How to get Writing Jobs on UpWork?
If you are an UpWork beginner and want to start living the digital nomad dream. You need to know how to land online jobs. It can be challenging building an UpWork profile that will actually get you hired, but with our tips, you're certain to start making money in your first week.
Create a High-Quality Profile Proposal
Build a Portfolio of Your Work
Get 5-Star Reviews
How Much Money Can You Make as a Freelancer on Upwork?
Create a High-Quality Profile and Proposal
You need to personalize the proposal for each UpWork job you apply for. Fully read the job posting and show them in your proposal that you read it. You want to highlight how your skills can benefit them.
Speak of past experience and relate it to their specific job posting. Then attach examples of your best work. If you’re brand new to writing and don’t have any examples, don’t worry. This portfolio will quickly build up.
Here is an example of the UpWork Proposal I have recently been using. It helped me land several higher-paying jobs this week. Feel free to give the template a try and let me know if you have any success getting UpWork jobs.
A tip I received for getting Upwork jobs was to ask questions of the employer about the specific role. The photo below shows some of the questions I ask potential employers. By doing this you show the client your initiative. You are willing to dive deeper into the task than other freelancers on the platform.
After about 3 days of applying for UpWork jobs sporadically, I got offered a contract. It’s such a rush landing your first paid remote gig. The dream of getting paid to work online is being realized. Even if it is slogging away at a penny a word. I’ll take it.
Once you land your first job on UpWork, check out our post on How To Stay Productive While Working From Home.
Build a Portfolio of Your Work
It’s crazy how fast your portfolio of work builds up. I have been keeping all copies of my work on Google Docs. Have a diverse portfolio really helps when applying for jobs. You can show examples of different types of work, allowing you to apply a broader search for gigs.
After landing my first job, I completed a trial article and have been receiving recurring work ever since. After the trial, you join a group board of writers on the project management platform, Trello.
Here they upload tasks for you as fast as you can complete them, its basically one cent per word. The writing is all about content writing for business websites. They cover various niches. I have recently been writing about SEO and digital marketing, Roofing services, accounting, and consulting companies, and a range of others.
Get 5-Star Reviews
When you first start out on Upwork you want to get reviews as quickly as possible. This shows your credibility to potential clients. Look for jobs that are asking for beginners. There are a lot of quick writing jobs that are directly offered to people trying to get reviews and improve their UpWork profile. I took a couple of these that paid $5 to $10. They take around 20 minutes, and you can easily earn a 5-star review.
Reviews are crucial in landing jobs over other freelancers. Especially the quick one-off jobs that are posted daily. The more 5 star reviews you have, the more likely the client is going to trust your capability as a freelancer.
Landing these 5-star reviews in my first week of freelance writing has helped me to quickly gain momentum on Upwork. I now have daily writing jobs and am starting to increase my pay rate.
How Much Money Can You Make As An UpWork Writer?
In my first week as a writer on UpWork, I landed 6 different gigs. These paid a total of $194. $155 after Upwork fees. Two of these gigs have been recurring and I now have as much work as I can do for one of the clients.
These 6 jobs took me around 20 hours total, not including the time setting up my profile or sending proposals. So for my first week, it was under $10 per hour. For a beginner with no reviews or Upwork experience, this is pretty good. It is more important that you do quality work to ensure you get 5-star reviews. Your writing speed will quickly improve once you start dong recurring jobs and getting a feel for the content.
So far in my second week, I have made $279 in 5 days. I applied for a job and got accepted to a one-off contract that paid $50. The work was easy and took me an hour and twenty minutes. Making my pay rate $38 an hour for that gig. That's almost the most I’ve earned in one hour of work ever! Not bad after only working as a freelance UpWork writer for two weeks.
My Total Earnings after Two Weeks of UpWork jobs is $473.
I’ve spent $15 on buying connects to making proposals for jobs. UpWork takes a 20% cut, which makes my total earnings $366.
Once you land your first job on UpWork, check out this post on Staying Productive While Working From Home.
If you found this post interesting, check out this post on What I Learned in my First Month of Affiliate Marketing and Blogging.
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