Overcoming My Lack of Marketing Skills with Upwork

In my last post, I started my story about my career change. I gave up on looking for long term government contracts to go into building business to consumer (B2C) web sites. Since my marketing skills and my WordPress skills were non-existent, I chose to use Upwork for my marketing. Upwork takes 20% of the fee billed to the client.

Upwork has a system to vet potential freelancers. As I had signed up for Upwork sometime ago, I wasn’t subject to that. They still have hoops to jump through — profile requirements, badge requirements, language, Rising Talent Program. I’m working my way through those.

You are graded on everything: your response time, availability, and performance. After completing a number of contracts, about 5, they assign a Job Success Score which is a computation of all of the job factors.

Finding Work

Upwork provides a Find Work page based on up to 10 categories related to your skillset. The default Find Work query is a filter for jobs matching any of the categories that you set up. My query also filters for jobs for U.S. freelancers.

Advanced queries are also available. You can create specialized queries for keywords, job types, pay ranges, client information, the number of proposals, and other items.

In my categories, there are about 100 new jobs posted every day. They are pretty much displayed 10 at a time, newest first. The listing displays the Job Title, Fixed Price or Hourly, when posted, Budget, Experience Level, Job Detail, some of the Category Tags, and the amount the client has spent on Upwork. This information is enough to make a preliminary decision about whether or not to submit a proposal.

Clicking on the Job Title takes you to the Job Detail page which provides more information about the job including feedback about the client, their other jobs, and more detail about this job.

The information about a job runs the gamut from “I need a web site” to much more detailed requirements. I’ve learned to avoid sparse requirements.

The detail page may also include questions from the client to the freelancer. Often, the questions have been prompted by Upwork. For instance, “Do you have any questions about this project?” or “What is the most difficult part of this project to implement?” when the Job is “Build me a web site.”

It’s common for the client to request the freelancer’s portfolio of projects that relate to this job. That’s my challenge getting started — no portfolio of related sites. I generally don’t bid on these jobs. That may be a mistake on my part.

I query for new jobs two or three times a day. I feel pretty good if I find one job a day to submit a proposal. I’ve had two jobs in the last five weeks with $850 in total billed to the clients. Not much, but it’s a start.

Freelancers have ‘Connects” that are required to submit proposals. The number of Connects to submit a proposal range from one to six. When you start with Upwork they give you 60 Connects.

I’m still on the “free” plan and have about 20 Connects still available. When you are out, you can buy Connects for 15 cents each, or you can upgrade to Freelancer Plus and you’ll receive 70 Connects per month and get a few more benefits.

For now, I am working on my portfolio of WordPress sites and finding an occasional job on Upwork. I’ve got most of my granddaughter’s legal site moved into WordPress and I’ll be working to get that completed.

I’ll get into WordPress on the next post.

Rich