clearly, obviously a better offer. Especially you're offering yours for the same price as everybody else, but they get more. That becomes a no-brainer for them to hire you, even if you don't have the ratings and reviews. So it's not like everybody is going to hire you because of this, but this is, this is the opportunity. This is how you get people to hire you when you don't have the ratings and reviews. This is really the only thing you can do because you can't compete on job success score, ratings, reviews. Like everybody else does, you don't have those things. Okay, so that's the first part is figuring out the features and what they're offering and then make your offer better objectively. Then also offer things that they don't. So maybe maybe nobody's is doing weekly progress calls. So you could do weekly progress calls. You could include a course that fits with the service you provide. So if you build a website, websites for people, maybe you could include an SEO. You could create a real quick SEO course and show them how to do some basic SEO and include that with your service and nobody else in your niche is doing that or include resources that they might need. So maybe you can get them a subscription to a photo site where they can get all the royalty-free photos they need. Or maybe you have a way that you can provide them with hosting for their website, et cetera, include resources that they might need for whatever you're building for them. I just include that in your service. If it makes sense for you to do that, where others aren't doing that to make your service clearly superior. So that's the second thing that you can do. And then a third thing is to get creative and think turn key. So whatever you do, you're likely one small part of what they need in order to, for their whole result that thereafter. So to give you an example, if you're building for me, I built membership sites for people. Well, the actual membership site is one part of the overall membership business. They also need to create content. They need to market their membership site. They're going to need a CRM, they're going to need a payment provider. They're going to need all of these other things outside of the website itself. So the website is one small part of what they need to actually build our membership business. So turnkey is you trying to provide in some way those other things. So maybe you can again, provide a course on creating content for a membership site and some information on how to do marketing, or you helped them with their marketing. Maybe you can get them an extended trial to a CRM or a discount on a payment provider, etc. So that when they look at your offer, it's like, oh, it's the membership site, but it's also the content creation, it's the marketing, it's the CRM I'm going to need is the payment provider. It's all the things that I need to build my membership business. It's all included in here in some way and I'm getting discounts and extended trials and courses and so forth. That's going to help me with every part of the business. So the more you can make it turnkey and a complete solution or, or look like a complete solution. Again, when nobody else in new niches doing this kind of thing, it's clearly superior and clients are going to want to hire you over everyone else. So again, just to kind of go back, we're gonna go through some more things, but just, just to kinda go back with everything that we've done. We've we've done things that probably nobody in your niche and Upwork is doing with creating a marketing angle and a positioning hook than optimizing our card with the profile title, the snippet, and our portfolio item around all of that feature Ising our service and getting rid of any confusion and then making our offer objectively superior to everyone else. Again, this is all stuff that when someone looks at your profile, it gives them reasons. When they went, when someone asked the questions, why should I hire you over this person over here who has way more job history, weight, better job success score, way more ratings, et cetera. Well, because you can start listing off a bunch of reasons I have before they build time. Instead of a five-day build time, I offer for revisions instead of three, I do weekly progress calls. I include these courses that can help you with these other parts. I'm gonna get you this extended free trial for the CRM, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You have a whole bunch of reasons you can rattle off why they should hire you over someone else who might have more experience or more ratings and reviews on the site. That's the idea here. That's how you get hired on Upwork when you're brand new and you don't have all of that stuff. Or when you do have that stuff, a way that you can set yourself up to be even better than everybody else in your niche to give you another advantage beyond just your ratings and reviews. 8. Exploit Projects: Secret number seven then is adding projects to your profile so you want to create relevant, relevant projects that clients can just buy. They don't have to think about a service. It's just a project that's listed and this is sort of like what fiber does. And now it's kinda brought over to Upwork. And actually if you look at this image here and it might be a little bit tough to read, but you can kinda get the idea here. This gives you an idea of when you're featuring your service of some of the things to look at. So this is a website built. It's the delivery time, the number of revisions, the number of pages, whether it's a customized design, whether you're going to upload the content, the design is responsive. And if it includes e-commerce functionality, that's what he's listing here. And you can go and look at again with your client account, go and look at multiple freelancers, see what projects they have, the projects similar to what you want to offer. You can look at multiple 1015 different freelancers and the projects they have and see if a lot of these features are the same. And now you've got your features list. And then you see, oh, they're offering three revisions at this level. I can offer for their offering five pages at this level, I can offer six five-day turnaround time here I can do a four-day turnaround. And so it just gives you a cheat sheet for how to feed your eyes and how to beat it. Make your superior offer. So these projects are a really good way to do analysis, just off the jump. But then you can create your own projects that clients can buy. Which kind of goes back to the vagueness of services. Projects are specific and finite. They're easier to understand, which leads to less uncertainty the greater the likelihood of purchase. They're more like a product than a service. And products are easier to understand and so forth. And they're typically, typically easier to deliver and they pay you better because you have a finite project with a well-defined scope. So the scope on a service contend to be vague and it can grow over time and so forth. But with a project like this, it's well-defined. This is exactly what you get, this is exactly what I'm gonna do. So you delivering on it becomes easy because you know exactly what you're doing. You've done it before and you'll get clients, you'll just keep doing it over and over and over and over. And so you just get better at it. Because you get better at it. You actually get quicker at delivering. So you're spending less time delivering, but you're earning the same amount of money to the amount that you make per hour goes up dramatically. And I've had projects like this where I've made round five $600 per hour equivalent because what I was charging for the service $3,000. But it was only taking me five 6 h to actually build the project because I'd done it so many times I got so good at it. I had all of these resources that I compiled and all like 90% of the site was already built before you even started, et cetera. It allows you to do that over time. So you want to add these projects to your profile because you're more likely to get hired for them because they're easier to understand. And you're just going to make more because they're easier to deliver and you just get better and quicker at it. So this particular project has been bought 280 times. And if you look at the lowest rate that's being charged for the starter package is $1,500. So if everybody just bought the starter package, which is unlikely, there's probably people have bought the higher level packages, but at the minimum price, 280 purchases of this is $420,000. So imagine if he never put this project on his sight. He just want to miss out on all of that. Now, some of those people probably would have hired him for his service, but I bet a lot of those people wouldn't have because they were just went to somebody else to find the project. And he has 275 five-star reviews. And the other five that aren't five-star reviews are actually four-star reviews. There's still not terrible. And that just speaks to the fact that he just got really good at it and he's able to deliver it very efficiently. Otherwise, he would not have to earn 75, five-star reviews. It doesn't matter how good you are. If you're having to do custom projects, getting 275 out of 285 star reviews is very unlikely. There's something that's going to come up where someone's gonna be like almond only be a four-star review more often than that, unless you do it over and over and you get really efficient at it. So this illustrates how lucrative projects On Upwork can be. And you've already featured your service, like we talked about. So this formalize that and put it into a project. And that's ultimately what this is. You can use the feature rising that we did earlier to help you build your project. And you can use analyzing other freelancers projects to help you feed your eyes, your service. So these two things sort of work hand in hand. Like I said again, look at others and your niche and just make your offer better. So less time or visions, more pages. Maybe if you notice down at the bottom here, he has an option for adding blog functionality and design. Maybe just include that in yours instead of charging an extra $500, conclude that in yours. And that helps you to create that superior off or whatever that is for you. You kinda gotta figure that out. But if you start with the superior offer, a lot of people rely heavily on trying to write persuasive copy and marketing and convincing people. Just make your offer better. If you're selling a better offer becomes easy. The marketing becomes easier because what you're selling them is better than everybody else's. But you got to do a little research to do that. So that's what trips most people up or most people don't want to do. Like I said, you can also use projects from other Upwork is to help you feature as your main service. And you might be wondering, well, why not just do projects or projects or this lucrative? Why not just do this? And the way I would think about it is projects being four standard builds. So you have a standard build, would you build the same thing over and over and over again? And that's what these projects are for and a lot of people are going to want that. But then you can use your main service for custom-built because there's always gonna be people that are going to want some custom things or whatever. And so that's what your main services for. So you open yourself up to both. Why not be open to both of those things? So that's the idea here. Projects for standard builds, your main service for custom builds or designs or whatever it is that you happen to do. 9. Exploit Specialized Profiles: Number eight is exploiting specialized profiles. So you want to, the way you want to set this up. And again, the secret is how you set this up, alright? How you get the two working together with your main profile and your specialized profile. So here you're going to use your main profile to target a larger high traffic keyword. So like something like WordPress developer. Again, using all this stuff we've, we've talked about so far. But that's a broader keyword term that there's gonna be a lot of competition on. There's gonna be a lot of freelancers with really good job success scores and a ton of job history and all of that on that keyword, it's a really competitive high traffic keyword. So if you're new, it's gonna be hard to compete there. But over time, if you can get to where you are able to compete as a lot more traffic and you're just gonna get a lot more work so you don't want to just completely ignore it. And so you can use your main profile and your specialized profile to kind of do both. And so again, your main profile is targeting that higher traffic keyword. But then you can create specialized profiles to really go, go all in on more specific keywords. So if your main keyword is WordPress developer, you might have a specialized profile. For me. I might do something like Wordpress membership site developer, or I'm even go more specific and name the plug-in that I use, which is wishes member. So wishlist member, developer. Or I might do WordPress custom plug-in development or WordPress custom theme development or wordpress page speed optimization. Those are all specific niches that fall under the umbrella of WordPress developer, but they're more specialized. And so again, you want to create your specialized profiles around those smaller, yeah, maybe less competitive, less traffic keywords, but things that when you're brand new, because there's not as much competition, it'd be a little bit easier for you to get hired for. So again, more specific keywords typically have less competition. It's easier to get hired, especially when you're starting out. But they're also not going to have as many jobs, right? So that's why they're not as competitive because there's not as many jobs coming through there. Everybody's trying to go after the large volume keywords. So again, that's why we take this approach. Because with your specialized profile, since you can build multiple specialized profiles, I think at the time of this recording, two, maybe three specialized profiles. But because you can build multiple specialized profiles, you can target different keywords. So one specialized profile you could do WordPress, membership site developer. Then you could do another one that is WordPress custom plug-in developer and then WordPress custom theme developer, et cetera. And you can target multiple keywords, but still have them relevant to your main profile. So as you're building your job history, all of those things fall under WordPress developer umbrella. So they're feeding into your job history to support that main keyword helping you to rank higher for that main keyword, WordPress developer, which is the high traffic hi competition keyword. And so as you do these specialized projects, they're going to help boost your profile for the more general WordPress developer keyword. So that's the idea here is you're using your specialized profile to help build your main profile so that it can rank for a high-volume keyword. But you're doing it in a way where when you're brand new you can still get hired because you're gonna, it's gonna be almost impossible to keep compete on those main keywords when you're brand new. So when you're doing this, you want to use your keywords fairly heavily and your specialized profile. If you look at the example we have here, you can see he has Elementor Pro expert, and then each of the first three paragraphs is the word Elementor. So keywords are being targeted fairly heavy in the profile here. And so that's what you wanna do with your specialized profile because the whole idea really is to just get ranked higher for those keywords because they're not as competitive, it's a little easier to rank. And then doing everything that we talked about before with the offer and the angle and the positioning, and your title and your card and all of that. So that in that less competitive keyword, you're kind of a juggernaut. You're super optimized and you're able to out-compete all of everybody else that's competing for that keyword pretty easily. That's the idea here. Again, just never forget Upwork at its core is a search engine. So you need to optimize around keywords. You need to think of it like you're optimizing around Google and it's a sophisticated search engines. So you don't just want to write element or element. You don't want to stuff keywords too much because they'll pick up on that as well. Of course, the clients I'm going to hire you if that's all they read on your profile. But just never forget that it's a search engine. Ultimately, I always say search and suggestion engine because clients can search, but also when they submit a job, they get suggestions as well. And a lot of the rules that apply to the suggestion engine and showing up higher there also apply to the search and vice versa. So it all works together, but ultimately at its core, it is a search engine. And so then what the specialists profile, sort of think of them almost kind of like throwaway profiles in the sense that you want to be really willing to experiment with them heavily to find out what works for you. So to try different niches underneath your main keyword, your main profile, you're going to tweak it over time as you learn things and all of that. But you really want to keep it kinda oriented around one keyword. It's really hard to change your profile from one main big keyword to a completely other keyword, especially as you develop job history, because all your job history is going to be oriented around that keyword and so you go to change it. It's really difficult so, but with specialized profiles, you can experiment more. So just think of it as you're trying things and you're trying different keywords and you're just really experimenting heavily until you start, oh, now I'm getting, suddenly I'm getting a bunch of job invites for this particular keyword. Okay? And so now I've found one and you latch onto that and let that help you build your job history and so forth. So just don't be afraid to exploit heavily with the specialized profiles. 10. Review and Next Steps: So those are the eight secrets. Let's recap real quick. Secret number one is optimizing your profile title. Secret number two is optimizing your second title, which is your portfolio item that shows up on your search card. Secret number three is optimizing the snippet that shows up on that card. Secret for is developing a strong, strong positioning hook and a marketing angle that's unique and better in your marketplace place, finding that gap that makes you different so you stand out so that secret number four, then feed your icing, your service. So it's easy to understand. People know exactly what they're getting when they hire you, creating a superior offer. So when people look at it, they see it objectively better. It's obviously better than everybody else and it gives them compelling reasons to hire you over other people, especially when you don't have the job history in job success score and ratings and reviews that they have when you're new at projects to your profile. Again, they're very lucrative and they make it easier for people to understand. And then the last one is exploit those specialized profiles and use them to experiment and ultimately build your main profile. So those are the eight secretes. These are things that again, the reason I call them secrets is people know all these things exist, but they don't really know how to optimize for them. And they may be overlooked them and think they're small things, but these are huge things. And I'm confident you do all of these things. You're just going to see more resorts results over on Upwork. So again, that's the idea behind this, why I call these secrets. Alright, that'll do it for this course. I appreciate you taking the time to go through it. And if you do want more freelance secrets that got a completely free training that will show you how to land more high playing clients and build a thriving freelance business without relying solely on sites like Upwork. So if you want to expand your freelance business, be on sites like Upwork and fiber and so forth. Then you'll want to get that free training that's going to show you how to do that. Again, It's completely free and you can get it at Learn with john.com. Alright, that'll do it. Thanks for watching if you liked the course, I'd appreciate if you'd leave me a positive review. And we'll see you in the next one.