I’ve been posting Upwork and freelancing tips on LinkedIn for years. Most of them were delivered to the mailboxes of everyone who subscribes to my newsletter. Here are all the weekly tips, the best freelancing tips, of the year 2022!
Enjoy all these freelancing tips responsibly. There are 26 each in Part 1 and Part 2!
Check the links for the full post and particularly pay attention to the comments. Many freelancers have contributed to the discussion by sharing their experiences and stories.
And if these tips don’t help you get business on Upwork, my webinars most certainly will. They will also help you to avoid working for peanuts and go for coconuts instead!
CoachLancer webinars are the best place for getting my best freelancing tips!
Best freelancing tips No. 1: Don’t look desperate
Two main reasons for you not to be begging for work, giving free trials, and asking clients to “give me a chance” are:
- Scammers target those who look most desperate
- Clients who don’t want to pay much for anything
Best freelancing tips No. 2: Don’t do unpaid test projects
Usually, the test is the project the client actually wants to get done… for free. Many dishonest companies and fraudulent individuals ask for free test projects knowing that new freelancers on Upwork need nothing more than the first project with 5-star reviews. They misuse the hope of new freelancers for their own purposes.
Best freelancing tips No. 3: Make connections and build your clientele for the long run
Upwork allows taking contracts off the platform after two years from meeting a client. The best way to create a sustainable freelance business is to make a great connection with many individuals who need you for their businesses.
Best freelancing tips No. 4: Don’t list Upwork as your employer on LinkedIn
Listing Upwork as your employer on LinkedIn may make you appear as a full-time employee of Upwork, not a freelancer, which can reduce your chances of getting hired on this platform. Instead, include your Upwork profile on your LinkedIn profile as a link that can be clicked, and write “Self-employed” or “Freelance” as your employer.
Best freelancing tips No. 5: Pick the keyword that describes your service best and is not overly popular
Put that keyword in your profile title and text, and write a description about your competence regarding only that keyword. Then, get all projects with that keyword in the job title by sending perfect proposals. You don’t actually need to send many proposals when you have a 100% in a very specific niche. After a couple of projects, you have a great track record in delivering projects in your specific niche, a great portfolio, and reviews that look fantastic!
Best freelancing tips No. 6: Calculate your Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the sum of all costs that occur before you have a contract with your client. Depending on how you find your clients it can cover:
- Marketing and advertising of all types
- Publishing and production (e.g. your YouTube channel or blog)
- Sales effort, e.g. time spent on interviews, discussions, and scoping the project
On Upwork, you have 4 kinds of main costs:
- Cost of the Connects to send proposals
- The platform fee (that gradual 20%, 10%, 5% commission)
- Upwork Plus membership plan (optionally)
- Your time spent discussing and scoping the project
Best freelancing tips No. 7: Keep your track record of all your projects clean
Don’t “pollute” it with additional keywords that might confuse your clients about your expertise. Make sure each job contains the keywords critical to your success online because it is your track record that shows to all clients. Online freelancing is an expert’s game, i.e. those who appear to have the most expertise can get the best clients.
Best freelancing tips No. 8: Write your profile to impress only your dream clients
You don’t need to appeal to everyone. Here’s a checklist for writing a specific profile for a specific clientele:
- The clientele is explicitly defined
- The focus is on something that those clients need
- Only the relevant background to solving that problem is described
- There is a clear description of how clients can work with you
Best freelancing tips No. 9: Spend money to improve your personal efficiency
Buy services from other freelancers because you can always find a specialist who does part of the work better and/or faster. Or both! Administrative tasks, tasks that take a lot of time, uncritical tasks… these can be left for others to do. Focus on where your time makes the biggest impact on your client’s work.
Best freelancing tips No. 10: Switch your communication to team collaboration tools once your contract has started
When you have accepted a new offer from your client, you can take the communications off the Upwork platform and use whatever collaboration tools you like! But do not use other communication and collaboration tools before the contract is active.
In many cases, the normal Upwork messages are quite enough for getting work done. But if you work with teams and need to interface with a number of people in the client’s organization, Upwork’s tools fall short, and dedicated collaboration tools are much more useful.
Best freelancing tips No. 11: Skip contracts with clients you cannot read
Too many things can go wrong when you’re not sure about what your client really wants… and in some cases, you have to have the ability to offer something the client needs but is not able to describe as a ”want”. A little mix-up and an angry client could make your entire Upwork career to a premature end.
Best freelancing tips No. 12: Aim to earn 3-digit hourly rates by evolving your service
your service in terms of your operation and the delivery must be perfect – every time! But that’s nowhere near everything. You also need to deliver a great customer experience! Some suggestions for doing that include:
- Being a great listener
- Deliver more than promised
- Add on other types of benefits of working with you
- Lead the work in a way that even an unsure client feels like being in good hands
You also need to be able to refine the service to areas where 3-digit hourly rates are acceptable.
Best freelancing tips No. 13: Know which freelance platform suits you best
The freelancing platforms are fundamentally different, although one part of it is identical: Freelancers can post package deals (gigs) on Fiverr and on Upwork. But which one is better for a newbie?
Fiverr is a very crowded place and what makes it more difficult for beginners is perhaps the lack of an active sales process. You can only post your gig and wait for clients to reach out to you. Many don’t because you don’t have any reviews of previous successfully completed work yet. This means that you need to do your campaigning outside the platform!
Upwork supports an active sales process in the form of proposals. Clients post jobs that you can apply for as a freelancer by sending a proposal. This process allows you to be active within the platform as long as you keep buying Connects, the virtual currency of Upwork.
Best freelancing tips No. 14: Don’t post “why I cannot get a job on Upwork” publicly
Posting such things publicly, on LinkedIn, Facebook, Upwork Community Forum, etc., will make your freelance service look amateurish and unsuccessful. You don’t want to show your amateurishness to the whole world!
Best freelancing tips No. 15: Get your JSS back to 100% by working with old clients
One bad review can have an enormous impact on your Job Success Score (JSS). It is important to keep it 100% or close to it at all times. A lower score can lead to losing your Top Rated badge and give a negative impression otherwise in the eyes of new potential clients.
After getting a bad review, go work for your old clients! one or two projects done for people who already know you, already accept your invitation for collaboration, are your best chance of getting your JSS back to 100%! They don’t care. You already did a great job for them.
Best freelancing tips No. 16: Bonus won’t show immediately
If your client wants to send you a bonus and you want to maximize the earnings shown on your profile, ask your client to add a fixed price milestone instead. The bonus won’t show in your work history on that project immediately.
Best freelancing tips No. 17: Don’t start overlapping contracts with the same client
A little mix-up in one contract could terminate both! There are two significant problems in having multiple contracts for the same client:
- Communication mess
- Double effect from bad feedback
Best freelancing tips No. 18: Report every client who asks for free work in any way
Report also those who ask for a refund if they “don’t like the work.” If you use the interface correctly, it is almost impossible to not get paid for the work done (as long as you’re not dealing with a scammer). Not getting paid happens when you give in to clients’ ridiculous claims.
Best freelancing tips No. 19: Use this checklist to attract your dream clients
This is how you can attract your dream clients:
- The vocabulary you use is what the client understands (no jargon)
- The keywords match 100%
- You look positive and approachable in your profile picture
Best freelancing tips No. 20: Do not list all possible skills and background
Only list those that are relevant to your niche service and can benefit your clientele. Doing that gives a concise, consistent, and focused message to people reading your profile. At worst, you might end up looking like a person who has:
- References and work samples in one area, but the profile text talks about another field
- Education in one field but the business is focusing on something else
- Ambitions to learn totally different things than the service is
- No idea about what is relevant in general
Best freelancing tips No. 21: Don’t start your profile text with “thank you for visiting my profile”
This is probably the nicest thing to say and at the same time the most useless opening line for a freelancer profile. What it does is:
- Distracts from the message you have in the profile text
- It takes away your one chance to impress a client when only seeing the first two lines of your profile text in the list of proposals
- Gets your profile skipped by regular Upwork clients who know only newbies start their profiles with that phrase
Best freelancing tips No. 22: Check the number of invitations before you send a proposal
This is one of the most obvious clues that give away spammers from good clients. And then there is the gray area. These are the common categories of Upwork clients by the number of invitations:
- Loads of invitations: The client is probably looking for the cheapest guys
- About ten invitations: Probably not worth your time as the client shoots invitations at many people
- A couple of invitations: This is good to apply for!
- One invitation only: The client found you and wants you!
Best freelancing tips No. 23: Don’t ask more… offer to do more
This is how you can win in negotiations where you might be losing to a cheaper guy or are in danger of not getting a reasonable price for your work:
- Listen to the whole story of your client. What is the client’s business?
- Identify other problems that are related to the one client is directly asking you to solve. Where are the inefficiencies?
- Suggest solutions to those other problems. How can the client’s business become more efficient?
- Offer to solve all of them at once.
- Organize, manage, execute, and hire others to complement your skills.
Best freelancing tips No. 24: Use the freelancer search function to out how to differentiate
Differentiating from your competitors is rather a trivial thing to do when you understand how to use the search functions to your advantage:
- Pick your primary keyword and put it in the freelancer/talent search of the platform.
- Look at the search results one by one and assess if the search produced a list of freelancers similar to you.
- Look at what those freelance professionals similar to you are offering and how they try to market themselves.
- Now, think of something that none of your competitors advertise but is relevant to your ideal clients. This takes a bit of research effort and imagination.
- Re-write your profile according to the result of your analysis and make sure your profile title tells the most essential thing about your revised services.
Best freelancing tips No. 25: Say ‘no’ to Shoppers
The Shopper client exists only for the sole purpose of getting the best deal out of everything. Clients are free to pick the freelancer who suits their purposes best, but sometimes it is all about money.
There are several reasons for trying to shop around to get the cheapest thing. Some of them are:
- Genuinely there’s no money. The client’s business plan is not working or understanding of the basics of supply and value chains is fundamentally missing. As a freelancer, you’d never make a penny out of this!
- The client is actually another freelancer and trying to pipeline the whole project to someone else and make a cut for himself. Nothing wrong with making money as a mere project manager, but working with a good and expensive freelancer might be impossible.
- There is money but the project is just a trial of some new strange ideas. Whatever way is the cheapest, let’s give it a go, it doesn’t matter really. There’s no glory here for the freelancer. Nor money.
Best freelancing tip No. 26: Make sure each job contains critical keywords
Make sure each job contains the keywords critical to your success on freelance sites. Skip those that don’t look good as they would reduce the perceived expertise by potential clients. It is your public track record that shows to everyone.
