Freelancing on Upwork | How to Build Your Profile and Write Client-Getting Proposals

1. Trailer: Brad landed the $1700 gig within a week of tweaking his profile. Did the Endo landed and completed three jobs within a week. Animate landed to a 100 dollar jobs in the first five days, Stefanie got the rising talent badge and our first client interview in two days, Justin was flooded with interviews, his words within a week, these are all people who had Upwork accounts that were essentially dead. They had tried the traditional route and got nowhere. Then they made the tweaks I outline in this course and suddenly started seeing results. Now look, I want to be clear. I'm not promising you any kind of result. I can't and I won't do that. But what I will show you is a different way of looking at Upwork that you've probably never seen. This isn't the typical do good work and make clients happy info that you'll find in a 1000 other places. You can get anybody to tell you that stuff that you already know. This is a unique strategy based on a unique understanding of how upwards algorithm works. And is specifically meant to help new workers, but also seems to be working for existing up workers looking to resurrect and essentially dead profile. Now, again, no promises. But if you'd like to learn how these people transformed the results they were getting on Upwork. That's what I'll show you in this course. Fair warning though, there are no shortcuts. This is a nearly six hour detail heavy course. It's not about one weird trick that magically makes everything better. It's about a lot of little things that add up to a big change. So if you're looking for a quick fix, you will not like this course and you should only take it once you're ready to get serious about Upwork. So with all that said and all of that context, if you're ready, let's dig in. 2. Dissecting the Algorithm: John here this lesson we're going to talk about dissecting the algorithms. We're going to take a detailed look at Upwork algorithm and what I call the R2 protocol strategy. In order to understand the algorithm, you have to first understand the client side of things. So I want to do a little thought experiment with you. So imagine you are the client, put yourself on the client choose. And imagine that you go on Upwork and your searching for a freelancer, you type your search into the search box over on Upwork. And you come across two profiles and just, let's just imagine for a second, you were able to put these two profiles side-by-side like I have here. And let's imagine that the title that the, the freelancer, both freelancers used as about the same. What you read in the profile overview is about the same. And when you look at portfolio Generally the things look about the same. And you don't necessarily have a ton of difference when it comes to all of those things between the two freelancers. However, on one side you have a freelancer, like you see on the left here that has 62 total jobs that they've completed. They've done over 1500 hours of work. They have a bunch of five-star reviews. They have a really high job success score. They have all of these indicators of them doing quality work. And then on the other side, the other freelancer, as you see here, they don't have any of that because they're brand new to the platform. If you're the client, if you're in those shoes looking at these two freelancers. One, Who do you think you're probably going to invite to your job and want to hire? That's the first question. And then the second one is, what reason would you have to invite the one without the job success score, the one without the ratings and reviews and all of that. What reason would you have to invite them to your job when you have this other person who has all that stuff. Okay? And that's really the big understanding that you have to have when it comes to Upwork algorithm. Because upwards algorithm is all about dealing with this, this phenomenon and dealing with this situation. So to understand that we have to start by talking about the purpose of the algorithm. So upwards algorithm is a matching algorithm first and foremost, that's what it does. And Upwork openly states that their goal is to match clients with the best freelancers for their project. They're open about that. That's what their goal is, that's what they're trying to do. That's the whole point of the platform. So that was the goal of the day it went live. It's the goal now and it'll be the goal if un until they change their business model, which isn't very likely there, such a big company now. So that is the goal of the algorithm. Match clients with the best freelancers for their project. And the algorithm is in total service of this goal. That's it, That's all it's meant to do. Now, there's a bunch of nuance to how it does that. But this will forever and always be the purpose of the algorithm. So that's the first thing to understand, matching clients with the best freelancers for their project. Next, you need to understand Upwork. So gross strategy because Upwork has competitors and it needs to compete and grow. There are other freelance platforms out there that it has to compete with. And it has to get both freelancers and clients to want to work on it's platform versus the other one. So how does it do that? Well, again, fairly openly stated its growth is dependent on new freelancers. New freelancers with skills not already represented on the platform. And that matters because they want to attract clients looking to hire freelancers with those skills. So the whole point is, as technology advances, Upwork stays on the cutting edge by constantly adding new freelancers with those skills, with new software or new strategies or whatever it is. As the world advances, as technology advances, bringing those, those freelancers is what then attracts the clients because there's no reason for the client to be there. If there's no freelancers there that have that skill. So Upwork has to ride a really fine line between attracting freelancers and attracting clients by keeping both groups happy, okay, So it's a really delicate balance that they have to walk. And just so you know, I'm not this is not something that I just made up. I actually, when I first saw it and understood it, I read it. And this article, and this came from the former Vice President of product and marketing named Bonnie Sherman. She's not there anymore. She's moved on. But at the time, she was at a conference and she was speaking at a conference or doing a Q and a and a conference where they were talking about how to grow a network marketplace like Upwork. And so she was talking about how Upwork grew. And she said as you grow your marketplace, if you manage your supply and demand well, you have the network effect. Effect which makes your marketplace hard to displace. Now, that's kind of executive speak. Boyd, she's saying is if you manage your supply and demand. So supply is the freelancers and demand is the client. If you manage those well, you have a kind of network effect like you see with Facebook and some of the other social networks you may have heard of. And that network, network effect makes the marketplace hard to displace. It makes it hard for others to compete against that marketplace. Because as upward grows, we gain a wide breadth of skills, covering even those that are hard to find elsewhere. So again, it's about new freelancers coming in that have skills that aren't available on other platforms. And so they go to Upwork because they can't find freelancers with those skills anywhere else. That's up works gross strategy. So again, it's a delicate balance between attracting freelancers with the right skills and then also bringing clients into higher those freelancers. Point being upward, growth strategy is almost entirely based off of new freelancers. And that leads us to Upwork dilemma because new freelancers don't have any rating on the platform. We just talked about the algorithm and how the point is to match the best freelancers with clients with the best freelancers for their project. Well, when you're a new freelancer, you don't have any rating. Upwork doesn't know how good you are. So they, they, they, they don't know how to rate you. And so that makes matching difficult and makes matching those new freelancers with clients very difficult. So what is Upwork to do? Their entire gross strategy is dependent on new freelancers, but their algorithm is not very good. The way it's designed, the way it has to work, is not very good at dealing with new freelancers. So how does it solve this dilemma is critical. It's not just some dilemma that, that's on the side. It's critical to how they compete and how they grow. So it's an important question that they have to answer. So what is Upwork solution? Well, they have to test new freelancers on the platform. They have to find out if the freelancer is good and what projects, if they are good, what projects they're best suited for. If a freelancer can perform and deliver and McCloud clients happy, they'll stay on the platform. They can't Upwork now these days tends to kick people off because it's all, all about experience for the client. So specificly they're going to test three things. They're going to test click-through rate, higher rate, and satisfaction rate. So click-through rate, they're going to put your profile when you're new on the platform. You might not have all the job history and success score and all of that stuff, doesn't matter. They're still gonna put your platform or your profile in front of a bunch of clients because they need to test you. They have to. And what their first going to look at is when they put your profile in front of clients. Do clients even click to view your profile if they don't, then Upwork immediately just marks that as an indicator that you're you're, you don't have a very good profile. And you can, you know, your profile could die before you even get started because nobody clicks through to look at it. So we look at click-through rate. Then they looked at higher rate. When people do click through and go to your profile, how often do they hire you? Again, if you have a really low, higher rate of work is going to say, okay, high click-through rate, low, higher rate. Again, bad profile. And again they can bury your profile and kick off the platform and all that. And then finally, satisfaction rate is of course, once you are hired, how well you perform, is the client happy? Do they leave feedback? Is a good feedback, et cetera, which is the obvious one that only one that most people talk about. But upwards going to test you on all three of those things. So the point here is, it's not just about doing good work for clients. That's only one of the factors that they're looking at. It's also about creating a profile that gets clients to click through and to hire you. Specifically when you have 0 job history. And just as a side note, this is one of the things that I have a problem with, with a lot of people to talk about Upwork and they don't address this because they'll talk on and on and on about doing good work over on Upwork and making clients happy and that sort of thing. Which is obvious and it's true you absolutely need to do that. But it doesn't address how you even get hired in the first place when you have 0 job history. So if you're reading information on Upwork and they're not addressing specifically what to do with 0 job history, then you're going to have a tough time with that because it's all based on this notion that you're going to have some of this stuff and when you're brand new, you just don't have it. So again, how do you get people to click through? How do you get them to hire you when you have 0 job history. And so that's a tall task. I'll I'll be up front with you. It's not something that's simple or necessarily easy to do, but the key to it is relevant. So if we go back to Upwork goal, remember it was to match clients with the best freelancers for their project. So rank is how they determine. Best freelancers through the job success score, through the feedback, etc. That's all. That's all referred to as rank, okay? Relevance is how they determined for their project. So if you're a web developer, you're not going to be very relevant for a transcriptionists job now. And so it doesn't matter what your rank is as a web developer, you just are not a good fit for that project. Now that's an extreme example, but it's done in very nuanced ways as well, even within the same web development category. Figuring out what freelancers are the most relevant for a job that's been posted by client. Okay. And this is one of the reasons why sometimes refer to this as the rank and relevance framework or the R2 protocol. It's referring to rank and relevance and relevance when you're brand new. That's how you succeed on the platform. So going back to our thought experiment, how do you get a client to hire you when you're being compared to a profile with a huge job history and high job success score. How do you get them to click through even in the first place? How do you get them to when they view your profile? To actually hire you and then when they do hire you and your new, how do you, how do you get it so that you're able to deliver in a way that makes them happy and want to leave your view and so forth. Why would they pick you over someone that is way more experienced? Why would they do that? Relevance? Because you're a better fit for exactly what they want. And so, to give you an example, again, imagine you're their client and you're looking for someone to help you speed up your WordPress website, right? You want to get your Google page speed score above 90 percent and it's down at like 40 right now. And so you go on Upwork and you look for someone you use search in their WordPress speed optimization. And you find two profiles. One is a WordPress developer, and they have a high job success score. They have a lot of reviews, good ratings, etc. But in their profile they talk about, you know, building themes and plug-ins and all these other things that are relevant to WordPress. But they're not exactly the speed optimization. Ok, then you look at another profile. Who doesn't have the job success score. It doesn't have the ratings and review. But it's all about WordPress, speed, optimization, everything. That's what the title says, that's what's an overview. You look at the portfolio. It's examples of them speeding up other websites. It's all about speed optimization. That's the way you get someone to take a chance on you. And so that's ultimately the strategy. It's not a magic pill. I want to state that up front. It is not a magic pill. It's not suddenly going to make every client start hiring you, okay? But what it will do is they'll get one or two to take a chance on you because you're so highly relevant for what they want. They're willing to take a chance on you over someone who has a better jobs, who has better rank and all that, but isn't specific to what they want. When that happens, then it becomes about doing good work for clients and getting positive feedback to grow your rank, okay, It's only after that happens and you get people to take a chance on you. But when you're brand new, you gotta get them to take a chance on you and you do that through relevance. And so that's the strategy. That's what I'll be showing you how to do in detail. And all of the little nuanced ways that Upwork assesses this, because it's not one or two things. It's not simple keywords in this. There's a lot of ways the Upwork looks at this. And so in this course we're going to go into detail of how to build your profile, how to bid on jobs, et cetera. All in service of attacking this relevant side of things to help you build up your rank. And from there, you know, I can get those first two clients to take a chance. We can do that with this strategy. And that's what happened with those success stories as I showed you at the beginning of this course. But that's as far as I can take you. All right. I can't I can't help you or make you do good work. I can get you a fair shot. But from there it's really on you to deliver. And so again, that's what we're gonna do inside of this course. I'm going to show you how to do this. You'll have to obviously up to you to go through and implement everything how I lay out. But with this strategy, we can help you give you your best chance of getting some clients to take a chance on you. And then from there it's on you to do really good work and continue to build your profile, build up that rank. And that's when things were really take off. 3. If You're Brand NEW to Freelancing, Watch This First: okay, So real quick before we dive had a headfirst into up work and everything about it. I wanted to let you know if you're someone who's absolutely brand new to freelancing, then I would recommend checking out one of my other courses, whether it's now before you dive into the this upward course or it's sort of afterwards. But I would really strongly recommend you check out this this course called The Beginner's Guide to Freelance, because what we're doing now is talking specifically about up work. But up work is just really one sort of player in the overall industry, and it's one thing that you can do in your overall sort of freelance strategy. And so the Beginner's Guide to Freelance. What it does is it actually gives you sort of the big picture view and teaches you things like how to figure out what services to offer. You know how to find people that are willing to pay you for that. How toe to sell your services out, feeling like a slimeball. How how to deliver on projects, getting referrals, all these different things that are a staple of freelancing, whether or not you do it an up work or you do it on your own website or wherever. So again, if you're absolutely brand new to freelancing that it's a really good course to get you introduced to the overall concept, the overall idea and the big things that you need to do in order to be successful as a freelancer again, whether you use up work or not. So I just wanted to let you know about that course. I think it's a really great supplement to this up work course and and will help you to sort of put everything into a big picture scope and have a plan. You know, a 5 10 year plan for your freelancing career. Ah, and be able to move forward whether you use up work or whatever. So you want to get access to that course. You can just go to my profile most my courses down here. You'll see my profile. Just click on that and you'll find the course on there and you can just enrol and start taking it right away. So again, just want to let you know about that. With that said, let's go ahead and get into the rest of this upward course 4. How to Get Your Profile Approved: Hey, guys. So I've been getting a lot of questions lately about getting your profile approved over on up work because up work, semi recently, I would say, has started curating Ah, and and having an application process for its freelancer. So they're not letting just everybody apply for an account like they used to. And so there's a lot of people who sort of go through that or certain number. People go through that and get denied and have get in touch with me about what they can do to get through that. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Obviously, at the time when I first got on this all a lot of years ago, I didn't have that process and I'm on there now, so I have an account. But there are some things knowing how up work works, that you can do that. They're gonna sort of be able to help you get approved, if that's what you're trying to tackle here. So the first thing that I want to show you before we get I've got a couple things that I want to go through that I've got 11 different things that you can sort of do to help you get your profile approved. Now, one of the things that I want you to keep in mind with all of this is it could be easy to get frustrated about this, this whole application process in this policy. But I would advise you to think of it as a good thing, because again, it's one of, if not the biggest freelancing platform on the planet. And the more people that they let in the MAWR competition there is. And if they let just anybody in that also can know, it can tend to lower the quality of freelancers there, which will be less attractive to clients. And I know some people might get heartburn about me saying that whatever. But it's just the truth. And so this policy ultimately is is a good thing. And if you can get approved, that means you're you're gonna be dealing with a little bit less competition. You're gonna be in a little bit more of in ah, more nous elites. Maybe not the word, but a A group that is a little bit mawr again curated, so it makes it a little bit easier for you to get work over there and attracts more work to the site. So that's the first thing. Another thing to keep in mind is up. Workers based very heavily on algorithms. And so if your profile is getting rejected, especially if it's your submitting, it's happening fairly quickly. Now that probably is. There are probably are humans that look at this sort of thing, but there's probably also a baseline sort of algorithm. Um, that goes through and just sort of reject rejects profiles that don't have certain things or maybe list Onley, certain skills, etcetera. And so you want to make sure and at the very minimum, get past that algorithm and get to the human person. And then, of course, get past that human person. But again, there's certain things that you can do to get past that algorithm pretty consistently. So just keep that in mind as we're doing this. And then the other thing is, if your profile does get rejected, you can continually resubmit it. So if you get rejected the first time, don't just sort of I got rejected this one time, that's it and give up, keep making changes and resubmit your profile until you get accepted. Because once you get in, you know, up work is kind of a gold mine for ah, freelancing. So it's something to put some work into just getting into all right. So Ah, those are a few things I wanted to to go through. And then what? I want the first thing I'm gonna show. You just want to show you how to get this. So if you go toe up work dot com you scroll all the way down to the bottom. You'll see under company this link that says press. And if we click on this, then we can come down here to this up Work skills index. This is a resource that I want you to know how to get to. They release this on a quarterly basis. So about every quarter, you can come in here and check this, and what they do is they list the top 20 fastest growing skills in freelancing, so it's not necessarily Ah, I don't think is necessarily just from their site. They do research for multiple places, and they sort of figure this out, but it gives you a list of what they consider the in demand sort of fastest growing skills out there. This is a really good resource for understanding the kind of skills that up work when they're approving profiles is going to be looking for, and one of things to keep in mind with up work is you always have to remember that up or get the end of day is a business. Their company, whatever their marketing says at the end of they want money, they want to earn revenue and they earn when you do, because they get a percentage of your earnings. So they want freelancers that can make a lot of money on the site because that just means they make more money to. So they want freelancers with hot in demand skills like this because they know a lot of people are looking for them and will pay good money for these skills. So they went freelancers that can do this. That's why this is such a big resource here. They also want freelancers with high experience levels. So people who have these skills and have a lot of experience because then that means that they will have the third thing that up work wants which is enough proof that freelance will have enough proof in terms of experience, portfolio, past clients, testimony of all that sort of thing to justify what they're going to charge on the site and actually be able to get work to get hired at higher fees and make more money, which ultimately means up work makes more money. Okay, so again, that's something to keep in mind. Ah, as you're going through all of this, they want money. It went in demand skills that one experience on. They want people who can prove that experience. So use this as a resource toe help you sort of figure out what skills are in demand. And, you know, if you look at this and you're like, like, I can't do any of that stuff I mean, there's some There's some things in here that are somewhat generic, right? Like e learning customer retention? No. Ah, the rapid prototyping product photography. I mean, these are all things that you know. Anybody who does what we do in a sense could maybe list thes sorts of things as as skills that they have. Um, so just sort of keep that in mind. Don't get too too wrapped around. I mean, articulate storyline. Don't get too wrapped up. And I need to have all this experience, you just wanting to get approved. And then once you're approved, then you can sort of maybe change up your profile a little bit to toe ah, to portray what you actually want to do. So right now, we're just trying to get approved and get through that that application process, and then we can change up our profile, how we need, right? So well, that said and knowing where that resource is, then when you get into the section here where you're actually creating your profile on listing your skills and so forth, there's sort of 11 little things I'll go through here fairly quickly that you can do so the 1st 1 is just to make sure in list every skill, right to ask you what is the main service you offer to clients here. Okay, so picked that Remember the job skills list or the up work skills list of freelancing skills list, And if you need to pick something that you know from that list is gonna be a little bit Maurin demand and then Now you can select up to four types of work that you do within this . Okay, So make sure and pick all four and again use that skills list is sort of ah ah, guideline for what? Things to pick in here. And then you come down here and it says, What skills do you offer clients And you can see it says that you can, Ah, the top 3 to 10 skills you have revel in relevant to the service you provide. So when you start typing and stuff here like content and it will bring up ah bunch of stuff here Well, if I remember, right content strategy was one of the ones further down on that skills index that was in demand. So if you're a writer, you would want to put content strategy here, and you want to make sure and fill all of these out. So don't just that sort of second thing. Don't don't just list one sat subcategory list multiple sub categories. The other thing is, when we get down here to experience level, don't lowball your experience of a lot of times. People come into this tentative and a lot of people are going to select this entry level area here. But you really want to be accurate with this. I mean, if you are entry level, OK, but if you can consider yourself it all an intermediate oryx expert that's just going to sort of raise your profile in the eyes of up work. So you really don't want to lowball your experience here. You want to try and make. This is accurate is possible in the higher orm or experience you have the better. Okay. And then when we get into to some of ah, the rest of this of actually filling out your profile here and so forth one of the things we scroll down here, you know, you really want to Ah, you know, a lot of times up work. And let's just sort of do this, you know, up work will maybe recommend Ah, I've seen different ones here. Will the recommend an hourly rate here? If you get a recommendation for an hour hourly rate here, you definitely want to let them do that. But in general, the the higher this hourly rate is the better in the sense that again up work wants money so you don't want to necessarily come in here and put $500 or $5000 an hour or whatever, right? But if you can put a higher rate in here than up work is more likely to want to approve you because, ah, you you are going to potentially make them more money. So Ah, don't lowball your experience. Don't lowball your rate. You can always change this once you get approved. Hey, in terms of your title, you're probably gonna want to write a broader title than what I recommend in this course just to get approved again because we want to appeal to a bunch of were sort of trying to appeal to a bunch of different, um categories or sub categories within up work so that up work sees our profile is one that could potentially get a lot of work. Okay. And so we want to appeal to a zoo, many of those as we can to help us get approved again once we're inside. Then we can change all this up to be more specific, like I recommend so right, a broader title. Another thing is, just make sure and fill this out completely. Don't put one sentence in here or no one, even one paragraph put in multiple paragraphs. Try to fill this out as much as possible, because that's gonna show up work that you're willing to put in the work, that you have more experience, all that sort of thing. So you want to fill all of this stuff out as much as possible? You want to list your full education and employment history now again, when I get into the rest, Of course I'm gonna talk about being very specific and narrow with this stuff. But you, when you're trying to get approved, you're trying to list as much as possible and make it as full and look as biggest possible for up work because that's what they tend to think. Ah is going to help them make more money now, knowing how the algorithms work. I know that that's not necessarily the case. Of course. These two specifically you could just leave the full education employment history. I know I'll talk about this later. Um, where I talk about relevance, but it's not gonna hurt you, really, to just fill this out fully and leave it there That's not gonna be a big hindrance to your relevant. So you could just leave that you definitely want to make sure, ah, not sure if it's on this page, but at some point you'll be able to fill out a portfolio. You want to make sure it include a portfolio in this that shows that you know what you're doing. And, again, a profile that has a portfolio versus one that doesn't the one that has is much more likely to get approved When you get the chance to take relevant tests, take those as well. Make sure and add a photo all of that stuff. So you just want to fill it out as much as possible. Put as much information as you can in their list as many skills as you can. And then keep in mind that that skills index that I showed you in some of the hot in demand skills and try to list some of those as well to increase the chance of you getting approved . And then again, once you're approved, then you can change it. Change your profile up to how I suggest throughout the rest of the course, so that's sort of the strategy here. And then the last thing is, just make sure, as I mentioned in the beginning, that if you don't get approved right away, keep trying. Take multiple shots at this. And I think eventually, if you're doing this and being sort of conscious about how you go about doing this, you'll get approved. And once you're in, then it's It's gonna be worth the work that you put into doing it because you'll sort of be in that elite group of freelancers that are now able to come on here and get work. So that's sort of my advice for dealing with how to get approved. It's a little bit different now with how they're doing this and some of curated sites like Top Town. Some of the other ones, I think, have pushed them this way, but they're definitely not nearest strict to some of these other sites. And like I said, I think if you take this approach to it, keep trying at it that you'll get approved sooner rather than later, and then you'll be able to to sort of dive into the rest of stuff that we're going to talk about in this course 5. Upwork Profile Master Strategy: neither. John Moores. Here, Joe Morris online dot com This one, We're gonna be this lesson. We're gonna be talking about the master strategy, so there is a strategy. All right, Well, I think that's a thing. A lot of developers, they kind of go out and they're just like a lot of freelancers. They go out and they're just, like, kind of just winging it. And I get it because it's not. I mean, I did that when I first started. It's not something that we're taught how to do any of that, that sort of thing. But you do want to eventually develop a coherent strategy and approached how you're doing that. And I believe from my experience, both my own experience and then other people that I've worked with and taught this to that the particular strategy that I'm going to to talk with you about today can be incredibly effective, especially for someone who's new to the platform and doesn't necessarily have ah, huge portfolio in a big client base and that sort of thing. So I think this situation, a lot of freelancers starting out, find themselves in. I don't I don't have a network I don't have clients. I don't have a big portfolio, but I know I can deliver. I know I'm good at coding. How do I get started getting clients, Okay. And so that's what this strategy is really aimed at. And we're gonna be taking a look at some stuff here on up work to kind of to show you this both Why? I think this strategy is the best, and then how to actually do it. And then the rest of what we talk about throughout the this course is going to, uh, help you kind of fill in all of that strategy and actually implement it. All right, So the strategy here is really kind of Ah, it's a three step approach. So the first thing you're gonna do is you're going to start out by positioning yourself as a small niche specialists, and we'll talk about that What that means here in a second as you. When you do that, then you're going to use that because you'll have an advantage. We'll talk about what that is here in a second, you're going to use that to build up your portfolio and your job history to actually expand and grow. Ah, that job history in that portfolio, that is the thing that you don't have right now that all these other freelancers on here do that makes it hard for you to compete against them. So you're gonna build that up, and then as you build it up, then you can start to basically expand up out of, ah, small niche into a little bit larger niche and then maybe a little bit larger one after that and so forth. Right? So it's it's really a You go from a very you go in, very laser targeted, which gives you an advantage. And then you build up the thing that you need, which is job history and portfolio, and then you and job success rate. And then you expand out from there and you're able to grow and appeal to a larger client base and get more work as a result of that. All right, so let's talk about first. Why this? I think this works. So if we come over here to a freelancer search, I'm in my client account. When I just did a search for woo commerce. I'm not familiar. Would commerce is a WordPress plugging it basically turns your WordPress site into, ah, an e commerce shop. That's what it's designed for. And so when we talk about ah, being a niche right, what we mean by that is you have the kind of the big space of Web development. A lot of people just market themselves as Web developers and say, Well, I know HTML CIA says this that the other right. But that's really general, and it doesn't really speak toe look, the clients language in terms of there, not really thinking in terms of languages. For the most part, they're thinking in terms of end products, what's the thing I want, Bill, I want any commerce site, right? So and I want it built with Lou commerce or whatever. So you have this big space of Web development within that right? You have WordPress. WordPress is one segment of the overall Web development market, and then within that you have woo commerce because woo commerce is only one plug in, and there's thousands of WordPress plug ins out there. So that's what we mean when we say a niche, we're not going after Web development. We're not even going after WordPress. We're going after a really small subset called Wu commerce. And so we're looking for clients who want e commerce sites built using loop commerce. And so if I do that search over here as a client, remember, there's my client account. Um, this is and then I've done some filters here, so I've filtered for the freelancers that have earned 10-K or more. They have a job success rate of 90% and up, and they're independent freelancers. They're not the agencies or whatever, Right? So we're looking in terms of the freelancers that offer this sort of thing that appealed to this woo calmer search. Here we're looking at kind of the cream of the crop, and this is one of the things that I recommend that you do is that you go on here and do these sorts of searches and look at what these people are doing. Do these filters look at the ones that are earning the most having the highest job success rate and look at their picture, their title, their tags, what they're writing for their descriptions and so forth. And you want to model success. So find the successful people on these sites and look at what they're doing. Now. What you'll notice here is that a lot of these have woo commerce rate in their title. Well, commerce this this one doesn't blue commerce woo commerce woo cars, Will. Commerce will commerce. This one doesn't blue commerce, and this one doesn't. Okay, so all those on does have has e commerce. But you can see most of these there. Seven that have will commerce and their title in this three that don't know not. You know, some of these are adding other things in there, but they're adding specific things, right? Gravity forms is another plug in magenta is an application. Uh, no event registration, X theme expert WordPress woo Commerce development. All right, so and you can look it. Look at these. 60 k plus earned 20 K plus earned 20 k 50 k 100 k 2030 2040 20. So there's plenty of money to be made in this niche. These guys, they're targeting specific niches, right? That's a big, big kind of objection. People have this fight. I talked really small nature is not gonna be enough work that my some images that might be true. But if you find the right niches right and there's there's a lot more of them out there than you probably think you can. Still, I mean 60 k 100 k 20 k 50 k 40 And that's, I mean spread among 10 developers here. How many K overall is that maybe half a 1,000,000? Something like that? So there's and that's just the first page here. So there's plenty of market here in just this woo commerce area for you to get into, and so again we want to. The first thing that you want to do is you want to take some time and think about and also research and up works. A really get great tool for doing research like this. Think about what specific end result do I want to start out delivering for clients. You don't have to do it forever. Doesn't have to be the only thing you ever do. But what I want to start out with do I want to build e commerce sites? Do I want to build social networks? Do I want to build forms? Do I want to? What is it that I want to build not what language do I want to operate? And developers tend to think of languages. That's what I want to break you out off. Don't think in language is think in end products. What's the end product that I want to deliver four people. A membership site, five page business website. Ah, menu website for restaurants. Ah, realist. A real estate agent website. What is that? And then when you come up with 45 ideas or 10 whatever, when you come over those ideas, right, those 10 ideas down and then come over here and search for it how you would search if you were a client, right? Woo Commerce, membership site, real estate agent website or whatever, Right? Come over here and try different keywords and so forth and try to figure out, you know, when you do those searches, then look at what comes up. Do some of these filters here and see what kind of money is being earned, right? If every developer, a freelancer on that page shows up $0 earned, that might not be the best market to get into. You might want to look at one of the other things that you wrote down. But if you're something like this and you're getting 10-K in 20 Kane 30 cane, 60 k Well, then that might be a little bit better market to get into. Also, click into these on DSI. Okay. What did they what's their overview? Like what tags they have. What's their title? Like, What's their work history look like that you're not necessarily be able to do anything with right away. But look at their portfolio. Okay. What tests did they take? ODS readiness tests. Of course. Junior, My sequel WordPress PHP five. Okay. Actually, I wouldn't even put these on here. That's a low score. That would actually kind of work against you, but we'll talk about that later. Ah, but just kind of look at what they're doing here and and sort of model that a little bit. And you don't have to look at just one look at all 10 of these here and see if you can spot a trend, a trend that all of these successful freelancers in this particular niche tend to be doing . Okay, so just kind of look at that and see if you can spot those. You'll probably find trends that they use the the keyword in the title that have it as a tag. It's probably in their description a little bit, that sort of thing. Okay, now, once you've decided on that, then like we said, what you're going to do is start going out and getting that sort of work. Now, this particular this particular class, we're not gonna go into bidding on jobs or that sort of thing. We're focused on just building our profile, so that's what I'm going to stick to hear. But along with building out your profile and looking to come up in these searches and so forth, you're also going to be outbidding on jobs. And when your profile is built the way that I'm gonna have you built it, you'll be more appealing. Aziz. Long as you make sure you're bidding on jobs related to the niche that you pick to start out with, you'll be more appealing to clients. You're going to come across a specialist. This is what gives you the advantage because people just I can't even necessarily tell you why. But people just place more value and mawr belief in someone who markets themselves as a specialist versus a gent generalist. So someone who says something like, Ah, Web developer, right? If you are looking for a woo commerce site and someone says I'm a wool commerce specialist and then someone else says, I'm a Web developer, you just automatically find the one that says I'm a woo commerce specialist more appealing , more believable, more likely for you to get what you want from that person. Because the very first question that you would ask someone who says If you want a woo commerce site and they say I'm a Web developer, the very first question that you would ask them is, Do you know woo commerce with when you specialize? You answer that question off the top. Don't even have to ask it because you're saying I'm a woo calmer specialist, so it just makes you more believable. So again, that's why we're looking and picking these these niches like this. We're going to start small because we're gonna use that specialist. We're gonna lean on that specialist advantage when we don't have a portfolio. When we don't have, you know, Ah, big long job history and all that sort of thing. We have to learn, lean on the specialist side of things. And then, like I said, as we build up our portfolio and job history, now we can expand up. Now we have the portfolio and job history that gives us credibility and proof, and we can expand from being woo commerce to being WordPress. All right, we can cut, go up a level in terms of our ARN itching. And then from there, I don't recommend that you ever just go Web developer, right? I think I feel like you should always specialized in some sort of and result or set of end results. But I think this is kind of perfect right here. Wu commerce, gravity forms, magenta wordpress. So WordPress blue commerce, gravity forms and then magenta like it's not that I'm doing Web developer one blanket thing that covers everything. But now what I mix doing is expanding up one level from Wu commerce into wordpress and then also different kind of specializations in WordPress and then, of course, magenta. So that's the That's kind of the approach that that you want to take. But you need to start small. Start with a small, small niche that you could specialize in so that you can work around the credibility issue of not having the job history in the portfolio. So that'll do it for this lesson again. As we go throughout the rest of this, we're gonna talk about building our profile on how toe build it in such a way to kind of fit with this. This strategy hopefully found that helpful. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you next time. 6. Create an Appealing Profile Picture: Hey there. John Morrissey. John Morse online dot com This less this lesson. We're gonna be talking about how to create a professional, engaging looking photo for your profile. Now, it could be easy to kind of brush this off, but I want to kind of start out by driving home. Why? This is important because it's not gonna completely sell, sell you and get you hired. But in a competitive arena, like up work and some of these other freelance sites, it's small things like this that can make a difference. So I've just done a search over here on WordPress is kind of a standard search that any client might do over here on up work. And I want you to just take a minute. Let me scroll down here a little bit. Just take a minute and look at the the images that you can see here and just think Look at each one and kind of get your first impression of each one, and I'll just give you a minute to do that. Okay, so hopefully you've had a chance to look at each one of those. Now, if you're like me and I would say probably most people Each picture you looked at, you got kind of an initial impression. And if you and if you think about the question of kind of professionalism, which one looks the most professional, you kind of got an idea of that right off the bat. So, for example, the two that really stand out to me in terms of looking professionally done are the one from Kristen C. And Mohammed. I would guess I'm taking a stab here. But you probably if you were asking yourself that question, probably something similar. If you really look at Pablo Mohammed up here, Ilya and Antony, all of these it is kind of in between, not 100% sure. It's kind of too far away to really know. But Antony, Mohammed and Pablo all looked. Don't give me that aura of professionals. And now I'm not trying to rag on these people too much or anything. But I do want you to see the difference between the two, because one of these kind of lends that air of credibility and authority, and then others of these don't now again, you may not think that matters all that much, but when someone does a search like this and they're looking through. I mean, how many pages air here? There's probably hundreds of pages, thousands of different developers. When you're looking through that and you're trying to decide on one of these, all the little things matter. So again, Ah, professional looking image isn't going to completely sell a client on you. But it could be the difference between them clicking this post, Ah, job to invite button or not okay or them inviting you to their project or not. I don't have one created. So that's why it says Post job to invite. But normally this would say, like invite. That could be the difference between them inviting You're not to their job. And so we want to stack all of that Ah, in our favour so that we can get that click and that click through and one of the first things people are just visual. If one of the first things they're gonna look at is this image over here on the left and they're going to get people do this all the time we talk about Don't don't judge a book by its cover yet. That's what we do all the time. And so they're going to get a read of you just by your picture. And so again, we just want to stack that in our favor. All right. So with that said, how do we do this? Well, I the kind of framework the approach I take was actually not something I came up with. I was I told this by somebody. And, you know, it wasn't easy to hear a the time, but they had a point I went through, looked at my stuff, And sure enough, you know, if it seemed like I needed to make an update and so they kind of gave me what they had been told from their mentor. They kind of pass that on to me. And so it's worked well for them, and I've done it now. It's worked well for me. And essentially, the idea is just one a nice shirt, a nice background and a nice smile. And so we're gonna talk about those things kind of a little bit more in detail, and as we do, we're gonna be looking at I've come over here to Pinterest, and I just pulled up some headshots. These air professionally done headshots. And so we're gonna take a look at some of these and some of the ideas that we want to talk about, and you can see some of this stuff at work. All right, so let's talk about a nice shirt. So the first thing is, you generally want to stick with solid colors and avoid patterns. And if you look at most of these headshots that you're gonna see here, you can see most of these. I mean, this is semi cell. I means pretty solid color, solid color, solid color, solid color, solid color, solid color. Oh, I mean, there's one pattern here, but it's not like overbearing pattern. Ah, this one here that maybe fits a little bit more of her personality. I'm not sure, but that's a little pattern E. But most of these air solid colors. And if we scroll down, I've got one pattern here. But if you actually look at that the way it kind of looks on the screen, it is a little distracting. Okay, so that's really what you want to avoid is having your shirt or whatever be distracting. Here's a really good example of why patterns and stuff. You could see just how, like, when you look at this photo, it's just kind of distracting. And the lines get Jagan, and it just it almost makes it look wrinkled, in a sense. So Ah, again, You want to try to stick to solid colors and you want to stick Teoh. Anyone avoid patterns you also want don't want to go with anything kind of too bright or overbearing. I think if you look at all these a lot of these air just black and white or they're like a dark blue. This one is kind of a more muted blue, Really. The only want. There's only a couple here that I mean, this is a brighter blue, but it is a solid color. Um, but you know, it seems to work. OK, this one's a bright red down here. Um, but there's you look at all these professional head shots and again these air professional photographers. A lot of these people are probably actors and actresses, business, famous business people, reporters, that sort of thing. So these air, probably a lot of money, went into these photos, and if you look at the majority of them, What you're getting is solid colors, no patterns, nothing too bold or two glaring in terms of color and so forth. Also, just some simple stuff like you don't want it to be wrinkled. Of course you don't want it to bunch up when you sit down or that sort of thing. Ah, if if you're a guy and you're gonna be wearing a tie, then you want to make sure that the color of the Thai again isn't not any sort of boulder glaring color. You want to make sure it's kind of between the color of the suit and the shirts. So, for example, if the suit like this one over here, if the suit is black and the shirt is white, then you want to go with kind of a shade in between that maybe some sort of grey or something like that. So depending on what color suit you wear, that could work. This one here actually know this works pretty well. You have, ah, kind of a dark blue suit. You have a tie that matches that same color has a little bit of pattern to it, but it's not too bad towards completely overbearing Here's another interesting example, although not something I'd recommend because you don't see his face. But you kind of see how the shirt ties in with the little pocket scarf thing or pocket handkerchief and the the shoes here. So that's that's That's pretty nice if you could include the face there, but again, No, keep that. Keep the colors simple. You know the thing about it is you can go for you can go for really bold and try to make a statement if you know what you're doing. But if you're not a professional photographer and that sort of thing, you are taking a risk in doing that. And so there's a good chance that you could miss. And in this context it's not gonna help you all that much to go try and go and do something bold that really stands out. You're not gonna get so much advantage of it from it that it's worth it, whereas if you kind of if you don't get it, get kind of just the fundamentals down here, it can't actually hurt you. So there it's better to just go simple and plain and make sure that your no, you're not going. Just you're not creating an impression that that's working against you again. If your guy and your there's no tie Ah, then avoid a white shirt, right? If you're not wearing a coat or anything like that, even know Ah, for women probably want to avoid all white because that can kind of tend to. What happens is especially if you start messing with the color balance afterwards. The details and the white can kind of start to convey easily just get blurred out. And so now it just looks kind of like this white wall. So just be a little bit careful of that and try to avoid shiny sort of things as well. Because again, on the camera, that sort of thing, if you don't get it just right, can really start to blow out. Ah, in the processing on the back end and so forth. All right, so that's kind of probably more detail than you ever wanted around wearing a shirt. But those were some simple things that you can do to make sure that your headshot looks professional in terms of a background again. No ah, solid colored. Generally you can do an environmental shot. You'll see some of these air environmental. But if you're doing a solid color, you wanna have something that gen again? Generally, you wanna have something that contrast well, with whatever sort of of shirt or jacket you happen to be wearing. So a really good example is this right here you have a nice kind of darker background here . You have a white kind of coat here, and that creates a real nice contrast between the two. It really helps her to stand out away from the background, and that's kind of what you're looking for. Now you can do. You'll notice some of these, like this one is really neat. She has darker hair, and then it is a darker background, and so it almost kind of blends in a little bit and creates a kind of nice effect. But again, this is a professional photographer doing this, so that's an effect that they probably really worked on. There's a lot of stuff that goes into these sort of shoots that look simple, but there's a ton that goes into him, so they probably really worked on that to get that effects. So you want to be a little bit careful of that. If you're not a professional photographer, generally something like this is gonna be a little bit better. Okay, so again, you see, there are people's again. She has darker hair in the darker background with a darker coat. It works here because they've they've kind of set it up toe work and really went into it. But you'll see here solid color, lighter shirt, a little bit darker color in the background creates a nice contrast between ah, the subject and the background. So again, for solid, solid colors Ah, solid color background. You want to have something that contrast well with the person and what they're wearing for environmental. You see some of these it against these brick walls and on couches and these sort of things . The thing you want to do here is make sure it fits well with what you're doing, right. So if you're a Web developer, make it something a little techie like, for example, this here would probably be pretty good because you have your computer in here, your little notes. It kind of works well with you being a freelancer. So something like this might work, whereas against a brick wall like this and I I know she's probably not a freelance. I get that. But against a brick wall like this for a Web developer? Probably. I mean, it's not like it's has some huge thing, but it doesn't really fit with with what you're doing and probably who you are. Like, how often do you stand against brick walls like that? Hey, were compared to How often are you at your computer? So you just want to make it fit with who you are and what you're doing. Okay, whatever you happen to be freelancing at, ah, really good source for backgrounds. If you're like OK, I've got you know, I'm doing this in my house. I don't have a good wall that I can do this against, or if I do, it just looks. We're doing it against the wall. One really neat source is backdrops, outlet or backdrop outlet dot com Not an affiliate or anything for this, this is just happens to be what I actually use. My podcast background for my YouTube channel for a while was Ah ah, backdrop that I got from here, but you can see they have all these really cool backdrops that you can use that all these would ones here, you can go to all sorts of different ones. So you have abstract. You have these abstract backgrounds. I mean, these maybe aren't necessarily the greatest for head shots. Ah, Bo. OK? Yeah. So you I mean, there's all sorts of stuff here again. Maybe not the greatest. Yeah. Ah, just go toe would. I guess. But, you know, you could come through here and find some backgrounds that could work for what you're doing . And these are I mean, a They're pretty cheap. $39 into bad. And the way they work, we just kind of click through to one. Here is you can kind of get several different kinds, so they have their baby drops. They have these titanium claws, platinum cloth. They have these candy floors. Ah, the one I got. Was this what they call a stick? So, basically, it was like vinyl, and the pattern was printed on the vinyl and the back of it was sticky, so I could look, Larry just stuck it against my wall, where I record, and that was my back. My back drop. So these air really handy could be a good source for you to get a nice looking background that you can and then take your picture with All right, Last one. Then we did a nice shirt, A nice background. Now a nice smile. And this could probably be the most personal one. I personally just so you know that I get it If if that's, you know, I I've got a crooked smile. You may have noticed that if you see me in my pictures I know my parents when I was young didn't have, um, the money to afford me getting braces and as adults just something I've lived with and never really didn't did much about. But, you know, it is one of those things that that Ah, for me, I could be a little insecure about. But even in my pictures, I've learned that even with the crooked smile, that smiling is better than not smiling. Generally, unless you have a good kind of mouth smile like this like, this is a good mouth smile that works right? But for a lot of people, when they try and do this, it doesn't. It doesn't come out really well. In a matter of fact, I would say, If we look at we go back to the very first Ah, kind of page here with this. A lot of these mouth smiles they look kind of more like smirks that almost looks angry of This is a good if we look at her picture, that's a good teeth smile, right? And I can. Now we're getting into details here, but I just want to give you everything that you more than what you might need to make a good a good head shot here. This almost looks kind of like a frown. That one. Just it's hard to tell. This looks a little off. No, that one's not so bad. Maybe a little grumpy here, but not too bad. But generally speaking, if you look a say, this one, and I think this one a little bit, too, is getting there. But if you look at this one compared to the rest of these, this looks like a real smile. Looks like an inviting person, and so again, you just want to try toe toe, have a nice smile, try to show teeth if you can And I mean, if you if that's something that with me you're insecure about, you know, I drink a lot of coffee, so I have toe, you know, to keep my teeth from just going completely dark. I have toe white, my teeth kind of regularly. If that's not something you do go go ahead and start Now. You know, a few weeks before you're going to do your your your shot for your headshot and start working on that. Also, don't be afraid to photo shop. Ah, your picture. My effects, like over to my get on my freelancer account on we go to my profile and we click on my picture. You can see, like when it's up this close, it's pretty obvious I photoshopped that right. But when you're back here like this is maybe not so obvious, and that's the way they're gonna pretty much look at it. Okay, So don't be afraid to To to go in and Photoshopped that after afterwards, All right. Just some kind of sign notes on the side of of this outside of the nice smile. Nice background. Nice shirt. Another thing that you can look at is creating some visual interest. One of things is what we already talked about with these disappearing backgrounds. You could maybe play with that and make that work. But another thing here is the angle, right? It's not. This isn't just a straight on shot. And no, this isn't She's kind of tilted to the side here. She's kind of tilted, tilted. This is a little bit more straight on. This is a little bit more straight on, and that works in these cases, and that's, you know, that that's completely fine. But you see this one kind of tilted to the side, kind of tilted, leaning against the wall, tilted to the side here. The reason they're doing that is they're trying to create angles to create visual interest . If you just do a straight on shot right, it can be difficult to make it to have any sort of visual appeal or visual interest because it's just a straight on shot. So play with the angles a little bit. If you if you're taking a front on shot and it feels just doesn't feel quite right, try taking moving in the camera or yourself out a little bit of an angle and playing around with that and take When you do this, don't just take one picture, take ah 100 pictures and go through them and find which one just pops out to you, okay? And then maybe show it to a few people. Or maybe sure the gather like the best five and show him to your friends and family and be like, Hey, which one to you looks the most professional stands out the most two makes you This would be someone that you would want to work with or maybe higher to do something for you and get people's opinions And, you know, trust those opinions of those air people you trust because, ah, lot times they can give you a perspective outside of what you kind of think. So don't be afraid to play around that visual interest and get insight from other people and so forth. All right, so that's everything you never wanted to know about how to take a good head shot. Hopefully, that gives you more than you need to go out and take a professional looking image. And again, I know this consume like a small thing, but it's probably the very first thing that people are going to see about you and you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, that cliche line. But it's very, very true. And you want to stack everything that you can in your favor in that first initial impression, to get someone to wanna look at your profile and invite you to their job. And this is one of the simple things that you can do to do that. All right, that will do it for this lesson. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you next time. 7. Write a Keyword-Rich Title and Tags: Hey there, John Morris. Here. John Morse online dot com. This lesson. We're gonna be taking a look at our title and tags, so I'm gonna actually just be calling through my own profile and and writing kind of along with you to tell you what I would write. So I haven't used this profile in years. Actually, I kind of got off Lance and up work several 45 years ago and have done all my client work through my own website. So not a big deal for me to come in here and change stuff around. Ah, but we're gonna go through this, this sort of thing and tell you how I would do this. So, first off, looking at the title again, this is why it's important. Have a strategy because your strategy kind of dictates all of this stuff. So we know that we are. We are taking the approach of going after a small niche where positioning ourself as a specialist. And so what we want to do is build our profile in a way that speaks to that. So when we talk about our title in our tags, it becomes a little bit kind of self evident what we should do, right? We should speak to again. Let's say we're gonna be a woo commerce. We're going after this woo Commerce niche. Well, we want to speak to that now. What a lot of people do as they do like this. They just put a bunch of title tags and then they'll put expert at the end or developer at the end. And that's probably fine, but I really like to kind of try to speak to the client. Remember, this is what's going to show up on your when you're listing comes up in searches. This is one of the things that's going to show up. So I tried to speak to them and really, you know, uh, tryto get them toe. Want to click on my profile? So but you also do want to put in your keywords for search is, that's why people do. That is because they're just trying to come up for these different searches. So it's a fine line between coming up with come ah, doing this in a way that you'll come up for those searches but also speaking to the actual humans that are going to be reading it. And so what I like to do is just a simple sentence. I like in type, specialize in. That's how your sentence should start. Make sure you spell it right. I specialize in basically. And then whatever you do you specialize in, I specialize in woo commerce websites. Or I specialize in building woo commerce websites. Or if you, if you wanted you could. Even if you wanted to insert another key word, you could say who Commerce and WordPress websites like this. Okay, But I always like to to say, actually say the words I specialize in because that really to me drives point the home home the point that I'm not just throwing up a bunch of keywords. It's the second thing is it's gonna be different from what everybody else out there is putting up. Right. You've seen we've looked at some of the other freelancers out there. They're all just putting keywords with slashes and then putting developer expert at the end of it, great. So you don't again. A good rule of thumb is look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite or do something different. I like to do this? No, Only because it's different, but also because it actually says the words I specialize in. It puts that in their mind. Okay, so you just kind of say that like that. And now that's what's going. That's one of the things that's going to come up in the search when when people are searching for someone for woo commerce or WordPress and they see your your listing, they're going to see that the other thing, then on top of that is the tags. So again, a lot of this becomes self explanatory. But you you know, you want to stick to what your specialization is. So blue commerce, Right. So there it is. We'll take woo. Commerce will take WordPress, and then we see wordpress happen to see WordPress e commerce. Right? So the thing is, is we don't Yes, we don't want to dilute dilute again. We don't want to dilute our approach, right. We want to really hone in tight on this idea of WordPress woo commerce, WordPress e commerce, that sort of thing. Okay, so we don't wanna you can add more tags. You could add web development in this that the other, but That's not really what we're going after right now. What we're trying to do is we're trying to the up work has a relevance score. Okay, this is the thing to keep in mind. They have a relevant score. It's part of how they surface, right? Because if you look at the freelancer base, there's how many of those freelancers out there that have, ah, 99 percent job success rate who are considered top rated freelancers who have, you know, this huge, long job history that have, ah, this big portfolio that have all of these markers that you would look at for quality right ? Those are all things that are aimed at quality and up work is in the business of surfacing . What the best freelancers for a client's particular project? What a lot of people, Mrs that last part for a client's particular project. They focus on the best freelancers part, and they do. They have a kind of quality score, and they have, ah, ranking and rating of all the freelancers on the site. But it's not. You could be freelancer for, you know, ah, data input, and you could have the highest job success score uh, on on up work, you could have the best job history, right? But you are not relevant for someone who's searching for Woo Commerz, so relevance has to play a factor. That's the big thing to keep in mind here. Relevance has to play a factor, so they also have a relevant score. What we're doing is we're using that relevant score to our advantage. We're going all in on the revenue relevance score because we don't have the job history. We don't have the portfolio. We don't have that part of it yet. So we have to go all in on relevance to try and get ourselves to rank higher than we might normally for very specific searches in this case will commerce. So that's why you don't want to dilute your tags. You don't want to add 15 tags that aren't relevant toe the very specific thing that you are looking to specialize in. You want to stick to that thing because that's gonna make your profile. It's gonna signal toe up work that your profile is woo commerce highly relevant for Woo Commerz so that when someone does a search search for woo commerce, you are more likely to go to rank higher in that that ranking, then you might normally based off just your quality score. And then as we get clients now we can use, we can build up our quality score will move up much higher in that will commerce ranking. And then we'll reach a point where were consistently ranking really high. Top 12 top five. They do kind of rotated a little bit, but top five, or at least first page consistently for woo commerce. Now we can expand. Right now, we can start to try, and we've got the quality scoring place that we can start toe, be a little bit more aggressive and and broaden our appeal. Okay, so that's what we're doing here. That's why you want to make sure and have very specific targeted title and tags so that we show up higher than we might normally for those particular kinds of searches. All right, so that's it. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. Whatever you you've decided to specialize in, go ahead and write a similar phrase to what I have for the title here, and then search for tags relevant to that and place those things in there. Pretty straightforward. So hope you got something out of that. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you next time. 8. Write a Compelling and Believable Overview: Hey there. John Morrissey of John Morse online dot com. This lesson We're going to dig into the overview here, so this might be probably the the biggest part of this whole thing and maybe the thing that people struggle with the most, because it can be difficult to kind of figure out what to say. So again, this is gonna be driven by our strategy. So that helps Knowing what our strategy is helps us to then be able to write this this sort of thing. But I wanna give you a framework that you can use that I've use over and over and over again for freelancing. Really? For for all sorts of stuff, for getting hired, I've taught to people they've used and come back to me and be like, OK, that worked really well, etcetera. So I just want to give you it's really three simple kind of steps for writing. Your overview are parts of your overview in a particular order that does matter. And once you kind of get that, it kind of writes itself. So let's dive into this. So I'm just gonna delete everything that I had here and okay, so the first. The the first section is proof The SEC second section is specialization. Third, uh, section is how to start. Okay, now these will have a little bit. Some of these will have a little bit of subsection type thing. But these are the big things that you want to. Let's So let's just talk about this for a second. The very first thing that you need to do is establish credibility. It is the single biggest thing that people are looking for when going to hire someone and frankly, is often missing from profiles of freelancers who are struggling is proof. You have to prove that you know what you're talking about that you know what you're doing now. It's not good enough to say I know what I'm doing or to say I'm an expert or to say I'm good at you have to actually show them right. Imagine you're talking to the most skeptical person that you've ever met, and everything you say every argument that you might make you say I'm reliable. They say, I don't believe you. Show me and you then have to prove it to them. Or you say I'm an expert in WordPress. I don't believe you. Show me or, you know, I'm a great web developer. I don't believe you. Show me. That's what you have to do here. So it's not good enough to say I'm an expert in lieu commerce. All right, That's not good enough. Well, you need to say is Hey, I'm John. I've been a freelance. This is why I generally don't type in my coding videos. Freelance Web developer for 12 plus years. Okay, so what am I doing here? I'm speaking to experience, but I'm not saying I'm experienced. I'm saying I've been a freelance developer for 12 plus years, right? The 12 plus years part communicates experience with a fact. Not with me saying I'm experienced. So again, that's the thing you need to to to look for fax actual things that you've done that, that that speak to the arguments you want to make. Now, one thing that I get here often is they'll say, Why don't have 12 years experience? You know, I've only been a web developer for one or two years. Okay? You can't say your experience then, right? If you don't have the proof, the fact to back up that you are experienced. You can't say you're experienced, but saying your experience is not the only way to sell yourself. Okay, you can sell. Sell yourself in other ways. You can sell yourself with talent, or you can sell yourself with that. You know your your new and energetic and ready to get going or you're passionate or you're talented or whatever. Okay, there's lots of ways to sell yourself. There's lots of anybody out there has some sort of advantage is that they can lean on right . If you're fresh out of college and you you've just learned this stuff that actually could be an advantage for you could say, Look, I'm fresh out of college, meaning I've learned. I've just got done learning the latest and greatest in, you know, Web technology. I've just come from learning the most cutting edge stuff, unlike, ah, lot of experienced developers out there who, you know, they're still they've kind of got their own niche, and they're putting this stuff that kind of put this stuff off and learn it when they can. I've just come from learning all of it. I'm eager. I'm ready to get going. I'm ready to build my name and and put, you know, get my portfolio built and get my profile built and make establish a a good reputation. So I'm hungry to really go overboard. You know, I'm young and I'm energetic, and I'm hungry to go overboard for a client. So if you hire me, you're probably going to get someone who's not know, necessarily more experience and maybe a little jaded. You're gonna get someone fresh who's energetic, excited and probably going to give you MAWR because I want to really establish a good reputation than, say, someone who's been doing this a while. So that's a way that you can take what might seem like a disadvantage in experience and turn it into an advantage. Now you, of course, could just take that exact same idea and flip it and say, Look, I'm on experience developer. I've been doing this for 12 plus years. You're not gonna get some a rookie that just came out of college who really has no experience and hasn't been never done anything like this. Never worked with any sort of clients, could flake on you halfway through, could have some sort of mental breakdown and realize that they just spent the last four years getting into something that they have. They realize they don't enjoy, like you don't have to worry about any of that with me. I've been doing this for 12 plus years. I've got an established process. I know this is what I want to do. I've delivered for all of these particular clients and ah, and I can work on your part project like I've done all these other ones. It's It's no big deal for me. I can knock it out and be done right so you could take that idea of experience and you can flip it either way. And that's what you need to do. You need to look at. Matter of fact. I recommend that you take out a sheet of paper and you look at all of write down all of the things right. Advantages and disadvantages. Write down all the things about you in terms of your ability to deliver on a freelance project, an end result for somebody, all the things that could be advantages for you. Maybe it's your experience. Maybe it's your lack of experience, whatever but write down all of the things that you think could be advantages that you have going for you. Then underneath that under disadvantages write down all of the things that you think are working against you. Now take all of the all the things that are advantages Those air sales points that you can use here and what you need to do is for each one of those. What's the proof? I don't believe you. Show me. Remember that. What's the proof that you're experienced? I've been freelancing for 12 plus years. I've worked on 50 plus projects. I worked for this particular client, etcetera. What's the proof for each one of those? For the things that you think are disadvantages. How can you flip him? How can you flip those into advantage? How could that? How could inexperience be an advantage? Try to think that through and figure out a way that these could be Ah, uh, the advantages for you. Okay, so that's what we're trying to do here in this first section. So I've been a freelance Web developer for 12 plus years. I've worked with some of the biggest names in online business, including New York Times best selling author Michael Hi Internet celebrity. I don't know what to call him. Honestly, nobody calls themselves these days Internet celebrity and and entrepreneur. Lewis House. Good guy, By the way, I am several times in person who's could do this house. Ah, famous copywriter Ray Edwards in a magazine and others. Okay, so again, fax, I've worked with some of the biggest name names online business where we're talking about credibility. Great. Why would why would a New York Times best selling author who gets well, half a 1,000,000 or more visits to his website every month? Why would he hire me? Well, maybe it's cause I'm trustworthy, right? That that that's that's a question that you're something that you want to put into their mind. So you just I'm establishing credibility with fax. I'm not. I've never have yet to say I'm experienced. I'm reliable. I'm any of these things and I won't say those things. I am talking about things that I've done. I worked with some of the biggest names in online business, calling New York Times best selling author Michael I. It True Internet celebrity and entrepreneur Lewis House. True Famous Copyright Reddit Ray Edwards. True Inc magazine and others. True. So those are all facts that speak towards credibility, authority, etcetera. Most people in their minds believe those people wouldn't hire me unless I know what I'm doing. Okay, so that's the type of thing that you want to dio. Now, you don't want this to be seven paragraphs, but, you know, you want to really kind of hit those bullets quickly and establish that a crow credibility as much as possible. All right, So again, think through those sales points that we talked about, how can you prove it? Think through the disadvantages. How can you flip them? And then that's what you want to put in. This first section is your proof. All right. Next is specialization. So this mirrors are title. We're going to start with. I specialize in now. I don't specialize in building will commerce sites, but specialize in building woo Commerce websites case now, in reality, I specialize in building membership sites. That's when I built for all of these guys. But I'm gonna assume I'm just gonna pretend for for these purposes that I built these guys e commerce site, right? I built Michael. Hi. It's Platform University and you know, if you can look this up for your clients, here's the thing. If the client is putting out this information publicly, it's fine for you to use if it's something that you learn behind the scenes, maybe asked them or just refrain from using it altogether. But any sort of numbers that you can remember clients don't. Clients don't want you, but that may sound a little weird, but they don't want you. They want what you can give them, right. If they're looking for an e commerce site, they don't even want any commerce site. They want the money that they get from the e commerce site. That's what they want so ultimate you have toe always keep ultimate ends in mind. You are a means to an end. You are a means to get the e commerce site, and the e commerce site is a means to get the money, and the money is a means to get the car, and the car is a means to them. Feel proud and satisfaction. Be able to get from point A to point B, etcetera, etcetera, so you just have to keep ultimate ends in mind. So That's some of the things we're gonna speak to here. I built Michael Heights Platform University, which doubled his revenue in the first year. It was something like that. He put this out publicly. I don't remember exact number. Well, I'm not actually gonna post any of this, so it doesn't really matter exactly what it is, but you get the idea which doubled his revenue in the first year and continues to grow each year. Ah, I'm also worked on Lewis House Web shop, which I don't know any numbers for him. I'm just making this stuff stuff up. Which did? 2.2 million and 20 17 2016 or whatever. Right again, we want to We want to speak to Ultimate ends and we want to again, all the way through. We're providing proof, right? What? We did not what we are. Okay, so I specialize in building woo commerce, Web search websites. I built this website. I built this website. I built this website. And how does that How did that help those people towards the ultimate ends, which are the same as the ultimate ends of the person who might hire me right? Because what that's going to do in their head? Is there gonna be like, Okay, I could have this guy build my website who Ah is good at websites Or I could work with the person who built the website that inspired me to want to build an e commerce website. And that website did double its revenue or did 2.2 million or whatever. This is why I wanna build one. I could work with the guy that built that one or something similar. So you just you you separate yourself from everybody else by speaking to ultimate ends. Go look at profiles. Across up work. You rarely will. You see this sort of thing. It's very, very rare. People don't ever go this far with it. You are going going to stand out in a really good way, and you're going to appeal to what the client ultimately wants. They don't want you. They don't want the website. They want the result, it gives them. And that's what you have to speak to a little bit Now again. Ah, lot of people here say, Well, I don't know. I didn't work with this guy. I don't work with her I didn't work with these people to be able to say that. What did you do, though? That it's not about Hey, I worked with these people, right? It's You gotta look at what you have to work with. Okay, so, you know, maybe it's at school, right? You I worked on this project where we built this particular no, uh, this particular e commerce shop and, you know, in the shop it had all these features, and it was unique in the sense that was able to do this. This and this and this. Right? Maybe that's it isn't about people. It's about the functionality of the thing that you built. And that's what will appeal to to that person. Because they're they're seeing that in there. Look. Oh, man, if I could do that, that would allow me to, you know, if I don't know, you categorize the products in some unique way. Oh, if I If I'm able to do that, you know, it sparks an idea for them. O Now, I could do this, and that's gonna help me make more money, etcetera, etcetera. Or you can speak to how the reason why you built it in this particular way will ultimately help the Web shop to run. But maybe it's we built it, and we we really focused in on the S e O. And so we found that the Web pages when put online tend to rank better versus other e commerce shops because we did a better job with the S e o. Or maybe it's we built it on such and such frank or ah, platform. And that platform is five times faster than the platform you know everybody else uses. And so because we're using this particular platform to build on, uh, your pages are gonna load five times faster, which we all know when it comes to online experience, especially buying experience of page takes to load tow law too long to load, that really ruins the buying experience again. You have to really dig into this and be creative and pull out anything that you've done. How can that be an advantage? How can it speak to their ultimate ends and get creative? Think it through this. This this overview is your big pitch. So it's not something you should should be written in five minutes. It's not I know people. I just want to get this done. You really need to take some time and right and and go through this. This is how you're one of the big ways you're going to get clients. You need to slow down and really focus in on that. Okay. So again, I specialize in Bill building loop commerce websites. I've done this thing speak toe ultimate ends, and then you can move on to how to start. All right, So how to start is he could do something. Like, here's how I work and what I So I'm gonna just talk through what I do. You can kind of adjust this, but I do recommend something similar to get actually on up work. It's gonna be a little bit ah, different. But you. The key here is you want to do future pacing. Okay, So or you could write this like this. This might be a better a better way with this. When you hire me, here's what we would dio Okay. And then you be like, you know, first click the invite button to invite me to your job. Okay? Something like that. You can just set up a little bit once everything is accepted. Oh, jump on the phone with you. You go over all the details and you can again fleshes out. We'll go over all the details. You'd be like colors. Ah, functionality, etcetera. Right again. And you don't have to write exactly what I'm writing here. Okay? And you probably shouldn't. You should you should think through what your process is going to be when you work with someone on up work. How are you going to do it? Maybe you don't want to make a phone call, Okay? So don't put that. Don't do that. Don't say that if you're not gonna do it, or maybe you want to do it a different way or whatever, but you just want to lay out how it's going to work, right? When they click that invite button, what's going to happen? Or, you know, when we get into proposals, if they accept your proposal, what's going to happen? You want its future pacing and it's being a sump tive. So you're you're assuming that they're going to hire you and you're telling them what's going to happen, which alleviates their fear. People are people fear the future, they fear the unknown. So you have to get rid of the unknown by telling them exactly what's going to happen when you hire me. Here's what we're going to dio first thing. I'm gonna jump on a phone call with you, and I'm gonna We're gonna go through all the details. I'm gonna tell me exactly what what it is that you're after. I'm gonna, you know, kind of give you my guidance in my advice on how how I think you should build it, How you know, how we should lay things out, how we should manage this, that or the other. Once we get off that phone call, then, Ah, I always It's a little different for me cause I haven't done up working a lot of years, like I said, but ah, so a lot of my stuff comes through my own website. But what I would do is I would take a 10% retainer with up work. That's that. A nonrefundable fee. It's It's different the process a little bit different with up work because you have to, uh, you know, they they handle that whole sort of thing. So anyway, you say you know, once we get done with the phone call, I will immediately start beginning building the site. I'll build the site on my own. Servers will get a kind of we'll get everything hashed out and all that sort of thing. And then once you agree to everything transferred to your servers, set it all up there and then you can once everything's good and all set up there, then you can go into up work and finalize that the project has been done and issued a payment in that sort of thing that you just want to talk through those details of exactly what's going to happen here. And then you essentially want to end with so sounds good. Just click invite button and we can start. So I always like to use the word we as opposed to me, or I always we right, because a lot of people say, just cooked about. Then I can start. We can start. You want to really make it inclusive and a sump tive as much as possible. Now, if you get to a sump tive, people will notice it and they'll actually be put off by it. So that's why you don't want to say so. You're ready to hire me now, so click the invite button. We can start. It's like if that sounds good just or when you hire me, here's what we would do, right? So when you hire me is a sump tive, here's what we would do Kind of brings it back a little bit, So that phrase doesn't come overly aggressive on them. But again, you just want to future pace and tell them how it's going toe. Look what the process. You want to get rid of that unknown, and then you want to follow that, Uh, you want to end that with what they need to do, like right this Say you always end with what's the one action they need to take right now. And that action is the invite button. Hire me button, etcetera. So you wanna That's what you want to dio, right? So proof specialisation and then how to start slash how it works. Okay, those are the three sections there. And if you just embed that with proof of the advantages of working with you of the sales points for working with you and again it's focused on the proof part of it, then you're going to have an overview that's really appealing and really stands out from a lot of the other ones that are out there. So there it is. In a nutshell. That's kind of the big, probably lesson of of of this course here. But, uh, you know, take some time to write this. Don't don't think gulf. Don't try and write this in 10 minutes. I do the things that I've mentioned. Get out a piece paper. Do the disadvantages advantages? Do the proof elements really think this through is a really big piece of of your profile here. Probably the most important piece, because it's the thing that really is you making your pitch to potential clients. So really, take some time with this, think it all through and then get in there and and write it. And don't don't be afraid to write it. Rewrite it, come back a week later and tweak. If you have another idea talking, just keep working on this thing and making it better and better. And as you get more proof elements, Adam in here it's just gonna help you grow and grow and grow and grow. Right, So hopefully get something out of that. Thanks for watching. Talk to you next time. 9. Record an Engaging Profile Video: hither. John Moore, Sir John Morris online dot com This Listen, we're gonna talk about your profile video. Now, if you want to talk about a way to really separate yourself from everybody else, a profile video is a really great way to do that again. Go on up work, look through the different profiles from freelancers that are out there and see how many of them actually have a video. Pretty rare. But a video is a really great way to to personalized, to make yourself human to the person who's looking at your profile and could be really great way to stand out because so few people do it now. Of course, for a lot of people, creating this sort of video can seem a little daunting. What do I say? I don't make it look good. Video quality, audio quality, that sort of thing. Well, it so happens I happen to run a pretty popular. I mean, relatively speaking, for my niche YouTube channel have about 50,000 subscribers, get AH, 120 130,000 views per month on its a coating channel, so it's not some big comedy channel or whatever, so I've I've created over 3 300 some videos for YouTube. So have a little experience it with this and can speak to some way. And I've done it all from my home and have a professional studio. Wasn't a professional video agua for adding to go to college for any of that sort of thing . So have some experience of how to make this work with, Ah, you know, not knowing what you're doing really, and and doing it with kind of what you have. So let's talk about probably the first big thing, which is how do what do I say? How do what do I say in this video? What? How did I speak and all that? So the thing is, is if you've been falling along with the lessons and you've been doing it as we're going through, which hopefully you have been, you already have your video script because your video script is your overview. What you've written for your overview is now your video script, because that is exactly what you should say. Almost word for word. Matter of fact, the first thing that you should do when you go to record your video is memorize your over you. You should memorize your overview anyway. Why? Because if you ever get asked about Hey, what do you do? Are you know, tell me about your services If you ever get asked, your overview is really what you should be telling people, and so you should have it. It's not same memorized word for word, but have the the main sales points. The different parts that we talked about be able to to kind of spit that out without really having to think about it becomes second nature, so you should be memorizing this anyway. But that also is your video script. That's what you should shut, saying your video is what you wrote in your overview, and you have to worry. I mean, it's not a big deal that if people read your overview and watch your video that relies, it's the same thing that that's not a big deal. A lot of people will do one or the other, and in fact, I would say, if you have a video, most people just watch the video and that's it. But doing it in on a video where they can see you, then it it makes it more real for them, and they can kind of read you, and it makes it more believable in that hole sort of thing. So again, you're your script is your overview. In terms of the quality of the video, the quality does matter. And here's the thing all saying I I'm hesitant to say this because I don't want it to be a reason for you not to do it. But if you can't get a certain level of quality from your video, it would be better not to do it. Okay, so you have to kind of assess that. And don't let that be an excuse not to do it. You should try to do the video anyway and then record the video and take it to someone, not a friend. That's just gonna tell you, Oh, no matter what, take it to the person that you know. Well, if it's crap, they'll tell you it's crap. That's the person that you want to take it to. So and have them look at it. And if that person is like No, that's good, that's actually pretty good. Then you're probably fine, okay? Or if you don't have a person like that, a try and find one you like, but be really be hard on yourself in and assess it. OK, But you do want a certain level of quality now when we talk about quality that when it comes to video, there's some really kind of key things that matter. First off is you and your appearance, and we've already kind of talked about what's necessary for for for that And that is, go back to what we talked about with your profile picture, a nice shirt, a nice smile, a nice background, simple colors, plain colors or solid colors, all that sort of thing. Everything we talked about in the head shot video, the profile pic video. Our lesson is everything that applies when you go to record a video, okay and really seem with the background. As a matter of fact, whatever you set up to take your profile picture, use that to record your video. That would work really, really well, matter of fact, my profile picture on up work. At the time that I took it, I took it in the place where I was recording my videos against the background. I was of recording against at that time with the camera that I used to. I mean, it was my video set up, and I just took a picture with it. So those two things can are all really identical things to add on top of what you did for your profile picture. Because, really, if you think about it wherever you took your profile picture, the framing of that really is perfect for a video. Now there's just a couple of things. It's the only thing that's really different set of snapping a picture you're hitting record . So what matters then? On top of that is, ah, a lighting because with the video, with ah picture even going to photo shop or some video photo editor and turn up the brightness and it's not too big of a deal with video usually have to crank up the brightness too much. It starts toe become problematic, so you just want to make sure you have good lighting wherever you're doing it. One of the biggest new look at videos One of the biggest signals of unprofessionalism is the lighting is bad. Okay, so just make sure you have good lighting. I have studio lights that I bought. But I bought this whole kit for like, 150 bucks. Gave me three lights with all of the diffusers and all that it gave me. Ah, the stand for backdrop And I got, like, two or three backdrops with it. Um, you could do that sort of thing, but ah, again, It could be simple for lighting as going toe like a Home depot on getting some work lamps. Now, don't put floodlights in inflates or way too bright. Get kind of the You can get the soft light, maybe 40 or 60 watt bulbs and put those in the I'm thinking of the clip on work lights with that have, like the chrome kind of shield thing on him. You can use those and just get some 40 or 60 watt bulbs. It's kind of play around that. It kind of depends on um, you know where your what you're your set up is like how much light you're gonna need. But that can work really great. You may need two or three or four of them in orderto kind of get some real lighting, but those things are super cheap. The light bulbs or super cheap. And generally, you know, depending on how he's all set it up, that that can be good enough for what you need for your lighting. Um, if you want to get professional and you can go online and look for some professional lights with diffusers and all that. But for a lot of years, I just used the work lamps and just had enough of him that I had the light that I needed and placed them so that I was getting kind of even, like just across across my frame that I was recording into. It's a lighting that's the first second thing. And because it's second doesn't mean it's the least important. It's actually probably the most important thing is audio quality sounds strange with video , but when it comes to video, the most important thing is the audio quality. And so there are you, you know, depending on what camera you would use in that sort of thing. No, I use I use an actual camera, a Nikon D 5200 But you could use an iPhone if you have an iPhone or an android phone. But though the microphones that are built into those things really aren't going to be all that great. So what really what I do for for those sorts of videos from the talking heads sorts of videos these days as I use a lapel mike and so a lapel. Mike, let's just jump over here real quick. We can do a pedal on like all right, so you can find all sorts of lapel mikes. I actually think I think the roads Smart lab is the one that I have, so I got it for 80 bucks, but you can see wireless lovelier. Mike's is what They're old, all these air wireless ones. You don't even need a wireless wanna wired ones just fine. Um, but you can see they have all sorts of different options here. They may even have this at your local best Buy like this for 18 bucks. Okay, now, this isn't going to be as good quality as the higher price ones, that's for sure. But it's almost certainly going to be better quality than what's built into your phone. And so essentially, you take this and you just plug it into whatever you're recording with, and you do have to be a little bit careful because your phone is designed. Most phones. Smartphones are designed to take what's called TR R s. Essentially, it's designed to work with both headphones and a microphone. Okay, so the connections on the end of it, if we look at the connections Ah, the connections that Yes. So this actually is tr r s because it has thes three rings, right? Where's the T R S on? Lee has to a TRS can on Lee take the mic input. It can't do the mic and headphone. And so if you tried to plug, if you try to plug some things that's designed to take on li the only do the microphone into something that's search looking for microphone Ah, and headphones the rings on here. These rings don't match up. Okay, so you do have to pay attention to that a little bit, but you can type type like lapel microphone for iPhone, for example. Okay, and maybe even your version on. So just say iPhone seven, and you'll see Okay, there's this. Sure, let's see what it says, right. There's the sure one, and usually somewhere in the description, it's going to tell you if it if if it works with those sorts of of devices. Okay, so maybe this one doesn't say so. Maybe it's not one that we want to go with, or you could look it up and research into it. Ah, a little bit more iPhone. Here's a iPhone seven microphones. Okay, so where he could be android Google pixel lapel microphone. Usually, though, if it's gonna work with an iPhone that's gonna work with any android. But you can see all sorts of options here for a microphone. And so here you have this sort of thing. This is kind of neat. This might work pretty well. Um, I have a zoom H one which records pretty well. You have this eye rig thing here. You have the Sennheiser clip. Mike, this could probably be something that works really well for Ah, you're your iPhone. If you have that, you can find other stuff. You can again do the same search for ah, for android and so forth. But point being is that the audio quality really really matters. It's probably the most important thing. So again, it's worth investing a little bit into ah, microphone like this so that the audio quality that you get is really good. So again, take everything that we talked about from the head shot in terms of your attire, how you look your background in the frame of all of this. Take that. All of that applies to the video you condone. Quite literally. Use the same spot that you use for your headshot and then add into it. Make sure you have good lighting and make sure you have good audio with some sort of microphone that you can plug into your camera or your iPhone or whatever. And then sit down and you have your overview memorized and just get on camera and go through the overview. And don't be afraid to ad lib where you think is necessary. Toe. Add inflection and just speak how you speak. But again, what you should say is generally what's in your overview. So I know this won't be for everybody. I mean, there's a lot of people are just like I will never do video, and I get it. But if you if you want a way that you can really stand out ah and separate yourself from other freelancers on sites like up work. This is a really good way to do it. And hopefully that gives you some tips for how to get that done. All right, That will do it for this lesson. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you next time. 10. Create an Eye-Opening Portfolio (Even Without Previous Client Work): Hey there. John Morrissey, John morse online dot com. In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about your portfolio. So along with your overview, your portfolio is probably could be debated. Which one's gonna be viewed? Mawr. Which one is going to be more important? Probably the portfolio A little bit. Um, but both are very, very important. But we're gonna get into kind of the portfolio, and I want to give you a strategy again. I'm if you have a bunch of portfolio items that you can put in here, then I mean, you're pretty much set to go. You just want to put them all in there. Ah, stuff you've worked on. But I'm again taking the position of someone who maybe doesn't have all of this stuff. You're brand new to getting into this and how you can go about doing this. Ah, when you don't have all these client projects you worked on because you're just getting started, right? So I'm back over here on our woo Calmer search. I've done the filters, and I just first off want to start by showing you ah, few things over here. So we're gonna look at some of these You're gonna see this? Has this is telling you how many portfolio items they have, How many times they have in their port for those? This one has 10. This one has nine. We have 20 here we have eight 11 26 52. We have five. We have none, apparently. And we have four. Okay, so you have the 50 twos you have the 26 is you have the twenties, but you also have the nuns. You also have the fours and the fives, even 10. I mean, I think a lot of people think I gotta have 100 things in my portfolio. But you really you really don't? For example, look at Eric J. Here. Nothing in his portfolio. 65 an hour and 40 k plus earned. Now, I don't necessarily recommend not having anything in your portfolio, but you can kind of He's obviously able to still get clients without it. Here we have four portfolio items and 20 k earned five portfolio items and 20 k earned. Now you'll see some of these people 30 2011 and 100 k earned. So 11 portfolio Adams and 100 Cayard. That's I mean, I think most people would think that at 100 K this person would have 100 things in their their portfolio. So again, having stuff in your portfolio is important. I think you need to do that. But you don't need to stress that. I've gotta have 1000 things starting out. You get 45 things in your portfolio. Your find my portfolio when I start out had three. Now they were three big ones. But there's it was still only three items, and it and I was just fine. Right? So now let's just kind of click through. So you maybe could learn a thing or two from someone who's, um no made 100 K on up work. One thing I want you to notice here. Uh, if he said he starts out, I'm a top rated senior WordPress Commerce PHP Web developer. Eight years experience in solving problems. So he's starting off with proof now. He could probably go more in depth. He probably has, you know, 100 k on here. He probably has more experience that he could go into, but he does start off with proof, and then he goes into I built everything from presentation sites to real estate, directory dating and serums, all using WordPress and woo commerce. So again he's getting into things that he's done. Ah, and kind of proving that he's experienced by. Here's all the different things that I've built now again, he could be more specific, specific, more specific is always better. But I just want to kind of show you that for the overview, because that's exactly really what we talked about. You can actually see right here, he says. Just click the green invite to job like he's following that exact pattern. Proof What I do. Here's how to get started, All right, So if we scroll down to his portfolio now, you can see he's got I think he had 11 or whatever. Well, it's pretty, pretty straightforward here. I mean, this is just stuff that he's built here. I mean, this looks really, really nice, but at the same time, this is also probably a template. You could probably find a similar template over on rap bootstrap or in a WordPress theme or whatever. So it's not ah, it's not something that's impossible for other people to dio. Ah, this is logo design and branding Mrs Logo design and branding. This is another website he's done. Looks really nice. So he's, he's his portfolio looks pretty good, but it's not just jam packed with all sorts of things. But what I want you to notice here is that the items that he has in his portfolio here's the mistake a lot of people make is they want to put everything in their portfolio, and the reality of it is sometimes the things that we make some of the projects of we worked on aren't necessarily always like we look back on, and we're like that wasn't necessarily the greatest design or looked the best or whatever. And our tendency is to want to put that in there. It's better for you to not put that in there than to have it in there and and have it created an impression that doesn't benefit you. That actually works against you. But the big thing here is notice all of these, they're all visually appealing. That's, um like it or not, wherever you go in, whatever you do in Web development, what people are initially drawn to his own always visual appeal that's always going to catch people's eye, and it's always something you can use to our advantage. So the portfolio items that you pick. You want to try to stick to stuff that the most visually appealing. Okay, so most people aren't going to click this and read each one of these. They're just not. So you're talking about all the functionality and they're doing it wrong. You should, because there will be those few people who do. But the bulk of people are never going to read that. And so if you have something where maybe the picture, the screenshot you have isn't as visually appealing. But you're thinking OK, but the description. You know, I did all of this stuff. All this functionality that's in here. That portfolio item is probably going to work against you because they'll never read the description, and but they will look at the picture. And if it's not as visually appealing, then there's a good chance that they're going to that's going to work against you. So when you're thinking about what goes in your portfolio and we're talking about putting your best portfolio items in there, what I'm really saying is the most visually appealing ones. Okay, so just keep that in mind as you doing your portfolio items. Now to get to the people who you like. I have no portfolio items, So this is all a moot point. Here's the thing you do not meet. Your portfolio does not need to be filled with stuff that you did for clients. Here's a really classic example. Have you ever seen a picture? I'll look it up here for you. The Vitruvian, the true Vienne man, you probably never heard that before, but you probably have seen this picture before this right here. You've probably seen this before and this was done by Leonardo da Vinci is actually one of the more famous things that he's done that people have seen or whatever is this little sketch in the variations of it and so forth. Now what is this right? One of one of the things that he's you know, known for in history that he created. What is it? It's not something he did for a patron. It's not something that's not one of he only did like I think it was like 20 some actual commissioned paintings in his lifetime. Most of the stuff that people talk about from him actually comes from his notebook, which is what this is. This is Ah, page from his notebook where he was laying out, he was drawing out the different dimensions. Realism was a really big thing at that time. And so he was trying to g jum geometrically get the exact proportions of a human being so that when he went to paint when he painted a human being and and had all of their proportions laid out on his canvas, it was it was perfectly symmetrical. And it was the right proportions that matched how people actually look in in real life. And so that's what this, this this sketch ultimately was was him trying to do that, trying to build a system for how he could paint a human figure and make it look realistic. So what I'm getting at is the things that the things that you can become, the things that people pay attention to and become known for and can help you get people right like this was something that he would when he was trying to get commissioned work. This is one of the things that he might point to and say Look, I figured out the exact proportion. So if you're looking for a realist painting, I have the exact I can give you the most riel painting out there because nobody else has figured out the science behind the geometry behind this. I have. And so this was something he could use to to sell his work to get commissioned paintings. So again, your portfolio, what I'm driving at doesn't need to be filled with stuff you've done for clients. All it needs to do is show off what you're capable of doing. And so if you have no portfolio Adams right now, you have no clients. You have no job history. You're just getting started. You can still have items in your portfolio. The way you do that is you go out and you're like, OK, I'm gonna build loop commerce sites for people, go out and build a cut woo commerce site for nobody. He was building it just to put it in your portfolio. Okay, so go out and build it and then take screenshots, make it vision really visually appealing. Take screenshots and put it into your portfolio and then here. What you say is this is a study I did for a woo commerce site, you know? And here's what I was. Here's kind of what I was thinking. Here's why I built it this particular way, etcetera. But just say this is a study, or this is an example. I don't pretend like it was for a client. Just say this is something I just built, right? And then once you have that one done, go build another one and build five of them. A. You could probably reuse that code and actually delivering you may get clients back. Whoa. I like that one. Give me that. And you're like, Whoa, well, I already built it, So let me just transfer it over so it's helpful in that regard. But it also allows you to put stuff in your portfolio when you know you haven't had any clients, and it's perfectly fine to do that. You just make sure you don't lie and try to say this was a four clients say right in there . This is a study. This is an example. Whatever. So and again, a lot of people aren't even gonna read that part of it, and even if they do, they don't really care. Because when they're hiring you, what they want is to be able to see what you can do. And that's what your portfolio is. So if you have no portfolio, am's or you just have one or if you try to get to five, that would be my minimum number. Try to get to five and to get to five. If you have to go out and build something for nobody for no client at all, build it and then put that take screenshots and putting your portfolio. Then as you get clients on here and you're building these sorts of things, take now. Take screenshots of that project and replace your studies with actual client projects over time until all you have in here is client projects. Because, yes, that is better. But having studies is better than nothing. You don't want nothing. You know the one guy Eric J. I think it was kind of got away with that, But most cases you're probably not gonna be able to get away with that. People are gonna want to see your portfolio items, so don't be afraid to do studies to do that. All right, so those are kind of the big things. Focus on making your portfolio visually appealing. That's probably the That's really the more important thing than anything else. And to you can. If you don't have portfolio times, fill it with studies that you've done of example sites that you've built until you can then replace it with actual client projects. All right, hopefully found that helpful. Thanks for watching contact you next time. 11. Tests, Certifications, Employment History, Etc: Hey, John Morris. Here, John Morris online dot com. This lesson We're going to kind of wrap together. Some of the, uh I would say miscellaneous parts of your profile here and talk through some of the questions that I've got pretty regularly about all this stuff and how to go about doing this sort of thing. So specifically we're talking about, ah, certifications, tests, employment history, education and other experiences. These are things that you can you can fill out on your up work profile. Um, that, you know, can have benefit or not, depending on the situation. So we're gonna talk through the so first off, we'll actually start with the the certifications. So if you have those certifications than ah, it's perfectly fine to put them on there. The more relevant they are, the better. But I think if if you have any sort of certification is probably better to put it on there than to not even if it's not pretty, ah, 100% relevant. Okay, So that that and that's gonna be true for most of these things, except for one. Basically, your certifications, your employment history and your education all are the same. It's better to put it on there than not put it on there. I mean, if you have ah, degree, it's better to put that on there than they not put it on there. If you've worked for, you know, your job history, probably better to put on there than not put on there. But the more relevant it is, the better. So, for example, he has this employment history of senior developer, a cama design that's relevant to what he does. In a way, it's a developer position, a master of computer applications. So he has a master's in a computer related field bachelor of Applied science. Again. He has a bachelor's degree in a computer related fields, so it's better to put that stuff on there than to leave it off. The more relevant, the better. But again, if you have it, put it on there. If you don't have it, don't worry about it. I mean, most of the clients aren't. They're just they're going through this stuff so fast. Most aren't going through your whole employment and education history anyway. But like I said, if you have it, it's better to put it on there. Ah, when we talk about other experiences? I think so. We'll come back to other experiences. Let's talk about tests first. So this is probably the biggest question that I get. What tests should I take? So you first off, I think you still have to take the up work readiness test. It might still be called the ODS writing this test. Um, pretty sure you still have to take that one. There's a couple that are that one, maybe a couple of their required. So you take those tests and l you if you score while you put him on there, for example, we just go back toe mind for a second here. We'll see if it's still the case here. I don't quite, uh, remember here, but yeah. So the ODS readiness test, um, I out of five point. Oh, this used to say top 1% of all freelancers now just says past, but used to say top 1%. So that's if you're in that. Then I would put that on there or whatever, but you know, you'll see here if we go down again. I Stalinist page, But just go ahead and click into here and he's another one that ranks high for work. Were President Luke Homers, Right? So this is when it comes to tests. This is generally my recommendation. You see, he has the one test relevant to what he does. He's he's, ah, specializing in woo commerce. There's probably not a Woo commerce test, but there is a WordPress test, and so he's taken the WordPress test, and he scored a 4.95 out of five. And he's in the top 10% of freelancers, and he you can see here. He completed in 13 minutes, and he scored a 4.95 So you want the test that you put on here because you can choose whether to show them or not right? You don't have to show every test, so show the ones that are relevant to what you're doing and show the ones where you've scored high. What I see often is people will take a test and they'll score of three out of five, and they'll put it on there that that's not a test you want to show. That's not helping you. Scoring a three out of five of 60%. That's mean on a high score that could be failing. So that's not something that you want to show. I generally say if your 4.5 or higher, then to put it on there, because that will usually get you in the top 20 around the top 20%. I believe again that fluctuates spending. One other people are scoring, but that'll get that that's high enough. That's a 90%. That's that's pretty good in terms of the score. And then you also want the ones that are relevant. So what test should you take? The ones relevant what you do? What test should you show the ones that you scored well on and you can retake tests. So if you take it and you score bad, just don't show it. I think they make you wait a little while to retake it. So wait a little while and then when you can retake it, retake it and just keep doing that until you score well on it. And then once you score well on it, you put it on your profile and then never take it again. So that's how you handle tests. Finally, other experiences. This is a block where you could just kind of put in other stuff, right? So if you have ah, you know, when you write your overview, you generally want to stick to the really high impact stuff, right? You want a toe, you can't write eight pages there. You have to stick to a couple paragraphs and keep it short. So, uh, if you have other stuff that doesn't really fit up there in terms of sales points and proof All right, again, this is other experiences. So really about proof, things that you've done, that you feel a relevant. But they weren't high impact enough to nestle. Put in your overview. That's what you put in your other experiences. Okay, So if you have that stuff, um, then then then put that in there. All right, So And really, most of these outside of probably the tests are really kind of optional. That's the other thing here. I really don't think that clients placed too much emphasis on this. They're going to read your overview, and they're gonna look at your portfolio. That's generally the two big things that are gonna matter in terms of hiring in your job history, on up work itself. Right. So this job history up here, that's what they're gonna look at near rating and whether your top rated developer and all that sort of thing. So 99% job success. Oh, how many hours worked? Two jobs. What? You earned all that sort of thing. So those are the big things that they're going to look at? Um, these other things air. A really kind of optional test is probably when they look a little bit more at. But if you don't have good stuff to put in there, just don't put anything in there. It will be perfectly fine. All right. All right. Well, I'll do it for this lesson again. Thanks for watching detector next time. 12. Class Project: Build Your Upwork Profile: Hey there, John Moores. Here, John Morris online dot com. So let's talk about the class project. Really? The class project is to complete your up work profile. That's what I want. That's the action item I want you to have done as a result of going through this. So, you know, if you were able to follow along with the videos and build your profile along as you watch the videos them great, you probably already have your profile built. Well, what I would encourage you to do is submit your profile as a project on and then I can actually and and others in the community can take a look at it and maybe give you some tips and so forth. So if you want some feedback on your profile, be sure to go ahead and submitted as your project for this class. If you haven't, then we're gonna kind of go through the steps briefly and on in the class project description and then kind of do that over here on up work soap. What I would do is I would kind of split screen like this if you can put the project over here. So you can go through the steps and then put up work over here. So if you go to your kind of long in tow up work, you should have Ah, Page that's similar to this is your feed your home page? Just click view profile. And then once you're in here, you can see there's all these little different edit buttons that come up so we can edit are our title and all that sort of stuff rate on the page here. So once you have that, then I would really just kind of go through the steps. So post the quality headshot. Now there's a ton of description in here. There's also the video that supports this, right? So there's all the information you need in order to make your headshot quality. Is there for you to do that? But once you have that, then you just simply click on your actual picture. And I have one in here, so I would be uploaded. Different photo, but you just click the upload button, go ahead and uploaded into your hit save, and that will update your picture. Okay, so that's step one is your picture. Step to then is to edited at Enter Targeted Title and Tax. So we talked again about starting with the words I specialize in making sure you're talking about the keywords that matter for the market that you're targeting in this case, woo commerce and potentially WordPress. If you wanna put that in there, whatever that is for you again, we kind of have those summarized right here. Makes your title tags include relevant keywords. Speak to your client in your title and start your title with I specialize in. So that's what you want to do here again. Just click this. This will pop up and you can edit it in there. All right, Part three is to write your overview. So down here again, just click this button and that will pop this up for you to edit. And again, over here on the left, I've summarized the three sections you need. You need a proof section, a specialization section and how to start section really recommend If you haven't watched the video for this step on how to write your overview, Go watch that video. It's a little bit longer video, I know, but it really gives a ton of detail about exactly how to do this and go through it a couple times if you have to. This is a really, really important section of your profile. So spend if if you're gonna spend a ton of time, this is the time place to spend the most time is on the overview. All right. Next is record an intro video. Now, this is optional, of course. But as I said, you already have most of the things that you need in place to be able to do this. You have a place where you took your headshot, hopefully can reuse that place. So you probably already have that place set up and a frame that you can kind of use for your where your video would be shooting that you use for your headshot. Ah, you know, you already have your script. It's what you wrote. I just wrote in your overview. So you have the script that you need for it, and I imagine most of you probably have some sort of smartphone that you can use if you don't have some sort of expensive camera. Or you could have a friend that has a smartphone that you could borrow or something like that to where you could be able to actually record the video on. The only thing that you really might need is some sort of microphone for audio. And there was, Ah, I showed you again in the video I showed you for this step. I showed you a really like, I think was three or four, maybe a $7 option that you can get at. I think it was best buy as a microphone. That will be good enough. It'll be better than what you would get on your just the audio from your phone. So really inexpensive option for that. And then, of course, there's If you really want to go in for quality there, there's way more expensive options that have a lot better is really crank up the quality. But again, you have most of everything. You need to be able to do this, so it's optional. But, man, you could really you could really stand out by doing that so really heavily. Consider doing that. Next. Is your pope portfolio again? Another really big part of your your ah, your profile Here. Here's where you add portfolio items can you could see title overview, thumbnail image files. You know, all sorts of categories. Ah, was this done on up work, etcetera? So I mean everything you need to put all the information in here about this particular project. Like I mentioned, stick, the things that were are visually appealing. Um, and if you have to do, do studies in order to be able to fill this up with stuff, But be sure you have something in here you see here only have three. I had three on This is what I did for the longest time. And I mean, it worked fine for me. Now, it's been a little while since I've actually, you know, uh, used up work. I was able to get off of it and start freelancing for my own website, which, you know, we may talk about at some point another course, But, ah, you know, this Just have something in here. It's better than nothing. And if you have do studies than do that And then, of course, the certifications, the tests, the history, educational, that stuff, as I mentioned, use it if you have it. Ah, you know, if you have a degree by all means put it up there. If you have a some sort of semi related certification, put it up there. The tests are probably the biggest caveat there, you know, put tests that are relevant. But if you get a low score on him, you don't really want to put that test there. This one actually is kind of against my rule. It's Ah, you said usually 4.5 and higher. This owns 4.4, but because it's in the top 10% that's why I went ahead and put this on here. So, you know, use your own intuition there. But if you got a three something on anything below a four, for sure, I wouldn't put on there. And I would really try to stick is close to 4.5 as possible So you could retake those all that sort of thing. But get those on there. So entered, all that information it and that's it. You're profiles. Now, set up this point. You have a picture. You've got a really good overview. You got a good portfolio, all of your tests and all that stuff done. You may even have a profile video, which is really going to set you apart, Got your tags on line. You got your title online. You're really ready to go and get out there and start bidding on jobs And when people. Now, when you bet on jobs and write your proposals and people click over to view your profile, say Okay, what's what's this personal about? Your You're gonna have a profile in place that really it's gonna put your best foot forward and do the best you can in order to sell them on hiring you. So that's the class project again. I would do it just like this. If it were me, I would put the class project from skill share over on the left. I would put the up work over on the right, and I would just walk through the steps and get it knocked out. So and then again, post post when you get yours done posted so that all of us can kind of take a look and give you feedback and that sort of thing. All right, so let's get the class project done. I look forward to seeing your profile and how you go about doing it, so that will do it for this. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to next time 13. The Competition: one of the first things toe really nailed down when it comes to bidding and and and winning jobs over on up work is the competition aspect of it. Now, I think most freelancers, when they go on up work, realize pretty quickly how much of a competition it ISS, and you certainly are competing with other freelancers. However, you're not only competing with other freelancers and the big distinction I want toe I want you to get from this lesson is this idea of you could call it the trust threshold. You could call it the higher threshold. But every clock, every potential client who may hire you has a threshold at which you know above that they're gonna hire you or they'll consider hiring you based off where you land with other freelancers below that, they're not going to hire you. And it doesn't matter if no, you're better than every other freelancer. If you're below that threshold, you're still not gonna get hired and a common sort of problem that freelancers face on up work and just in general. But you'll see it specifically or especially over on up. Work is you'll go and you'll bid on a job in there, maybe 20 or 30 other people who bet on a particular project or job, and the client ends up not hiring anybody. And a lot of times, what happens is people will look at that and go, Oh, well, that's a fake job or that was, Ah, scam job or whatever And the reality is is that the reason? By all means they could be. But I've definitely seen it before and think that more often. The case is that the those particular clients never connected enough or never felt like they trusted a particular freelancer that bid on their job enough to hire anybody. And so they just end up not hiring anybody at all. And so you always have to remember that your complete you're competing with that threshold and the client's own skepticism and fear, and you have to take steps, and we're gonna talk about what those steps are as we go through this course. But you have to continually push that trust level up to the point that you crossed that threshold and get oclock get into the higher zone, so to speak, and then on top of that, you also have to then compete any out, compete any other freelancer who also gets above that threshold. So there's sort of two competitions that are happening here. Other freelancers, of course, but also the client's own skepticism, their fear, their their natural sort of distrust. You have to compete with that as well. So a lot of the stuff we're gonna talk about in here really is about mastering your sort of own game and your own pitch and just getting you above that threshold. And oftentimes, if you could do that, that's 90% of the battle you're gonna You're gonna win the job simply by getting over that threshold. 14. It's NOT a Number Game: The next thing that I want to cover when it comes to bidding and winning on jobs is this idea of the numbers game. And I'll admit upfront. This is a little bit of a rant, but again, I think it's something that we need to sort of knock out of the way and allow you to sort of free you up to to freelance in a way that's gonna be beneficial for you. So ah, common thing that you'll hear when it comes to freelancing and even sales in general is that it's a numbers game and what's interesting to me. A lot of times, people who sort of buy into this idea that it's a numbers game, often a company that that sort of talk with complaining about the fact that no clients bid low on up work and they have toe send out hundreds of of inner proposals or bids for jobs and so forth in order to get hired. And they sort of lament the fact that it's a numbers game and reality with up work is the upward is the largest freelancing site on the planet. There are thousands and thousands of jobs or whatever the exact numbers are posted to up work on a daily basis, and there are absolutely clients over there who are looking for the lowest bidder you know , don't necessarily realize the importance of really high quality or having to pay for high quality who think that they can get really high quality for a really, really low price. All that those people those clients air there. There's also clients who've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on up work. There are clients who really care about quality. They pay no high premiums. You confined freelancers on up work, for example, who charge in excess of 60 70 80 9100 125 $200 an hour. And they've had more than 1000 hours billed. They've made No. 34 $500,000 on up work, and so ah, and so there's whatever game you want to play. You can play it on up work. You can play the numbers game. You can play a sort of a low quality game, or you can play a value game. You can play high wall, high quality games so again you can play whatever game you want, and the big point here is if you don't want to play his numbers game. If you want to play that low quality game, then don't play it. You have that choice, so don't go out and bid on 20 jobs a day. Don't just bid on any sort of job that comes up in your feet. Don't copy and paste your proposals. Now All of these things are you playing that numbers game? And if you don't want to play it, stop playing it Instead. Focus, air, switch over and play a quality game. When you play a quality game, there's some things that you have to do. So you have to no analyze the clients whose projects you bid on. Don't just again take any any client or any project. No, not not even bid on jobs that are out of your budget Ranger. If you do, don't lower your budget in order to just get the job and explain. Take time to explain to the client potential client why they should care about quality and why that their their budget for the project doesn't really match up and take the time to do that. Take the time to actually read through projects and figure out what a client wants and see if you're a good fit for it. And if you are, then take the time to hand right your bid in your proposal, all of these things, you know and again, we're gonna go through a lot of these as we go through the course. But all of these things are things that you can do to switch from playing a numbers game to end switch to playing a quality game. And again, that game is absolutely 100% available for you on up work. As I said, there are freelancers who charge in excess of 60 70 $80 an hour who have thousands of hours billed who have made 102 34 $500,000 over on up work. It's it's completely possible it's just up to you to decide to start playing that game, and the thing about it is, when you do start, we switched to playing that game. What you'll notice is that you often get a lot more response from clients because they can tell that you actually took the time to read their project your your rate of how much the amount of projects you bid on in the amount of response you get from clients in amount of time, the amount that you get hired, that rate will increase. And you'll very quickly reach a point where you don't have to go out in a bid on a ton of jobs because you know what to say to get the jobs that you actually want. And that's gonna for you up then to pursue the high paying jobs, the quality jobs and so forth. So once you have that confidence, that's what's gonna free you up, to be able to, to go out and bid on those quality jobs. 15. Trust as a Strategy: So the last sort of concept or principle that I want to cover before we get into the sort of nuts and bolts off actually going on up work and doing this is this idea of trust as a strategy, and the big point to get here is clients don't hire freelancers that they don't trust at some level. So we talked about that. That threat threshold again. It's a trust threshold. So a lot of times it can be easy to get caught up in in writing fancy bios or trying toe, you know, be really persuasive and so forth. But at the end of the day, what matters is trust and they have. You have to get them to the point where they believe that you can deliver on their project . That's the key point, and the way you do that is you have to prove it to them. So one example of this is a lot of times you'll see, you know, I'll read bios over on up work and they'll say things like I'm experienced or I'm reliable or I'm trustworthy. Telling people those things is not enough. Saying you're experienced is anybody can say that But when you say something like I've been a freelancer for 15 years now, or a Web developer or a designer or whatever it is that you do, I've been this particular thing for X amount of years. Well, that's, Ah, hard fact. And that's something that they can actually look up and see your they could try t get some sort of hard proof that that that's actually true. But it is a It's a fact that communicates the same thing. So when you say I've been a freelancer, I've been a developer, designer, whatever for 15 years. What that communicates is that your experienced But you do it anyway. That is fact based instead of just instead of claim based. So what you want to avoid doing is making claims and instead providing proof. So if you want to say I'm reliable again, you're not going to say I'm reliable. You can say I was trusted by so and so big name client to to handle, you know, x number of projects at a time, or handle their website that had, you know, 10,000 users on it, and I was I was trusted to handle the transition to a new platformer. Whatever it is that you have in your past history that you can use as proof. Now, now, some of you are not necessarily gonna have that past history, right? So one of the things that you can do is you can leverage whatever you have. So one of the things that I did when I first got into freelancing is I was actually I would leverage my military experience. So when I was in Iraq actually managed a warehouse, and that warehouse had about $3 million of inventory. And so when I wanted to communicate that I was trustworthy early on, I would say I was I was trusted with managing $3 million worth of inventory, and in our Year of End audit, our inventory was only $500 off, which was several $1000 almost $10,000 or so below the threshold allowable threshold. So out of $33 million we only lost $500. That's a pretty good sort of account accounting and accountability, so that's not directly related to Web development. But it is something that helps communicate trust and so you can use those things if you have some other career that you have been a part of, Or maybe you were involved with sort of, ah, projects in college, as you were getting maybe a C s degree. Or maybe you took a boot camp and there were things that you did there that you can leverage that again. Things that actually happened in your past that you can use to prove the claims that you want to make. And again, that's how you get people to trust you. So move from claims over into proof. Now, if after all of that, you're still looking at a going, I don't have anything, Then before you go and try toe get work and that sort of thing, you need to go and get some proof first. So maybe you go and work on some open source projects. Or maybe you go, ah, and and do do a little bit of free work in order to get a little bit of a portfolio and testimonials built up. Or you volunteer somewhere, do something along those lines to get get some proof. You don't have to have a ton. The other thing that you can do is things like your portfolio, your certifications, your specialization, uh, or specializing even just being passionate about something can provide certain elements of proof. So one of the things that I recommend in particular when it comes to your portfolio, and I talked about this quite a bit and module to. But as an example, instead of having to use client work, you can just go out and create websites that are relevant to the services you're going to offer and put those in port your portfolio. And that's sort of an element of proof that you know what you're doing. You know how to build these types of sites? Here's five of them that I've built now. I didn't build those for any clients, but you can see right here I know how to build this kind of site. You could see what it looks like inking idea of how it functions and so forth. And so again, whatever you gotta do to move from claims over into providing proof, go out and do that. And then when you're writing your bios, when you're writing your port for your bids in your proposals and all that sort of thing, you have those elements of proof to drawn me personally. You know, I sort of reference all the time the fact that I've worked on projects for Tim Ferriss Inc magazine Michael Hyatt Lewis House. These are all in different circles, at least the circles that I I worked in all really well known and famous people and so provides an an air of credibility and authority toe what I say So again, whatever those things are fine. Those and remember, it's trust as a strategy, and the way that you do that is you move from claims over into proof. 16. How to Find the Best Jobs: Now let's talk about finding the best jobs or the most ideal jobs for you on the platform. Give me talk about this quality game. So let's let's now start learning how to play that. So one of the mistakes I think a lot of people make is they sort of just use this job, feed that you get right here on the front page of your of your freelancing log in here, sort of just 10 just kind of scroll through these and see what's what's available there. And the problem with that is that this is yup, work tries to make this relevant to you and what you do. But who knows, really, what the order is here, sort of random. And, you know, the jobs that we see here may not be the absolute best jobs that are available. For example, you go from a job where the client has a payment verified. There have, like over 4.68 stars. They've spent over 100 K on the site. The very next job you have a client who the payments on verified has no ratings and has spent zero on the site. Those two jobs are completely. It's not just the topic. They're in two different worlds, and so you want to be able to hone in on the cream of the crop. Now, another mistake that people make is they may do something like this where they actually do search. I would say this is pretty common, and again we get a list over here, and this is us only jobs, but it's 1549. So again we just sort of scroll through here and see what's available. And it's sort of random again. You'll see down here we have No zero spent, zero spent, zero spent, zero spent, 300 spent and five K spent two K spent 10 case. These jobs were completely and totally different in terms of the quality of these jobs. So what you want to do is you want to get really good with these filters, and this is sort of how you find the best job so you can see there, you know the obvious. The criterias here is sort of obvious, but you need to hone in on what your what your ideal settings are. And so there's there's sort of a pattern for how you do this. First off, you need to decide. Do you prefer hourly or fixed price jobs? Okay. I generally recommend that the most ideal type of job is often the fixed price job. So let's just go ahead and sit fixed price jobs here and the experience level will just say any experience level for now. Um, just because, you know, we're sort of opened any experience level type jobs, client history. 10 plus is the most ideal. So we'll start there. We want payment verified. Um, I I'm gonna leave any number of proposals just because I don't think that really necessarily dictates the quality of the job. Then you can do budget. So you see five K there, zero, but 1 to 5 k. There's Fifteens. We'll go ahead and click that and then these ones don't apply since we're doing a fixed price job. Now you look at this and you'll see Okay, there's 15 jobs in here. That's not a ton. But these are the absolute best jobs on the platform for this particular topic at this time Fixed price. The client has hired more than 10 people. The payment is verified and the budget is between one K and five K. These air jobs that you can spend time bidding on you can read through. You can sort of get toe understanding what they want and spend some time on a response to these people. Because often times one of these jobs, a month or two of these jobs a month might be. You know all that you need, or at least a significant amount of income. So the estimated budget Here's 1000 1815 100 4200 1000 etcetera, etcetera. So you don't need to land every single one of these jobs. And again, it's worth investing time on now. From there, you might look at this and let's say you apply for all 15 these jobs and you don't get it hired for any of these. Okay, let's just imagine that's the case Now. What you do is sort of this this circle out technique. So now that we have these air are most ideal, most stringent settings. Now we can sort of walk it back until we, we find, were able to get hired for a job. So let's say that, you know, we look at these criteria and we say, Well, you know what client history I could live with someone who's hired 1 to 9 people that now opens me up to 23 more jobs. So there's now ah, 38 jobs in in this this criteria here. And so no, again, that just opens me up to more jobs. And I can go through these these jobs now, and I can. The ones that, uh, I didn't, you know I didn't bid on before. I can now go through and and bid on those. Or maybe we look at it and we say, Okay, we're willing to go into the 5 to 100 k area. So again, that opens me up to even more jobs. Or, you know, maybe we we switch completely. We go to the hourly area, we go toe hourly and and we switch, you know, more than 30 weeks and less than one month type job. And again, you have to figure out what your smoke most stringent kite criteria. What's your second most stringent wants your third most stringent. Usually by that, by the time you get to three or four sort of iterations of this, You're going to get to a pretty broad swath and there's gonna be in, you know, the 100 to 200 amount of jobs available in those criteria. But you always start with the most stringent. First, see if you can get hired for those jobs. If you don't wait a couple days and if you're just not getting any sort of bites or anything like that, then you expand out one level. Don't go all the way out. Just go one level. Look through Joe. Those jobs been on the ones you want to bid there. And if you don't get high for deals, go to the next level again. Usually by that second to third iteration, you're going to get hired for something. There's gonna be something in there that you ultimately match well up with. And so you're gonna may not be your most ideal, but it's something that is ah, heck of a lot more ideal than if you just go through the feed randomly. So use this circle out Teoh technique to find the absolute best jobs, determine what your criteria are, Know what your criteria are, and then remember this We did this just for one search. This is just WordPress. Okay, So you could do this all over again for justice, say woo commerce or python or walking dogs. Whatever it is you can, you can for each search, you consort of ah, set up these criteria and be able to circle out like this. There will be overlap between jobs. Of course, using different terms will help you to really dig in and dig out all of the absolute best jobs that are out there for the various sort of niches that you want to work in. 17. Search Filters: this lesson is a bit more of just a deficiency thing. So we talked about how to go through and search for different terms and set up our criteria for our filters Now, because we're gonna be doing this on an ongoing basis, we want to make sure we can be efficient with it again that were not necessarily getting into play playing a numbers game. But if you can save yourself some time, why not? So let's go ahead and go back to fix. Price will go back to We'll go to our most stringent criteria here, and this is our 15 jobs that we found available here. Now, up work has this handy feature where you conduce save search, and so and it will let you save the search as a name. So we'll just what I like to do is just name this as number one and hit save. Okay, this is my most stringent kite criteria. This is where I'm going to start with my searches. And so let's go back over to my profile here. Ah, actually, it's just go and click on the up work logo and just started Go back to our home home page and you'll see here. We have recent searches, but we have under here. Saved are saved searches. We have our number one. So we click this and now our number one comes up when we have right here in our feed, that search. And so then that's where we always start when we when we do our searches. And the thing is, is there's so many new jobs that are posted toe up work on a daily basis. You can pretty much almost do this on a daily basis. Now you'll have toe sort of get a feel for your particular niche because there are a little different. Some will have more post on daily basis. Some will have less. But you know a lot of these you can come in here on a daily basis, Click this number one and you'll find that there's new jobs that that show up in it. And so this is our number one search. This is where we're gonna start. It's our wordpress keyword. You could maybe even put number one and then WordPress or WordPress number one you could so that you know which one which keyword the search is for You can label them how you want, but I like having them in an order. So I know I just click this number one thes air my most ideal, uh, filters. I don't find anything there. I don't get higher. Anything there? Whatever. I click number to click number three. Click number four And you can just sort of click your way through. And you don't have to go back and set up all the filters and do all that stuff. You have it all set up, and now you can just sort of go through it And then if you find, you know, hey, I want to try some new searches and some new stuff. Then you can do those searches. You can save that search and you you can label it appropriately so you know what it is and develop a system is ultimately the point here, developing a system for how you go about finding the best jobs, consistently doing that on a daily basis, being efficient about it, but then going in and investing the time in those proposals and investing quality into that . So and this is somewhat of an efficiency thing. But that saves search feature of up work is really, really handy to allow you to do that 18. Uncovering Key Hiring Criteria: Now let's talk about how to look at an individual project and break it down and pull out the important things that we're gonna need for both analyzing the project, but also how we're going to communicate with the client and persuade them to hire us. Because oftentimes clients will prove he explicitly tell you how to convince them to hire you or how to persuade them. So I'm gonna click on this one here. Design and create website using WordPress Seems like a pretty generic type of site that can give us some information here. So we'll click through. And so obviously, you need to actually read through the job description here, and this one happens to include a new attachment that you would download. I've gone ahead and downloaded that ahead here so we can look at that here in just a second . But what your look, the first thing that you're looking for here is sort of keywords or key hiring criteria in what they've posted here. Now, a good indicator of that is the questions that they ask that he's This person's almost telling you what they're going to be looking for with someone that they hire. So have you built built websites using WordPress before? So that's Ah, that's ah, hiring criteria. If the answer to that is no, then you're probably not going to get hired. So that's when we talk about this threshold. We're looking for indicators of what's going to how we're going to climb that ladder and each one of these that we can have the right answer to is sort of ah, step in that ladder. So have you built websites using WordPress now? Just sort of a sino. If you haven't, then this probably isn't a good project for you. Don't don't spend a lot of time trying to convince people who hot toe higher you when you have things. When you're not meeting some really significant key hiring criteria that they have, that's the sort of swimming upstream in this appeal. Uphill battle. We have a number of projects here that we can bid on, so you should be looking for ah fit as much as they are. The more of a fit you you find, the easier it is it going for gonna be for you to get hired. But also it's gonna be easier for you to deliver on the project. You're actually be more enjoyable for you to work on, so don't swim upstream. Go find an uphill battle. If you're not meeting some of these key hiring criteria, just move onto the next job. And if you're going through a particular search and ah, you you haven't you're finding that you're not meeting all these criteria. Try a different search, a different niche, and find one where you start meeting all of the criteria. So you gotta gotta play with that a little bit. So anyway, have you built websites using WordPress? What past project or job have you had That is most like this one and wise. So what? This tells you what this is. This person obviously is looking for someone who's built sites using WordPress. But what's really important to them is someone who has done something similar to the site that they want. Bill, probably because what they're wanting to build is maybe something that's a little different than sort of a standard site. And so again, they they want someone who has done something like this before. That's not always gonna That seems like an obvious thing, but that's not always going to be the case with every project that you come across, different people are gonna have different criteria like this. So again, the ultimate point is, these questions are a good indicator of that. So understand what the key cry hiring criteria are. Make sure you meet those and then write them down so that you could have that available when you go to write your proposals. Another thing, of course, is looking through what they've written here. So looking for an experienced designer. So experience is something that's important to them, right? They could have said, looking for a super creative designer, looking for a really reliable designer, but only said, looking for an experienced designer. So if you have experience, you want to make sure and mention that in your proposal this is an indicator who has worked with WordPress, so that sort of matches our criteria. Here. So worked with WordPress is another criteria to create websites and landing pages. Now websites is sort of generic, but landing pages that's a little unique and different, so they're wanting someone who specifically has landing page experience. So again, if you have that, that's something you want to highlight in your proposal that you've worked with landing pages before I purchased the WordPress business plan, which enables the creation of a website that includes blog's on proportional page pages, including ads. So the fact that they pit they mentioned that they've purchased this WordPress business plan. This sort of is another subtle indicator that this is a criteria here. So if you've ever worked with the WordPress blues in this plan before then that would be something to mention. By the way, I've worked with people that have this WordPress business plan before. I sort of know the ins and outs of it, and, um, I could work that really easily. If not, it might be worth mentioning. Hey, I haven't worked with the WordPress business plan stuff specifically, but I did some research and looked in into it. Ah, and it seems like it's pretty straightforward thing. And maybe list off some things about it to demonstrate that you did do the research and to demonstrate to them that you do know what you're talking about to reassure them that you'll be able to work with that sort of thing. But again, this is the thing that we're going through and we're looking, What are the what are the things that that come across as criteria that we can write down in our list? So when we go to write our proposal, we have some raw data, some raw material that we can work with in order to write a proposal that is convincing and persuasive to the client and addresses the needs that they've outlined. Ah, lot of times. Just simply doing that is gonna be more than what most freelancers do, and and it's going to stick out to the claim in a good way and make them a lot more likely to believe and trust you. So key hiring criteria. Another one that's sort of related and similar is obvious, sort of. I read it elements, so you want to speak to their criteria and your proposal. But you also want to demonstrate clearly that you read what they posted. So when someone posts on attachment, that's sort of, Ah, Big Red, a sign that says, Hey, I need to read this thing and this is played. This is an area where you can really find these obvious. I read it elements in generally what you want to. Ah, generally, what you want to look for things that aren't They're sort of obscure, not a necessarily obvious or generic to these type of projects. So something that's specific to their project that you can pull out. So the fact that they, uh, this person calls this I meet that would be something to point out and mentioned. I meet or you might look through here. No one say, Say it says, uh, you know, set up automatic sharing and social posting of emails Block. That might be a little bit Jamar generic pages, bro. I meet services, ground transportation, registration services and discontinue travel. This is pretty specific to their site. That's not something you're going to see on every site. Um, you know that they want to have pages that promote thes particular services, so that would be something to mention to demonstrate to them that you've read this and again. You just want to sort of look through here. You know, the They call this our f p link. So you may want to you you may want to reference that acronym. You know, again, just just going through here, and looking for things that you can. Can we pre load all current members and pre register them at this site? That's sort of a question that in your proposal, you would want to answer because they asked that question. They're expecting that you read this document. I mean, this is on, you know, sort of buried on page to there's a question essentially, And so you want to make sure in dress and answer that that would demonstrate to them that you actually read through this so again, just sort of obvious. I read it elements where you can demonstrate to them that you you read their proposal, you read any of their attachments And a lot of times for for these these clients, they get a lot of copy and paste and people that it seems like, didn't read their proposal. So you just demonstrating that you read it is a big thing for them. The final thing, then here, that that I like to look at is sort of go looking at it from the other angle. So we've looked a lot at it from the client's perspective. Now you gotta look at it from your own perspective and actually do a little bit of a client analysis and see if this is a client that you want to work with. So some of the obvious things of the reviews, you know, 4.92 out of five stars, that's usually pretty good. 84% higher rate. 44 hires, 16 active. Ah, projects which, you know, that sort of that can tell you a little bit about how active they are. That could be a good thing. It could be a bad thing. Um, but again, this gives you some raw data about the client. If they have no Ah, 4.0, or 3.5 rating here than that might be a red flag for you. If they're higher rate was like 50% or 40 or 20. That would be sort of a red flag and three K total spent. That's not s a ton on the site, but they've spent some money, So you sort of you sort of have an indicator that they're going to They're going to be willing to actually pay out the money here. Another thing, though, is just sort of again reading the document that they posted here. Ah, and reading the job description here. You know, Do they sound like someone who knows what they want? That's huge. When you're working with someone, if they're seeing a lot of things like I want someone Teoh, tell me I want some doing to figure out for me. You might be OK with that sort of thing. You know, maybe you're Mawr into those sites sort of projects where you have to be the one that comes up with the ideas and so forth. But if you're not, then that might be a project where you're seeing those sorts of phrasings. That would be sort of an indicator that this person doesn't necessarily know what they want . And I work best when I work with someone who does know what they want and vice versa. You can work the other way as well, too. But you want to look for language and indicators of someone that you would be good that you would like working with, You know, if there if in their their document of their they're sort of job description here, they're using a bunch of all caps and red, and they're, you know, Maybe they're cussing or they're saying, saying very aggressive things that are sort of a put off to you again. That would be a red flag to you that maybe this isn't something that you somebody you want to work with. So when I talk about having standards, these air, the sorts of things that I'm talking about, you wanna have standards about the kind of clients that you wanna work with that you're willing to accept Because if you if you take a bunch of clients that you're not, that you don't really get along with you necessarily like, and you do it just for the money you're gonna you're gonna end up being miserable only miserable because you're dealing with people that you don't like dealing with. But a lot of times, the reason you freelance in the first place is so you didn't have to be around people you didn't like. So why put yourself in a position where you you have to do that? You're gonna feel like a little bit of a sell out? And I'm not saying that that's true, but that's how it's gonna feel and really ultimately for you. That's all that really matters. So again, half standards look through this stuff, analyzed the client, make sure it's somebody that it feels like you want to work with. Oftentimes they're gonna want to jump on the phone. And when you get on that phone call, do the same thing. Make sure the way that they're communicating with you is the way that you like to be communicated with and if not, walk away. There's plenty of jobs on up work for you to go through and find were playing a quality game. That's not just you delivering quality. It's also about finding quality clients that will pay well, You like working with the kind of project you want to work on. 19. Writing Your Project Proposal: All right, So let's dig in and actually right apropos. Er, submit a proposal here. So I've kind of picked another job here. That I think is a good we'll provide a good example for us to talk about. This isn't necessarily the best job for me in particular, but it'll I think it'll give us some stuff that we can dig into and give us another chance . Toe, take a crack it analyzing a profile here. So this one just says WordPress slash developer. We read the details. So is looking for an experience WordPress developer to create a website for a business. We ask that you have at least three years experience in developing not only websites but also landing pages and membership sites from WordPress. And you can see we have a number of questions down here as well. So, again, just analyzing this I would pull out. Experience is, ah, big thing here than they kind of go into that here. Three years experience in developing only websites but landing pages and membership sites from WordPress. So that's something that for me, you know, I got I don't know how many years off building membership sites with WordPress, so that part of it is sort of right up my alley. I have some questions down here. Have you read or seen any of miles? Becker's work has been your biggest challenge in setting up websites and then add my name, Victor Napier in responses. So again, experience seems to be a big one here. The reason I say this probably isn't the best sort of job for me is you know, Sit says, I'm looking for freelancers with the lowest rate. So this is sort of an entry level job, not a job that I would probably bid on because my hourly rate at $100 an hour is probably going to be more than what they're they're in line with. But again, the just the text of this will give us some good something to work with for writing the proposal. But one of the points I want to make right up front is, and I feel like I may be harping on this a little bit, but it's so important is that the jobs you pick to submit a proposal in that part of it is as important, if not more important than what you write in your actual proposal. So finding a really good match for you, that's what's input where you can answer these questions where the money is in line with what you're you're sort of after. And you know, you can answer these questions well and you have good answers to all of this stuff. That's as finding a good match is probably more important than what you actually write in your proposal, right? So again, I'm beating that horse kind of to death. But let's go ahead and click into Submit a proposal and we'll walk through what we want to do here. So now this is another reason is that Ah, great fit because they prefer people from the Philippines. But again, I just want to get into actually writing a proposal here. And I thought this to do a good one. We'll talk about in the next video. Ah, the pricing part of this. Okay, so Well, I'm gonna do ah next lesson on how to think about this so we'll skip that for now. But what we want to do is we should have written down the things that were the criteria that we pulled out that were important. So experience experience with landing pages experience with membership sites. In our cover letter, we really want to do the work of answering all of those criteria. So the way that this works is you want to start off with, uh, I'm gonna write this out here, and you can write this down his notes but credibility and then hiring criteria and then ask for the sale. Okay, This is the process for writing the proposal. The cover letter here and the reason it's done this way is because the very first thing that you need to do is establish credibility with this client. Because if they don't believe what you're saying, if you have an established credibility credibility, then they're not gonna believe anything that you're saying at that point. And so it's gonna be pointless to say anything if they don't believe it. So the first thing we gotta do is establish credibility if we can work that into maybe one of the hiring criteria and I'll show you how to do that here in a second, even better, because it seems more natural. But if not just be sort of obnoxious about it. and establish your credibility. Then we go one by one through the hiring criteria that they might have. And then finally, we end by asking for the sale. So when we talk about credibility, I of course again I'm going to lean into the things the best elements of credibility I have , which are the membership sites that I have built for these really well known people like Tim Fares and Louis House and Michael High and so forth. So I'm gonna lean into that because it frankly, it works. Now, whatever your credibility is, you want to lean into that as well. And if you've picked the right job, you should have something you can lean into. It just so happens, though, that one of their criteria is someone who had experience with a membership sites and landing pages. So I'm gonna say you something like this. So you mentioned experience with membership sites. I've been building member ship sites with the WordPress for nearly a decade, which is true built membership sites for Tim Ferriss. Michael. Hi, it Louis House Kamanda Zine Re Edwards. I'm throwing out all these names that someone right now and then I'm gonna put and many others see. Ah, it's like See Attachments doesn't say See portfolio, but see attachments. And then I'm gonna attach basically what's in my portfolio from my from my profile, which has all of these sites in it. So I'm very familiar with membership site building in WordPress. All right, so that's all it's got to be, just a simple sort of statement like that. You know, these are the sort of sites that I've worked on again, not claims, but proof if if you're just making claims, anybody can do that. But if you're providing proof people you factory actually worked with than you know it's it's believable they'll actually believe what you're saying. So it could be something as simple as that to establish your credibility. That's a really hard hitting paragraph for credibility. Now, from here we go into our hiring criteria. It so happens that in this case that one of the main hiring criteria is also the thing we addressed up here. So we don't necessarily have any other hiring criteria to go into. But let's just say you know, for example, well, let's take the landing pages. Think so. That's one of the the hiring criteria. You also of mentioned landing pages. I've built the sales letters and email opt ins for Michael. Hi, it's, um, membership site launches. I've done the same for, uh, wish list products, launches. I'll just put makers makers of Wish this members so they might know who that is. And many others. I also run my own work site with various landing and sales pages. See, And then I'm just put a link to again. I'm not saying not once here did I say I'm great about building landing pages. I said, I've built sales letters and email opt ins for Michael. Hi. It's remember, you know, I've said what I've done. I'm not. No, I'm not making claims. I'm providing proof. I'm providing evidence. I'm providing links to my own website and so forth. That's what you want to do here and for each hiring criteria that you identified. When you analyze the project, you want to go through and do this and you can quite literally say you mentioned this or you mentioned this or you asked about this or you said this. Well, here's you know, here's my evidence. Here's my proof. Here's what I have to say about that, okay? And so you start with credibility, Then you go through each of the high end criteria. If there's 10 hiring criteria, go through all 10 or if there's one than go through the one. It doesn't matter. However many they are. Go through each one line by line and at the end, say something like, I love to work on your project. Once you accept the proposal, I can get started right away. So this is sort of an Assumpta tive type of of clothes where you were some sort of assuming that they're going to hires by saying once you accept the proposal, I can get started right away. But essentially, even if you wanted to be direct, you know, I love to work on your project where you hire me. I mean, you could be that direct about it if you really want, But you need to sort of put the ball back in their court and and and say something along the lines of Go ahead and hire me, you know, Go, uh, click. You know, accept the proposal so I can get started right away. Etcetera, etcetera. Let me know if you have any questions. If non accept the proposal like, it can get started right away, etcetera. But you want to sort of put the ball back in their court that you're ready to go, all they need to do is it Accept the proposal. Okay, so that's what we're gonna do in the cover letter. Were basically going to address all of the hiring criteria and ask for the sale, Establish credibility, address the hiring criteria, asked for the sale. Then you have these sort of leftover questions here. So, have you read or seen any of miles? Bechler Miles Bechler's work. So I had no idea who this guy was. I just did a quick Google search and he sort of Ah, he's a youtuber that teaches sort of like Facebook advertising or how to do stuff on Facebook or how to do stuff on YouTube, That sort of thing. Sort of a social media, I guess, expert. And so I would just tell the truth here and heard of him until I read this proposal. I looked him up and found his work to be pretty interesting. Is this something you'd like me to dive into and learn more about because I'm more and happy to do that. Okay? And and the thing is, I am I mean, that I find that stuff interesting. So I would be more than happy to do it if it is like underwater basket weaving with one height hand tied behind your back while watching paint dry. And you're just like, Yeah, I don't want to do that. Ethan, go to another project. Fine. So I mean, you don't have to stress out about it all that much, but whatever it is, whatever these questions are, they always kind of random. Just answer him honestly and always remember credibility criteria asked for the sale, etcetera. I'm gonna come down here and do this one road quick because this is just these air sort of silly at this point because it quite literally says, Add my name Victor Napier in your responses. And it's one of the questions like it's almost impossible to miss this, So it's sort of weird, But again, I just said, do it. So I did it then. The last one is what has been your biggest challenge in setting up website, so this could trick. People trip people up a little bit. This is sort of I remember when I would go apply for jobs of different companies, they would say they would ask the question like, how many minutes late Due toa work do you think is acceptable? Of course, the answer is none, but they get people that will tell them. 05 minutes, 10 minutes. It's just sort of this basic sort of weeding out. So when you say what has been your biggest challenge in setting up weapon websites, if you write well, most of clients I work with are a bunch of idiots. That's gonna be a red flag. So that's not something that you necessarily want to put out there. What I decided to write for this is, you know, something like this. So my challenge is, is working on projects. I have a natural interest in that ups. That's actually one of the thing that's exciting about this project. Is the miles that clearer info you pointed me to. If this project involves this sort of thing, I really I am looking forward to it because I'm highly interested in that type of information. All right, so one. I'm telling the truth, right? That's true. But when I'm pointing out my biggest challenge, I'm flipping it into something that's actually a strength by saying when the biggest challenges, you know, working on projects that is finding projects that I have a natural interest in right. It's hard to find projects where the actual thing, that the content of side or whatever is something I'm actually interested in. And so that's actually one of the things that excites me about your project is I'm really into this stuff again. It's true, but I'm also not. I'm writing the challenges, something that actually works in my favor because now they think, Oh, this person's actually excited about this sort of content they'll be into my project will be passionate about my project. That's a sales point for me, Okay, so just keep that in mind when you're asking these questions, don't just we'll try to answer them. Don't answer them in an obnoxious form where it works against you. But don't just try to have a blank answer. Try to think of a way you can turn it into a strength for you did this all the time with interviews. I I learned this very, very early on in doing interviews, and it sounds really sort of cliche and like, it would be obvious. But a lot of these people like employers to do interviews or clients to get, Ah, proposals like this. They get so many where people don't do that, they get so many where people say just random stuff or just things that totally work against them. Them getting hired, that when someone does finally do this, they do kind of know, Right? They read in there like, yeah, you know, whatever, dude. But they recognize that you were smart enough to do that, and so that that gives them an indicator that this this person actually is intelligent. They're thinking they have, ah, wherewithal about what's going on and that so even getting caught, so to speak, in trying to flip this works in your advantage, so there's no reason not to do it, Okay? And then down here, I would just upload any relevant sort of portfolio files that makes sense. So, you know, I would probably upload the screenshots I have for Michael Hyatt's and Louis House, Neat magazine and all that stuff upload that stuff here and then submit proposal. All right, so that's that's sort of the way that you want to go about this again. A big thing is analyzing the project and then breaking down the hiring criteria and then working that into your cover letter where you address all of those hiring criteria. And you know, if they if they at. If the hiring criteria are one of the questions down here, then you don't need to address it in the cover letter, so you don't need to address it twice. Just address it in the cover letter or in the question where it's actually asked if that's one of the height hiring criteria that you've identified. But you just need to make sure whatever criteria you identify, you address them somewhere on this page. Eso that. You know, though that's the thing that when we talk about this trust threshold, those air the wrongs of that ladder, meeting those criteria and meeting them not with claims but with fax with proof with evidence. That's what's gonna get you hired. And I'm just I'll tell you straight up. Oh, I would. It's a small small I don't know what the number is. But it is a small, small, small number of freelancers who actually take the time to do this. So you're gonna have a huge advantage. You're going to stick out in a good way, like a sore thumb, and you just you're gonna get in that quality game, and you're just going to see a lot more success taking the time to do this. So again, dive into this. Now make sure in credibility hiring criteria asked for the sale. Stick to that. He analyzed the profile. You make sure it's a good or the projects you make sure it's a good match for you. All of these dominoes, sort of stacked in your favor, are just going to lead to a lot more success with the proposals that you submit. 20. How to Build Rapport: what I want to talk about. This is this idea of building rapport because as your writing, your bids and as you're communicating back and forth as a result of that, the thing that you want to do is you wanna build report with that person to get them to the point where they trust you enough to hire you. So you probably heard that people talk about Hey, you gotta build report. But I don't know how many people actually dive into exactly what that means and exactly how to do that. And so that's what I want to do here. And it is a process, and it's a sort of a three step, three step process and that that process is know, like and trust. So first they have to know you next. They have to like you and eventually from that moving into trusting you. Now when we talk about knowing, you know, sometimes we will talk about this in the context of they just need to know who you are, and it's sort of this simple thing, but I don't think that's the case. I think it goes beyond that. It's not just knowing your name. or knowing who you are, but sort of knowing you at a personal level. That's that's kind of the bedrock of of trust. And so you might say things like, I'm married, I have kids, maybe your religious or you're Christian or you're Jewish or your Muslim or whatever. Me. Personally, I'm a Husker fan, and what you want to do is you want to sort of paint them a picture of who you are Now. The thing to keep in mind is you can paint whatever picture you want, so the things you say need to be honest and true. But you also get a pick and choose the things that that you say. So you're not going to say like when I was 18 I used to show up to work all late all the time, unless somehow you're twisting that toe, work to your advantage. However, that would be so again you you want to pick and choose what you talk about. But the idea here is that the things that you put out are often the things that you're going to get back. So, for example, let's say let's take the religious one, even though it's a taboo topic. Let's say that that you are Christian, your devout Christian, and that's something that's important to you. Well, when you communicate that in what you put out in in your bio or whatever in the way you talk about yourself when you put that out, what is likely to happen as a result of that is you're going to sort of maybe put off people who aren't as devout a Christian as you, who or maybe they're Christian. But they're not devout like you. Or maybe there another who, for whatever reason, maybe when they hear that it sort of puts it off putting to them. You're going to reject those people. And that's good, because what you're also going to do at the same time, you're going to attract people who resonate on that same level. And so what? That ends up, what that that leads to is you creating a connection that goes beyond the work that you're doing for them, and it allows you also to then be working with people who are like minded, who have similar sort of ideas as you. Now that doesn't mean that you should outright not work with other people. And when you talk about it in terms of religion, people get a little. But if I talked about it in terms of me being a Husker fan, well, then it would be a little bit more trivial where I would attract other people who are Husker fans. And those Iowa fans can go jump in a river so again, when we look at it in that context, it's maybe not such a big deal. But the idea is you want to put out who you are so that you attract those sort of same people to you and you create MAWR loyalty with those people in the services industry. Like what we do, you don't need 1000 customers. Often you only need three or four clients. You just need them to be really loyal and stick with you and give you work and care about you and your success, just like you care about theirs. That's how you win in this game, and part of doing that is communicating who you are and attracting people who are similar to you that you can develop that connection beyond just the work that you do for them now, not every single you know, not every single client you work with is gonna be like that. You're gonna work with people who maybe you don't fully resonate and so forth. But over time, the more you can find those people, the more likely you are to to ah, to get clients that you work with long term, you have good relationships with, and ultimately that becomes how you make your your living. So knowing is going beyond just them knowing who you are. So you have to be You have to be willing to put those things out there. You know another thing when we move when we move from knowing in into liking, then liking is about sort of taking that deeper. So things like being married and having kids and religion and maybe political believes and that sort of thing, those can be sort of surface level. But often times those things are derived from deeper, sort of held beliefs, values those sorts of things. And so the next sort of thing that you wanna communicate and move into is talking about the things that you believe in the things, your passion about the sort of people that you love working with of the projects that you were love working on. So if you're looking at this from a bio perspective, you might say something. In terms of the no category, you might say something like, you know, Hey, I'm John. I'm married. I have three kids, you know, Im ah, rabbit. Husker fan. I'm a libertarian. Um, and you know, I live in Omaha, Nebraska, right? And that's sort of a surface level that sort of throws some things out there and then you would go in sort of the next paragraph and say something like, you know, growing up. My dad was a small business owner, and I saw the struggles that that he went through and the ups and the downs and no, the destruct, the failures and the winds and all that sort of thing growing up as a kid, I would. When I came home from school, I didn't go home. I went to my dad shops. That was just sort of my childhood growing up, and so have sort of this natural affinity and desire to help people that are entrepreneurial that are small business owners that are people who want to take something that they're good at that their creative and they want to turn it into a livelihood. And that is why you know, I'm very passionate about helping people like you, and I believe no, that that that this ah lot of this is a lot simpler than what people make it out to be. And so what? I focus honest, really trying to simplify all of this stuff for you and make it easier to understand. So you can act because ultimately that's what matters. So I just totally made that up on the fly, but it is true, but I just sort of went off the top of my head with that. But the idea is, is that if you are one of those people that I'm trying to connect with those entrepreneurial minded, small business artists who wants to make a living, that sort of message is going to resonate with you. It's gonna allow you to connect with me and get to know me at a deeper level. So again, that's how you go from knowing in tow, liking they actually like you. They have the same values and beliefs, and they resonate like this. This person gets me, they understand me. And so the last thing then is moving from that into trust. So once you've set that sort of foundation, then there's some things that you need to do in order to push them over the top in terms of persuasion, to get them to hire you. Now the first part of this is, is what I call sales points now any, you know, established, savvy marketer when they have some sort of product or service that they're going to sell. The very first thing that they do is they sit down and they make a list of all of the reasons why someone might buy this product or service, and these become their sales points. So these are the main persuasive ideas that they want to communicate to someone to explain to them why they would want to buy this particular product, and often times you know, you might sit down and write 2030 40 of these. Now some will be better than others and so forth. So you will, after you write them all down, you'll prioritize them. But the idea is is to to really flesh out exactly why someone should buy your product or someone would want to buy your product or service. So the first thing that you need to do is you know, you are your product. So why would someone hire you and just answer that question over and over and over and over again? Now those convey claims. We talked about claims and proof before. When you're thinking about him in this context, they can be claimed So you can write stuff like, Well, I'm really reliable. I'm really trustworthy. I'm really creative. I'm this, I'm that etcetera. And you can write all those things down. So you start with those claims. But then you move into actually making it proof, and one of the things that you can do is create sort of internal proof for a claim. So I call this a pattern of irrefutable fax. And so what you do is you start with some sort of irrefutable fact. You move to an obvious inference from that fact. And then from that, you lead into a logical sales conclusion. So what you're doing is a is creating a chain of logic from a fact that is irrefutable and you're moving from that to ultimately, what is your claim? You know, I'm trustworthy on this that but it's done in a way that makes logical sense. So the where I learned this actually was selling shoes. So to give you an example of how this would work, we had what we called a fab technique, which is a sort of specific implementation of this pattern of irrefutable facts and fab stood for feature advantage benefit. So the feature was the irrefutable fact. We would start with something physical on the shoe. So I might say issue has a polyurethane outsole. Well, that's irrefutable that you can see the outsole is made of polyurethane. You could maybe try to dispute that is made of polyurethane. But most I mean, most people are going to do that. They're not that obnoxious. So you can actually physically see this thing. This this polyurethane council, the obvious inference moves into the advantages of a polyurethane council. The biggest advantage is that it's a lot lighter weight than rubber. So if you're someone who's on your feet a lot, you have to walk around a lot at work. No, instead of lugging around these heavy rubber rubber shoes. You can wear these polyurethane. You can use his polyurethane out, so it's gonna be a lot lighter weight. It also is a lot more flexible, so it's a lot more comfortable and it's actually really durable. No, it's not quite as durable is rubber, but it's it's pretty darn close. So you're going to get a really durable shoe that's also lighter and feels better on your feet. And so those air sort of the advantages, and I kind of leapt into because I'm program from having done this so much. But I leave. I sort of leapfrog into the logical sales conclusion. So the the obvious inference is, Well, it's lighter. It's polyurethane rubber. You can pick him up. It's lighter, lighter weight. The logical sales conclusion from that is Well, these were gonna be They're gonna, um, take, they're gonna wear you out less you're going to be is tired at the end of the day that your feet won't hurt as much etcetera, etcetera, that sort of thing. So that's the logical sales conclusion that is. The thing that matters to me is the consumer. I want to shoot that. I'm not gonna be dead tired at the end. A cause I gotta lug around this heavy shoe all day. So again, that's an example of this pattern of irrefutable facts. So to give you some examples for actual sort of freelancing So a claim that you want might want to make is that I am trustworthy now for me, If I were trying to communicate something like that, I would sort of rely on my past experience. And I would say, You know, I've worked on projects or I've worked on sites for Michael Hyatt Lewis House, Tim Ferriss Inc magazine. That's the irrefutable fact. I have testimonials from those people have screenshots I can show you I could show you emails if you really wanted to question it of me working with these people to build their sites. So that is the irrefutable fact. The obvious inference from that is Well, obviously those people had to really trust me to work on their sites with the amount of exposure and traffic and just how important their sites are and how if one little thing is off, then that's gonna be a problem. So obviously those people had to really trust me in order to work on their sites, and they don't just hire anyone. That's the obvious inference. The logical sales conclusion is, so whatever your project is, you can trust me, too, if they can trust me on these really important, really sensitive sort of projects you can trust me for. Your project, which may not be as a sensitive mate, may not have as much traffic, etcetera. And so again, that's how you move from an irrefutable fact into conveying AH point and conveying a claim , which is I'm trustworthy. I'm saying I'm trustworthy. I'm saying the same thing, but I'm doing it in a little bit different way. Another one Ah, that I used to great effect was, if I wanted make, I would make the claim. I can help you make your membership site more successful, which is something other developers can't do. And so I would start with actually the same irrefutable fact. I would say I've worked on membership sites for Michael Hyatt, Lewis House Inc magazine, Tim Ferriss, etcetera. I've worked on sites for these people. The obvious inference from that is well, obviously, these sites, thes membership sites are really successful, and they are you can go out and see, and these membership sites have done really well, so they're really successful. Logical sales conclusion. I can show you why they're successful, but you have to hire me to build your site. That's a really persuasive argument that I know from my own experience. Got a lot of people to hire me. And, of course, it's 100% true. I've learned a ton about membership sites, both through those projects and one of my main clients, whose whose flagship product is a A membership site plug in and all the people I've worked with through that and so forth. I just know, having been the main content creator for their membership site for a number of years now there's just a ton that I know about running a membership site, that I can show people who I build memberships five sites for that. A lot of other developers, I mean, I might even dare say there might not be another developer in the world who could show him as much as a zai can when it comes to some of that stuff. Maybe not 100% true, but I could legitimately you know sort of point at that that claim anyway, and actually have some some logic or an argument to make their. So again, that's how you move from in. Keep in mind, I moved from the same irrefutable fact that the sites that I work on, but I made a different sales conclusion from it. So again, that's the idea here and when you wanna build trust, communicating in this way makes everything you say more believable and makes people just sort of more wanna believe what you say and more naturally, trust you. And this is how you constantly push people. You're always pushing people up that threshold on getting them over that threshold and positioning yourself higher than over other freelancers being more persuasive, more convincing, more believable, more trustworthy. Now again, although that goes out the window when comes time to actually deliver on the project. If you don't deliver like you say, you're going to. But in the lead up to that in tow, into the getting hired part, all of these things work together to help make you more believable. So if we start with the foundation of attracting people that are sort of like minded, opening yourself up and talking about what you believe in, what you value, and then communicating the sales points that you want to communicate in a way that is irrefutable or its logical and it's persuasive. That's a really good recipe recipe for allowing you to bid and win on jobs, right? Proposals that air convincing just allow you to communicate and everything that you do in a more persuasive way. 21. How to Price Projects: right now let's talk about pricing and and what to bid price wise on your projects. And I think a lot of freelancers think that that part of the equation happens here. It sort of makes sense, right just where you enter that number and so forth. But this is really and I'm gonna tell you what I dio. I'm sure there's other people that have I know there's people that have really sort of complex schemes for how they come up with their their pricing and and all this sort of thing. I've never really done that. I've really more operated off of what I'm willing to do it for than I have what is necessarily like I've nailed down every nut and bolt and figured out exactly. I just have never done that. It's more just I generally have a sense of what the market rates are, and it's mainly what I'm willing to do it. For some days I'm feeling frisky, and I might do a project for a lot cheaper than what I normally would just because I want to do something or I just want, you know, I want the money or whatever. Other days I maybe like I don't want the work. I don't need the work, and so I'm not willing to do it for less or whatever. So I think it's a lot more grey than what people think. But anyway, I'm going to tell you what I dio and for me, my approach this page. By the time you get here, the pricing question has already been answered. And where against answered is over here. And that is when you're looking for the jobs and not even bidding on jobs, where when you get to this page, you're sort of like, uh oh, maybe I should Right? There's so many jobs on here, there's no there's no point. There's no point in getting here and being like Oh, I guess I should do this so I can get this job right? You know, make sure that by the time you get here that question is already answered. So the way that you do that there's a couple, so there's a couple things to this. First off, I prefer fixed price jobs. Now, the reason I prefer fixed price jobs and I feel like you should prefer fixed price jobs is because generally with fixed price jobs, you're gonna make more money, and you're gonna make more money per hour because the, you know the reality of it is is clients and developers are not really good at estimating how long a project is going to take and what's going to go into it. And so often times what you're gonna have on we're gonna have on up work is you will have clients who have a project scope and the budget that they've attached to that project. Scope is way, way, way, way, way lower than it should be. And you look at and go. No way I'm going to do that job for that price. Now, if you want, you can take the time to explain that to the client and see if you can get hired at a a higher price, or what I do is not even been on that project. Go find one where the scope what you're seeing is the scope is mawr in line with with what the actual budget is, and that's where you gonna find some of the opposites that end of the spectrum where the budget that the client has posted is way more than what the scope is. Those are the projects I bid on. That doesn't mean that I charged them necessary their full budget. But I know that in that particular case, I'm much more likely to make more money or at least get to the point where I'm getting what I think I deserve, that I am in some of these other projects and so again, with fist fixed price projects. Because you're not. You're not necessarily really tracking hours, and they don't really care how long it takes in terms of how many hours per day it's, it's more just overall time to get the project done. If you If you know you pick your jobs right. If you strategize properly, you can actually make more money per hour than you would if you're doing an hourly project . So again, I prefer fixed price jobs. And of course, as you see on here, we can do fix price and then we can do you know, one K 25 K 5 k plus, And I'm doing a search for WordPress us only, and we have 170 jobs. Why would I bid on a job that's $500 when I've got 100 and 70 jobs that I can bid on that are one K plus fixed price. So it again so it doesn't make any sense. Toe. Confine yourself to something that you don't want. Okay, so that's the first thing when it comes to pricing is fixed price jobs and making sure you're picking the jobs that you want. That said, sometimes you want to do hourly jobs, or you may be someone who prefers hourly jobs more so again we can do the same sort of thing over here. We can come to our early, you know, we can look at the amount of hours per week. 30 hours per week is a lot. So usually for me. I'll put this because less than and more than that, I mean, that's sort of a huge number. So I would leave this at any hours per week. No, but ah, then we can sort of come down here and look at the kind of jobs that are available at those different, uh, rates and so forth. And a big one to look at here. Is this right here? Okay, so this this triple money right here. What that means is I'm willing to pay higher rates for the most experienced freelancers. So if we come up here, we can filter for that right here. Experience level. Now, most of the time, I would probably do intermediate and expert because, Intermediate says, Let's see if we can find one here, Intermediate says. I'm looking for a mix of experience and value, okay, whereas the inner the entry level is they want someone with the lowest prices. Well, don't even bid on those jobs. There's 850 jobs that are actually let's go ahead and get rid of these. Get rid of these. So there's 800. Still, there's 850 jobs that are hourly that fall in that intermediate to expert range. If we got rid of intermediate, there's still 397 jobs where the client has specifically stated that they're willing to pay more for an experience developer. So again, why, why go in and ah, bid on a job that doesn't have the kind of money that you want? When there's so many jobs here that are available and this is just one search for WordPress , there's all sorts of different searches you could do on here. Okay, so again, that's what I'm saying. Bye. The the the pricing starts here. It's in the jobs that you pick now the way that I handle. Oftentimes the clientele say, Well, how maney, you know, how many hours is it going to take? What's what's the project linked for this and the way that I handled that is First off, I realize it's a guess. It iss. I don't care what anybody tells you. The only people who really have that down are the people who have done this for a long time , and they've done the same thing for a really long time, and they build the exact same kind of sites over and over again. And that's the only thing they build, and they have a set process of how they build them. But those people often aren't on up work right. That's not gonna be necessarily what you're doing on up work. Those people are getting their clients from their own sites, so when it comes up work, you're probably not gonna be falling into that category. So with that said, you have to realize it's generally going to be a guess. Now this is what I do is I Look at the project. I tried to get a sense of how long it will actually take me how long I think in my head. So let's say I think you know what This isn't. Take me three hours at the minimum. You should double that. Okay, so if you think it's gonna take three hours than in your head, you should be, like, probably six just the way that it works. So that's the first step, then. Once you've said six, you still don't tell the client. Six. I used the phrase up, too. So I say to the client this this project, when they ask how many hours is going to take, I'll say it's going to take a max of 10 hours. Now I've done a cup. Couple things there. One. I'm not really given them any sort of hard number because I don't really know, and I'm guessing and I know I'm guessing. And so I've kept it sort of open ended, but maybe they put down, you know, maybe they were thinking in the the five hour range. And you say it could take up to 10 hours, and I've had clients do this all the time. They're like, 0 10 hours, That's a that's Ah, that's a lot. And that's maybe, you know, maybe double what I was thinking. I would say, Well, yeah, that's sort of I'm giving you arrange. It just depends on you know, if the scope there's any sort of scope creep. If there's things in here that maybe you thinking that I understand that maybe, you know, they're just all sorts of things could happen. So I'm seeing a max of 10 hours. But it could very well be five hours. And that sort of alleviates any sort of discrepancy that there is between you know, what you're thinking in your head and what they're thinking in their head when you say a max of because, you know, if they think it's gonna be too, you say, Well, yeah, it could be it could very well be to I just have to dig into it and see, But it's a max of 10 hours, and then I add on top of that, any hourly work, anything over 10 hours you won't pay for, and that sort of really pushes them over the edge, because I'll tell them, okay, I'm gonna It'll be a max of 10 hours and anything over 10 hours you're not gonna pay for. Well, that sort of relieves a stress off of them where they're like, You know, he said it could be a max of 10 hours, which means it's probably really gonna take 15 hours because that's been their experience with every over the developer they worked with. And when they go to get their car fixed at the at the mechanic, the mechanic says it's gonna cost 200 ends up costing 400 accept so that they have all of this in your head. And when you say a max of 10 but you're not gonna get charged for anything over those 10 hours, it just relieves all of that stress and probably nobody else. They're talking to us saying that, And so it makes this now this sort of up sell to 10 hours, actually positions that has a good thing for them. It makes it really persuasive, persuasive and convincing. And I've dealt with all sorts of price, object and time objections that way. Now, the caveat to that is you make it into a project where you say that and you get into it and all of a sudden they start hitting you with all of these extra things or things that they didn't tell you about initially. And that's when you have to have sort of the guts to stand up and say, Hey, look, I know I said a max of 10 hours, but you didn't tell me about this in this in this or you're wanting to add this in this in this in this and that really changes the scope of things. Had I known that at the time, then I would have said a max of 20 hours and I would have been more accurate. But since I didn't, I said the 10 and you won't get charged any more than that. So here's what I'm willing to do. Either we can say a max of 20 now that I know the full scope and we can go proceed like that or we can just sort of agree to disagree, and we'll both move on, and I think I've had that happen maybe once or twice, and In both cases, client was like, Yeah, now let's find Let's just let's just move on. They didn't ask me to refund anything, although I certainly would have, cause it's not worth my time to go through that headache and so forth. But it just it rarely happens because clients know they know when they're if they're trying to get one over on you. So if you stand up and say something, then you can, uh you know, they're gonna know. And most people don't want to be bad people. So it's rare that you're gonna have someone who actually tries to screw you over in that sense. So again, use that that phrase that Max of and if and I recommend you don't have to. But I recommend you do the end. Anything over that you won't get charged for that will help you deal with all sorts of price objections and then know if that project takes you five hours and it takes you five hours. They're happy if it takes you 11. Well, you got up to the 10. You made 1000 and you go did an extra hour's worth of work. So you only made what, 90 $90 an hour for that for that particular project. It's not as big of a deal as we like to make it out to be. So again, that's how that's how I deal with pricing. And it all happens here when you're picking the job, not when you're over on the actual proposal page. By the time you get there every year, what you charge, your pricing should be in line already, and so you're only bidding on the jobs that that that meet that criteria. 22. Ask For the Sale: So this lesson I just want to sort a hammer home a point. This is idea of asking for the sale and the big sort of point here is just to do it. And this is when when I was coming up in sales and I have sold cars, I've sold shoes. I've sold knives. I've sold just about a everything that you could think of and the every sort of tramping through about every training program that they wrestle tools. I've been through all of their training programs, probably five or six different sort of sales training programs. And I would say the one constant throughout all of it is that one of the most important things maybe the most important thing that you need to always make sure and do when you're selling yourself or selling a product is to ask for the sale directly, ask people. One of the one of the interesting examples you can see of this is if you go to some of my YouTube videos. If you can find one where no, at the beginning of those videos, I always sort of make some sort of pitch. I'll talk about what I'm gonna talk about in in that episode, then I'll make some sort of basically an ad and then I'll go into the rest of video and some of those ads at the beginning, our for my patri on and one of the things one of the switches that I make made that I saw just a tremendous increase in the amount of people that actually took me up on the offer was I went from saying, I want to tell you about I You say I want to tell you about I used to say, I want to encourage you You say I want to suggest they used all of those terms and had mediocre success. Then, for some reason one day I used the phrase I want I wanna ask you. And when I switched to using, I wanna ask you and made it sort of this a direct appeal. Suddenly, a lot more people started signing up for my patriotic just by that little switch. The rest of everything I said was the same. But I started off by saying, I want to ask you to support me on Patri on. That was how I started it. Instead of I want to suggest or I want to encourage. I said, I want to ask you and making that again. Making that direct appeal had a significant impact on the the results that I got from from those little ads at the beginning. So what it illustrates is that people like being talked to directly. People don't like being sold because they don't like feeling like they're getting scammed or they're getting the you know they're getting one pulled over on him when you ask people things directly. It has this air of honesty and forthrightness and trustworthiness. And so whenever you're dealing with clients and your messaging back and forth, your writing proposals and so forth, you always want to make sure and ask for the sale. Now they're a couple of different ways that you can do this. And I've sort of I've tried him, and in different scenarios, different ones work better. One is what I've already talked about, which is this direct direct. You know, when when I would sell shoes be like, So do you want to buy these shoes? Do you want to get these shoes? Oh, yeah, let's go ahead and get them so a direct Ask another one Isn't a sump tive ask? So when you and you sort of have to read the person that you're interacting with But when you know they're sort of you could tell that they're in a flow and and they're really liking what you're selling them like I had someone who was wearing shoes and like, man, these air really comfortable. Wow, these air so much These look really good. These air so much more comfortable than I imagine. Etcetera, etcetera. When you when you sort of have that flow going, you can do this sort of a sump tive Ask which is all right. So we want to go ahead and bring those up, which is you're asking for the sale, but you're sort of assuming that they already want him. So you have the direct ask you have the summit of ask and then you have the 3rd 1 that I found the work really well. Which is the why not? And you might see this in places. But basically you ask Well, why not? You know Ah, why not invest in this program or why not hire me to do this or that, and that's sort of more works better when you've made some sort of point where it's it's like a no brainer why they would say no to this like it doesn't. If you've laid out a pitch to somebody where you get to the end of it, you're like it doesn't make sense. Why you would say no to this. Like, Why would you say no to this? That's when using the Why not works really well because it's sort of plays on. That's like, Why not hire me to do this for you? It would be sort of dumb not to. So again, direct Theus Emptive and the Why not? Or three different ways that you can ask for the sale, depending on the con. Ah, the context. Now, my suggestion to you, if you don't really want to dive into all of this and this year, just like I don't wanna I don't want to get that deep into the sales stuff. Just do the direct ask do doing the wreck. Direct ask is just fine. Using that a sort of ah, starting point or a standard or a default is probably the best way to go And then if you find yourself which you just might as you do this getting sort of into the sale stuff, then you can start playing with the Assumpta. I've in the wine hot and there's there's others that are out there. But these are the three that I found to work the best for me. Um, you can start playing with those a little bit and see how it works for you, depending on how the interaction is going with the client. So but the biggest thing again is ask for the sale. You tell them, click this button to hire me. Do this toe toe, hire me, or why not hire me etcetera directly. Ask for the sale. People were respect that. And if you don't ask the the studies that have looked at this, it's crazy. It's something like if you ask for the sale, your your your conversion rate will increase some like 80% or 90% increase. Like it's insane. The amount of difference it makes when you ask versus don't ask. So always make sure in everything that you dio toe ask for the sale 23. Final Thoughts: All right, So this final lesson I just want to sort of go over some final thoughts here in and wrap this up a little bit, maybe try to condense a little bit. Everything that we've been through. We've talked a lot of mechanics, and we've talked a lot of concepts and strategies and tactics on all that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of this really a It comes down to confidence when you have and really, it's confidence toe. Believe that you deserve that, are that you're worth that extra money or that extra the extra fee, extra price that you're worth that to take you from playing that numbers game to playing the quality game. To me, that is the biggest thing out of all of this. All the mechanics, all of that stuff. It's all great. But what all of it is pointing to is giving you the confidence to communicate. Um, assertively with potential clients asking for the sale, knowing how to specifically build that trust reached that threshold and again give you the confidence to be able to charge 50 60 70 80 $90 an hour. So you take everything that I've taught you here and you go on up work and you charge $10 an hour, you're gonna have problems. It's a different game. The client you're interacting with aren't thinking on that level. So hopefully, by going through all this, you've got the confidence to go out there. I started at $25 an hour. Now, for me, that was a lot of money. I mean, I was early twenties and in the most I think I'd ever made up to that point was maybe $15 an hour, 10 to $15 an hour. Somewhere in that range, working construction, that sort of stuff had had some, I guess cells jobs at that point. And ah had maybe made a little bit more than that. But $25 an hour was a lot for me, But in the grand scheme of Web development, it's really not all that much. So I'm not saying you need to go out there and start off a $100 an hour, but you need to be beyond that. Five in 10 and 15. I wouldn't start. I don't honestly, I don't care where you live. I wouldn't start before low $25 an hour. That's just what the work is worth of you can deliver. That's a bare minimum of what the work is worth. So again, hopefully this gives you the confidence toe, get out there and be able to do that and move up. From 25 to 35 I went from 25 to 50 in the span of about a month and 1/2 and then I moved from 50 to 80 and eventually settled Ah, right around 100. I think it was 95 or something like that. Before I I sort of moved out of freelancing and started doing other stuff. But the point is, is that when you get that confidence to be able to charge MAWR, that's what puts you into the quality section. That's what gives you the confidence to put yourself out there like that. And then the big thing from there is just making sure that you deliver, making sure that you're you are reliable. You are trustworthy. You are all of these things that we talked about so again, that's that's sort of the big the big idea behind this module that I wanted to give you, Of course. Dig into all the mechanics. That's all. That stuff is gonna help you a ton. But like I said, none of this stuff is gonna work. If you go out there in charge $10 an hour, you need to be charging more than that. You need to be charging what you really want and what you really think you're worth. Ah, and playing that quality game. 24. BONUS: Promote Your Upwork Profile: All right, welcome to module for this video. I'm gonna be giving you the strategy for what we're gonna do inside of this module and just quickly before I jump in. This is probably the module I'm most excited about, because really, up to this point, we've kind of been playing by the rules of up work. And it's this module where we sort of get a break out of that and start playing by our own rules and start building something that when we get later on, we talk about leaving up work and sort of going out on your own. We're actually starting to build that rural world machine here, So I'm just going to show you want to talk about what it is, surely the strategy, and then just show you some of how I've used this over the years. So the big first big thing that I want to talk about here is this idea that you may or may not have heard of called network effects. So to give you sort of the standard definition, the network, the network effect is a phenomenon where increased numbers of people are petition or participants improve the value of a good or service so that here they used the example of the Internet. Initially, they were just a few users. But as time went on, more and more people got on the Internet, and as that happened, the Internet became more and more valuable. Ah, this is generally talked about in relation to social media. So Facebook as an example. You know, initially it had a limited amount of value. But the more people that get on there than the more value it has and one of the there's a ah lot of sort of effects attached to this. So one of the things that's attached to it when it comes to social media is this idea that if I want to leave Facebook and move to a new social network for me individually, it only social network only has value. If my friends are on it and so or or people that I'm interested in in interacting with and so if I want to move a social network, I almost have to move my entire actual real world social network over to that platform for it to have the same amount of value for me. So it sort of helps insulate incumbents, which is why the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter that were around early on have sort of survived, even though there's been a lot of innovation and change in the industry, because it's really hard for people to move to a new platform because again they got to bring all of their friends with me. They got to convince those people, etcetera. So this is kind of this general idea of network effect now. This doesn't necessarily I'm not saying this because this necessarily apply specifically to up work. But up work is a network, and it has certain effects that that go along with it. And one of those effects is that it's not that the more people on it necessarily the more valuable, although that could be argued. But more for you as an individual, every client that you get, every person that you work with, every review, every rating, all of those things, those those sort of have a network effect and that they affect the algorithms that we've talked about. So I've talked a lot about relevance. This is a little bit more about rink, and so what? You're simply trying to do is you're trying to get that first job and then that second in that third and sort of starts to snowball and these network effects start to kick in and network start are up. Work starts to see you as more a more and more valuable freelancer. And as that happens, you start rising in searches. You start rising and suggested freelancer Ah, list. You start rising and all of the things that are important all of the different network features of up work, and you eventually reach a point where getting work becomes really, really easy because everything is sort of turned or tilted in your favor. And so that's what we're trying to get to and again, up to this point, we've sort of been playing by the rules inside of up work. What we're gonna do now in the strategy that we're gonna do now is we're gonna use all of these other networks outside of up work toe help us trigger the network effects inside of it. So, YouTube, medium twitter, Facebook, our own blawg, etcetera. We're going to start using all of these places for posting content, and we're going to start driving people to our up work profile. And so again, we're sort of competing outside of the very highly competitive platform that up work is. And we're getting work. We're bringing work to up work, and this is one of the things that I did that I mean, a lot of the jobs that I got were invite only jobs, and that was because someone had found a YouTube video of mine and they saw that I was available to hire. They click through and I sent them to my up work profile and they I I explained to the even had a video where explain to people how to create in by only job on up work. And then they would do that. I would get hired for that job. I complete that job and that job still counted in my review and my rank and all of those things that matter in up work. And so I was able to methodically build that to the point that up work itself started snowballing in my favor. And the really great thing about this is this is if you've had a few, you've had a profile on up work for a while and have it necessarily had, ah, luck with it or whatever, and you're trying to revive it. This is one of the easiest ways to do that. Because you're getting the work outside of up work, you're not relying on them at all, and then you're just sending it there, and that job counts for you or if you're just getting started. This is a really way really good way to establish credibility in a blogger or a video and then make it easy for people to go over to up work and hire you there and so forth. So again, it's just if you're sort of jade, if you're jaded on up work or, you know your maybe not having as much luck as you thought you would. This is a really great way to sort of eternal of that on its head and start putting things in your favor and as absolutely nothing to do with up work. So again it could be very liberating. So 01 of the things questions I get often to with this is some people asked me Well, if you can get the work outside of up work, why send them toe up work and take the hit on the fee and so forth. And the reason is is because if I send them to my my website on its own, then there's no network effect to my website. There's no rank that I'm not going to show up in. Search is higher. There's none of that. Okay, so I may get more money initially. But if I send them toe up work than those network effects, start working in my favor. And eventually I'll actually make more money in the long term. Because I'm getting Mawr invites. I'm get all of that over on up work. So it's a It's a calculated sort of trade off that we're making here, and it's something that I recommend. If you're just starting out on up work, Um, or maybe you're just decided you want to go kind of all in on up work. Then, of course, do that. But eventually we want to move off of up work on to our own site. But we want to make sure that we have enough portfolio items, enough reviews, enough ratings, enough traction with our content before we do that. And so again That's why we would do that and take the hit on the fee initially. But build up those network effects in our favor where we start actually getting more work in the long term. The last thing that that I want to show you, I wanted to sort of give you a real world sort of vision of this. And so what I'm showing you here is this that this is actually skill share. So this is the platform that I teach on primarily. And, you know, this isn't necessarily up work anything like that. As I mentioned, you know, I have one client now that I work with on retainer. Um, I'm I really don't do a ton off work on up work anymore. And there's a whole another thing about this about exiting up work that will eventually get to in this course. But the point here is that I've built up this sort of social media presence this YouTube, general blawg and email list, and so forth is which is what? I'm gonna show you how to do in this module and I can point it to anything I want. So when I started teaching classes, then and specifically why I decided to go sort of all in on skill sharing. Just put all my classes there and really just promote that that platform I turned all of that social media presence all of those eyeballs and everything towards Scotia. And you can see the effects here. In April, I had about 5000 minutes of watch time, which is important on SCO share, because that's how you as a teacher, you get paid. The more people that the more minutes people watch of your courses, the larger share of sort of the teacher pool that you get and that's essentially how you make your money. So back in just April, I was down at 5000 which is it was about, I think halfway through actually is halfway through May. I decided this when I made the decision to start pointing everything towards skill share. So I went up to 7600 there. Then the next month it was 13,000, 21,000 and last month is $29,000 is way down because we're only part way through Ah, the month. But this will probably up around in this range. I don't know exactly where it'll land, but you can see just the increase. 101 students 146 to 12 3 16 and then 4 41 So almost over four times the amount of students . And that is just me, sort of methodically turning that. What? I'm gonna show you how to build this module towards the skill share so you can point it towards up work. Eventually, later. You pointed towards your own website. If down the road you want a point, you wanna teach courses in pointing towards that, or you want to open an ice cream stand, you can point it towards that. You can point this towards anything. The most important thing is to start building this and using it toe toe. Help your freelance career, so getting work, it's a lot easier. And when you really start creating content like I'm gonna show you here, then what happens is you'll have content from two years ago that still working for you, that's still getting you clients or or whatever you end up ultimately doing with it. So it's a very valuable asset that can build over the long term and just sort of snowballs with each day and each piece of content that you create. So that's what this modules about. I'm gonna show you how to to, ah, build all of this and and start turning all of this in your favor. 25. BONUS: WARNING: one word of caution before we get into all of this. And I'm only saying this to you, speaking from my own experience and having gone down this route a little bit and seeing how dangerous it can be. But as we get into this and you start working with sites like YouTube or running a podcast or running a blogger, whatever it is, one thing I want you to remember is that you are not a youtuber or a blogger or a podcaster , a twitter of Facebook. Er, you are a freelancer, and what that means is, let's just take you to, for example, as I sort of started getting into YouTube and using it as my business. I sort of was caught up in the allure of YouTube and started thinking of myself more as a youtuber and started creating content mawr to try and get views and ad revenue and and so forth. And that came at the expense of being ableto point people towards. You know, at first my freelance, uh, my freelancing services and then the later courses and so forth, and it's really, really easy to get caught up in that. And look, if At some point you're along this you decide. You know what? I don't want to freelance anymore. And I want to just be a youtuber or a blogger or whatever, and you don't have the that you're making the income from those sites to be able to make that transition or whatever. Then, fine, you know, it's your life, sort of do it what you want with it, but just understand that they're what I'm going to show you in this module about how to use these different platforms for your freelance services. That is something that is completely different from being a successful, say, just YouTuber or just blogger or just podcaster. They're two very different things. Getting views and making sales of your product or your service is from, say, YouTube, are they? They're totally different. They're totally different approaches, totally different mindsets. This is one things that run into all the time from the lovely commenters over on YouTube. Not understanding that I don't like views is not the thing that matters to me. It's how many male sales I make that day. As a result of that video, and again, those things sort of tend to work in opposition with one another, so I just don't want you to get too caught up. And as you dive into YouTube and some of these other platforms thinking of yourself as a youtuber, a blogger podcaster when you're trying to promote your freelance services, you are a freelancer and YouTube, your blogger podcast. The social media sites. These are all tools that you use to help sell your freelance services, but you are not thes things in and of itself. And again, this may sound like weird right now, but as you get into it, I think you'll start to understand what I mean. And again, if you make that decision where you're like, I want to be a youtuber, make a hard break there and don't try and be sent. Ah, freelancer. But yet transition and be a full. You two were like, just be a youtuber at that point. Or be a podcaster at that point, because it's gonna be really difficult for you to try and sort of do both and sell your freelance services, etcetera. So again, just a just a quick word of warning Before we get into all of this. That's something that's out there that you wanna look. Look out for us. We go through 26. BONUS: How to Write Content That Sells: in this lesson. I'm gonna give you an overview of how to create content that sells, and we're gonna talk about metrics that matter. We're going to talk about edgy, edgy team. And then we're going to talk about something I call the 99 1 principle and just the sort of the big thing here before we get into this is you are creating content that sells. That's important to understand. That sort of goes back to the previous lesson where I harp on not getting too caught up in being a youtuber and so forth. You are selling every piece of content to Ukraine. Ultimately is an ad, and that's something that's important to remember. It has a purpose. It is not simply there toe put out good content, make people feel people will not buy from you. I told my little brother this the other day, when we're talking about some of this stuff and he said it made him realize a few things. So let me say it here. People will not buy from you just because they like you like you made good content and so they like it and they're gonna buy from you they're gonna buy from you because you persuade them to, and you have to do that with your content, so just always keep that in mind. So let's start off by talking about metrics that matter, because this could be easy to get caught up in lose sight of. So it's not views. It's not like it's not shares it ISS sales period. Now that doesn't mean that you don't pay attention to views or likes or shares. But all of those things are just supporting metrics for the one that ultimately matters, which is your sales. And so if you have, if you create a video and it gets 10 views, but you make 10 sales and those air No. $500 sales apiece and you make $5000 then what does it really matter that you only had 10 views now? And the other thing is a lot. People think that while more views or more reads or whatever is gonna automatically lead to more sales, it doesn't. Sometimes you can get lucky and you create concrete's something that gets a lot of views and a lot of people see it, and it also is very persuasive and a lot of people because by as a result of that, but creating day content day in and day out, that's not gonna happen. Ah, the those things they're few and far between. If you try to run your business just solely on those Ah, you're gonna have a really difficult time. You need to create content on a daily basis, and you need to really just sort of play towards the numbers. And the numbers are what I'm gonna show you here. You create sort of entertainment entertaining, informative content that sells Dan and day out. You're just gonna you're gonna get a, you know, a few sales or ah ah, maybe a few quote requests on a daily basis. Ah, and you just sort of play to those numbers. So again, at the end of the day, you need to focus on the metrics that matter. And that is the sales of the quote requests to the amount of clients that you get from a particular piece of content. There is one secondary to that which is email subscriptions, and the reason that is is because email subscriptions still, in this day and age, even though a lot of people love to hate on email and say Emails dead. And this at the other email subscriptions are still incredibly valuable in is one of the ways having a subscriber list is how you sort of solidify your business. Everything changed for me when I finally decided to create an email list. And so that's one of the first things that I'm gonna recommend that you do. We'll get into all of that later. This is just sort of a big picture overview, but that is a secondary thing. So sales and email subscription those air your two primary metrics. I don't care what you dio if you have your online and you have a business, those things still to this day email subscriptions still more than Facebook followers or YouTube subscriptions or Twitter followers or any of that are still much more valuable and are gonna serve you a lot better in your business than anything else. So again, focus on the metrics that matter when it comes to your content. The second thing is this term called entertainment. I've heard people talk about this before. I want to give credit to the person who probably taught me the most about how to do it, which has been settle and learn more about him. Have been settled dot com. If you would like this fair warning, he's very direct. So uh, not very PC or anything like that. So if you do go over there, just be prepared for that. But he knows a ton about creating content that is educational but also entertaining and ultimately is persuasive. And those are the things that matter. And the idea here is we talk about you need to be creating content only daily basis. I mean email every single day. I generally blawg every single day. I come close to you tubing every day. Ah, podcast is a little bit different. We'll talk about that here. Ah, in a second. But you need to be doing this every day again. Another thing. When I started putting out content every single day, things completely changed for me, right, because you don't have to hit a home run every time when you do that. If let's say that you email once a week, right, because you don't want to offend your subscribers female once a week. Now you have four emails going out in a month. Those four emails really have to hit or those four pieces of content really have to hit in order for you to do what you want to do in a month. And if one doesn't, then you might have a bad month that month. Whereas if you're emailing every day, if one email doesn't hit or you're posting content everyday, one piece of content doesn't hit. You can take a crack at it again the next day. More than that, by doing it every single day, you develop a habit and you get a lot better at it, and you will eventually hit a groove to where you can start toe maybe not hit home runs every day, but you can hit doubles and triples every day, so you need to be doing it every day. It needs to be content that educates and informs, but it also entertains while at the same time being persuasive. So we're not just putting out hard sales pitches every day. In fact, in our emails and our content, for the most part, every once in a while we'll hard sell. But for the most part we're not hard selling. Instead, we are focusing on educating and entertaining while also being persuasive. And then the pitches sort of of this little thing that we do at the end. And again, I'm gonna go in and show you examples of all this time we're gonna get into deal tell in all of this. But again, big picture wise, it needs to educate, entertain and be persuasive. And I'll show you how to do that. The last thing then is and again, this comes from Ben Settle. But this is 100% true is no hard teaching. And what I mean by hard teaching is sort of the I think that the impetus or they're the they're the impetus. But the approach that a lot of people want to take the sort of automatic feeling that people have when they start thinking about creating content for their businesses. Well, if I just create this really valuable piece of content, people are gonna like it, and then they'll they'll be really informed from it and, you know, then they'll want to hire me and again, it's like I said before, people are not gonna hire you because they think you're swell. They're gonna hire you because you persuaded them to. And hard teaching can be really boring. And a lot of people are really bored. If you think about those do tubes a really good example. And I even find myself falling into this most of the time when I sit down to watch YouTube now, I don't do it because I want to watch an hour tutorial on you know, some coding thing most of the time, every now and again, I do that and you do wanna have some of that content so that people can find it and we'll talk about the kind of here in a second. But you want to have some of that conduct, so people looking for those specific things confined it, and that can be useful. But you're sort of day in, day out content that you're creating. It needs to focus pretty much more on entertaining and having a sort of general lesson to it. The way I sort of think about it is I want to be entertaining primarily and then have some sort of deeper life or career or work or business or or coding lesson because I teach developers, But I want to have some sort of deeper lesson to it, and that's about it. Like I'm not focusing on getting into this sort of hard coating or hard teaching and teaching, teaching people the ins and outs of coding and an email or whatever. And I can just tell you from experience. When I stopped thinking that hard teaching was the way to go and I moved away from that, I started making a lot more sales. All my heart teaching is in my courses. If you want that, go take my courses. But if you want toe, you know my daily email and so forth that's is gonna be more entertainment, more sort of soft education and information. Ah, and so forth. Now the kind of there's sort of theirs, too. Caveats to that one is what I already mentioned now and again. It's okay to create hard teaching content, but you have. There's a purpose behind it. So take ah, really good examples. Let's say I create a YouTube video where I teach some you know how to create a Web page or something, some hard core coding thing that people want to learn. How to do. I would do that because I've gone. I've gone into Google AdWords. I've looked at the keywords. I found that there's a ton of people searching for this particular topic I've got. I've searched the topic on YouTube, have seen that the videos that come up for that topic have a ton of views. And so I'm creating the video to target that keyword and then create a piece of content that has real value in in it. So it does get, likes and shares, and it becomes popular on YouTube. But then it's still pitches like a full course or something at the end of it. So it's done for a very, very specific purpose, okay? And that's not gonna be something that's necessary. A part of your day today, sort of content that you're creating that is a strategic play that you do every now and again. OK, so that's one caveat to the no hard teaching. Another one is if you look at my podcast, you know, about once a week I do a more long form podcast. I try to release that every Sunday. Sort of depends on what's going on in my life, But I try to do it every Sunday, and that is Mawr, sort of ah, hard teaching. I go more in depth into a certain topic and and that's done about once a week and the reason that I do that, and I sort of pick this up again from bed settled. It's not something that he teaches, but it's what he does. And I sort of figured out that what happens is is when you're doing the daily persuasive education, entertainment content, you get to about a week and people start to be like I'm you know, this is sort of constantly just pushing me towards courses, and they'll start to have the sort of value question. And when you hit him with that podcast, it's sort of resets. That sort of gets them back. Oh, that was really, really valuable. That's why I'm subscribed to this list and so forth. And, ah, that that helps sort of keep that in check. But again, it's a mistake to think doing that kind of content on a daily basis is better that more is better. In that sense, it's really not because why are people gonna pay for your stuff? if they can get it for you from for free. So, um, again, you need to just be really strategic about that. And frankly, you deserve to be paid for the sort of more in depth service that you're gonna provide Whatever you end up doing later with courses, if you do that like, you deserve to be paid for that sort of thing. So again, just really try to stay away from the hard teaching because, ah, that can really hurt your business. The final thing, then, is the 99 1 principle here. So this idea of creating entertainment educate content that educates, informs, that's what 99% of your email or your video or your block post or your Twitter tweets or whatever are going to be there gonna be content that educates and informs. And then there will be 1% selling. But the important thing here is you always include that 1% selling. No, even I've had some emails that I've written where they were maybe a little more sensitive topics where it felt very uncomfortable to sell at the end of it. But I've just sort of, I kind of said in my mind. I'm sticking to this principle of selling on every piece of content, and that's what I do, and I did. And so again, you just really have to in green that into your mind you sell every piece of content because that's the purpose. The purpose is not to get views. Purpose is not to get likes or shares is not to make people think that you're swell. It is to sell. It is to sell your services. So you sell every piece of content. You just make 99% of what you're doing educational and entertaining and only have 1% pitch . And that's why people will stick around for the long haul because they'll actually start toe. Enjoy reading your emails and the little jokes that you make, or the way you talk about things or the little pieces of information that you drop in there . They'll find it sort of refreshing and light, and they like it and over time that that, in and of itself will also become persuasive. So those air sort of the big picture things when it comes to creating content that sells course again, we're gonna get more specific into this, I'm gonna show you examples of actual pieces of content that I've created and how I do this on a daily basis. 27. BONUS: Content Breakdown: right in this video we're going to I'm gonna break down two pieces of content, sort of go through it in detail and show you what's going on here and and give you an idea . Some specifics that you condone can use for creating your content and then sort of leave you with sort of a general sort of overview and framework. Now, one of the things I don't wanna really harp on before I get into this is a lot of people are on the lookout for templates or frameworks or things that sort of almost do the writing for you. And I really want to caution you against that. And the reason why is because when you do that, it a it it stops you from getting good at writing or say, creating a video or whatever. It stops you from actually learning the art of doing that. Because you're relying on this framework. I know they could be, you know, they could be really useful and helpful in the sort of feels like it. It helps you to write better, but it actually can be a crutch that can slow you down in you actually getting good at writing and so forth. Ah, the second thing about them is they often are very formulaic and their obvious to the people that are reading your content. If you read a piece of content that where someone is being very formulaic, it's really easy to see. And I go back and look at e mails and block post that I wrote where I was doing that, and I just sort of cringe because it's just dead obvious what I was doing. And when it becomes obvious to your reader or viewer that you are using some sort of formula, it's sort of waters down the effect, and it ultimately hurts the thing that matters to most, which is your sales. So I really want to caution you against that, really want to invite you to learn the art in particular of writing? Writing is the founder, and this is coming from someone. I was again that someone's talking about my little brother just the other day, but I never thought that I would wake up in the morning every morning and have the urge to write like I hated writing for Iona. How long I really still sort of hate writing in a way, but having done it every day now for several years, it's sort of like this urge, almost like a hunger pain when you wake up. And it's not that you know, you necessarily love, love it, but if you don't do it, you feel bad. And so I really want to encourage you to dive in and take on this idea of writing because writing is the foundation of this. I write my daily email first. I turn that into a block post. I used that to then record a video. All of the content that I create, the foundation of it is writing, and what's nice about that is when you write it out first and then you sit down to court a video or podcast or whatever it is. You don't have to sort of think of things on the fly, and that could be really, really helpful and allow you to make much more crisp, clean content on a daily basis. So with that said, let's go ahead and dive into this particular piece of content. Now I'm showing you these two pieces of content because these are two pieces of content that have performed really, really well for me recently. So these pieces of content led to about 20 sales over ah to day basis, which is Ah, pretty good amount of sales for me. That then spurs on Ah, the watch time that I get over on skill share and lead to three in a row three days in a row of my highest ever watch time that I've gotten on the platform for a daily basis. So these air were pretty good pieces of content that did really well from a sales perspective. So let's start off with the title here. This could be a subject line for an email or whatever, but tips from a 400 K up work freelancer. So this is sort of goes back to a classic headline if you've studied any sort of ah copyrighting or so forth. Now there's this headline. Ah, something along lines of what doctors know about health or something like that. The whole idea is a strong appeal to authority of 400 K up work. Freelance ever gonna get tips from that person, So it's a really strong appeal to authority. There's really nothing more to it. than that. That's all the thought that really went into. It is how can I p ah, Pia, till authority, this is what I did here. So then I go in up workers like the PHP of freelance sites. I wrote that line. I'm gonna tell you why I wrote every single line in this piece of content that will go into another one. So I wrote that line because up to that point, I had been writing a lot about PHP and talking about how people in the deaf community loved to hate on PHP. And so I wanted sort of a little bit of a transition of I'm gonna be talking about up work for a while now. And so Ah, that made for a nice transition because I'm I'm emailing or I'm writing on a daily basis That made a nice transition of what I had been talking about to. Now what I'm going to talk about now. And I do think that you should think about those things about the context of Don't just write each piece of content and it's self contained container. Think about what you've written before. Think about how people view you will talk about that a little bit more later and think about all of those things. Think about your your content in context of everything else that you, ah, that people know about your O. R. Have been getting from you. And that can actually help you to be a lot more effective with your content. So is that workers like PHP a freelance sites the most dominant player in the industry? That is again, I'm appealing to authority here. I want I want people to I want to say that so people start to value up work. It's the most dominant player in the industry. It happens to be true. But that is something to ah again get established authority four up work which I'm gonna be talking about so the most dominant player in the industry, but the one every everybody loves to hate for some reason. So I'm addressing, um, addressing an objection that's out there. Everybody loves to hate it for some reason, So I'm sort of addressing that objection. I guess when you get big enough, it's inevitable. That's just a simple ah me addressing that objection. I'm not gonna go deep into doing that But I always like to address that sort of thing because it is, Ah, something out there that people, not everybody. I think he gets overblown. But such a big platform. You have people that are happy anyway, it's it. But because of that, I get asked a lot is up work worth it? So that's just sort of a transition into the point of this, which is this question is up work worth it? So rather than me, answer again, why not hear from someone who has had massive success on up work over foreign que earned fax so again a transition into authority? Then we have. This is Adam. So this is why I'm said. Before getting involved in up work, I was in a significant amount of debt from several failed businesses from restaurants, taps, and the company I was currently working for recently failed to leaving me stuck between Iraq and a hard place. So I included that quote this. This came from a question that was asked over on coral cores. A by the way, treasure trove of content ideas. Talk about content ideas later, but you could probably literally is going up work. Google or Google but searched the topic and you'll find all sorts of interesting questions and really good answers those questions and so forth. So that's what I was doing. I found this one, Um and then this was his answer. Were part of his answer. Reason included. This from His answer is because I wanted to create a before and after and when any sort of persuasion. If you campaign a before and after picture like that, that'll do 90% of the selling for you, and you don't have to even, like, pitch people. You just tell a story or you clued a quote of someone you know who's done it. I mean, there was all of the content for this. This block post was most of it is written by this Adam guy on this answer, and it was him trying to sell his stuff, by the way. But, ah, I didn't have to come up with it out of thin air. I just quoted his answer, Let's over there Publicly, free available. I gave him credit, right? I quoted him Ieave, including picture of his upward profile here. But ah, it was mostly written for me so I was just looking for the before after here. So this is the before, and then I right Then he joined up work. It wasn't more than a couple of days in my pursuit for paying projects. They would cream, accost. My first client that hired me to do a small $40 task on infusion Soft took him about 30 minutes complete. But I went above and beyond. My man was ecstatic. Melanie, do you write me an amazing review? But he basically offered to hire me for unlimited hours at $40 an hour, which me, at the time sounded amazing. Okay, so that's that's the start of the after. That's really all the thought that went into that then and now, while the pictures worth 1000 words right? And this is more after and this is also proof, right? Because I can, I could I mean in someone's mind. If they're really being skeptical, I could just make this quote entirely up, right? I mean, this is just text on a page. I couldn't entirely made that up. We're here when I show the picture and it's his foreign. K earn and charges $295 an hour and all that sort of thing 96% job success score. It's proof. So it's again the after, but it's also the proof. So that's why I know I included Ah, why I talked about this but also included screens hunting. Didn't just say Well, now he charges to 95 hour makes over foreign carriers like Well, yeah, but I can't see that. So this adds credibility to what I'm saying. So I say so. Yeah, definitely worth it. This is this is sort of this is reinforcing a point that I want them to make, right? So I'm saying, Yeah, definitely worth it to get them to say Yeah, definitely worth it. Right to answer the question Is up work worth it? Yes, definitely worth it. That's the first point I want them to reach in their mind. That's the entire point of the first part of this piece of content is for them to say up work is it's worth meet investing, effort into up work. So I'm essentially selling up work to start, but I'm doing it by just sort of telling a story next, I say. But his biggest insight on succeeding on up work might sound a bit familiar. So now what I'm doing is I'm taking and I'm taking all the authority that I now built up for this guy, and I'm transitioning it to myself because I'm saying his biggest tip might sound familiar , insinuating that it's something that I have said before. So I said, I quickly figured out that the above skills are pretty common. The competition was fierce. What was different about me is my motivation to help decline, achieve their desired goals in a word, competency. For some reason, many freelancers on the site where were are unreliable. Only did I experience this when I was hiring people, but also when I spoke with potential clients when I was interviewing for gives Giggs, there wasn't a lot of trust at all and so included that particular quote because I wanted to introduce the idea of trust, which is something that I have talked about for a really long time. So again, I'm transitioning his authority on to me because I have been saying for a long time something that this guy who makes 400 K on up work has also is also saying so. Then I really hammer this home. At this point, I think I know someone who has been hammering this point home for ah, for years now. Okay, so that's the sort of completion of transferring his authority on to me when I say trust is the number one most essential part of all freelancing, including up work. So now I've got people to say OK, up work is worth it. Johns and authority on up work. Well, now I'm going into what do you need to do in order to be successful on up work? Okay. And I say trust, trust is the most important thing you can do and knowing how to demonstrate that you're trustworthy. So this is all just me setting up criteria that I'm gonna pay off later. So beyond reviews or your portfolio, everybody does that. But doing it simply in the words you say in how you say them. So everything you write every phone call the potential client, every ounce of messaging they get from you just oozes with trustworthiness. That's when this Freeland think freelance thing gets easy and you can charge two or 95 an hour and make 400 k or more. So I'm setting up a criteria for success. And then I'm talking about what success looks like. Tor 95 in our 400 k or more. Anyway, that's the main thrust of my freelancing on upward course over on skill share. So that's the payoff. The payoff is I set up this criteria. This is what success looks like. If you follow that criteria, my course teaches you that. Okay, so I have set it up before I paid it off. It's important that you do that and said, Just saying I have a great course, right? Or I I'm a great freelancer. So showing you how to demonstrate your trustworthiness even if you don't have a big client history. So I'm I'm going through objections. Now I know people will be like a lot of people say, Well, you know, I don't have a bunch of clients or I don't have a ton reviews. I don't have a perfect portfolio. You can still have success from day one there, so that's addressing objections that I get a lot. That's what those lines are for, anyway. You can get access that course for nothing on skill share. This is the now the sort of the the actual pitch part and I always try to give people Ah, I tried to make it an offer they can't refuse. So you can get access to the course for nothing on skill share. As a teacher, I can give you too much. No cost trial of skill share. Get old full Accel of courses including all my courses etcetera, etcetera Such a cancel anytime. Never pay a penny like I'm eliminating risk, right? It makes it sort of a really simple yes for them to say which is what I always try to do. Ah, with with my pitches. So for you is a freelancer. You can pretty much take all of this. You know this everything they've done here conceptually and then the pitch of the end of it . When you go to make your offer instead of you pitching a course like Ideo, you would pitch your freelance services but make it an easy offer, right? A a no cost consultation, right? Maybe you want you'll actually get on the phone with them for free and talk about their project now the reason you would do that from a business perspective is people have a really hard time saying no to people in person, so if you get them on the phone, there's a good chance they're going to hire you. I think in all the years that I freelanced when I got someone on the phone, I never got to know. I don't think I ever got to know when I got someone on the phone. So you may be like averse to talking to people on the phone. But if you can get him on the phone, like if you look at it that way, you can. It's a lot easier to get a yes. So maybe you offers that sort of thing or, you know, of course, we're sending them over to our up work profile here, so you know you can, ah, sort of point them over there and explain to them that they can see your entire client history and all of the reviews and so forth to learn about you and that, you know, you're completely covered when it comes to up workers so forth. But you just want to try and make it in easy. Ah, yes, Over here. One of the things that no one of the ways that I did this a lot was Ah, I would create a piece of content where I showed someone how to do something. And this is maybe a little bit more hard teaching. But I would just It wasn't in the sense that I would show them something really technical. And I was I was targeting it, not towards developers. I was targeting it towards people who are not very technical. But I would show them all the technical stuff and like they would look at it and go. I don't understand any of that. And at the end of it, I basically address that conversation that they're having in their head. I would say if you don't understand any of this and just want me to do it for you, you can hire me over here. That's a really good way to create content like this as well. Okay, so that's one piece of content. Let me go through the 2nd 1 here. Well, maybe Ah, tackle this one a little bit more quickly. But the subject line is my tech job is killing me. So one of The things that I've learned is that when I read a headline where it it sounds like it's about me. People tend to view that more mawr, they click that more. It gets more attention because obviously they're following me. They're following me for a reason. They want to hear about me. But, oh, a lot of these subject lines aren't actually about me there something that somebody else said. And so I do play without a little bit and you'll get charges of people saying you're using Clickbait or whatever and who knows? Maybe it's true, but at the end of the day, the metrics that matter or not some random commenters opinion it is how many sales you make . And again, this is one of the the pieces of content I put out that did really, really well, sales wise. So again, my tech job is killing me. Ah is the headline. That's sort of like What? What's going on with John like what? Is everything OK, right, that that's why people click on Ah, something like that. So then I go. About a month ago, I got this message from Scott, So it's not about me. I'm gonna established I t guy about on my own Since 2003 I've seen my workload steadily decrease over the years due to better hardware, etcetera. You can sort of read that The whole point of putting in this is he introduces a problem at the end. He says, my quality life is really taking a hit. So that's how I tied into my tech job is killing me. So Ah, I'm introducing a problem here and again. This is a little bit of a before. So then I come down here and said he wanted to get into web development and want to know if it was any better fast forward to today. And he just sent me this. John, I can't tell you how grateful I am for you Work. I see your happening. Take more because they're now free time on Labor Day weekend, etcetera, etcetera Your tutorials help me to get my first PHP project on. So this is an after again in most of what I do, I just try to do before and after and if you can if you can get before and after, it can be really, really effective. And you think about that in your freelancing career, right? It it You know, if you work with a client, you can talk about their before and they're after and get creative about. Don't just talk about the before as a whole one, blah. But this one specific thing of their before they felt this way about X and then another piece of content could be they felt this way about why and then after this is how they felt the after this is what they had or this will their results like, you really want to dig into that before and after and fight all of the little nuance and intricacies, that of the problems that they were having, the way they were feeling etcetera and then tie that into the nuance afterwards of working with you and how they felt and so forth but before and after is incredibly powerful. So if you can do that, um, then give me really effective. And here's one of the really funny things about this. If you go back to the previous article that I just showed you, this one here, this wasn't even my before and after, right, cause you might think Well, I don't have any clients right now. Are you know, I don't know if I can do that. My This was somebody else's before and after. This wasn't anybody that worked with me. This isn't anybody that had anything to do with me. I don't know this guy from Ha ha Adam, but I could still use his before and after to illustrate a concept about not me, but about up work. Right? So sometimes you have to sell the topic as a whole. Right? Like for a freelancer? Let's see your freelance developer. Well, you might have to spend some time selling the topic, telling people on just hiring a developer, period, right, talking about the topic, not just talking about them hiring you. And so in that sense, you don't have to talk about just clients that work with you. You can just talk about clients that have worked with a developer, their before and after, and how hiring a developer was much more saving a ton of time and frustration and headache than if they hadn't hired a developer to sell them on the concept as a whole. And then, like I did here, sort of transition that a little bit into hiring you as their developer. So again, you don't have it Doesn't have to be your before and after you just get try to get really creative this and really sit down and think about it. So then I go into now. It's obvious to me what happened. I get all the navigation. Scott is absolutely Tauron too, is learning. So again, I'm sort of setting up a criteria for success. Scott was successful because he did a lot. He took action. So, you know, he dove into these different courses That sort of a subtle ah ah, push towards my courses. Hired a pro photographer, started working on YouTube just insane amount of action. And if he keeps it up, who almost be impossible for him to lose because no matter what happens around things change, he will grant through. And that's it. That's the secret, which, of course, is no secret of all. Combine insane workout ethic with the right training again, a subtle, persuasive element towards the right training, and you're basically unstoppable. And then I go into my pitcher for my course again. So I set up the criteria for success. I sort of talk about what success would look like, right. If he keeps it up, it will be almost impossible for him to lose, you know? And then I I go into my pitch of I teach you how to do that. In my course, you'll notice a lot of my content. That's sort of how how it ends is I set up a criteria for success. And then I talk about how my my product will teach you that that criteria for success again , as a freelancer selling services, you could do the same thing right? You can take to you can take to projects. Maybe one is a project that failed or you can take to clients. They don't have to be your clients. And you could talk about how, with one client hired developer, the other person tried to do it on their own. And the person who tried do it on their own. It took them way longer, and it didn't look anything like they wanted to do. And there's and then the project failed. They eventually gave up and quit this person over here. Hire developer was done in two months. They started they could focus on growing, creating their content and and doing their sales. And they had to success. And now they're they're super wealthy or whatever, right? And even beyond that, it doesn't even have to be riel, Right? You could tell that story as a fiction and just be up front about It's a fiction, right? It's a you know, to imagine this scenario and then when you get done, say, now is you know, is that did that really happen? It most likely happens every day in our world, which is probably true, right? So you don't even have to use riel stories to do it. So again there's there's just be creative with this and and really dig into two and so forth. And so again, the before and after story telling and then always transitioning into setting up that criteria for access and my thing will help you to be successful with what you're trying to dio. Okay, if you if you know your market, which we've talked about previously course about knowing your market, knowing your ideal client, all of that if you know them well, you'll know what they're trying to achieve. What point they want to get to, and you can create really compelling content that will appeal to that. So it's all about just being creative and understand that this is a persuasive process. And I think probably the biggest thing toe understand with this is if you'll notice all of this is storytelling. Right when I talk about Scott or I talk about this 400 k up worker, that is me telling a story. His story doesn't have to be okay, kids, gather around and let's you know a story is me just talking about something else telling someone else a story. And so this is all storytelling. And again, this is one. Things I learned from Ben Settle is, you know, selling will do 90 year storytelling. We'll do 90% of the persuasion for you and me. Personally, I found, If I tell before after stories like this, those tend to be the most effective. If that's all you ever did when you created your content, you would have pretty good success. People love these stories. I get people when I do these people who will message me your comment or whatever and be like I love the inspiring stories the before and after like this. People love this stuff. So if this is all you ever did you again, I think you would have a lot of success. But hopefully that sort of opened your mind to the kind of things that you could do and some of the different ways to use this stuff and start creating your content. Like I said at the beginning, I really want to caution you of trying to think of this super form formulaic Lee trying to get a framework or a formula or this. I'm gonna follow this pattern every time. Ah, that again, that becomes really obvious. And it keeps you from learning the art of writing, of storytelling, of being persuasive, of being educational and entertaining and so forth. That's an art that you really have to learn. You can only learn it by getting in the quote unquote Jim and putting in the work by putting out content like this. So that's what I want to encourage you to do not just hand you a formula that probably isn't even gonna work all that well for you anyway. So again, really try to be creative with it. Try to tell those before after stories, and if you do that, you're gonna be in in really good shape. 28. BONUS: Content Ideas: one of the big questions I get whenever I talk start talking about creating content is how do you come up with content ideas and I'll give the answer right off the bat. The actual truth of the answer and the truth of the answer is that I get content ideas from anything and everything every day, all the time. And what I mean by that is when you get into this habit of writing and creating content on a daily basis and you know you're sort of on the hook every day for some piece of content, what happens is your mind starts to sort of prep you for that and sort of starts to turn in the world around you into this source of content ideas. So I could be driving down the road and see a billboard. Or I could be watching a video, and there's a part of it that I think, Oh, that would be good to talk about or whatever it is just everything that I experience on a daily basis, My mind sort of will bring up to me like, Oh, that could be a good idea for a piece of content. I could talk about this and this. And so it just sort of comes from everywhere. The big key with that is when you get those ideas to make sure and write them down and write them down with enough detail that you can sort of recreate the thinking and also the emotion that you're that sort of went along with that first moment. Of all this could be a good idea. So again, content ideas ultimately come from everything that you do all around you. Um, it's just a matter of getting in the habit of creating content on a daily basis, and that will start toe happen naturally. But there are moments where maybe I feel like I'm at a loss. Or maybe I just some of the ideas I've written down I don't feel like writing about. And so I have places that I go in order to get ideas. And so ah, and there's you know, you could probably google content ideas out there and you get all of these sort of answers . And I've even been guilty of talking about this in the past like I've I've said, Oh, you can go on Amazon and look at the outlines of books and that can give you ideas. And, you know, you could look at the dummies guides, books or and and there's a lot of advice around that. And what I've found is that the reality of it is, Well, that sounds good when people say it, because I don't actually do any of that stuff. And so I really want to stick to just showing you what I do and and my sort of process. And then you can kind of take from that what you will instead of trying to give you this exhaustive list, half of which I don't actually even do and may not even know really work all that well. So the first places I've kind of mentioned already that I go on. Probably the place I spend the most time is over on Cora, and I think the reason why I like Core is because it's a question, answer oriented sort of site, and that just sort of really works well with my thinking. But there's a lot of really, really good questions and content over Encore that you can draw from so whatever. Whatever the topic is, you can pretty much find it over here. Let's say that you're a freelancer, Newbold WordPress sites so you can come over here and I have this sort of already in in my sidebar here. But you can just come up in the core and you can search wordpress, and you're gonna get a list of all of the different WordPress question. So what are the WordPress themes? Maybe you could do Ah, piece of content on that. What is the breast WordPress hosting site? Which black Bloc Pat Platform is used to make additional income? Where? President bet. Better to use to make additional income. WordPress or Blogger? What are the best WordPress plug ins? What is the best free one page theme for wordpress? Like if you build WordPress websites, this is all a treasure trove. How do I speed up, like, literally every single one of these? You could write a piece of content on like these air. Ah, these are all really good. And then if you click through into your here's what's even better. All right, there's the answer. You don't even have to think of the insert right here. Okay. Ah, Bata x team seven. Right And then this one comes down here and says, My theme shop Ah, let's go down a little further here. Hello? Uh, I'm being sarcastic. I love when they put pictures and their answers actually hate it. But see EG news magazine newspaper Echo like you can just go through and they give you the answers here, and you can sort of kind of read through it and figure out what you sort of agree with and what you don't agree with and make your own list out of this. So that's what's really great about cores. Is not only gives you the idea for the content, but it also gives you the answer. And so your content is almost sort of written for you. Okay, so that's the first place that I go, and I mean again, any topic you can think of. It's over here on Cora, Um, dog breeding. I guess that we have no idea which dog reach of the average person. Not only like maybe you dark walk dogs for a living, and your people that are your clients are really interested in dogs. So you want to create content around just the general topic not just dog walking in particular. So which dog breach? An average person not own. What is? You know, opinion is the best dog breeding. Why? Which Brett breed of dog is the smartest. Like this is all stuff that you could use as ideas for contents. So again, Cory is a really, really good one for that. Another one you've sort of already seen here, um, is actually let me go. Let me actually hit up the block here. I'll hear this. Okay, so is this right here? When you start creating content, you're gonna get people who message you. They're gonna comment on your videos. Ah, that is probably the primary source of where I get content. Ideas is YouTube comments, email messages, Facebook comments, Facebook messages, Twitter tweets like and, you know, it doesn't even have to be. It doesn't even have to be your own stuff. Like you can go over to Twitter, for example on Let's just let's type in something like PHP. Okay? You can come over and go in here, and you can sort of just look through this and you can see what people are saying. Ah, about PHP in here and you could find sort of ideas for content here. You find something that you agree with or find something you don't agree with. And you could make a piece of content about it. Um, you know, so it doesn't even have to be your own like people commenting on your stuff. The thing about the world today is so many people are putting out so much content, like getting inspired to write a piece of content. Sort of should be the last thing like that should be the easiest part of all of this because there's so much out there toe look at and react to, and you confined blog's that you follow and so on, so forth. I mean, that's sort of the standard advice that you see out there. Um, but again, that's not something that I really do. And so I don't necessarily want toe. Ah, say that Something I do when it's not another one is Ah, I use is Google AdWords or Google ads now, as it's called, and I come up here to this tool section up here and we go to tools, click on the keyword planner, then you can type in Ah topic up here and we'll do fine keywords and we'll do WordPress because that's what we've been doing. And I sort of just look through here and it's like, premium or press team. So maybe I could write a piece of content on premium WordPress themes. Um WordPress App. How to build a WordPress app. How to build a blogger using WordPress Oh, um WordPress hosting one of the best hosting accounts for WordPress. How to use WordPress, Um, WordPress paid themes. Top WordPress sites, etcetera, etcetera. Now, not all of these are going to be no, the greatest idea or whatever. But you can sort of troll through here and you see, it's one of 50 of 634 keywords. So again, there's lots of things to look for through for Look for in here, find in here and get ideas about. So that's another one that I use. The nice thing about this you also get the amount of searches here, so that could be be really, really useful. Another one that I like to use is Google trends. And so the nice thing about Google trends is it will show you sort of how it's training at the that very specific time, so it's very real time. So if we go to say like trending searches here and let's just go to real time searches, I can select a category. And for me, I can go to Sai and Tax Science and Tack and, you know, I can see the moon Destiny to Apple shows AMG board like I can get an idea. A I, um I can get idea of what's trending specifically right now in the tech community. And if there's something in here that fits with or I can sort of parlay into a piece of content that relates to my freelance services or your freelance services, then you can write that in right a piece of content about that. So that's another place. Ah, that I get content ideas. So for me, those were really the four main places. Cora, my own like comments and tweets and so forth that people send to me, Google AdWords and Google trends, those air those of the primary places that I get ideas for again. Outside of that, if you follow blog's or whatever, the end of the day is, as you consume content you're going to see things that you want to talk about. And if you're creating content on a daily basis, right, your mind's naturally going to be looking for that, and it will just start toe happen. So it's is more important that you're creating content on a daily basis to get your mind in that mindset of I'm on the hook for content. Then the ideas will start to just come from everywhere and everything that that that you look at. So ah, again, consuming content is a really good other people's content. Blog's looking at this stuff. Being on Twitter, etcetera and consuming is really the where the ideas that you'll spark ideas because you want to react to something that somebody else said, or you'll see an idea that you think is a good idea that you want to talk about or whatever it is that's ultimately where the ideas they're going to come from so 29. BONUS: My Content Creation Process: and this. Listen, I'm just going to describe sort of my process for creating content on a daily basis. So now this is my process. I'm just going to show you what I do, so you can kind of take from that what you will. I'm not saying you have to do it this way, but this is what I've sort of come to over the years. So I start with once. I have my idea of what I want to dio. I start with going into my email software, which I use a Weber A where Burr is, um, an auto responder service that I use. I pay a monthly fee for it and they people can sign up for your mailing list and then, ah, you can send send emails out to them, and they can unsubscribe if they want a let's or things. So I start here, everything that I do every piece of content and create starts here, and I write it out as an email doing everything that we've talked about up to this point. And this is a piece of content you can see here. I think I'm gonna give up on up work Ah, this one I wrote several days ago and again, I just sort of write it all in here, and that's the first thing that I dio. Then I take that and I literally copy and paste it over into my block so you can see that very same piece of content is now a block post on my block. So I copy and paste it over into my blawg. I create a featured image for it so that when you actually look at it on the blawg, then you on. Actually, I'm not showing him anymore on here, streamlining a little bit. But if you have featured images that show her gets shared on social media, it'll show an image. So I created Thumbnail is the only extra step that I really need to do. Ah, for it here. Then I have a plug in so medium dot com. If you're familiar with medium I cross posted over on to medium dot com, Medium actually has a plug in. They taken download install for WordPress That will do all of that for you. So basically, when I hit publish over here. It also gets published over here and from time to time. You may need to come over here and clean this up a little bit, but the biggest thing is is when I tag it. If I come down here to the tags, the tags that I put for WordPress are actually met for medium because it crossed post those tags. And those tags are sort of the categories that medium has over here, which is what's important on medium. So that's what I do. So I've been the same piece of content. I write an email, a copy and paste it into my blawg. It gets cross posters into mediums, announcing three different ah places out there and then when that when I create this block post here, it also gets cross posted over to Facebook. So you can see this is I think I'm gonna give up on up work. This is the text. It gets cross posted as a text post over on, um, Facebook as well, and I use a system or service called Zap here. We'll talk about that in the second, so gets cross posted over onto Facebook, and they get gets process across, posted over on to link dense. You can see that here. I think I'm gonna give up on up work. So again, literally the same piece of content Now, in five different places I've written at once and now it's been syndicated out to five different places. The next thing that I do most days, this isn't necessarily every day is I will. Then take that and I will sort of set up and record a YouTube video, and I use the block post or the really the e email that I wrote as a guideline. Now I don't follow it word for word. Although, if you had to when you started off, that would be perfectly fine. And some I do because the ah, nicely word for word. But, um, some I I follow pretty closely just because the email is I think is really well done, and I don't have much to add to it. So, um, but I create a video using what I wrote as sort of a guideline of what I want to stay, and that helps create really streamlined pieces of content for for video. And then I mean, you could do, however, want you want. You could create a power point presentation from and I have done that you can do a screen cast like I'm doing here and actually show examples. I like to do that because I think it's most effective. If I'm talking about something, I can show an example of it actually on the screen on YouTube. So ah, I like doing that. But again, you just create the video based off of it. So that's sort of a new piece of content. But it's based heavily on what you wrote, so you're not having to think up a new idea. It's all released the same idea, the same content you now are just recording and as a video, once it's recorded as a video that gets automatically posted to my Twitter timeline. And it also gets saved over on Pinterest, which I don't know Twitter and Pinterest in terms of, actually ah, you know, having good getting a ton of interaction there, whatever. Not necessarily. But again, these are sort of the major platforms, and I make sure it gets out there. So one piece of content syndicated to all of these different places. And that's one of the reasons why when I take all of this and I point it towards any one thing. Like when I changed it and pointed it all towards skill share. Suddenly skill share started getting a ton attraction because it's just get syndicated out everywhere. So you're not missing anything? Ah, And so of course you start doing this and start pointing it towards your upward profile. Like again. You're just gonna You're going to get a lot more traction. It's just you're stacking the cards in your fail in your favorite almost becomes hard for you to fail over on up work because you've just got so much mo mentum going that way. Now for all of this, a use ah, tool called zap e er to to automate a lot of this. So the cross posting to Facebook to linked in, um, I have a zap here, so this one goes from when I post too. Well, let it open here. When I post to my block post on WordPress, it does a little bit of formatting cause I'm picky than it creates the Facebook post, and it creates the the linked in update there. So that zap does that. And then I have one that when I create. See YouTube right here. This is the one that when I uploaded a new video, my channel, it automatically creates a pan and creates a tweet. So for me, the steps that I actually take our writing the initiative email and then posting that to my blogging when I do that Ah, when I hit publish on my blawg, I have the plug in that automatically puts it on medium. I have the zap that puts it on Facebook and linked in. And then well, then from there, I create the video and edit the video and upload the video. When I published that video, it automatically gets posted to Twitter and Pinterest, so I don't have to do that part of it. So it's really me just creating the content. And then I have used Zap e er to do all of the syndication part of it and the medium play in. So that's sort of my process. There's also ah site called I f t T T. If you're familiar with that, that'll do some of this. I just proverbs Appier. It's ah, it's a little bit more, I guess, reliable. A little bit easier to use them. In my opinion, I f t t t is a little bit. It's not necessarily specifically about these kind of things, like oriented around, businesslike as things for smart homes and all that sort of stuff. And so it's There could be a lot of stuff in there that could be a little bit overwhelming , so I prefer to stick to sappier. But again, you, both of them, will do a lot of this same sort of thing. So anyway, that's my process, for for creating and then syndicating my content as I mentioned, beginning it all starts with that email. That's where I start everything. I write that email, and that becomes the basis of the rest of my content for the day. And this process, you know, has become pretty pretty efficient for me. I can do all of this in a couple hours in a day, and that's pretty much my day for running my business. I don't have There's not a ton other that I have to do in order to sort of run my business on a daily basis, other than if I'm recording a course like this or doing something extra. But just running the business on a daily basis. It's just this and takes a couple hours a day is all. So, um, again, that's my process. 30. BONUS: Email: all right. So I wanted to finish off this module by talking about the different platforms out there that I that I use in giving you some insights into them a little bit and what's important with each one and or how you can get started with each one, etcetera. So I wanted to first start off by talking about email, because again, it is the most important one. Despite all everything that's going on with the YouTube's in the Facebooks of the world, this is still the most personalized, effective way to get in contact with someone and have them actually read it and be persuasive. You know, there's no there's no filtering of the feed like Facebook does, or Twitter like this hits their inbox. Um, it's still way more personal away, more effective, so I use a service called a Weber. The basic idea here is that you have a site that someone can sign up to your email list and then this service and this service helps you build that the forms for all of that and so forth, and then this service will allow you to send emails out to those people. So let's say you have 10,000 people that subscribe to your email list. If you're trying to send that off of your own website or send those emails individually, somehow that I mean, that would be very feasible. So this is a service that will collect those names and email addresses for you. And then you write your piece of content and it'll send it out to does all the sending out to the emails and so forth. So that's the basic idea of what these do again. I use a Weber A. Weber was probably one of the first ones that was really popular on, and I just I got it back then I've sort of stuck with it. I haven't had a compelling reason to change, just to give you an idea of what this sort of looks like. So if you go to John Morris online dot com, you'll see this this name and email box here and this. This this box right here. This form right here actually comes from a Weber, so they give you code, and I put that on my site, and that's what allows this toe happen. So if I try to, for example, I try and submit this form felt put anything in it. You see, I get this. This this page comes from a Weber. This is their service. So they're collecting the names and email addresses so I don't have to store that stuff, and then they're allowing me to send emails out to them. Now, the one thing about an email list is, even though you're using a service to collect them, you actually do own them than the email list. And so one of the things that you can do and what I suggest you do is, you know, on a monthly basis or whatever, go into your service provider like a Weber, whatever it is, and you download your list as a CS we file on, then store that somewhere, maybe put it on a thumb drive and stored offline. Just with all the new regulations for GDP are and all that sort of thing something like that, however you want to do that. But, um, I recommend doing that because those those air an asset for you and if something were to happen if they were ever decided, we don't want to work with you anymore. If you downloaded that list, you can then go to another service and start up there. And you still have those names and email addresses. So that's a really big asset that you want to protect in your business. Um, So anyway, this is 11 place that I put it. Ah, if you goto the blawg to see that, actually, don't. I used to have it on the side bar right here. But now I linked to this, uh, John's free toots stock calm. And if you come over here, this is probably the main place I get Some. Ah, subscriptions is this is a tutorial site. If you click any one of these, it's going to take you to a place here where you can see there's another form for name and email address. And all of these people ultimately go on to my to my mailing list. So that's what the software does and then again allows you to send out the emails. So I use a Weber another one out there that you may have heard of his mail chimp. They also have these other ones, um, like convert kit. Uh huh. This must not be, uh, Well, I walked myself into a trap there. I thought convert kit dot com would be it, but ah, oh, says it is. That's interesting. Anyway, amongst the type to roll anyway, here's convert kid, though, Um, so this is another one. This is this these ones when you start getting into convert, kid and like, say infusion soft here you'll start hearing the word marketing automation. And the idea here is it is probably heard, the term building a funnel. So they help you to automate that, that sort of process. When someone opens this email, you can attack him with this and Adam to that, and they get this sequencing. I'm not really big into all that. I do a little bit of that. And a Webber, of course, supports that as well. Um, but if you're into that kind of thing, you know, convert kit or something like infusion soft, you know, fuses oft also has a whole back and shopping cart to it that you can use as well. So it sort of depends how big you want to go Like a Weber is going to be probably the sort of the small a Weber Mail chimp the smaller. If you just want to focus on emails something simple that's gonna be these two convert kit and infusion software gonna be If you want to go like big and and so forth you go that route, Honestly, starting out. I mean, I would, you know, if you're not running a big multi employee business where you're selling all sort of products and services, you just were on in your own freelance business. I would keep it simple, and stick goes something like a Weber male champion. If you want my recommendation, I would suggest a Weber just because they're developed deliver ability, record is pretty good. So they get e mails delivered on, and that's ultimately what matters. So that's sort of the the email part of this again. This is really the most important. Ah, part that that you want to do and you want to make sure that ah, again you get thes you get these forms on your website or you have a site like this where you have for me. This is you know, I take the 1st 567 lessons from one of my courses when I create a new course, and he gets here, says Free sample. I basically give them away as a free sample. That's what people sign up and get here. And when they sign up, they get add to my mailing list and then I can a email them, Ah, you know, on a daily basis after that. So that's a really huge asset, and I recommend that you do. From the moment you start creating content at the very minimum, you have an email list that people can sign up for. You don't necessarily need to do YouTube videos or have a Twitter or a Facebook or any of that other stuff from the beginning. When you're creating content, you absolutely do need to have a mailing list. In my opinion, it's just it will change your entire business, being able to follow up on contact people in such a personal way like that much more valuable than Twitter and YouTube and Facebook followers or subscribers on and so forth. So anyway, those are some of the platforms are available out there for you. Toe to take a look at 31. BONUS: Blog: Now let's talk about our blawg and in sort of conjunction with that medium dot com, and I'll just tell you right off the bat, My my blawg is probably the thing I think about the least. And that's not because it's not important. I think building your home base and having your content stored on your sort of home site is really, really important because it's something you own. You know, YouTube could kick you off or, you know, medium could say they don't wanna have anything do with you anymore. But you always sort of have your own website and so forth. And so I think it's important to do. The thing for me is that I'm not gonna get real super heavy into like S E O. And especially with how complicated it is the today and everything that is changing all the time and all the A. I had stuff that like it's just way too complicated for me to worry about that a ton, and so the only thing that I can really do is just make sure I'm constantly putting out content, which I'm already doing, because I'm already writing on email on a daily basis, and I'm just copying and pasting that over into my blawg. And so I do my blawg and I know it's important, but I don't think about it all all that much because there's not much to think about. I just post the content and move on with it. So the big thing, uh, when it comes to your own block, of course, is search engines and getting your content indexed and people finding your content coming to your site and so forth. Eso, um again when it comes your block, that's sort of the big thing. But unless you really want to dive in deep into S e o, I mean, I try toe when it makes sense. You know, if I let's just go to my blawg, I try to put sort of major keywords in my stuff. So developers freelancing, YouTube up, work tech, job up work, freelancer PHP like I have the key words in here, right? But that's about the most thinking I do. I do with it so I wouldn't spend a ton of time obsessing over this. Ah, just you post the content, you put it out there and you kind of have to just let the search engines do their thing. Hopefully people find it. Hopefully they share and so forth. But I don't spend a ton of time worrying about it because I syndicate so many other places . And a lot of the social networks now are really big on native content. So I've moved away from taking like I post a post on my BLAWG post, and then I shared on my Facebook page. I don't do that. If you go back and watch. I actually take the whole piece of content and paste as text over on Facebook. So it's it's own piece of Facebook Ah, content and that content one is posted. Natively like that just performs way better. And at the end of the day, what I'm concerned about is getting in front of a Zeman e eyeballs on a daily basis as I can and persuading those people toe by my stuff. So if I have to oppose the natively to do that like I'm not getting all wrapped up in oh well, you know you're posting on Facebook and not posting your blog's like I don't worry about any of that stuff. I want to get in front of many eyeballs as possible. So that sort of my thinking on the block is a general medium is a little bit different. Medium has is sort of a quasi content network, quasi social network, and you actually can get some network effects from this, um, and the big thing that I've sort of found and I don't I'm not really claim to be a medium expert again. I don't think a ton about it, But one of things I have noticed is that is what's big on medium is publications. So if I do, let's just search for WordPress like this. Ah, what you'll find is you'll see stories. You'll see people. But then you see publications, and this is where sort of this is. Where it's kind of at is if you can get your content published on a very on a popular publication, you're going to get a lot of traction. And I can just speak to that because I just had a happen. I had one of my, um, medium posts that got published over on free code camp dot com are freed co camp publication, which is a thing as like 400 K subscribers. Something like that. It's a really popular publication for developers, and I mean that I got in one day the amount of use that I might get in probably three months of my regular, like it was just way off the charge. And as a result of that, because I sell in every piece of content and I sold in that piece of content and they're cool and they, like, actually let you do that and not try toe, not reward authors like a lot of places, Um, I made a good amount of sales as a result of that getting post on free coat camp. So what I recommend that you do when it comes to medium is go in, search your sort of keyword terms here, like this and that it related to your topic and find no. Four or five different publications that are actually active, like you need to click through and see. OK, so the last post was September 7 September 6. But these are all coming from the same person has 1.6 K followers, so maybe that's not gonna be a very good one. Let's go toe HSC OTV, although I'm I don't know about this. So the last July 13th August 10 2017. So this one, this 1 may be dead 2.7 k followers. And I'll be honest. There's not necessarily going to be a ton of really good ones, like there were people who started medium publications At one point. It was kind of this big thing, and then they all just sort of died. So you can see February 13 2017. So you need to go through and you need to verify these and see which ones are good. Ah, and are actually active, and people are posting content to him and have a decent amount of people on there. But try to find four or five that are that way, start following those and then look through and find their publication criteria pretty much every publication that is is established and has any sort of following. We'll tell you exactly what you need to do in order to get your content published in their publication. And so look through that and some just bite the bullet and submit. It could be a little bit scary. Put like all this. All of a sudden, this article's gonna go out to 400,000 people. But, you know, I had a ton of good feedback, and I have had a bunch of sales like it's worth it. And so find four or five and then, um, create a sort of hierarchy, Right? So for me, freed CO Campas number one, I'm always gonna try and get on their first. If they reject it, then I have, you know, a 2nd 1 a 3rd 1 a fourth or the 5th 1 I'm just gonna go down that line and then if a piece of content gets rejected by all of those publications, all then probably wasn't a very good piece of content. I'm a rework and re submit or or something along those lines. But, um, that's again sort of the thing on medium. And as you get published more and more in these publications, then you'll start to develop your own following. You could maybe even make your own publications. Um and and you can sort of do that here on medium and get some traction here, but I get probably between 1,202,000 views of my content on medium per month, which isn't a ton. But you know, it's every little bit. Helps you start stacking up 2000 2000 2000 2000 all over the over these different networks and you know, you start that starts to add up after a while and more importantly than that is if I get one sale from medium a day. Well, you know that that's that's one sale that that's better than no sales from medium a day. So, um, again, publications Big on medium blawg is search engines, and I just sort of post the content I for a medium. I try to submit it to the publications and then just sort of just see what happens from there. But the big thing is that you're actually creating the content on a daily basis. 32. BONUS: YouTube: Now let's talk about YouTube, and this is one of the things we're will divert. I think a little bit from you know, this will be obvious, I guess when the difference between what we're doing on YouTube and what a lot of other people are are doing because a lot of other people will tell you that you really need focus on building audience and building subscribers and building community and so forth. And it's not that you don't do that. But for me, what I focus on mawr than that is actually the YouTube search. And that's because YouTube is actually the second largest search engine on the planet behind Google itself. And so there's a ton of people that are searching through YouTube on a daily basis. And if you can show up in, you know, the search results high and the searchable results that are relevant, Um, for the keywords that matter to you like that, in and of itself can get you a lot of of traffic. And the way I view the way I you view my video YouTube videos like I said, everything. Ultimately, every all this content is an ad. It's because you're you're ultimately the purpose is to sell your services and you're creating the content so that you make a pitch at the end so we can make a sale. And so ultimately, what you're creating is ads. And so I want those ads to get viewed a lot, but also get viewed by the people that are most likely to buy my stuff. And so again, the search is really good for that, because when someone is searching for something a specific topic, there are a lot more likely to be really interested in that topic. Consume your video and be persuaded toe by your stuff or toe toe hire you as a freelancer. So I've done a search over here on PHP. This sort of fluctuates, but I just want to show you what can happen. So you see, there's a few videos up here that are ranked higher, but when we get down here just a little bit, you can see I have a video here that's probably in the top 15. Smit Online form to both my sequel on email using PHP. Ah, scroll down here. Send PHP email of PHP Mailer. That's my video. How to build a simple each move for that's my video. How to build advanced ah h mo form. That's my video. Should this video right here is my video. This video fake PHP jobs is my video. I don't know if there's any others down here, but I've got, you know, a good 567 videos that are in like the top 2025 over on YouTube search and so you can sort of start to dominate. The search is a little bit when you target keywords properly. And so that's the thing with YouTube. Is targeting keywords knowing what your keywords are? The key words are the terms that people type in the search engine, right? That's what you go on Google ads and look up. I sort of show you that earlier you go and sort of looked those up and and find out what your key key words are. But again, showing up in these searches is a big thing. And then also, you know, if you're showing showing up in this search when someone searches for PHP also, if they're watching a video that YouTube says this is about PHP, they're also more likely to show up in the related video section of those videos as well. So Ah, that's sort of what I focus on when it comes to YouTube More than maybe the community aspect and and so forth. It's about showing up in front of the right people and having a video that not only they like and they'll the watch it maybe like in sharing all that sort of thing, but actually persuasive and gets them to to by my stuff or, in your case, hire you as a a freelancer, though. So it's really all about search engine. It's about keywords. It's about showing up in these searches. Now I have a tool that he used called to Buddy, and the big thing with it is that when you go to create these tags, these air a big part of how you sort of tell YouTube what your video is about. And so again, I use this tool called to Buddy that makes this like really, really easy. And so when you come down here into the tags and there's these tag tools down here, you can do this. Explore right here. Then you can type in a topic So this one happens to be up work. I can type in up work, and it's gonna give me a list of a bunch of keywords, and it will show me how popular they are, Right? So are, technically, this is the most used tags from the top ranking videos. So when ah, when someone The video that ranks top the top videos that for that search that we just looked at these air, the key words that they used. So it gives you an idea of what? What keywords you need to use in order to rank high, like they are to at least have the same keywords that they have So you can compete. And so you're not missing anything, So that's what this is. But you can also do. You sort of look at a historical sort of map here so you can look at it. This is Google Trends data here. Right inside of two, buddy. Um, they have auto suggested for both Google