UpWork Freelancing: Your Guide to Finding Remote Freelance Jobs

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to UpWork freelancing, your guides of finding remote freelance clients. My name is Christopher Dodd and for the last almost three years now, I've been using UpWork to find remote freelancing jobs that allow me to work from literally anywhere in the world. You see before I got started on UpWork, I used to rely quite a bit on personal networking to find my freelance clients. But the great thing about using UpWork is that whether I'm working from the beach in Thailand or from an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. I can both find the work and perform the work from literally anywhere. All I need is a computer and an internet connection. In fact, I've used UpWork extensively as one of my major tools in order to enable my current nomadic lifestyle, which has seen me travel to over 21 countries in search of Wi-Fi and adventure. So in this course I want to take you through my story with UpWork, but more importantly, share with you a system that I've refined over the last two years to attract better clients and more money with UpWork countless hours I used to spend sending out proposals. So if you're ready to get started, click on the next video and I'll see you on the inside. 2. My UpWork Story: Before we get started with all the lessons, I just wanted to share my personal story, in order to explain how I came across Upwork and how I managed to overcome many of the challenges that I first experienced on the platform. To briefly cover my story, I started out working here in Brisbane, Australia at a co-working space called River City labs. Through that co-working space, I was able to meet people that would ultimately hire me to work out of the co-working space with them or at their own private offices. It was great. I got to work on some good projects, but in 2016, when the lease ended on my apartment, and I wanted to go traveling, I needed a way to find clients remotely, and that's where Upwork came in. As the biggest marketplace for finding freelance work online, I saw it as my best opportunity to find work while on the road. Starting out, however, we have no previous clients for IT or of what I was doing on the platform, I really struggled to find work. It was a real wake-up call for me and something I really want to stress in this course, and that is, you don't just need the skills to perform the work, but also the skill of selling them. In other words, you can be the best programmer, the best designer, the best writer in the world, but if you don't know how to sell your services, you won't have too much luck convincing clients to work with you. I realized that I had the skills to do the work, but I needed to learn more about sales. That is when I started to take some courses on how to better market myself on Upwork. Honestly, some of it worked and some of it really didn't, and I couldn't tell whether it was my strategy or my patients that was wearing out, but it just wasn't working. I kept going and occasionally I would get a good client who would pay me and treat me well, but it wasn't until about six months ago that I decided to look back on the previous two years and figure out what was working and what wasn't, and then I started to get a grip on Upwork. I stopped doing the things that weren't getting me results, and I started doing the things that did. Plus I went back to the Internet to search for the freshest information on how to succeed on Upwork and found one tactic in particular, that is really supercharge my results. In this course I'll be sharing that one with you also. Today I have a pretty good profile on Upwork, I have a job that says score of over 100 percent. Top rated status and a bunch of five-star reviews, and let me tell you, regardless of whether you are able to make good money from day one on Upwork or it takes you a little while to build up your profile. What you have at the ends over the long-term is an asset that sits on the web and starts to feed you work without you even having to look for it. That is the big reward that you'll get from putting in that initial effort. That's a little bit of my story. In the next video, we're going to go into the nuts and bolts of the course. I'll see you on the next one. 3. How to get Approved: In this class, we're going to cover how to build your profile and how to actually find work. But in recent years, Upwork has added in another step. Now, if you sign up to Upwork, your information will go through an approval process that could see you getting rejected before you even get to apply for any jobs. But don't worry, if your profile does get disapproved, you can always try again until you get on the inside. Now, I have to admit I don't have any personal experience with this as I got into Upwork before this whole approval process started. But if you do a little bit of a Google research, like I just did, you can start to find a bunch of different tips that might help you to get approved. This article here by Freelance To Win has a bunch of really good tips on it, as does this one by Fulltime Nomad. You can also check out the list of the most in-demand skills published by Upwork themselves, by searching for Upwork, fastest-growing skills in Google, and finding the article in the search results. Chances are that if you're applying for work in any of these fields that your profile would be much more likely to be approved. One thing I've heard from a friend whose profile was initially disapproved was that when she changed her title and skills to something more in demand, she was able to get approved, and then she changed those skills when she got on the inside. I don't know if I would necessarily recommend that approach, though, because I have heard stories of accounts being suspended, which goes to show that Upwork is still monitoring you once you're on the inside. A general idea to remember when making your first application to Upwork is that Upwork is trying to provide the best experience possible for the clients on the platform. Try and be as professional and complete in your application as possible. Once you do get approved, you'll be thankful that Upwork actually weeds out competition for you, meaning a high chance that you actually be able to find work. 4. How to Choose What Skill to Freelance In: Before we get started with the actual mechanics of Upwork, I wanted to make sure you have a very important step taken care of. This step is deciding what it is you're actually going to freelance in. So if you've already decided what you're going to do, feel free to skip this video. Otherwise, let's go into some of the things you may want to consider. Like we mentioned in the previous video, there are certain fields that are more in demand than others, and certain fields that are much more lucrative. To use myself as an example, I am predominantly a front end web developer, but I also am skilled at creating videos. So early in my Upwork journey, I actually experimented with bouncing back between those two disciplines and over time, I realized that video editing as a service, in general was a much less in-demand skill than web development. In fact, if you just look at the statistics or login as a client on Upwork, you can see that video editing has a lower rate than web development and has much fewer jobs. This is something to take into consideration if you're tossing up between two or more disciplines. On one hand, you may have a skill that you enjoy more than the other and have maybe even a portfolio of work already around it, but then on the other hand, a skill that is much more lucrative and perhaps less exciting to you, or something that you don't have a big track record in. The important thing to remember here is that you can change your profile to whatever you want, whenever you like. This allows you to test out certain disciplines and specializations without the risk of being locked in and the best part about this is that any work you do on Upwork will earn you a higher job success score, a high rating, and more reviews. So you can always choose something to get started and then update your profile details into the more difficult fields later. In this class, we're not going to go into a lot of career advice on which path you should pursue but in the context of Upwork, specifically, what you should consider when making your decision is the market on Upwork. My recommendation would be to head over to the the find work area on Upwork and starts searching for opportunities. How many projects are out there that fit your skill? Do they sound like something you might be interested in and are they opportunities that you think you could realistically be hired for? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself during this process. But again, if you've already made up your mind about what you want do, I don't want you to start second guessing yourself. Ideally, you should have already decided what field you want to work in before arriving in Upwork. But if not, have a look at what's going on, and remember you can always change your profile later. 5. Freelancing 101: Determining 'your pitch': In a few videos, we're going to start setting up your profile. Before that, we need to cover some basic freelancing theory. This lesson is going to be on determining your pitch. What exactly is a pitch? A pitch is just a short summary of the offer that you're going to bring to the marketplace, and this is something I learned from my good friend and fellow freelancer, Sergio Sala. The four steps to finding your pitch are: One, what's your skill? Two, what's your focus? Three, who's your audience? And four, what's your solution? In Sergio is case, he's a web designer who creates custom WordPress themes with the Genesis Framework for online entrepreneurs slash professional bloggers to generate more sign-ups, get more sales, and establish a better personal brand. Of course, the obvious part and the one that we covered in the last video is your skill itself, but if you have a focus, an audience, and a solution, your pitch will be ever more compelling. Now, while having a focus audience and solution is awesome in theory, for people just starting out, it may be hard enough just to choose a skill and a specialization, so I don't expect everyone to answer these questions straight away. What I will recommend is that you seek to refine your message over time. If you're just starting out, of course you need to know what your skill is. If you have that figured out, then you should seek to find a specialization or focus, then determine your audience, and finally, if possible, get really specific on what solutions you can provide to them. This is a process I believe should happen naturally as you gain more experience and reflect on the work you've done over time. For example, as a web developer, one of your first gigs might be building a WordPress website. Once you've built one of them, maybe somebody else sees your work and wants a WordPress website as well, and suddenly, you're starting to form a specialization. Let's take that example one step further and say that most of your clients that you've worked with happen to be in the financial services industry. Suddenly, you've found yourself an audience, and finally, you might find yourself producing a similar solution or grouper solutions to each of these clients, and now you've naturally come across solutions that you can offer to others. Do you see now how your experience can lead to answering these questions? This doesn't just have to be freelancing, your experience could relate to a specialization and an audience that you worked with in a previous, say, corporate job. Once you've done one job working in a certain specialization for a specific audience, then you can reference that experience when applying to work in that specialization again with that same audience. Again, it's a good idea to hold these questions in your mind, but don't let it hold you back to start with. Just know that specificity will work to help your marketing message. Anytime you can be specific with what you can do for clients, let that come through on your profile and in your proposals. 6. Freelancing 101: Think like a business: A common mistake I see freelancers make and one I've actually made myself is taking on an employee mindset into freelancing. Sometimes I get questions like, do I need a degree to freelance as a blank. I am 18, am I too young or I'm 60 am I too old or how many years experience do I need to start freelancing? To me, all these questions come from the mindset of an employee as when you apply for, let's say a regular job, employers might be very particular about your qualifications or years of experience. However, in the freelance world, there are virtually no rules. Essentially, it all comes down to whether you can convince a particular person, usually just one decision-maker at the company, that you can provide the results that they're looking for. Now, I'm not saying that experience and qualifications don't count and should be ignored but at the end of the day, the client just wants to trust that you'll do a good job for them. If you're a 15-year-old high school dropout with zero experience, but can somehow convince a client that they can trust you to do a great job on a particular project, then kudos to you. Obviously that's impede of an extreme example but what I'm getting at here is that the client is not paying you for your degree or years of experience. What they are paying you for is a certain experience and certain result. They are more concerned about things like, can I trust this freelancer? Will I like working with them? Can he or she get the project done within budget? Will they produce a high quality result? These are the real questions that you should answer, whether it be in your profile or in your proposal. Now, don't get me wrong. There are, of course, some clients on Upwork who may evaluate you based on your experience and qualifications, but don't let that deter you if you're lacking in either of those two things. The key here is to think of yourself as a business, not an employee. What do I mean by that? Well, if you head to the website of any successful agency, let's say you do web development, you would head over to the website of any of these successful firms and have a look at how they market themselves. Does their front-page read like a resume? Do they talk about their list of skills and years of experience? Maybe they do, but I'm sure what you'll find is that there is a clear focus on the result that they can deliver to their clients and a portfolio that demonstrates that they have done so for clients in the past. That is the mindset I want you to take into designing your Upwork profile and writing proposals to clients. Stop getting hung up on how many years of experience you have, or a matter of college qualifications you have and focus on how you can communicate trust, quality, and reliability to your prospective clients. 7. Setting up your profile: I wanted to bring up a completed profile as an example for you guys and we can go through the different parts of the profile, and what better profile to bring up than my own. This is how the client will see me on Upwork, and as you can see, we've got a first box here that sits above the fold, and then as you scroll down, work history, portfolio, skills, certifications, employment history, education, and other experiences. If I scroll back up to the top, this box is what the client sees first, and so this is your first impression. I count this box as the most important parts of your profile to get right. As you can see, we've got your name, your headshot, you're registered location, we've got a title, we've got an overview, hourly rate, number of jobs completed or in progress, number of hours worked and you've got your job success score up here and I've got my top rated badge right there. This information is also what comes across in the preview box when clients will search for freelancers, so if I go up here and do my own search and type in WordPress developer, and I'll search for somebody like me, somebody who does WordPress. As you can see here, this is what some people have referred to as the preview box and you can see that it's got the name, the headshot that title, the hourly rates. It's also got amount that has been earned in total on the platform, where you can hover over and see the number of hourly jobs, the number of fixed price of jobs, the number of hours worked. You've got the job success score with a big badge and you've got the location, which is a bit broader than a specific suburb or city, it's got the country. Then you've got the first line of your overview here. If I was to look up myself by going into filters and filtering by Australia, this should bring up my preview box. If we scroll down, we can find my profile here. Honestly, I think it's pretty on point we've got all blue here with the jobs that says score, we've got the badge right next to it, and pretty happy with how this is showing up. If I go back to my profile now. Remember, everything that you put in this box will also go in the preview box when people searching for your profile. This is really the most important part of your profile. Obviously some of these things and not directly editable like the job success score and the badge, the amount of jobs I've worked and the hours worked, so if you're starting out, you're not going to have a job success score, you're not going to have a badge to start with, and you won't have this work history. But what you can control, is your headshot, your title, your overview, and your hourly. What we're going to do in the next few videos, is we're going to go through and cover each of these in its own video and then we're going to go cover the rest of the profile down here. I'll see you in the next video. 8. Selecting a profile picture: In this video we're going to talk about the profile picture specifically. This is mine right here. If I open it in a new tab and have a look at it, I can increase it a bit, it'll still be pixelated, but literally this is the highest resolution that your prospective clients will see it. You really don't have to have a photo that looks amazing in a high resolution or a high screen size because this is basically the highest resolution. I have this as it's super high res photo on my desktop, but once it goes up to Upwork, this is as big as anyone's going to see it. Any of the small details like you have a blemish on your face or anything it doesn't really matter, the important thing is that you get the basics right. When I say the basics, I mean your attire, your look on your face, the background, and the composition. First of all my biggest tip, and this is not going to work for everyone. But as you can see, this is a pretty professionally done photo and actually had the help of a professional photographer that take this. There was a special deal going at the co-working space I used to work out of back in 2015. A really good photographer came in, and was just taking headshots all day. I got this pretty cool headshot, which has lasted me up until now. It really is a good investment if you want to hire somebody or even have somebody who you know, who's good with cameras, who can take a good shot, come and take a photo of you. It's a great asset to have and it's not just for Upwork. You can use it for LinkedIn, you can use it for all things. The reason why I mentioned that upfront is because the photographer is going to make sure that your photo is not only professional looking, but it's going to make sure that you've got all these points covered in terms of the lighting, the composition, the attire hopefully, and your expression on your face. Let's just go over those right now in case you don't have a photographer and you're doing it yourself. The first thing is attire. I'm wearing a dressed up button up shirt, but I'm not wearing a tie and I think that's a good balance of professionalism without looking like you're some corporate dude. We are freelancers on the platform, so we're not expected to be this corporate person unless maybe that's your niche or that's your audience. Again, it has to all match with your audience, but for me, I think having a businessy type shirt, but buttons open, no tie is the good balance. The second thing is I got a smile on my face. Don't put a photo on there of you being angry or anything like that. I mean, it should be common sense, but you want to look approachable and people have to get the sense that they're going to enjoy working with you. Don't obviously put on a silly face because you want to be professional, but you can be professional, and be smiley and happy at the same time, I think I got a pretty good balance in this profile photo. Next one is no distracting background. As you can see, the background is pretty much plain gray. If you don't have a nice plain background, it's pretty easy to find. I think just looking around here I can see some pretty plain walls. But if you do have a distracting background that you're shooting on, maybe blur it out or just in Photoshop, try and lower that contrast because you don't want anything to take away from the photo of you, then of course, the lighting. It's all very even in this photo, as you can see, I think from memory, the photographer who did this had a flash. It's always going to be even lighting when the photographer is using professional lighting. But for yourself, I don't know, maybe step out into a sunny area, right here, for example, I've got the sun on my face because I'm looking out off this patio right here. Maybe right here would be a good place to do a headshot. Essentially, you just don't want your face to be dark or it to be hard for somebody to make out your face. I mean, again, putting this down to 100 percent, this is what the size is going to come out to when your client looks at it. If your face is not easily distinguishable, they can't figure out what's going on in the image from looking at it for a split second at this image size, then you've already lost the battle. That brings me to my last point is the composition. I think I've got the composition pretty bang on here. I've got my head in the middle. I'm showing a bit of showed, it's not to close on the face like I think if you had it about here, maybe it'd be a bit close up, a bit intimidating. But I think having it here showing a bit of the shoulder's it's at a good distance so that you can actually see my face, but you're not right up in my face. I think, aim for this composition and you'll be fine if we want to go through the search results and find a few examples, let's just do WordPress developer again. Going through the results here, you don't have to have a background that is neutral necessarily. You don't have to necessarily be wearing a business type shirts. The important thing and I think this profile right here is all right one. The composition is pretty perfect I think. You've got his face. It's not too close. Maybe he needs to smile a bit more or maybe that is his smile. But, one like this where you're wearing a cap and a hoodie and it's super close into the face. I wouldn't say that that would be the best look. Here, you can see it looks like a professional photo shoot. But what I don't like about this photo is the composition that doesn't need to be a lot of his body in the shot. I think if we just did a front on shot with his face, that would look a lot better. Muhammad is looking good here. For [inaudible] I like his composition, but the lighting is not perfect. It's a bit dark on his face. Pretty easy to fix that up in photoshop if you've got some photo editing skills, otherwise, invest in a light or find a light source in your house and put that close to your face because you want your face to be bright and clear in the frame. I just thought I'd share some thoughts with that. Another resource you can use if you're iffy about whether your photo is actually really good on that is a website called photo feeler. I learned this from my friend Lewis. It's just photofeeler.com. When the page loads, I'll be able to show you what it does. Here you go. What you do is you add in your photos, you say what it's for. In this case it would be business and you get a rating on certain aspects. Essentially, if you have a bunch of photos that you've taken and you can't tell which one is the best. You can put it into a tool like this called photo feeler. You can let other people decide basically. You can see here, if you scroll down more about how it works. But basically your crowd sourcing and answer to is my profile picture good? Or which one of these profile pictures is the best? That's if you want to take it the step further. Honestly, the same principles apply. If you were going to do a LinkedIn photo, you just want to have good composition. Honestly, I think if you try and follow what I've done in terms of my profile, I think you'll be pretty sweet. That covers the profile picture. In the next video, we're going to go over choosing a title. I'll see you in that one. 9. Choosing a title: In this video we're going to talk about choosing your title and the two words I want you to keep in mind when you're writing your title is; one, relevant and two, specific, okay. Obviously it goes without saying that if you are a web developer, you want to say that your web developing your title, if you're a designer, you want to say that you're a designer in your title, if you're a writer, you want to have the words write in your title. But what you need to do is also be specific. If I put out web developer, that's simply too broad. The reason why that's too broad, is because you have to have an understanding of your audience. At least in the web development world, if somebody is looking for a web developer, they could be looking for a number of things. Maybe they want somebody to build them a simple website built on WordPress. Maybe they are looking for somebody who has experience with a certain language or framework like say for instance, a React. js Developer. Calling yourself a web developer is just too broad, and even calling yourself just a designer is to broad. Are you designing UX, UI, web, graphics? Make sure to be specific enough to the point where you're covering that specific need that the client wants. Again, this goes back to understanding your audience and understanding your focus. This all goes back to your pitch, what is it exactly that you're audience? If you can answer that question, that answer goes directly into your title. Looking at my title here, I've identified that I like working with Australian clients and Australian clients like working with me. That's like my audience right there and that's why I put Australian at the start of my title. Then I go into my main title or the core of my title, which is WordPress developer, and I could actually put in another word here, Word press web developer but I think people get the point with WordPress developer. I'm not saying I'm a web developer, I'm going one step deeper and I'm being specific to the point where I'm targeting people who want WordPress websites. Which I feel is quite a good balance, and it's done me well so far. This extra bit here that I put in keywords that often go along with it. I've heard of WordPress experts being referred to as theme experts. The difference between developer and theme expert would be, a WordPress developer can develop features and customized code, whereas the theme expert is just somebody who knows how to use WordPress and maybe can build a whole website and customize one without any use of code. With this title, I'm telling people that I'm an Australian, I can build on WordPress and I can do basic stuff on WordPress as well and update the theme, build them a website, all that stuff. That is basically the framework to developing a good title. You just want to be relevant and specific and talk directly to what the client might be looking for. Really guys, that's pretty much it, keep it simple, be relevant and specific. If you don't know how specific you want to go, my guideline would be to choose a category that you're obviously in, you should know your category by now and go one layer deeper. We talked about specialization in a previous video, if you're not sure what to specialize in, just put what you did last time in there. If you're a web developer and you did a WordPress website last, specialize in WordPress for the time being. You can always come back and change your title later. Now before we wrap up this little lesson here, I want to give you one more bit of advice and it's something that I see some freelance is doing, which I think is actually detrimental to their success. What I'm going to do demonstrate this is click over into the ''search box'' and search for WordPress in freelancer. Once I get to the search results, you can start to see some people doing what I like to call keyword stuffing. If you look at Arti R here, she has basically thrown words into a tidal. It doesn't say I am WordPress developers specializing in, or I am a WordPress developer with a particular focus on, what it says instead is just the words WordPress, Joomla , HTML5, Ccss3, she's even misspelled one of the terms here, CSS. Probably that's why she's $0 on the platform and Bootstrap. These are skills that she should definitely include in her skills section but to keyword stuff these inner profile, it's actually working in the sense that when I typed him WordPress, she did come up, she has done that part well in terms of including her keywords. But as soon as the client sees this, they need a WordPress website, maybe they need a Joomla website, but they probably don't need both at the same time. I think it would help for her a lot to be a lot more specific with what she offers clients. Maybe she wants to say, I do WordPress websites and Joomla websites but I don't think you should go into five different things that you can do even if you are multi-skilled. But I think at work you want to be as specific as possible because put it this way, you've got to think in the mind of the client, right. When they come to the search engine and they're looking to find somebody to build them a WordPress site, they're going to go down here and look for somebody who knows WordPress. They're not necessarily going to care that you know Joomla, and you know Bootstrap, unless they're working with a theme that uses Bootstrap. But essentially the question that you want to answer in the mind of your prospective client is, is this the relevant person for my job? What your title has to do is communicate relevance. Yes you want to put the right keywords in there, but you don't want to keyword stuff. You don't want to throw a bunch of different keywords in there, trying to rank for all different jobs because you might rank for all those different jobs but once the client comes to the search results, they're probably going to go for somebody who's a bit more specific to their specific need, okay. To provide you a few other examples of other profiles that are doing this okay. This guy Pablo K , expert Web Design with WordPress. He's saying he's a web designer, but he specializes in working with WordPress, that's great. If I scroll down, there's a few that just say WordPress in their title, I think that's specific enough, but surely they can add in a few words saying, I am a WordPress developer who enjoys this or something. You don't want to use one word when you can flush that out a bit and make it into a proper title. That's all I'll say on titles, guys, it's pretty simple, just try and remember to be relevant and specific and remember the experience of the user coming to Upwork, searching for a freelancer, and that's something that you should do throughout everything you do on Upwork. Remember to think in terms of what the client sees, okay. That's the title, in the next video, we're going to go into the overview. 10. Crafting your overview: All right, we've talked about your title and your headshot. Now let's talk about your overview, which for those of you who didn't know is this section right here. Sometimes it shows up condensed, but you can just click the more link here and you'll be taken to the full overview of any freelancers profile. There's a few theories about how to write your overview but for me I keep it very simple. Again it just goes back to what we talked about in the theory lessons basically what's your pitch? What audience are you speaking to? Essentially, the overview is a place for you to talk about the different selling points of yourself that you think clients and your audience would be interested in and help them make a decision about whether to hire you. I know that's quite vague. I'm actually going to share with you a bunch of tips that I've learned from other resources online that you may want to try but before that I'm going to go through my own profile just to share with you the parts that I think are particularly important and also share with you what not to do. Let's go over that right now. One thing that I've tried myself that I wouldn't necessarily recommend is going super salesy in your overview. I've learned this from some courses that have this salesy tone in their overview. You don't want to be talking like say for instance, if you're a web developer, talking in the salesy tone, that's something like, hey are you at your desk struggling with this website and you just almost given up hope, well, never fear because I'm here. I'm this expert developer who's had all these years of experience and I'm going to solve your problem, your life is going to be so much, but you don't want to give off that tone of being a sleazy salesperson. It does work on certain contexts on the web really well. There's a lot of sales letters that are written like that but for this purpose, for LinkedIn and for Upwork, they're pretty much the same thing they're professional network. You don't want to give off too much of a sleazy salesperson vibe. That's all I'll say on that one. I think that's pretty common sense but basically to go over my overview here, if we look at the first line, I state again what I do. I state that I'm from Australia. Again, that's going back to targeting my audience. I've found an audience of Australian clients who like working with other Australians. I make sure to reiterate that in the first line of my overview and I enjoy working with clients who appreciate quality. Who doesn't appreciate quality? I just go into a story of what I've been doing, how long I've been doing it and I make sure to mention that I've done small websites with WordPress, but I've also worked on large web applications. I talk about why I specialize in WordPress, but I tell them that I also contract as a front end web developer and I list a few of the technologies I'm familiar with and can use proficiently. I also talk about kind of broader experience here. I can advise the basics on SEO, content, marketing, social media and I reference my experience through my personal brand and blog, Crystal freelancer for that. They can actually go to that website and see those skills demonstrated. I talk here about other services that I offer clients.I actually had an overview that targeted all these different things in the one and it was confusing clients. I actually had one client reach out to me and say, your title says you're a WordPress developer, but you've got marketing in here, you've got video editing, like what is it you do? You want to make it super clear. What do you do? I mentioned that I can do video editing, YouTube marketing consulting, which is something I've done before. I've edited podcasts for people before, and I've done voice-over work. I just mentioned that as just t one sentence at the ends because I want to tell people that I have that in case they need that later, but I don't want to confuse them with I can do all these different things. The final part of the overview and this is something I recommend for everyone is a call to action. For me this came naturally because I'm like how else am I going to end off the overview but if it didn't come naturally to you, make sure to give them a call to action. Which is basically tell them what option you'd like them to take up after reading your overview. That's kind of my overview and my thinking behind it. It's working for me and I feel like I'm not an expert writer. I could probably write something better or hire somebody to do it but I think that this covers all the important points. I'm just going to go over a few of the other tips that I learned from different other resources that I learned Upwork marketing from. One of the other things you might want to do is develop a point of difference. Maybe you have a unique offer that nobody else has. Maybe you have this unique experience that nobody else has. It's always good marketing. If you have a point of difference, share that. Another tip is study other successful freelancers and see what they write in their overview. If they've done over 10-K, 20-K on the platform and they have a top rated status. Look at what they've put in their overview and evaluate the different themes or different things that each of them are doing. Obviously you want to format your overview. So if I didn't use paragraphs here and had it all as one paragraph, not only would that be hard to read, but it doesn't show I'm very professional when I don't even know how to break up my profile, breakup sentences into paragraphs. Make sure your formatting is done. It's pretty simple, I don't know if you can even bold on this, but you want to at least use paragraphs. Another tip I've heard is stating who you want to work with, like who is your audience. I think I've done it kind of implicitly here. I'm from Australia and I enjoy working with clients who appreciate quality. That's vague in the sense that everyone appreciates quality but basically what I'm saying with this line is I'm from Australia. Your probably from Australia as well, from maybe the United States or the UK. You're going to be talking with another westerner who understands English fluently and who's going to give you a high-quality. Some people have actually been banned on Upwork, working with people who have poor communication skills that may be charge a really low rate, but just ends up producing low quality work or wasting the client's time. They want to avoid that and I think with this I'm implicitly stating, I'm from Australia. I have that Australian professional experience and I enjoy working with people who appreciate quality. The final tip I have here is just don't treat this like a resume. Don't list a bunch of things you can, list your skills and things that you can help with, but don't make the whole thing a list. Essentially you just want to write in a simple but professional tone, what it is you do, what are your experience is and your selling points. The principles are the most important thing here. You want to make sure that you're appealing to your audience. You want to know what your pitch is and you want to communicate that through your overview. I hope that helps you out with how to write your overview. There's a bunch of resources I'm sure online to help you create a template around it but essentially everyone's story is different. Everyone's preference is different. Everyone's skills are different. It's going to be slightly different for everyone. I think again keep those principles in mind and I look forward to seeing what your overview looks like in the class projects. Thanks for listening. In the next video we're going to cover ricing. 11. How to price yourself: We are now on to the final point in this first section here that you have control over, and that is your hourly rate. Knowing how to price yourself as a freelancer in general is a really tricky subject, but I think it's actually a bit simpler on Upwork, especially if you're just starting out. One thing I'd say is don't price yourself too low. You might be asking, what's too low, Chris? Essentially, you don't want to be working for below minimum wage in your country. Number 1, why would you do that to yourself when you could just go get a minimum wage job and number 2, that's going to look weird to clients that are hiring. I don't know about you, but when I look at somebody from the US, maybe they live in Los Angeles and they are charging $5 an hour to do web development or do the similar job to me, I get a bit [inaudible] to why are they charging that little? Is that really how much they believe in the quality of what they do, that they're only going to charge $5 an hour? That being said, if you're from a country where $5 an hour is a good amount of money, maybe you are an expert in what you do and that $5 means a lot more than what it does in the US. Again, take into consideration where you're coming from, but as a minimum, I would say charge at least $25 for most things. All the skills that are on Upwork, they're things that require a certain level of expertise. If you can build a basic website, you're already more proficient than most people in the world. If you can design a logo, you're already better at design than most people in the world by far. Don't price yourself lower than the minimum wage in your country. I think a good rate that I've heard people talk about as a minimum would be $25. Again, if you're from a country where $25 is a lot of money and you're just beginning, you might want to price yourself lower. But don't bite yourself in the foot or stab yourself in the foot by trying to bid too low on jobs. Say for instance, you live here in Australia and you are trying to get jobs so desperately that you'll bid at $10. I wouldn't recommend it, start at at least 25 because that really is a bare minimum for that kind of work done here in Australia. I'm sure in the US, it would be a similar thing. The reason why I recommend starting at 25 or your equivalent base hourly rate in the country that you're working from, is because you want to build up your profile on the platform. Right here you can see I've got all this experience right on Upwork specifically. But when I started years ago, I had nothing on there. I was happy to bid a little bit lower in order to get some reviews on my profile because ultimately, those reviews are going to build your profile up and increase the amount of trust factors that the client has to look at when they're looking at your profile. Regardless of whether it's Amazon or YouTube or Upwork, any of these platforms, you have to show success on the platform before you get taken really seriously. That's what the platforms will look for, and that's what the clients will look for. I definitely would recommend starting at maybe a bit lower than what you should be getting or you feel like you could be making, if that's going to help you to find more jobs. Just make sure that as you get more experience and as you build up those reviews, that you start putting up that rate until you feel like this is the right rate and you're confident at charging that. Another thing you might wanna do with pricing is taking to account your category. There's actually a section in the Upwork website that you can see if you're a client. I don't have access to it because I don't have a client account, but I have seen screenshots of it. Maybe I can bring one up here. I remember seeing this on a blog somewhere. I think it was this post. You can see here, a lot of freelancers don't know this, but when a client posts a job, Upwork shows them how much they can expect to pay. This is all dependent on your category. If the client sets a project at an experience level of entry level, they're going to expect to pay around this amount. Then if they set it at intermediate, they're going to expect to pay this amount. At this expert level, they're going to expect to pay more than that. That's not to say that necessarily if you're an expert that you should be earning that. But these are just things to keep in mind that this is the messaging that the client is receiving when they make a project. You want to keep this in mind and these numbers are not for every category in Upwork. I don't know which category this one is, but each of them are different. If you'd really like to know what the rates are in your category, create an Upwork client account and login. Start to create a project and then once you're doing that, you'll be able to see what the rates are in the category that you select. That's another one to note. If you are intermediate and your category range is 20-46.50 in that category range, maybe price yourself there. It really depends on your experience level and skills in terms of these three levels and also the category that you sit in on Upwork. Another thing you could do to figure out a good rate for you is to go for the Upwork search bar here and type in a search term that you would hope that clients would find your profile from and you can start to see how much other people are charging. What I'd recommend for this is actually to open up an incognito window. What an incognito is, is a private browser that isn't logged in as you. I'm just going to resize the browser here and right now I'm in an incognito window and I'm just going to go to upwork.com. Now if I go to find freelancers and I look for what I'm targeting when clients are looking for me. I want to rank for WordPress developers for the country of Australia. If I close that, you can see that I'm usually in the top five here, so I'm number 2 in the results. You can see here, I think I've got a pretty good rate at 50 an hour because if you look at other people in this search result with the same amount of job success as me they're charging around 50,40,37.50,33.33,50. Not many people are charging more than 50 an hour and the ones that are, they don't have the best job success score. I could probably push it a little bit further and I might experiment with that. But right now I feel like I'm at a good rate. Again, it's no hard rules to this. It's based on what your specialization is within your category and where your skills are at within that, and also audience, industry, there's no limit to how much you could set it. I'm sure I could set it to 100 an hour and maybe score at least one client. Going back to my own profile, my final words on choosing your hourly is to not price yourself too low that the client actually has to ask questions about your quality. Because say for instance, if I had all these job success scores top rated, I'm looking good on the platform. If I was to charge $10 an hour, that would probably go against me because there would be questions in the client's head. Well, does this guy value his time only as much as $10 an hour? That sparks some confusion to me. You don't want to confuse your client and you want to make sure that your price point is both affordable for your target audience, but also communicates that you believe in the quality that you're producing. If you have your rate too low, you may think, oh wow, the client is getting a great deal. But often price is not the biggest issue here. It's more about choosing the right quality at the appropriate rate. It's a tricky one knowing how much to price yourself. You get a feel for it over time. A lot of it really comes down to confidence. There's no reason why you can't jump on Upwork and for your first job bid a $100 an hour and snag that job. But what holds freelancers back a lot is having the confidence to charge that. I think your confidence is sometimes a good reflector of where you see your skills at. Sometimes you might be under confident and not value your skills enough, but you could be overconfident as well and you don't want that to happen where you sell somebody on a job where you're earning a 100 an hour, and you really don't have the skills to back that up. It comes down to experience. It comes down to understanding your audience, and it comes down to the confidence in what you can do for your clients. That's a little bit on pricing. Guys, just to simplify it once again, if you are starting out on Upwork, my rule of thumb is start at 25 an hour and then get some jobs on your profile and then test bumping your rate up and targeting higher paying clients and see how that goes. I'm pretty sure I started, I think at 20 or 25 an hour and now I've bumped it gradually up to 50. Just start small, build up your profile and over time, you'll get to a point where your profile is an asset that feeds you work and then you can start to charge more. That is the biggest area of your profile. This box here in the next video we're going to look at the other areas of your profile which aren't necessarily so much in your control or so important as this first box here, which is the first impression. I'll see you in the next video. 12. Other areas of your profile: To finish off this section on completing your profile, we're going to go below this first box here which as we mentioned is very important, but talk about some other important areas to fill out on your profile. The first one and most important, of course, is your work history and feedback. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can really do to edit this directly. You just have to provide a good service to the clients that you end up finding through this platform. The only thing I can say about this is make sure that you understand everyone you work with on Upwork is going to have the opportunity to rate you, so you definitely want to do the best that you can. Over-communicate, over-deliver, we're going to talk about those things in a later video but for this video, just understand that it's all going to go on your profile. If you get good reviews, this is going to be a great asset to your profile and make you a top rated freelancer. Take the work you do on Upwork very seriously and it'll come back to your profile. The next one is portfolio, and portfolio is going to be important or not that important depending on who you are. I think portfolio is a largely visual thing. Look at how Upwork are presenting it here. They've just got an image and a title here. I've actually updated my profile recently to have the websites that I've done look nicely and shown off in different screen sizes. But for something like web development, or something really technical, or something that doesn't have a huge visual element to it, I don't think the portfolio is as big of a deal. That being said, if you are a designer the portfolio is going to be very important for you because when people are hiring designers, they want to know that they can create good designs, which is largely visual. If you click into any of these, you will go into a little bit of an extra section where you can see some skill tags, a description that I've put in there and a link to the website to check out. I'm not sure how many clients actually will click on this or even know to click on this, so this box on the surface layer is very important. I would make sure good title and just really a good image. Consider this a place to showcase images of your work. Like I said, if you are in a field that is highly visual, you want to make sure you're doing this really well. Even still with something I do, there is a big visual element to it as well so I made sure to display some of the websites I've built here. Skills is something that you can put up to 10 different tags in and so number one, I would recommend using all 10 available tags. There's no reason to leave one out unless it's highly irrelevant, you can't actually do that skill. But there's often multiple ways of saying similar things like for instance here, WordPress and WordPress e-Commerce, PSD to WordPress. They're all WordPress related so I included them, and website development sits across all those as well. Basically, start typing skills that you think might be relevant and sought after by your clients and stick them in there and see if they're available. You won't be able to put in your own tags, only ones that are available to you so you just start typing and it'll come up with what tags are available, and just click all the relevant ones. If you wanted to take this a step further, you could go on other people's profiles and look at their tags for inspiration. Again, it's quite a simple section. Just fill out as many relevant tags as you can. In the certification section, there's not much to say about that except for if you do have any certifications, definitely include them here. A while back I did an AdWords Display Ads Certification so I decided to put that in Upwork but it's not highly relevant to what I do. But again, I don't think it can hurt to have a certification in there. Down here we have employment history and I actually do have. That's actually probably not that relevant, so I should probably remove it. I haven't edited this section of my profile in quite a while but we are getting down to the bottom sections here. My advice for this section, if you do have relevant employment history, of course put it in but it's something that comes further down the profile. The other thing I would say in order to complete your profile, maybe you don't have any relevant employment history. What I'd do in that sense, is just put yourself as a freelancer as a job and just say that, "I have experience working as a freelance." Say you're a web developer, freelance developer, "I have experience working as a freelance designer." Put that into a job and call yourself a freelance, whatever it is you do, and at least that fills that box for Upwork of having some experience and a client is not going to look at that and dispute that because you're already demonstrating that you are a freelancer by being on this platform. It does say employment history but it doesn't necessarily have to be a situation in which you were employed by a company. You can put in any work that you've done here that you think might be relevant and if you haven't got anything, just put down that you're a freelancer. Education, again it's like certifications. If you have it, put it in. If you don't, don't worry. But again, you don't need a degree to work on Upwork so if you've done any course, maybe you've taken my courses on Skillshare about web development or taken another online course, maybe you want to include that there. But, again, like I'll reiterate at the end of this lesson, you want to make sure that your profile is complete. The final section is other experiences and in here, I talk about my online brand, Chris the Freelancer. I don't consider it work experience because I don't have a client with that. It's not me being employed by a business or working for a client. It's just a project that I've done. But at the same time, it demonstrates certain skills that I have like video production, web development, seeing I built my own website, and content writing too because I wrote all the articles on my own blog, and then I provide a link to check it out. Here, maybe you want to include some volunteering projects you've done, some of your own projects that demonstrate what you can do. This is where you put any experience whatsoever that is relevant to your audience. Maybe if you are trying to be a travel writer, you could even put it in travel experience here like, I've been to this many countries and I understand the world of travel. Anything that's relevant that's not necessarily work related, definitely put in there. That's about it, guys. That's the whole profile. Again, I want to reiterate that you want to complete all of your profile. Now, I don't know for sure whether Upwork will promote your profile more or how much they will by having it complete but they constantly encourage you to complete your profile. That shows that it's actually important to Upwork. Like I said, once you get down to these smaller areas, you don't want to leave them blank and so if you can include anything that you can think of that will be relevant, that's not going to be too out there, definitely include it and you can see once we go into find work, which we'll get into in the next few videos. You can see this bar here saying 100 percent and that's telling me that I've completed my profile 100 percent. If you don't have that, that bar is obviously not at a 100 percent and it will remind you to complete your profile. Make sure at the very least, that you complete your profile as much as possible because there's two people that you've got to satisfy on Upwork. There's the client, or groups of people, the client, and then you've got to satisfy the platform itself, Upwork. You want to do good by Upwork, you want to do everything they ask you to do. You also want to do well by your clients, which is going to help you and is going to help Upwork. On the platform, it's all about doing well on the platform, building experience on the platform, showing Upwork that you are a great member of their freelancer community. That's going to help you as well to make sure that you get good support from Upwork and that your account never gets suspended, God forbid. Yeah, that's all on the profile stuff, guys. In the next section, we're going to talk about actually using this to find work. I'll catch you in the next video. 13. Finding Work: All right. Guys, welcome back. By this stage, you should now have your profile completed and be ready for the next stage, which is to now actually go and find some work. If you're currently logged in, which you should be, you can click right here on the Upwork logo, and that'll take you to the Find Work page. You can also get to this page by clicking this link. But the place I would recommend you to look is in a different section that you can find by clicking on this magnifying glass here. If this view, you can actually see all these different listings like you would in the Find Work section, but what you have is these really awesome filters, and these filters will allow you to filter by any number of these different attributes. The experience level desired, the budget, category, client location. It's very powerful to use these filters. Whereas if you go into the Find Work section, there is a link for advanced search, but it's pretty much an advanced text level search. You don't get those selection boxes, you don't get those check boxes, and basically you're searching the title and the skills here. I definitely recommend you go and use this one over here, and the reason why we want to use filters is because there are simply too many jobs on Upwork to look at. I mean, we can't just sit here all day filtering through 100,000 jobs, many of which are going to be irrelevant to you or not a right fit for you. This is essentially how it looks, but we can filter these results by using these filters up here. Now just a word on filtering and choosing what jobs to put into your search. You don't want to take an approach like I just mentioned, where you're sifting through lots and lots of jobs that aren't going to be right for you. You want to be strategic with your filters to make sure that you're being efficient. But of course you don't want to filter out anything, any opportunities that might actually be a good fit for you. When you're starting out, what you want to do is start a bit more broad. Look for opportunities, maybe jobs that are a little bit smaller, maybe for small amounts of money. But as you build on the platform, you're going to get more fussy, determine what you like, what you're willing to work for, and your profile is going to be more valuable over time. It makes sense to go bidding for those bigger jobs, for those higher paying jobs. But again, it depends on where you are in your Upwork journey, of course. For me, for example, who has had a few years and the platform now, I'm not looking for anything entry-level, so I'd be filtering via intermediate and expert. By that, I'm able to filter out 27,000 jobs. I wouldn't work for any less than $100. That's actually less than $100. But if I go down here and set a minimum, any project that is less than $100 is simply not worth my time. In fact, I would probably choose a higher number than that. Even $100 is a little bit small for me. The other thing is category. I make sure to filter by a category that should go without saying. Obviously you don't want to have in the search results all these different jobs that are completely different fields and skill sets to you. You want to filter by category. As I've determined in my audience, I'm looking for Australians. If I apply all those filters and then close that box, you can see I've significantly cut down the amount of jobs in that criteria. If 700 jobs sounds a bit small, remember, as you get more mature on the platform, you go for a more sniper approach than a shotgun approach of just sending out tons of proposals and hoping to get something back. Now I'm at the stage where I'm not willing to just work with anyone who pay me. I want to work with high-quality clients that are paying well, but when you're starting out, again, you want to find as much work as possible. You still don't want to work with bad clients, which we'll get to in a sec, but you want to work on as many jobs as possible, and if those jobs are small budget, maybe that's good just to get experience on the platform so you can get to this point where you're more targeted. I'm going to clear those filters, go back to the over 100,000 jobs and I'm just going to go back to filters now and talk about some of the filters that you might want to use. Experience level is one of the more important filters, and that's because it's not only dependent on your skills as a freelancer but also dependent on what the budget of the client is. As you can see here, they've not only got expert, intermediate, and entry level, but they've got these $ signs next to it. If you're trying to earn a lot of money per hour, you really don't want to be looking at these entry level jobs because as we've discussed earlier, when the client goes to make a project, they look at the skill level that they desire and they're given a range of values. They might get entry level, you're looking at below $20 an hour and they might look at expert, you're looking at more than $40 an hour. They have an expectation of how much it's going to cost them as well as their intended experience level. Price is a big factor in this as well. If you're just starting out and you don't mind taking a few jobs at entry level, you don't want to filter that. Maybe you want to filter out expert level jobs because you might find a lot of jobs that are just too expert level for you. Maybe you might want to do the opposite of me and just look at entry level and intermediate. Intermediate, I pretty much always use because it's somewhere in the middle. I definitely am not looking for entry level and maybe you're definitely not looking for expert but intermediate adds in a little bit of a buffer. Moving onto client history, of course, it's better to work with clients who have worked with other freelancers in the past. It gives you more data to work with in terms of seeing how they've paid other clients and also shows you that they have experience on the platform, so they're just more reliable as a client. But I still don't filter people out based on their client history because they might be a new client to the platform and they may have hired freelancers in the past and be a really good client. This goes hand in hand with payment verified as well. I wouldn't start a contract with anyone who isn't payment verified but to begin with searching for jobs, I don't mind applying for jobs where the client isn't payment verified. I just make sure that they are payment verified by the time we start our contract. The reason why I feel strongly about this is because my friend Denise, one of her biggest clients, ever, wasn't payment verified when he came onto the platform. She looked at that, she thought, they are not payment verified, that's seems a bit dodgy but then she brought it out with the client and the client was okay, sorry. I'm new to Up-work. He verified his payment and that client was worth thousands and thousands of $ to my friends Denise over the span of many months. You don't want to choose your filters too harshly. I would make sure your clients are payment verified by the time you start your contract but I don't filter by these personally. Moving on to the number of proposals, you may want to filter this just so that you can apply for jobs that are less competitive but I don't think you should shy away from any job that you feel is a good fit based on the level of competition. In fact, I do sometimes look at the number of proposals but that's always a last stage though when on the fence about a certain job, am thinking, I don't know if I can position myself. If they've got over fifty proposals already, maybe that's a sign for me to say, I'm not sure about this job, plus they got a hip proposals already. I'm going move on. But in terms of the preliminary search, I wouldn't filter out by that. For budget, obviously, it's up to you how much you want to work for. Like I said, you want to build up experience on the platform in the beginning, so I wouldn't necessarily filter by this in the very beginning but of course, as you get more experienced and you can start to be more choosy, think about the minimum job that you would be willing to do and filter by that. The other ones here are related to time and honestly, I don't ever filter by this because the client sometimes doesn't know how long it's going take or how many hours of a week it's going to be and you don't know where you're going to be necessarily. I always just suss that out by actually talking to the client, I don't use it as a preliminary filter. Finally, you've got these select boxes down here. You want to make sure that you're filtering via your category, if you're in web development, obviously you want to filter out skills that you don't have, you're probably not an interior designer or a contract manufacturer, so you want to make sure that you're filtering out all of those jobs that aren't in your category. That one is a very important one. In my case, I look at certain locations, that's just a personal preference, I guess that I've developed over time, you don't necessarily need to filter by location. Maybe time zones are consideration for you, you only want to work in locations that are on the same time zone as you but otherwise, you can just leave that blank. If I close the filters, you can see here that we've already cut out 80 percent of the jobs that we were looking at before. Very important to use at least some filtering, otherwise, you're going to be sitting there for hours scrolling through a ridiculous amount of jobs. Even still 16,000 is a lot. A lot of them are going to be older jobs, so I recommend only looking within a 24 hour period of posting. Sometimes I push that a little bit but I usually don't apply for jobs that have been up for more than a day. The reason for that is, Upwork is not really like a normal job board. People post jobs really quickly and there's so much volume of applicants that come in, so I usually makes sure that I'm only applying for jobs that are as recent as 24 hours. I've heard from other freelancers that they recommend applying within four to eight hours. So maybe you want to do this as a twice daily routine, for me when I'm in finding work mode, I do this as a daily routine and so each day that's a 24-hour difference, I'll go through, look at all the jobs that have been posted in the last 24 hours and then the next day I'll go through look at all the jobs that have been posted in the last 24 hours. By the time I get to Friday, I've looked at every job that's been posted from that Monday to Friday period. That's what I'd suggest for you and suggest getting into a routine with it and choosing how many times you're going to look for this search results per day and what times you're going to do it because if you are trying to go for that four to eight add gap, maybe you want to check three times a day. It's up to you. I think once a day is a good balance for me and I like having a daily routine. That's how I do it. The final step in this whole process for me, is going through the listings and actually opening up these job adds in a new tab. With the computer I'm using now, this mac book, I'm able to hold down "Command" and click on the link and that'll open up a new tab without having to transition over to that page. This is how I like to do it. You can also right-click open a new tab up here, it's off screen but a new tab is opening and I can click over to that job right there. Okay. If I go back here, what I do is I just quickly evaluate these jobs. I'm going to talk about evaluating jobs in the next video but what I do in my preliminary search, I just go through and I'm not very fussy, I just pick at every everything that could be relevant. I could make a travel agency website. I'm looking for an expert developer. Okay. Responsive one pager. I were to click on this but the budget is less than 50 and so I'm not going to. Now there's senior PHP developer. Okay. Let's have a look at that WordPress expert. Maybe this is a good video to watch in conjunction with the next one about evaluating jobs but all I'm doing here is a really preliminary evaluation on these. I'm just trying to filter out anything that is definitely not going to be relevant or definitely not something I want to do, otherwise, I go through and open them up in new tabs. We've got WordPress expert here, budget's too low but apart from that, it might be something I'm interested in. Then what you'll get at the end is a bunch of tabs. If I just bring this down, you can see here that we've got all these tabs now. Depending on whether it's a good day within those filters, I might have a long list of tabs here and then I go through and evaluate them one by one. If you're not sure about whether it's the right job or not, just my thinking is give it the benefit of the doubt, open it up in the new tab and have a look at it in more detail. This section here, as you're scrolling through, is to just pick out the opportunities that might be of interest to you and then you can get to the different tabs here and evaluate them with more information. All right. That's pretty much the finding work, at least getting to this stage, where you're actually on the job page. That's where we're going pick up in the next video. So I'll see you in that one. 14. Evaluating Jobs: All right guys. So for this video, I have removed those other jobs that I clicked on before because I'm going to use my own filters here. I will show you how I evaluate the different opportunities that I come across in my daily search if I'm doing it. So like I said, I'm only looking at intermediate and expert with a minimum of $100. Web development, obviously Australia. If I close filters, that narrows it down to the 700 jobs. All right. Out of those 700 jobs, a small percentage might have been posted in the last 24 hours. There's not that many jobs to go through in the last 24 hours, I would suspect. Okay. So as I scroll down, I'll go through the projects that are of interest to me and I'll open them up in a new tab and I'll do my best to share with you my thought process. So here we go. Our website is built on weeks. Okay. Let's have a look at that. Create WordPress theme and copy data from archive.You might be interested in that. WordPress developing needed for small projects. Okay. Yeah, maybe. Again, I'm not super fussy. For the purpose of this video, I'll open up a few ones that we can evaluate. Try and get a good variety here for you guys. WordPress expert to build full time. So I can go through the results here. I'm already up to 13 hours. As you can see, if I go further, I'm moving up to 24 hours pretty quickly. By page even page three, I've hit the 24-hour mark. Okay. So for you, you might want to have less filters so that you can actually find more jobs within that 24-hour period. But for me, I'm happy to take the sniper approach rather than the shotgun approach to finding work. Okay. So let's have a look at some of these jobs here. I'm going to bring this down again so we can look at the tabs and have a little squeeze at that these and evaluate them. So the first thing I would recommend is that you evaluate these jobs as much as the client is evaluating you. Okay? So you don't want to be coming from the mindset of you groveling for work. All these people are doing you a favor. All these people have something of value for you and you're just grasping at it. So get that mindset out of your head, you are a value as well. These clients are desperately looking for somebody to do a good job for them as well. Maybe they're not desperate, but that's the mindset that you should have. You shouldn't come from a mindset of desperation. If anything, you should be thinking that these clients desperately want to work with you. So it's just good to have that mindset and evaluate clients as much as they would evaluate you. Actually, I did an interview with another freelancer on my YouTube channel last year, Brett Dev. One of the things he said was, "When I go to interview with somebody, I'm interviewing them. They're not interviewing me." Switch that mental mindset around this value exchange. So I think it goes back to that employee mindset. There's one job and there's maybe hundreds of applicants. So you almost feel like you got to prove yourself. Here you obviously got to demonstrate that you can do the work. But they're looking for somebody just as much as you're looking to get hired. So keep that in mind when you're evaluating jobs. So the first thing I look for, I've got a bit of a list here; a detailed job description. So right now, this is not the best job description because it's one paragraph, haven't split it out into multiple paragraphs. It's small. If I go in and read it, we are looking for a talented designer and developer to an existing website is built on weeks. So as I'm going through this job description, I'm thinking to myself, Is it clear what they're after? Is this something that I want to do. Is this something I can position myself well to? As I'm reading this job description or any other for that matter, I'm trying to find the key points where I can actually respond in my cover letter, covering that key point and sharing why I'm a good fit for each of these key points and overall a good fit for the project. Now just in general, you've got this one paragraph and you've got a pretty non detailed job title. Website redesign and refresh. So this project is probably is not the best example. But if I look at the client information here, the client has a five-star rating from three reviews, which is good. They've spent a little bit of money, but not a huge amount of money on the platform. So the client looks okay. I'd be happy to work with a client who's five-star rated. With that level of experience, they look like they've done a good job on the platform so far. If I go down to the client's recent history, I can actually see the reviews that freelancers have given this client. So it all looks good. All these five-star reviews, nothing but good things to say about this client. So in terms of evaluating the client specifically, they look like a pretty good client. But there's other parts that I look at as well in terms of the actual job. One is the budget and whether they're going to pay well. So this person is looking for expert level of freelancers. But if you scroll down here, you can see the fixed price that they have paid people. It's hard to judge what the hourly is on these jobs, the effective hourly, but you can see some of the money they've paid in the past. That tells you how much money you can expect them to pay in the future. If we go to the bid range, let's see. This is a hourly job, but the average bid on this hourly job on expert level is $17.10. So I wouldn't be too deterred by this because maybe your competition aren't as good as you and you shouldn't be scared off by competition. But it is something to consider that if I applied for this job, I would be the highest bidder by far at $50 an hour. So maybe I would consider dropping my rate if I really wanted to work on this project to $40 or maybe this is a sign that I'm a little bit too pricey for them. So another section we should look at is the questions. Right here, you can see that there's three questions that they've included here. These are ones that you'll have the opportunity to answer when you click submit a proposal. Right here in this particular project, we can see that the questions are quite generic and maybe even generated by UpWork. So they're not very specific to this job or to this category of work. So it shows perhaps a little bit of laziness on the client's part to just choose generic questions. So that is a consideration as well. Otherwise, if they're asking good specific questions that you feel you have a good answer to, that's a good sign that you can actually position yourself for these jobs by answering these questions and having a really good answer to them. The final thing I would do with this one is check out their link. So I would open this up in a new tab. UpWork are going to ask you if you are willing to leave UpWork. That's there disclaimer saying you're not on UpWork anymore, so be careful. You can actually research more about their company and maybe you'll find some information about them that will help you to create your proposal. One example, sometimes they tell you a specific problem that they're having and then they give you the website link and you're able to actually look at the problem and advise them on what the issue is upfront so that's a really good one as well. But basically, that's how I would evaluate this client. Based on all that, I probably wouldn't bother with this one and so let's move on to the next one. We've got create WordPress theme and copy data from Archive.org. That's a pretty good title, I think that's pretty specific so let's have a read of the job description here. I actually like this job description, I like how they've broken it out into paragraphs which shows that they've made some effort with their grammar and making it readable, they've told the story of what happened and what they need done. It's pretty clear to me what the job is and that to me is a big thumbs up. That not only it makes it easier for me to write my proposal but it shows that these people know what they want which is going to make it easier to work with them. The budget is a little bit low but if I look at the client, they've got a pretty good rating from two reviews, they're in my location and they've spent a small amount of money so far. Let's go down and look at their work history. In their client history, they've only paid freelancers $8 and $3 an hour. What have they put the experience level for this one? They're looking for intermediate but judging from what they've hired in the past, they're maybe looking for somebody in more of that range. Now, when you're looking at these rates that they have had been charged to by previous freelancers, make sure to look at the work that these freelancers performed as well because if it's something low value like data entry, maybe they're going to pay somebody $3-$5 an hour but if it's something that's more complicated and more specialized, maybe they'd be willing to pay more. That's something that you can't necessarily judge but it's another factor to look at, how much have they paid freelancers in the past? Going back up again, you can see the bid range. They've put their budget as 200, and the average bid is around that 200 mark. If you're happy to do it for 200, click that "Submit a Proposal" button and go straight into it. I'm going to keep this one open because I like it. Budget is a bit low, but I think that everything else is pretty okay. The only worry I'd have with this particular client is that they're not willing to pay that much. But again, I don't know until I speak to them and so I think I might send a proposal for this one. Moving onto the next one, WordPress developer needed for a small project. Down here we've got a job description and again, I like that they've broken it down into tasks. They're getting really clear with what they're after, they've attached a screenshot. The job description is pretty good, the title is pretty descriptive. If I look at the client, they've got good reviews, they've spent a total of 952. If I go down here, we can see how much they've paid freelancers in the past and for what work. All of these fixed price jobs that are pretty low budget, I'd have the same concern with this client as the previous client. They seem to know what they want and they seem to have pretty good reviews but it may not be the budget that I'm looking for. Let's have a look at one more; front-end developer. I wanted to build our fundraising theme. Here and in this section, senior level that communicates to me that they're looking for somebody quite senior and experienced so you need to evaluate whether you fit that criteria of somebody who you consider senior or very experienced. Let's have a look at what else they put here. They use a lot of technical speak here like Pug and LESS. I'm not familiar with Pug but I've heard of LESS before, I don't have much experience in either Pug or LESS so I'm thinking with this one, it may not be a perfect fit for my skills. That's what I'm thinking with this but in terms of has the client got a budget? He or she has paid good rates before, they've spent over $30,000 on the platform and they have a close to five star, perfect average review. I think that this client will have the budget to hire somebody like me. At my rate, I'd be on the higher end but I think they'd be willing to look at it judging from their history but I'm not sure whether that'd be the right fit in terms of experience. Let's do one more and then we'll wrap up this and talk about how to actually submit your proposal, let's have a look at this. Somebody has a clunky and old website for the dance business and they want us to take a look so let's have a look at that one. They weren't lying, their website looks pretty terrible and old so let's see what they're after. This person knows they want a website, they already know they want it on WordPress, but they want somebody who knows design. I'm definitely more on the development side than the designer side. Maybe they're looking for more of a designer than somebody to actually build it or maybe they're looking for somebody to do both, which is often the case with small clients, they want design and development in the one go. I like the price that they're giving it for a basic WordPress website, that's an okay budget but the issue with this client is that they're pretty much new to the platform. Their payment is not verified and they have no previous reviews. Also your competition here is going to be 50 plus proposals because they have made the job pretty enticing. This particular client, I think I would still submit but of course, I wouldn't work with them unless their payment is verified. That's something that can be set up later. I think I would still have a look at this job and make a bid, and that's because it's pretty clear to me what they want and it's pretty clear to me that I can do what it is they're after. That's my thought process around evaluating four different jobs here. What I want you to keep in mind when you're looking at any job ad is three questions. One, am I right for this job? Two, can I compete? Three, do I have the answer to their problems? Or in other words, can I position myself as the answer to their problems? The first one, am I right for the job? You have to evaluate that on your own personal basis, figure out whether it's a right match for your skills, whether you can actually deliver on that job. Number two, in terms of can I compete? Again, I don't want you to get too caught up on your competition because there's a lot of low-level freelancers on UpWork that'll send through copy and paste proposals and they don't have the guidance that you're getting right now. Your competition is unlikely to be that strong but even still, you want to make sure that if the client has a really low budget and that's what they're looking for, you are probably not going to be able to compete with a really high hourly rate. On a flip side, if they're looking for somebody who's really experienced and knows all this stuff and they're paying well, maybe you can't compete at that level. You have to judge, do I have a good chance at getting this job for the price I want? The final question to answer yourself is, can you answer their problem? Can you communicate that you are the answer? A lot of this goes into how much information they've given you. If they give you a vague job description and they say, ''I want a website,'' there's some job ads out there that just say, ''I want a website.'' Well, there's not much you can say to that except for, ''I know how to make a website and I'm pretty good at it.'' So that's why this goes into the evaluation stage of looking at these jobs. You've got to ask yourself first of all, has the client given me enough information to be able to figure out whether I have the answers to the problem and if so, do I have some good answers to their problems, and can I position myself as the answer to that problem? Once you have that in mind, you can go to Submit a Proposal and then in the next video, we're going to talk about how you actually put those ideas into a text form and send that off to your prospective client and hopefully win the job. 15. Sending Proposals: In this video, we're going to talk about actually sending proposals, what to include in your application and honestly all of these different videos or different parts of the finding work and applying for work section, they all blend into each other because you should know what your pitches, what you're looking for, and that will dictate all the way from your job search to actually applying for the job. But in this video, I got rid of those previous examples because those were just from that short period of time searching and I found some other examples here for us to look at, and let's talk about how you might position yourself for these jobs. Here you've got a very simple job. The budget might be small, but it might be what you're after and they're looking to mobile optimize a WordPress website. They've only got really one requirement here, and that is that they want it mobile optimized. If you have anything in your experience or anything that you can show them of how well you can make mobile first websites, then definitely that's something that you would want to address. That's one example. In this job, you can see here that they've listed a whole bunch of things that they want the developer to do. Number 1, adding a live. 16. Getting Hired: In the last video, we were putting together our proposal and the only thing left to do is click the Submit A Proposal button right here. I'm not going to do that because I don't actually want to submit a proposal. But what happens after you submit a proposal it's up to the client. Don't feel discouraged if you don't get a response back. This is just the nature of Upwork. If somebody doesn't want to work with you, usually you weren't receive a response and on the odd occasion, you actually receive an email from Upwork saying that your proposal was rejected or that they hired another person. Oftentimes, however, you don't know if they even read your proposal. I wouldn't get too worried about it when you send up that proposal, stop thinking about it and let the client come back to you. There's nothing else that you can do. The next stage after sending your proposal is you get a response back. What will happen is, in Upwork, you can go to your messages tab right here, we can also access this using the Upwork app. But essentially what will happen will be, a new message will appear in your inbox. I've blurred out the names here to respect the privacy of my clients. But if I go down and find an example to bring up for you guys. Right here you'll see your proposal sent as a message and then you'll see as the next entry, a response from the client, if of course they go back to you. Now the process here is just to chat with the client and figure out if it's a good fit. Figure out if the client is easy to work with. You want to know exactly what thereafter. This is where you can negotiate on price as well, just because the job had a budget of $400 and you bid that and they're talking to you, or you put your hourly in and now they're talking to you, doesn't mean that that's going to be the exact hourly or project budget that will be sent in the offer. You can also negotiate price during this stage. You chat it out and then hopefully you'll get an offer. Once you get the offer, you can click on this link to view details. It'll take you to this page right here where you can see the offer details. Usually there's buttons on the side here to accept the offer. Currently, this is one that I've already accepted, so I don't have those buttons there, but you can either accept or decline the offer on this page as well. This is the official offer. If you accept this offer, you are now under contract with the client and that means that you can start charging time to the time sheet if it's an hourly job or you can submit a request for payment if you've actually completed the job. Once you're on the contract, it means that you guys are connected now on Upwork and once the contract closes, you'll be giving each other reviews. It's very important that you evaluate the client and you don't just accept any offer. You make sure that the client is going to be good to work with and that you're not going to have any issues because once you've already accepted that offer you now have an obligation to them and Upwork definitely looks at that. The next stage of course after accepting the offer and signing the contract, is to actually perform the work and manage the client relationship. Obviously, we're not going to cover performing the work in this course because it's going to be different depending on what work you are performing. That is where your existing skills come into play. In terms of managing the client relationship, that's something we'll get into in the next video. For now, on this video on getting hired, the next stage after this, I guess you've already been hired but just to cap off the contract process on Upwork, is pausing or closing the contract. This is important for a few reasons which we'll talk about in a later video but, you want to either pause or close the contract or follow up with the client if the contract is just idle for a few days to a few weeks. Just to run through the whole process, after you've accepted the offer, you're under contract, you've done the work, the client is happy, you are asked to end the contract. Then once you end contract, you'll fill out some details about did this go well and you'll give a review to your client, and I'm sure the client will receive something similar. They'll select whether the job was completed successfully and they'll give you a rating and a review. After that, you're done the contract is over and the client may or may not contact you again in future. It's up to them. I believe you can still message them on Upwork through the same message stream, but you're not under any obligation to do anything for them at that point, the contract is over and you've completed that specific job. This process is virtually the same anytime you do a contract on Upwork, except for the case in which you're invited to apply for a job. Actually clients have the opportunity or the option to send you an invitation to apply for a position. This is something that you'll get more commonly as you start to build a really good profile. So what you'll get when a client invites you to a job is you'll get a notification in your email or in your Upwork dashboard. What you'll do is arrive at a certain page that looks a little bit like a job description, but it has a few buttons. One to accept the invitation and another to decline the invitation. If you decline, it asks you to give a reason. You're free to decline any invite that you get sent through. I declined most of the invites because they're not a good fit or the budget is too low, you can flag that reason in the form when you're declining the invitation. Otherwise, if you like the sound of the job or you want to know more about it, click accept, and it'll go through and ask you to send a proposal. Now I say proposal because I don't structure these proposals the same way that I send proposals when I'm basically cold messaging these clients, what I do is I am bit more casual with it. If they've already looked at my profile and are interested in me doing the job. I basically just say whether it's a good fit and I'm excited to work with them and maybe ask them a question that I have about the project, move the conversation forward or I will say something like this where I say, hi, I would love to hear more about your project and find out if it's a good fit for my services. Sometimes I get them to book in for a chat and for me that just shows if they make a booking for a chat, they're serious and I can do a lot more on the phone, then I can do going back and forth on chat. That's basically another step that you could get to that stage of getting in the chat room of the client but for now, it's exactly the same as what we've just discussed. They'll send you an offer, if it's all good, and then you accept and then you're in contract together. There's three things to remember here that I just wanted to make clear. Number one, this is your chance to further evaluate the client. Remember, we don't want to accept anything that comes our way. Once you're in contract with the client, there are certain responsibilities you have to them and they're able to give you a review. If you have a bad relationship and the job doesn't go too well, then that's going to be a problem and you might actually get a low review from it. What you want to do is make sure that the client is going to be good to work with as best as possible. I mean, you get a better feel over time but if they seem too demanding, they seem like they don't know what they want, you don't know if you're even a good fit for this job, if you feel uneasy about it whatsoever, besides being a bit nervous as to your confidence of completing a job that you know you should be able to complete. Don't question your confidence in completing a job, but just in terms of the client, if they seem hard to work with or not the best fit, don't feel too rushed to accept the offer. In fact, what I like to do is wait a little bit, get a feel for the client, make sure they've got all their requirements in place and then accept the offer if they've sent it quite early. My second tip is to not be a yes man during this process. What I mean by that, is just saying yes to everything that the client ask. If the client says can you do this or can this be done, don't just say yes. There's a certain cultural difference, I see in certain cultures where yes means something different to different people. In the West where you're probably getting the majority of your clients from, yes means a 100 percent yes. If that makes sense. If you're a Westerner watching this, you probably get it a 100 percent. But what I mean is, if you can't do something, don't say yes to get the job. If you aren't happy with something, don't say yes to get the job. Clients actually will appreciate it if you don't know how to do something instead of saying, yes, you say, actually I don't know how to do it, but here's the extra information I need in order to figure out how to do it or I don't know how to do it, but here's the process I would go about to find the answer. They're going to appreciate that. Remember, and this is something we'll get into in the next video, is to communicate a lot. I call it over-communicating. You want to make sure that you're telling them as much information as possible and that's going to put them at ease, so don't be a yes man. That's another tip for you. This goes directly into my third point here, which is consult if you can. What I mean by consult is, don't just be the freelancer who takes direct instructions on what the client wants them to do, but help the client through the process as well. If they're leading you down a direction that you think is not going to help the client and you can offer a better solution or a suggestion of how to do the job better. Definitely, go ahead and do that. Clients really appreciate it. A lot of them actually don't know what exactly they want anyway. If you can guide them through that process and kind be their consultants, as well as the person who implements and performs the work, then you're going to have a great client relationship. Finally, speaking of client relationships, that's what the next video is going to be all about, so we segueing into that right now, this video I wanted to make on the process of getting hired. What happens from when you send your proposal to when you get sent an offer? Then you click "Accept", and then you start the contract. That is basically the process that happens on Upwork. The things to remember during this process is again, to continue evaluating the client, but then also negotiating If you haven't decided on the payment or what the scope of the project is and get that sorted out as much as possible before you click on any offer that they send through. It's good to be aware of the process and it's good to be as prepared as possible for when you click that accept offer button and you start a contract. In the next video, we're going to talk about how you manage that client relationship while you're on contracts with them. We talked about a few of them here in this video, but in the next video we're going to dive deeper into managing the client relationship, so I'll see you in the next video. 17. Managing the Client Relationship: All right guys, welcome back. In the last video, we talked about communicating during the getting hired process and the actual process on Upwork of accepting an offer, starting the contract, and ending the contract. In this video, we're going to talk about what happens when you're on contract with a client. You've already negotiated the price, you've already figured out what it is, and you've accepted the offer. Now, how do you manage the client relationship while you're performing the work so that the client is happy and it works smoothly for both you and the client. One of the principles I live by, I call over-communicating. The reason why I call it that is it because it's a reminder to make sure that you're communicating as much as possible. You don't want to be obnoxious with this obviously, don't be crazy and communicate unnecessarily. But anytime there's an update to share with the client, anytime there's a thought you had, don't be afraid to share. One of the things that you're communicating in a nonverbal way while sending multiple messages or contacting the client, is that they can trust you and that you're always there in case they need you. One of the tactics I've used with clients is to summarize the list of things they want because often clients are just sending random stuff to you. Oh I want this, I want this, I want this. What I like to do, summarize everything that they've said to me in the message stream of what they want or in another document, put it through, here is a checklist of what you want me to do. Then after that, go through and like I've done here, provide a summary of all the things I've done, checking them off and that communicates to the client, Oh, Okay. I know we're at now. I know how much he's done. The one thing you don't want to do when you're working with clients on Upwork is get the job, do the work and don't communicate with them at all. You might think, okay. I'm doing a great job. I'm not bothering them. But you want to let them know how it's going throughout the process. Be responsive when they message you. Make sure to tell the client as soon as you've done something, give them regular updates. Obviously, you'll get a feel for the client's expectations over time. Some are quite needy and want daily or constant communication, others are happy with communication more spread out. But if you haven't heard from the client in a while, make sure to follow up. If you've done something new or need something else to go on with, make sure to follow up. It's on you to communicate as much as possible with the client and let them know that you're there and that you're actually working on their project. Again, remember here, I want to reiterate this, once you're on contract with a client, they have the ability to leave a review on your profile and that can be very detrimental if they give you a bad review. You want to make sure if you're on contract with a client, you not only do great work, but communicate well with them and make sure that if there's any issues whatsoever that they have, that they can bring it up with you and that you'll sort it out. That's a lot better than letting issues just sit around and then they won't communicate how they feel and suddenly you'll be getting a two, three star review at the end when you could have gotten a five-star review. What you need, especially when starting out, is five-star reviews. You want to make sure that every review you get on artwork is five-stars. Don't leave it up to chance, make sure that you're communicating constantly with the client, making sure that they're happy. One of the areas that I really like to communicate as well is around budget. A lot of clients on Upwork are budget conscious. If they ask you to do something that you think is going to take a long time and you're on an hourly contract, you don't want it to get to the point where, you do this 10 hour task and then it gets charged to them and they're like, "What? I didn't realize it was going to take that long." Even though you're in the right to do the work that they asked you, you want to communicate to them, "Okay. That's going to be time-consuming. It's going to take me around this many hours. As long as you're cool with that, otherwise, here are some other alternatives." You want to make sure that you're respecting their budget and you're not going to charge them more than they expect. Even if you've done the work and you're entitled to it, you want to know up front that the client is going to be happy with you doing that. One of the things I do when I'm communicating with clients is if they asked me to do something that's going to be very time consuming, I let them know that that's going to be time-consuming, here's a more cost effective way to do it. Clients often will really appreciate it. If they say, "Look, that's cool, I want you to still do it." That's fine, you've done all you can. But that's a little extra step that I like to take when communicating with clients. Also during this process, you want to keep in mind that this could be a repeat customer and you could actually build a long-term relationship with them. If that's the case, I would recommend getting on the phone with them every now and then, maybe meeting up with them if they are in the same city as you. Try and build a relationship with them because clients like to come back to the same freelancers again and again. It's hard to find good people. As a business owner, I've outsourced once before and it was a terrible experience. The freelancer just couldn't figure out even a basic task. This is the environment that clients are working with. That's where trust and relationship become so important to you and the client. You want to make sure that if you trying to build a long-term relationship with these clients, which you ideally should be, that you communicate with them in as many ways. That's going to communicate, trust, familiarity, and build a relationship with them. Get them on the phone, meet them in person if you can, and build the relationship that way. Again, we talked about this in the last video, but I want to reiterate it again. One, don't be a yes man. Two, consult if you can, and three, if you don't know the answer, admit it, but offer a solution. Again, with the yes man thing, if it's a question that is really simple to answer and doesn't need any more information, yes, of course you can say yes. I'm not saying you can't say yes to anything. But if it's a bit of a loaded question with a lot of considerations, don't just say yes, but say, yes, we can do that or we can do it this way or I don't know about that. This is the opportunity where you get into being a consultant. You can say, "Yes, I can do that, but how about this?" Or have you considered this? Again, clients will really appreciate this. The final point is, if you don't know the solution, admit it, but be proactive in coming up with a solution. Say for instance, if they say, can you do this, don't just say no. You want to be honest with them saying, look, I've never done that before. I'd be happy to learn it. Here's what I can do. You can say no for sure, but don't just leave it there. Say, here's what we can do next. I don't want to harp on about those points too much. We covered a bit of that in the last video, but that's essentially it guys. After you've done a great job, you've done all those things, you've communicated thoroughly throughout the project, the client is happy, then you can end the contract. You want to make sure that before you end the contract, that the client is as happy as possible. If you have to put in an extra few bits of work just to make the client happy, do it. Because it means so much to your profile to have a five-star review rather than a three-star review with a few words of, oh, it wasn't a good experience working with this freelancer. Make sure that you end on a high point. Usually the job is completed, they're happy, they enjoyed working with you. That's a good point to end the contract and then you get that sought after review. It feels great. You got to five-stars on your profile. You're looking good, you're on your way to a 100 percent jobs success score, and top rated status. Actually one of the things when you're getting started on platform, if you starting to build some momentum, Upwork will give you a badge as well called rising talent, I think they call it at the moment. These are the things that incentivize you to do great things for your clients. It's going to make your profile look much better. Make sure that if the client is not happy, try and fix that up as much as possible before you actually end that contract and start to exchange those reviews. That's basically the whole Upwork process from setting up your profile, to finding work, to submitting proposals, to managing the client relationship, and then ending that contract. This is pretty much the bulk of the course completed. The next two videos are going to be bonus lessons that I mentioned at the start of the course, and that is my tactic that has really supercharged my results. I'm excited to share that one with you very soon. But first of all, let's talk about the job success score. I'll see you in the next video. 18. Bonus 1: The Job Success Score: All right guys, welcome back to the course and in this video, I want to talk about the Upwork job success score. So if we look at the computer, you can see my profile here, and in the top right corner, I've got 100 percent job success, and I've got top rated status. If we hover over job success here, we can see a little tool tip appear says that the job success rating is the percentage of this freelance jobs that resulted in a great client experience. So what you might think from this job success score is that it's simply a measure of the number of successful jobs over the total number of jobs that I've done on the platform. Actually, it's a little bit more complicated than that. The reason why I know for sure that it isn't as simple as that, is because my job success score at its lowest point was 89 percent. Suddenly, after I fixed up a few things on my profile, my job success score went up to 100 percent again. Actually it went to 91 percent, I think first and, then shot up to 100 percent. If my job success score is related to the number of successful jobs over the number of total jobs, then theoretically, I can't go from 89 percent to 100 percent. I could get to 99.9 percent, but technically I could never get to 100 percent job success score if I had even just one job that didn't succeed. So some people get frustrated about the job success score, think that, "Oh my God, I've done one job bad. Am at 80 percent now." Or maybe they've done every job well and they've got a low job success score, and they're thinking like, "why is Upwork punishing me like this." It can be a bit of a mystery and actually Upwork does provide a document here. I'll bring it up right now on the job success score. So it'll say down here how my job success score is calculated. Here it says at a high level, we look at job success score this way. So that's how initially I thought of it as well, but if you look down here, there's other factors that affect the job success score as well. There's all of these different things that can boost your score. They even understand that some projects have bad outcomes, because the client is difficult to work with. So the fact that one client marks your job is unsuccessful does not mean that that's going to negatively affect your job success score. Then they say here explicitly, we don't reveal the exact calculation for your score. Doing so would make it easier for some uses to artificially boost their scores. We need to maintain some privacy with this metric to ensure fairness and accuracy. Then you can go down to here and about how it's all calculated. I definitely recommend you go and read this article, at least to get an understanding of what Upwork is telling you, but essentially the Upwork success score, the main thing to realize with it is it's not simply a measure of the number of successful jobs you've done over the number of jobs. If you have a unsuccessful job, it doesn't mean that you can't get to 100 percent job success. As I mentioned before, I lost my top rated status at one point. It was down to 89 percent and I thought, well that's it, I won't ever get back to 100 percent. Then I got there, and actually I went to a rep and ask why my job successful was lower, and I asked how I could get it better, and then he told me a few factors that I could do to improve my profile, which I implemented straight away and got to 100 percent. So unfortunately, I've lost that conversation, I don't have a record of it, but what I will say, is the things that I did to fix my profile and fix my jobs success score was number one, close any idol contracts. So oftentimes clients will start a contract with you and as long as the work is performed and they've paid you, which if you're in an alley, they'll have already paid your time sheet, or if you're on a project, they can pay you a milestone without closing the contract, they may just leave the contract open, because they don't really care. You've been paid, the job has been completed, but you want to make sure that if you finish the job, and they don't want you to do any more work on that contract, that you close it as soon as possible. This I've found has directly impacted my job success score. So I call this cleaning up your profile, but you want to make sure that any contracts you have open, that you're actually communicating with the client, and following up at least to see if there's anything else they want done. If not, encouraging them to close the contract. This is one of the biggest things and easiest things you can do to help increase your job success score. The obvious one of course, is to just deliver a great customer experience to your clients. So that goes back into what we talked about in the previous video on managing the client relationship, but in this video, I just wanted to share that the job success score isn't what you might think it is, and you can actually improve it, and make sure to manage the client relationship smoothly, and provide a great service for your clients, but also do things on the platform that make Upwork happy. Close open contracts, complete your profile, respond to invitations quickly, respond to client messages quickly. Don't just leave the platform for a week without touching anything unless you go on vacation mode, so you want to be constantly maintaining your Upwork profile and your Upwork account. All of these factors, I think will contribute to making sure that you have a good Upwork job success score. So that's all I wanted to cover on the job success score, as I mentioned, the article is there on the Internet for you to check out, but just make sure to not be too discouraged if you start off with a job success score of not that great. You can always get it to 100 percent. It's not over. So that's the job success score. In the next video, we're going to talk about my secret tactic, which is not so secret anymore, it's video proposals. So I'll see you in the next video. 19. Bonus 2: Video Proposals: Alright guys, I hope you're excited because in this video, I'm about to share with you something that I started doing it in the start of the year that really supercharged my results and that is the video proposal. Now, credit where credit's due. Actually, found this idea from this article by Rich 20 something. It's called Hacking Elance, the step-by-step breakdown slash guide to how I made 23,704 weeks. It's a pretty big article but the part that really got my attention and the strategy I decided to implement was creating these videos or pictures or video proposals. He actually even provides you a script of what he sends to clients and he actually provides some video examples. What I did was I ran with this idea and I started doing it in my own way to set myself apart from the competition much more. Before I show you some of my video proposals, you might be thinking Chris, you've spent a lot of time on video, you've been on YouTube for over two years, your grade on video, I can't do this. Don't think like that. As you watch these videos and you watch my videos, you'll see that it's not like a regular YouTube video or even presenting a class on skillshare, It's very casual. I just use my webcam and my Apple earphones and I don't edit the video at all. That's the other thing. I just talk on camera. The important things about these video proposal is, number one, you're setting yourself apart instantly because who else is going to be sending a video proposal, maybe one other person if best, so you're already standing out amongst the heap. Two, the client can actually see you. They can actually put a name to the face and actually hear your voice. He heard genuine you are and so they're going to feel like they're interacting with a real person much more than if they just receive a bunch of texts from some no-name freelancer. Thirdly, it allows you to communicate better that you're understanding the job description, you're researching their company, and you're figuring out ways to solve their problems. In this video, I'm going to share with you two video proposals that I sent out that landed me jobs on Upwork. But before I do that, I want to talk about some principles with doing your own video proposal. Number one, and this is something I learned from the original article from "Rich 20something."I'm following this structure. We've got attention grab, lead into the video, website reference high-energy close. The main thing that I've done is grab their attention and lead them into the video. I do say something like, this is not a Cannes[phon] proposal, I am actually sending you a recorded video just for you. That will often intrigue clients more than anything is, somebody recorded a video for me personally, I want to watch this even if they see nothing else, they're like, okay, well, you've got my attention, I want to see this freelance actually talk about my job on camera and then they click on the link. That would be my first tip is be very succinct with the proposal. Chances are that the client is going through a lot of proposals and so they don't have a lot of time. You don't want to bombard them with a bunch of text and a video. The video is going to be the thing that communicates all the information and puts you forward for the job. The text is just to get them to click on the video. Once they've clicked on the video, what they can do after that, so you want to grab their attention, draw them into the video and once they've watched the video, make a call to action. I actually like to put the call to action in the video as well. Next, when you're actually recording the video, I want you to be very casual. Use the person's name if you can, bring up the actual job description on your screen, as you'll see in the examples. I do a full-on screen-cast while also having a box down the bottom that they can actually see me on the webcam. If you're wondering how to do that, you can probably look that up. I use QuickTime media player for it. It's an easy thing to do but I'm using a Mac but you'll see the formula that I go through in my example videos is I start with a job description, I go over me reading it and breaking it down and answering the points directly. We can apply all the principles that we've learned in this class so far to the video proposal now. The great thing about the video proposal is we can do it in real time. I can highlight certain points of their job description and talk about how I can position myself for that. The other great thing about video is that I can open up a new tab in my website browser and find actual examples. If I have a portfolio piece to bring up, I can show them that in real time, if I don't know how to do something but I've done my research, I can go and show them articles where, look I found a process of how we could do this, I've never done this before but I think using this approach would be good. You can do all the things that we've talked about in this course and you can apply them and do them on video. Makes it so much more powerful and the client doesn't have to go around clicking different links and interpreting it. You just click on the next tab in the browser, show that to them. Just physically show them on camera what you're talking about and what you would have put in your text proposals that in itself can be very powerful. Between this video and the article on 'rich20something.com', you guys have all the information you need to go out there and put out a video proposal, I think of course it helps to see examples. I'm going to play two examples for you now in this video, back to back of jobs that have actually won on Upwork and if you have any questions about the video proposal definitely leave them in the discussion box. I hope you guys try it. Let me know how you go with it. Let me know if it's something that has really worked for you because it's really worked for me and I highly recommend it. That's pretty much the course guys. Thanks so much for watching in the next video, I'm going to conclude the course, so stick around for that but for now, I want to talk about the class project make sure to post your profile once you've finished completing it in the project section of this skillshare class. The great benefit of that is that other students can go in, give you feedback, I can go in and give you feedback on your profile. It'll just give you more incentive to go out there and set up that profile. If you have any issues, discussion box below and I'll see you in the final video. Thanks so much. Hi Vanessa, Chris here calling but doing this video proposal for you from up north in the Gold Coast in Australia. I see you guys run a video production company in Sydney. I'm a huge fan of video. Actually, have three YouTube channels. Feel free to talk to me about video anytime I love it but this job is about web development. Lets get talking about that. I see you're interested in an interactive price list. I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to but I did take a look at your example. I see that down the bottom there is a pricing table. It's interactive in the sense that there's different tabs that you can click on and they open up different sections. You can click Choose and it opens up a modal. When the modal opens, you can start to make payment and get a membership. To me this is pretty standard functionality, a lot of websites have this. We can find a plug-in for this or code it. I'm sure there's many plug-ins available to do this, just it would have to integrate with your membership plug-in. I'm not sure if you have that yet or you have a payment gatemay or something like that. That's probably the biggest level of complexity to this but honestly it's not that tough and maybe you've already figured that out. I want to hop on about that. Basically, pretty standard functionality I can't see it being too challenging for myself a little bit about me because I didn't actually introduce what I do. I'm a WordPress developer. I will link a little bit of my portfolio in the job cover letter. I'm always excited to work with other Australians. My best clients pretty much all of my best clients are from Australia. It's always good to work with other Aziz. I really like what you're doing in terms of video. That's all I wanted to say. I just wanted to be able to talk on video to you guys have a face to the name. I don't know what I'm doing with my hand but anyway just please get back to me either way whether, it's just to say Chris, you're not a right fit or let's talk more about this project. I really appreciate a reply. Thanks so much for your time. I'll just speak to you later. Good day, I'm Chris. I came across your ad looking for an Australian based developer. I'm an Australian-based developer actually here in the Gold Coast in Queensland at the moment. You're looking for somebody with experience using the Yii2 framework. Actually the last contract I did in Brisbane, was for a startup called PetCloud and that was the code base we were using. We actually started on coding and then we moved over to Yii. To be honest with you, I was mainly front end for that job. Sir, I'm not a specialist back-end developer but I do have experience plugging into Yii and we did use postgres for the database. You have a developer actively involved but you just need extra resources. I can definitely help with that. I can start immediately, used Yii before and I think the front end stuff is my specialty. I might be a good fit for this job, if not send me a message anywhere, I'd love to hear from you and hope to speak to you soon. 20. Conclusion: That pretty much covers my UpWork process from setting up your profile to finding work. As I mentioned throughout this course, you will start to see things change over time as you build up your profile. Soon enough, you'll go from being the one constantly applying for jobs, to now being invited to apply for jobs by the client themselves. The long-term goal of succeeding on UpWork is not just to find a few clients and make a bit of money, even though that's great.But what you can do with UpWork is build your profile into an asset that attracts the work to you. Remember to keep this in mind as you work with clients, reassuring yourself that the benefits of doing great work for one client help your business in the long-term, helping you to work with more clients and bigger projects. As always, if you need any tips or guidance, be sure to leave a comment in the discussion box below, and I'll do my best to point you in the right direction. Anyway guys, thanks for watching and I hope to see you again in some of my other courses.