I topped the game on Upwork. So can you!
Freelancing gets nicely relaxing and very efficient when you can let a good high-end platform do your job hunt for you at a $0 marketing budget. Skip the endless proposal battles and learn how to earn 1000 USD per day — or even more. My Upwork story shows you how!
After I started my first project on Elance, the predecessor of Upwork, I picked my niche right from the beginning and faced little if any competition. I got all the good gigs early on! My earnings accumulated quickly which made my profile easily visible as my track record looked insanely good.
I’ve been Top Rated from Day 1 of Upwork in 2015 and bombarded with invitations from high-end clients ever since. That allows me to select between the best couple of gigs that I get without sending any proposals. I’ve changed my niche multiple times over and 10X’ed original rates.
Yes, 10X. From $30 to $300 per hour. 😉
The platform has evolved over the years, but the milestones are still the same. Once you reach about $10,000 of total earnings, you’ll be seen as a high achiever on Upwork. Then things get a lot easier. But to get there is hard work, of course.
My Upwork story: How to earn 1000 USD per day
The full story is available here: Go Straight for Coconuts, Part 1: How to Start Freelancing Without Ever Working for Peanuts.
Unfortunately, getting started on Upwork is harder and harder every year, thanks to remote freelancing getting more popular in every country. Almost anything you imagine to offer is already being offered by more experienced freelancers with perfect portfolios and big earnings backing them up. Your sign-up application can even be rejected in case you’re trying to enter a saturated market.
The key is to find a good niche. You must find yours!
Originally, I started with Microsoft Kinect-based Augmented Reality (AR) applications, then went back to my Ph.D. topic of VR training simulators for a couple of years, and now focusing on consulting & patenting for well-funded startups. The current version of my profile on Upwork is still active and very much alive and kicking although I’m not taking more than a gig per year because of other engagements (including this site, obviously). I am free to choose my clients from a continuous stream of high-quality invitations and only focus on the most critical projects.
When you know how to navigate the market, and the mechanisms of the freelance site of your choice, and you know how to make the shift fluently without causing an unexpected interruption, you can top the game every single time.
The good thing is that your track record stays online for life! Use it to your benefit! When you become a recognized freelancer in your field, your reputation precedes you and the work starts to find you without you doing much at all. You don’t even need to use Upwork for much at all, just keep the profile active so that your insanely good track record shows to everybody!
Nice, right? 🙂
The birth of CoachLancer: I had to share what I learned
Since 2015, I’ve had several Ph.D. students and first-time startup CTOs whom I have helped as an external advisor… which became a master-apprentice relationship – eventually, more like that of a personal coach. I can call the process a success as those 3 students of mine finished 5 Ph.D. degrees in total. 😉
Since 2017, I’ve been coaching young talented freelancers I worked with on various projects to increase their income.
Since 2019, I’ve been writing these CoachLancer articles and sharing all my knowledge regarding freelancing for free. There are well over 200,000 words worth of tips, tricks, hacks, and guides that help you become a better freelancer! I also started posting freelancing tips on LinkedIn every week.
In 2020, Upwork named me as one of the Community Gurus and a Community Featured Contributor (after only about 3 weeks of posting Upwork tips), and sent me a nice black Upwork cap and a quite huge thermos for coffee. (I use it as a coconut holder, though.) Less than a year later, Upwork renamed their famous Coffee Break forum section Coffee & Coconut Break for a while after my successful petition aimed at inspiring all freelancers on Upwork to not work for peanuts but to go straight for coconuts. Those were fun times! 😉
I’m now closing 1,000 posts on that forum and my coconut-powered brand is known to just about everyone out there, freelancers, clients, and community moderators/managers alike. (Special thanks to Mr. Nuts, my Head of Marketing, for his special appearance in this animated GIF. We are a dynamite duo, he gives me so much energy, in every sense of the word, hahah!)
In 2021, I bundled all my articles into a step-by-step self-learning course to make it easier to follow the recommended process of getting onto Upwork. But still, many people sought my personal support in some way. I helped whenever I could.
That year, the contact form on this site got so many messages that I had to remove it. My LinkedIn profile got completely flooded with requests for help and support in building a good freelance business, reviewing Upwork and Fiverr profiles, improving proposal-writing techniques, etc. With over 20,000 freelancer followers and an insane number of messages received every day, I realized that direct messaging like that didn’t scale up. Not one bit. 😐
As I also had learned some SEO writing and CoachLancer was already 6 years old, this site started to get loads of visitors every day.
In 2022, Upwork launched a new blog series with my 2-part story as their first content which also lead to an increase in requests for my personal support. Because of that backlink, CoachLancer went completely coconuts at this point!
In 2022, I also started doing some live online events and giving presentations on topics that many freelancers find interesting and educational. And of course, I’ve been “powered by coconuts” even during some of the events, e.g. this Upwork Expert Talent Talk titled ‘Charging 3-Digit Figures Per Hour And Increasing Your Value (Without Breaking A Sweat)’.
Upwork could only host 300 participants which meant that most people couldn’t join the event. Fortunately, it’s still available on YouTube.
(EDIT IN DECEMBER 2024: For its continuous pursuits of finally becoming a profitable business, Upwork “streamlined” their forum out of the existence on Dec. 13, 2024. RIP Upwork Community Forum. It was a fun place within the interwebs.)
In 2022-2023, I ran freelancing courses that helped hundreds of new freelancers get their first gigs on Upwork. But it took a lot of time for me to run each cohort, revise each homework assignment (e.g. optimize your own profile, or write a mock proposal for a real Upwork gig), and schedule each class so that everyone could participate. I saw how this didn’t scale up… and how a mere video course wouldn’t do the job adequately well as people mostly needed personal guidance and especially my feedback.
Besides the issue of the volume of people asking for freelancing tips, a more significant problem I faced was this: A big portion of those seeking my help are people who are “thinking about freelancing,” i.e. attempting to secure their starting position and making it as good as possible before taking the big leap – and never actually taking it! This is where I witnessed my effort go totally wasted in terms of business impact.
In 2024, as I had planned of compiling all my CoachLancer articles and course materials into a properly structured guidebook, I started thinking this might be the year to do it…
How do I start my own freelance business?
When you are trying to figure out how to start freelancing with no experience, think of business first. Money goes out, then it comes in – in larger quantities! It is hard to grasp at first… it took a while for me to fully comprehend it!
I always wished I had had the brains to get good guidance when I started. I would have gotten to the good money a lot faster… something I later calculated to have brought me tens of thousands of dollars when I compared the income from my first year to those years when I could call my service a high-value business.
Therefore, I packaged everything you ever need to learn about freelancing into the book ‘Go Straight for Coconuts, Part 1: How to Start Freelancing Without Ever Working for Peanuts’. As a non-writer and an awkward cocowriter at best, I took my time to get it right. I spent my Sundays for 5 years practicing how to write all the tips in a way that really helps people. I wrote 70 CoachLancer articles and 1,500 posts on LinkedIn as good practice for the book.
So, finally, I managed to wrap everything essential in MY E-BOOKS… and the prices are mere peanuts!
And if mere knowledge and practicing on your own don’t do the job in your case, go for personalized coaching. I’ll show you exactly how to do these things to the necessary shortcuts to the good money faster than you could on your own! The difference can be tens of thousands of dollars like I estimated my case to have been.
You can also make use of my free tips on LinkedIn that I post weekly. Come, join our nutty freelancer gang!
Can you freelance as a beginner? What to expect from coaching
The coaching support I’ve given so far is detailed here: One Year of CoachLancer – Here Are Top 5 Freelancing Problems I Helped to Solve. You can also check out the Hall of Fame of the most legendary coachees. Some of them learned how to earn 1000 USD per day just like me!
What I do is help and guide you. That means I don’t do the work for you. I give you objective feedback on your performance and individual guidance for building your freelance business. I help you understand the basics, I help you to raise your rates, and I help you to scale up once you’ve gotten far enough. I may give you homework to go through specific articles that help understand the problem you are facing. I help you find the way that works for you best.
There are many ways I can help you become a better freelancer! Find a great niche… and soon, become the dominating one!
Now, shall we get you some coconuts? 😉
