Getting the right kinds of clients early on is the key to success on Upwork. Many newbies fall into their own traps by low-balling just to get good ratings, but actually, that is a counter-productive approach.
Why? Because the track record shows to everyone. You don’t want to start in a way that makes you look like a cheap guy. It is hard to raise up from that pit. Always keeping your class, even in the beginning, is the best way forward. Yet, you must know what you’re searching for.
The tips presented here will give you a complete crash course on how to get clients on Upwork and land the first couple of jobs on the premier freelance platform. This is something you don’t find in the official Getting Started guides which give you an all too rosy picture of how freelancing is done on Upwork.
Client-screening 101: How to read job posts like Sherlock Holmes
Depending on your career stage, you may have a couple of options for how to get clients on Upwork at first. Either way, it is important to know what you’re looking for. Also, equally important is to know what you are not looking for.
The latter includes Shoppers, Scammers, and Delegators who you do not want to be dealing with under any circumstances. Let’s go through those first.
3 bad examples
Here, I picked 3 random job posts, each in a different category, to demonstrate how longbeards like me read job posts to avoid trouble. Let’s start with an obvious one.
Some of the most suspicious job posts that nobody reasonable would even look at.
There are many individuals who claim to be in some kind of trouble and it is their miserable situation that is supposed to invoke your empathy and consider the job… even if it looks more than suspicious from the start.
Here, someone wants to buy a developer account to publish something on AppStore. Can you think of what kind of developer would lend the account and risk getting into the same mess as the client?
Of course not. Normal people don’t do any of this stuff. This client is a Scammer. The fact that the client profile is new and the payment method is not verified makes the job post look far too risky for anyone to consider.
The next one is probably more honest, but these kinds of jobs are not good for anyone either. Not even just to break your $0 earnings streak.
Super-low rates are the trademark of the Shopper.
This is most likely a legit job, no big problem there. But this guy is a Shopper, no doubt. The only way you can win anything when working for a Shopper is… wait, no, there’s no way to get anything from them.
The worrisome part here is that within half an hour, there were more than 5 people sending proposals to this job! The lucky winner will probably get a couple of bucks for the trouble, an unpredictable review, and a horrible track record for working for the lowest possible rate (the minimum on Upwork is $3/h at the time of writing this).
Then again, there are kids on the platform. Students who are doing all kinds of school projects with no money to spend.
$20,000 budget for a school project. I wish I had that when I was doing my Master’s! The client is hoping that the big amount attracts good freelancers, but the impact is the opposite.
Students are great to work with, right? They are not professionals yet, so you cannot expect anything to be handled normally. Nor do they have money most of the time. Some even try to cheat by outsourcing their school work completely and by doing that commit academic fraud. Delegators at worst.
I’m not saying that you should never work for any student. I’m just saying that if you pick one as your first client, you’re consciously taking an even bigger risk than starting freelancers would normally need.
The last example demonstrates how the number of invites sent by the client correlates with the lack of quality of the job post. The correlation is obvious. There is a ridiculous amount of invites sent by the client to freelancers with the hope of getting some newbies to apply for the job.
To tell you the truth, I almost dropped my coconut when I saw this! Why were there hundreds of freelancers sending proposals for such a job?
When seeing nearly three thousand invites in a job post makes the ‘Flag as inappropriate’ button your best friend.
But this is nothing compared to what I got to see only after talking with virtual assistant Mmesoma Blessing. Now, this one is a real beauty!
Over 16,000 invites sent makes you only wonder how they managed to send them… who the hell did all the clicking? [Courtesy of Mmesoma Blessing]
Please note that the client has spent over a million dollars on Upwork, so most likely the job is not a scam but some kind of crowdsourcing assignment where thousands of freelancers get to do something relatively small.
In this case, it was some kind of live chat support task, but I don’t there’s any victory there for freelancers since the company tends to pay peanuts (less than $7/h) even on average.
These four examples are quite representative of those kinds of jobs Upwork and all other freelance sites are full of. Small lowly paid jobs are posted by the thousands every single day.
Checklist for picking your client
How do you know the job is legit, the client honest, and that you’re good to go to send a proposal to a job
Let’s draw a little checklist:
- The reviews the client has given to other freelancers are good (5 stars or close)
- The reviews the client has received are good (5 stars or close)
- There are no ridiculous amounts of invites sent (less than 20)
- There are no ridiculous amounts of ongoing interviews (less than 10… to have more is rare but I’ve seen some)
- There are less than 50 proposals sent by other freelancers (new freelancers don’t show very high on the proposal list the client sees)
- The job is a perfect match with what you do in a way that is evident to the client, e.g. identical keywords in the title of the job post and the title of your freelancer profile
- The job description looks reasonable and written clearly and correctly (which tells that the client is serious and has put time into making a good post)
- The budget is reasonable and not the minimum
In general, with those as your guideline, you can feel at ease when sending your proposal (here is more about how to send proposals). But there are exceptions to the rule too which means you need to assess each job post as a whole.
Here is how the checklist looks like when applied into practice.
My checklist applied to reality. Working for this kind of client would be a great start for you on Upwork!
Also, there are things that you do not need to be worried about if the client seems good otherwise. These are the things I never take as show-stoppers in my client-screening process:
- New client with no previous jobs posted and therefore no reviews (many of my clients were new to Upwork)
- Payment method not verified (I might just ask the client to add it after the interview)
- The budget is $5 fixed-price (as it is the minimum and the client had no idea about the cost)
Yet, as a new Upworker, it is probably better to go for those jobs that are posted by clients with a good reputation, a decent budget, payment method verified, etc.
How your track record must look like
There is no point in starting at all if you’re expecting the low-balling to continue. Upwork is still the premier site when it comes to finding good high-paying clients. It is your track record, the Work History section of your profile, that defines what new clients will see about your previous work.
Did you start at doing a $5 proofreading gig when your profile says you’re an experienced editor with 10+ years of experience? That first gig, even if it came with the best ratings and a fantastic quotable review, would still look to good clients like a petty $5 job. They would ask someone more expensive, probably.
Low-balling sabotages your track record.
Leaving a track record like this won’t make a good impression, even though there is a 5-star review or two. The worst part is that the job title says “no experience required!”… so, it is no wonder that this freelancer never got anything better than $5 jobs.
Instead, you must plan the jobs you take in terms of your intended clientele because the track record is your best sales argument. My first jobs were for exactly those kinds of clients that I planned to have. Therefore, just a couple of jobs made me Top Rated… and the rest is history.
“That’s it, is it?”
No. There’s more. You should also detect all the scams. And once you’ve picked the job and the client you want to send a proposal for, the next part is the interview which is probably the most important part of the client screening process. But these are topics of other articles. Read next: Code of Conduct for Online Freelancers and Upwork Scams 2022: How to Avoid Them Without Going Into a Personal Lockdown.
