Purpose Of The Book

Let’s discuss the purpose of this book. So the way I want to do that is to first discuss what it isn’t about.

So the purpose of this book is not about going out there and sign up for freelance websites, so there’s a number of freelance websites out there in the internet, and if you go and sign up for 10 websites and put in all your information is just a waste of time, I want you to focus on one website. And the best freelance website is

www.upwork.com

It’s also not about automated proposal submissions system. So this is not about a numbers game, so we can all imagine that how many proposals you submit, the better return, and the more jobs that you will win, and it’s really not what we are going to focus on right here.

Another thing is that we’re not going to spend a ton of time to design a perfect resume or profile, now don’t get me wrong, we are going to spend some time to setting up your profile. But we are not going to spend half the course on it because there’s more important things for us to focus on, and in a short while I’m going to show you how to create the perfect profile.

Ok, so you may think, “well, what is this course about?”

We are going to spend our time and energy on the following.

It’s about getting a huge advantage on freelance sites, and defeating your competition and actually winning the jobs. So i believe where the biggest need is for anyone who are getting in to freelancing is how do you get the jobs and how do you build long time relationship with your customers.

And as well, how do you maximize your earnings.

So you want to make a good living doing freelance work, or maybe you just looking to do a part time job but you don’t want to work for small cash.

Account Setup

Ok. It’s time to discuss the account setup. But before we dive in to that I want to say that we are focusing on www.upwork.com website, but of course you can choose any freelance website that you want.

When it comes to setting up a freelance account you may ask yourself, “should I go for the free account?” “Or should I pay for the premium service?”

I used to do freelancing work on www.elance.com witch probably some of you are familiar with, and I paid for their premium service there, and I also think I used it for a while as a free member. But now, I’m using upwork and I use their paid service as well and I pay around $40-$50 a month. So I believe that the upwork fees is about $10 dollar a month, but of course that could change at any time. But I have to tell you, from my experience, if you’re going to be serious about the freelancing business then get the paid version, even if it’s $10/$20 or $30 dollar a month I would go for the paid version.

However, if you have no money to start with, you can go for the free version, and once you get your first few sales then you can get the paid version.

So what do you get when you join the paid version?

-You get 70 connects per month.

But in the free version you get 60 connect per month and that is not much of a difference.

-The ability to buy additional connects as needed for $1 each.

Most of you probably know but the connect is basically the currency on upwork that allows you to bid on the jobs. So a client comes on, they post a project or a job, and then you submit a proposal, and it’s going to coast you about 1 or 2 connects.

-Rollover privileges so that up to 140 unused connects can be carried over the following billing cycle.

Now this is fairly significant especially if you’re going to be bidding and doing a lot of proposals. So I actually conceder this a legit benefit while the other two has not as much value.

-Visibly into their competitors. High, low and averages bids on jobs.

Ok, this is the reason why you want the paid account because it’s allows you to see your competitors, high/low or averages on the job, you need to know that so that if you see 10 proposals in one job and the lowest amount is $3 a hour and the highest amount is $5 a hour, so if I’m looking at that and see that 10 people already bid and no one is bidding higher than $5 then I’m going to think if I should compete with that.

But, if someone is bidding a $8 and the other person is bidding $40 then I would say to myself “You know what? I can fit in there!”

So I always think, don’t be the lowest, and try not to be the highest but some cases you may be and I don’t always see that as a huge negative, but I would always try and come a little bit below the highest. Another thing is, if I see someone posted a job and it have 40 proposals then I’m not sure that I want to bid, however if some jobs has over 40 proposals then you may have to bid but I tend to like when there’s only 5-10.

-The ability to create a customized URL to your freelancer profile.

I look at this and say “whatever”

-The ability to hide earnings on your freelancer profile.

Well, maybe if it’s really low I should hide it. But I’m not sure about that so I don’t see that as a big benefit.

Okay so now let’s go and sign up to www.upwork.com But if you’re new on freelancing, you may be a little bit confused from the beginning, so I would highly suggest that you first read this book and then get started!

Your Profile

Time to look at your profile. We are going to dive in about a whole lot of details here, and I can almost hear some of you saying “we have been doing some lesions here… Let’s get in to it!!” and “how am I going to win freelance jobs?” or “how am I going to make money?”

This is the point where we stop from the foundation and move in to the practical and what is going to separate you from the competition and what’s going to help clients to valuate you and decide to choose you as someone they want to hire as a freelancer. So here we go. So it’s called “your profile” and profile is the word that upwork uses to describe the aria, and it’s also where people can come to look at your work history and samples of your success. They can also look at your pictures and your design.

So let’s take a look at my profile.

So I’m not going to say that I have a perfect profile. But I will tell you that I believe it’s pretty solid and I have focused on the things that matters and it has served me well.

Let’s talk about the things that matters. What we are going to talk about is.

-Photo

-Name, job title

-Dollar/Hour

-Skills

-Video

-Overview

-Work History and Feedback

-Portfolio

-Certifications

-Tests

-Employment History

-Education

-Other Experience

-Work History

Let’s go over to my profile page aging.

The photo of you.

Make it a professional photo, it doesn’t have to be you in a suit or a tie or anything to fancy. But I would say that you should smile in your photo, and you don’t have to look like a model or anything, just have a picture of you while you smile.

Let’s move on here.

Your dollars per hour.

So in this one I believe that making this as high as

marketable. So what I would recommend for you is that you price it as high as marketable, because it’s not that critical and ultimately, and you are going to be bidding on jobs and putting in specific price ranges for the jobs that you’re bidding on. So I actually think it’s good to have a fairly high amount here so that you look confident and competent instead of just looking like someone that would work for nothing.

Then we have the skills. And that’s what this is:

When you register for upwork or other Freelance websites they are going to push you to do this along the way. So I suggest that you set it all up. Normally you are going to be directed to keep your skills sort of one category, if you look at my skills it’s under the design niche, and that exactly what I want.

Add a video to your profile.

I don’t know how long they’ve had this but you can actually click on “Place Video” and add a video to your

profile which I think is awesome. Now it may take you a little while to create a video but you increase your potential to get more jobs. But I only recommend that you do a video for a couple of minutes, because people like it “short and sweet” so I would recommend that you make a video for 3-4 minutes.

And your video doesn’t have to look super professional, it just needs to look good and it can be you just talking to a web cam. So remember when people are hiring you, they want to trust you, and that can help by adding a video.

Overview

So here in the “overview” you can almost think of it as a cover letter to a resume. So I would recommend that you write who you are, so for me I say “I’m a successful manager of marketing and sales”

You want to keep it broad enough that you’re not losing opportunities, because you are being to specific, but you also want to have very specific examples of what it is that you do. I also recommend that you write about your accomplishments or previous jobs that you have done. Because when someone is reading your overview, you want them to think about “is this guy going to work for me?” So the more examples that you can put of what you’ve accomplished the better!

By the way, I don’t think that there is that many people reading my full overview it’s a little bit too long, however, it’s good that I have this in here but I don’t believe that many people are reading my full overview.

The next thing is work history and feedback.

This is super super super important! People who interact with you and people that hire you that you deliver work for gets an opportunity to write you and you need them to give you perfect ratings, you need 5/5. So you may say “what if they’re not honest?” “What if they’re a jerk?”

You need to see this as the most important thing in your profile (the feedback and work history) if I thought someone would give me a 3/5 rating, then I would offer myself to do work for free to get that 5/5 rating, I would be calling him or her and I would do anything I can to make sure that I’m going to get the perfect rating.

I would even talk to them about it before they give me a rating.

So as we go through my here, you can see that I have 5/5 ratings.

So here is one that didn’t give me any ratings.

And this was a project that didn’t go so well so I didn’t insist on him giving me a rating and he never did give me a rating, but that’s not so bad. It’s just the bad ratings that you don’t want and sometimes you can’t help it when the project doesn’t go to well.

Anyway, just what I’m saying is work with your clients, talk to them about the ratings. If you get any kind of sense that they’re not going to give you a perfect rating then work with them and say what I need to do to get that perfect rating. Remember ratings are very very important, I often say that you should treat your ratings and reviews like a baby. Because when you post your bids and your proposals, it’s exactly what people are looking at is “what’s the success rates?” “What’s the feedback?” and you may ask yourself, “Well, what if I don’t have any work history/feedback/reviews?”

We are going to deal very directly with that item because that’s critical.

Your portfolio.

What I did for my portfolio was to put a number of screenshots like Facebook growth/video sales letter/managing google adwords campaigns/SEO rankings, and I put some screenshots in there because I think that a screenshot

can speak a thousand words and it also show that you are very confident. So this doesn’t have to be work that you did on upwork it could just be other projects or other accomplishments that you have had.

Certifications

I have no certifications listed. But you can add them in here if you want. For me and my industry, this is not so important and I had no trouble getting work without these. But if you got them, go ahead and add them in there.

Tests.

I see people doing these, so you can do tests around numbers of different topics. And this is tests that upwork has come up with, so people are basically trying to prove how good they are in English or programming and all that, but I don’t play that game, I don’t want to do the tests because I don’t believe it’s important. However, you can do it if you won’t but I think it takes a lot of time and a lot more stress for you, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

Employment History.

And then you have your employment history which is pretty smart to list at least some of your resent employment history.

Education.

And then the education, if you have education it is a good idea to put it in here. But I don’t think that it is important.

Work History.

So I think work history matters, but you don’t have it until you have it. And we are going to deal with that, so we are going to handle this issue. So if you’re just new starting out don’t worry we are going to handle this. If you have 0 hours work and 0 hours jobs, we are going to fix that, we are going to show you how to handle that.

Your First Jobs

It’s now time to talk about your first jobs. So this could come in some different forms, maybe you’ve been doing freelance work on your own or locally and you want to start doing it online. So you need to get your work history and your first jobs in whatever freelance community that you join such as upwork which is the example that I’ve been using in this course but it can be any freelancing site. Or maybe you’re leaving one freelance site and going to another freelance site, and you need to build some job history there. Or maybe freelancing is completely new to you and you have no work history at all. So having 2-3 job history is critical, you need a perfect 5/5 score from those jobs.

So how do you get these 2-3 jobs so that your profile is really complete? You ethically “rig it”

So I don’t know if you’re expecting that or not but let me explain what I mean by this. The first important thing that I want to point out is that this must be ethical, so we’re not looking to rip anyone off or looking to rip off a freelance site, and we’re not looking to rip of any clients or anybody. This all has to be done above board, that being said

You don’t necessarily have to follow the layout of what you think you supposed to do. I don’t want you to go and bid on 50 proposals for job bids that are being posted by clients on upwork or whatever freelance site you use. Because it’s too hard, because those people are going to look at your profile and they are going to say “this person don’t have any job history” so hers what you do, you do the same thing that you would do if you were to start an offline business, you go and you reach out to the people that you know very well, it could be your brother/sister/mother or someone that you feel you have a great relationship with, so we are looking for people that have something that you could help them with.

So let me show you an example of what I did.

When I first started out I knew I had to get some job history results because I know that what people are going to look for, because when you make a bid and you have zero job history then it just says ugly things.

So I add a sports radio website that I associated with, I knew a guy that was writing a book and I reached out to him and said “Hey, I’m doing some freelance work and I am willing to do this work for you, and what I’m looking for is a perfect ranking/review and testimonial. And I’m not going to charge you for the work”

So I did that job for free and got a perfect review!

But we do need to run it through the freelance website in order to get that review. So you make offline arrangement financially so then they are going to register for the freelance site and they are going to post the job, then they are going to reward you the job, and you are going to do the work, and you really need to perform the work, otherwise you are just scamming the system. So you absolutely need to do the work.

Then after the work is done they will “pay you”

So once you make the job and they pay you, don’t forget to give them the money back because you are doing a job for free, exchange of a review.

Example, if the job you are bidding on is $20 and they hire you, then they have to pay you through upwork. So once they have paid you $20 and give you a review then you can send them their $20 back through paypal.

The Money: Earnings, Upwork fees

So the first thing that I want to talk about is small jobs VS long term jobs. You could define a small job as a low amount that you’ll get paid or it could be a decent amount of money, but once you do it then it’s over.

Where a long term job is, you do maybe one or two project/jobs but there’s an opportunity that this is going to go on for months or even years.

So you may ask yourself, “do I want a bunch of small jobs, or do I want to get a few long term jobs?”

Here’s what I would conceder a small job and what it may look like.

And as you can see, it says “One-time project”

So most likely when you dive in to one time paying jobs like this, you are going to see that they need this, this and this, and that’s it... so it’s the end. So I don’t see any future jobs here.

And then, I look at this job post over here.

The title says: Manage Social Media Marketing for 3 Websites.

And just the title makes me think. “Okay, maybe this is an ongoing project”

Now the budget of a $100 dollars makes me think, “This can’t be a very big project”

BUT, when I read through it they say this “Be hired for a long term” So this job is really good.

Other things that you want to count on when you’re doing jobs are milestones. Once we get a percentage of the work done then you are going to receive a percent of the payout, this is very important, I think it is always a good idea, especially on big projects.

And then comes freelancing site fees. And if you’ve done work on freelancing websites then you can really freak out about how much money upwork or other freelance sites on what percentage of the job fees they take, now you may go crazy about how much fees they are going to take from you and that is fine but I would say, don’t stress it! Now upwork made some changes about fees and how much they charge, because all these freelance sites are going to take a percentage of every dollar that you earn whether you think that is fear or not.

And I would say that’s fear because they’re building these entire communities. So again, don’t stress it.

Here’s what I mean and this is what’s really worked out for me is develop your own relationship whit clients. So the value that upwork or other freelance sites, the value they bring is they help establish trust between a freelancer like us, and someone like that posting a job, and they hold the money in a secure account so that the person that’s hiring you has to actually fund the project. But then money has to be relished once you both comes to an agreement. So this helps facilitate this trust and building that relationship and that’s why I think they deserve money for that.

But I’m not going to keep a relationship going for years and years and continue to pay freelance websites a percentage of the money. Now you may think that you should do that, and iv you never really have trust with that client then I guess it’s a good idea, I think it would be crazy to not progress that relationship.

So how do you propose this? I propose it pretty simply when I have a conversation on the phone or on Skype or on a communication method outside of the freelance job, once I trust the person I say

“Where we’re giving a percentage of this through the freelance site, I trust you and you trust me”

and you go whit it from that, and it actually helps reduce the amount of money that they are paying, or you get a raise, or you meet someone in the middle and they pay last and you get more. So it really makes a lot of sense once you’ve established that trust. So again I don’t get big hang ups on how much the freelance sites want to charge for fees, I just pay for it and eventually I move my relationship to the next level with my clients and they become private, so I think that’s the way to do it and you should have some private clients outside the freelance sites.

Pick the right jobs

Picking the right jobs. So that’s the topic for this lesion, and this is very very important, do it the right way and you can be productive. But if you do it the wrong way, then you can lose hours and hours and frustration levels can be through the roof.

So I really am looking forward to go through this exercise with you.

The first thing on your navigation bar (if you’re doing this on upwork) is to go to “Find jobs”

So we are looking for job postings. Now in upwork, when you click on “find jobs” you are going to see a ton of jobs. And I have also the ability to search for jobs like web designer/writer or whatever job that I want.

Now, the feed on upwork is almost like a Facebook feed, but as job postings comes in then they are going to come up on upwork, and the most recent jobs is on the top.

You can have some recent searches right here, and I will show you how to do this in a moment.

So your settings are going to be important and let’s just quickly remind ourselves how we set up those job categories.

First go to “Profile”

Then click on “Profile Settings”

And when you scroll down you will see that you can go in to your categories, so click on “Categories” And I can select any categories that I want, and I believe you can select up to 10 categories that you are interested in and looking for work on.

Selecting a category is very important, make sure that you go through all of these and select those that are related to your work/jobs.

So let’s go back to “Profile” and then click on “Profile Settings” now when you scroll down to “Experience Level” you need to make sure that you have yourself

setup as an *Entry Level, *Intermediate or *Expert.

So conceder the categories of work that you are looking for, and then, would you conceder yourself brand new with that? Or intermediate? Or an expert?

I would incurred you to pick expert if you are really good at it, or picking the intermediate, I really don’t recommend picking the entry level.

And, the way I start looking for work, and this is how I spend most of my time looking for work, is simply browsing “my categories” section, and it is a little bit weird how upwork does it because you actually need to come down to “my categories” and click on one of your categories, and then you are representing with a whole new screen where you can filter things in and out in the “subcategories”

So all of a sudden you are given all these filters of how you want to look for work, so you’re not searching it, but it shows all that matches in that criteria, which I have found to be more effective and I end up seeing more that way.

So let’s do that. Let me show you what I would typically do.

I have my category of sales and marketing, and that’s what I’m in.

So what I do is I check off all subcategories.

And then I can choose between hourly or fixed price. And I’m actually going to keep that in both.

And then here we have experience level. You can choose all three of these, but I always look at expert jobs, I like the expectations, I like the people that I get to meet, and I obviously like the money.

You can filter out the client history, I tend not to do that because even though someone may have no hires or no ranking history they are still going to see what they are doing because it may be the perfect match for me.

I’m thinking back to one job that I did, it was a fantastic job and I got paid a lot of money, it was about writing so I did a writing work and it took some time to get through that job but it was very good and they had no hire history.

Client info. That’s not something I worry about.

You can set a fixed price budget. If you look for all the fixed price jobs you can set this between $0-$100K.

So if I’m not interested to work for less than $50 or more, then I would set it there. So I really don’t worry about that.

And then we have project length and hours per week, I don’t worry about these.

So now I’ve done these. And here’s what I think is really important, and it has saved me a lot of time. I can understand that this is a little bit annoying to go through and check all your categories and details. But you can now save this to your job feeds.

Let me show you.

What I can do is click on “Save this search to your job feed” (As you can see in the picture up there)

And I would call it “Sales & Marketing – High Paying”

Because remember, I selected only expert level jobs which are high paying jobs.

And then when you come back to the “Find jobs” section

Then you are going to see it right here at the corner.

The recency of job being posted.

I didn’t use to worry about this too much but the more I’ve done, the more I believe this matter, so that’s pretty straight forward.

So let’s go in to “sales & marketing”

And pick a job example.

This is one job example. As you can see, this was posted one hour ago, and for some reason they have a budget of $50 and that’s seems a little bit weird to me, but maybe this is some kind of a pilot project.

However, if I scroll down at the bottom and click on “Load more jobs”

The simple fact is, this is math, if I respond to a job within an hour of it being posted compared to being posted one day ago, then I have a better chance to get the job as quickly as possible.

So let’s see the proposals on this job.

Look at this… 20 to 50 proposals. This particular topic must be very popular because that’s a lot of proposals but in some market that is going to be the case. So if I was going to do this job, I would need to get in on this within the first couple of hours.

So if we take another example, and look for another job.

This job was posted 27 minutes ago.

And I can see that it has less than 5 proposals.

By the way, I wouldn’t be able to see this if I didn’t have the paid upwork account, so this is the sort of benefits to having a premium account on paid freelance sites.

So for this job, if this is a job that I was interested in I would say “WOW, I want to jump right on this”

So remember to getting in to the bid process early, even if you’re going against 20 competitors VS 3 that the person who posted the jobs is going to be fear and look through them all, no, they are excited when they’re post that job, and the sooner you get to them and start a conversation with them, the better!

Number of people that are being interviewed.

So what does that mean?

I don’t know this from an absolute fact, but it’s my experience that upwork (for example) calls an interview is simply did the job poster send the message to someone about the job.

Let’s take an example.

Ok, so if they have 7 proposals and they’re interviewing 7 or 8 I would be like “Well, I may have lost my opportunity there” so it’s going to be a tuff road.

But if they got between 5-10 proposals and they haven’t interview anybody yet then that’s a really good opportunity, so that last example I showed you is really great!

Now the next thing that I want to point out was bid range.

You can only see this if you have a premium account. The high range of this job is $500, the low bid is $200 and the average is $350.

I would tend to bid about $450 or $420, something like that because I like to be in the high end but I don’t want them to write me off because I’m the most expensive.

Last viewed by clients.

This is interesting. They may not be interviewing everybody, but are they paying attention to the job that they posted?

Let’s take a job example.

If you scroll down and look, it says “Last viewed by client 1 day ago”

I like to pay attention to this because it gives me a sense that the person who posted this job is paying attention.

Saving the jobs.

What saving jobs is, is basically adding a job posting as a favorite. So if I go back to “Find jobs” I can scroll down and look at all the jobs, and if I see one job that I like I can save it.

If you want to save it you can click on the heart icon.

Example

And later on i click on my saved jobs.

As you can see.

And it will be there for me. I can the go in and read a little bit more carefully and place a proposal.

Ok, so that’s sort of where we are at when it comes to picking the right jobs, don’t just wait for people to contact you, you have to take action!

And I have to mention that the first job is always the hardest to get, but I don’t want you to give up. Once you have master 5-10 jobs, you are going to find this so easy, imagine having about 50-60 jobs a week, then you could quit your 9-5 job and start working as a freelancer right?

Jobs To Avoid

So in the last lesion we were talking about picking the right jobs, let’s look at the red flags here. So usually a job may look great weather you looking for it on upwork or any freelance sites. But keep your eyes open for red flags and things that may make it not such a good job,

so we’re going to go through a couple of examples. First I want to take you to the criteria that we want to pay attention to then we will have a look at a couple of examples that I conceder jobs to avoid.

But as we go through this I just want to tell you that my aria is in the writing/sales and marketing. But you can do whatever you like, like a programmer/author or designer. So I tell you this because I’m not going to get in your particular market, I hope that make sense.

Entry Level.

Now, what jobs to avoid?

I think you should always avoid those who looking to pay for entry level, unless you’re willing and happy to work for $3/$4 or $5 dollars an hour, I would avoid those jobs, not just because they are low paying, but I worry about the psychology of the person that’s coming to these freelance sites and wanting to pay so little.

Low budget amount.

The next thing to avoid is a low budget amount.

I don’t mean that it’s a low hourly rate, but it could be something like “Hey, build a website for me and design it and after that I want you to market it, and I will pay you $40” So it ends up being a low hourly rate because you know how much time that’s going to take, there is some people that have no clue on how much work something can take, so they think coming to this internet sites and people basically do the work for nothing.

Unreasonable expectations.

They list out 10 things and they say “I’m going to pay you $70 for this” For me that is too low for so much work.

Unprofessional Job.

You should also avoid very unprofessional job description write-up. I always get annoyed at people that says “Looking for a marketing rock star”

If someone have trouble with spelling or if someone haven’t even taken the time to proof read their own project perceive with notes. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you should avoid all the miss spelling projects,

I personally have made this mistake myself. But just pay attention to those that are doing very unprofessional job descriptions.

Sometimes you will see a job description that is one sentence, so then you got to wonder how serious that person is about hiring someone if they’re not even willing to put more sentences in the job description.

If you don’t match most of the preferred qualifications.

Be careful about overreaching, I’ve incurrent you to be aggressive and have confident in yourself. But don’t go after jobs that you actually believe you will fail at, because it’s going to be bad for everything and you are going to end up with a bad rating and bad feedback, the whole thing is going to be a big mess, so be careful.

Questionable client location, ranking, hire rate, total spent, average hourly rate.

Look for all those criteria. And when I say questionable client location, let’s say that there’s a country that you have no experience with and you don’t know nothing about, it may be absolutely fine, but you don’t really have any experience with people (or working with people) in that country in expectations or communications (because it is different) so just avoid a job like that until you get a little bit more comfortable.

Old jobs, and projects.

If something has been posted a job 10 days ago, and the person that posted it hasn't looked at that is just a waste on your time.

Jobs with very high number of proposals.

You are going to need to compete, and you're goanna want to compete against very popular projects, and I would say go for it! I’m not saying no to that, but generally speaking, I would avoid those kinds of jobs because there’s so much more opportunities out there.

Extremely low bid range.

And then when the bid range is extremely low, it may not be worth your time if everyone is bidding and you end up doing a job for $15. You will want to bid at something that is $100-$150. But if we look at the other side, low bid jobs can be easy to get if you are looking to get reviews.

Ok so let’s look at what I would consider a couple of bad jobs.

Here is one called “Write a Gaming Novel similar to Minecraft Diaries” and the first thing that I’m going to notice is $50 dollar budget, so that is something to be concern about, but I’m not going to stop, I’m going to keep looking.

And then we can take a look at the Entry Level, I know that they are not looking to pay me very much for my time, so that’s now concerning.

When I look at the Details I can see that this needs to be 7.000 words, now I can hear myself saying “What? 7.000 words for $50?” So this is an example of a job that I would avoid.

Let’s look at another job example to avoid.

“Promote FIVE Books on Social Media”

That’s interesting.

First thing that jumps out to me is $10 budget… “$10 dollar budget? Really?”

And look at the Entry Level, that’s just no good…

But here’s something good, I can see that the client has a good ranking, so I like that.

I can also see that he spent a total of $89, that’s not very exciting.

I hope all of these make sense.

Proposals.

Before we start talking about proposals I just want to share with you one thing, I built a Facebook group where we can connect together, so if you want to join the group, just click here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/371833613163784/

Ok, time to talk about proposals.

So you found a job that you want, and you want to engage, and you want to get the attention of the person that has posted the job. And generally this is called proposals (It may called something else depending on what freelance site you’re using)

However, you are trying to win the work and you are trying to get the job, and I will tell you right now that I believe that I have the biggest secret to success in freelancing.

The first thing that I want to show you is…

An example of a job.

When I want to go ahead and submit the proposal, I can just click on the green button at the right where it says “Submit A Proposal”

When you click on the “submit a proposal” button it going to take you to another page where you can fill in some fields.

After that you can place a bid on the job, you will also see the Estimated Duration.

You can choose when the job will be done, just put something in that you think the job will be done. I always put something like one month, but of course you can put whatever you feel like.

So after you are done you can just scroll down and click on “Submit A Proposal”

When to propose?

We’ve talked about this a bit I would say get your proposals in as quickly as possible. If you can get it in at the first couple of hours, then it’s awesome. You want as a goal of your proposal (and I think this is where some people don’t get it) your goal of your proposal is to engage and start a conversation with the client.

Now, I’ve won jobs where I never actually got on the phone or on Skype, but I had have a long conversation with clients, almost always you are going to have a conversation with someone or at least a chat back and forth, live in or action.

So that is the goal of your proposal, the goal is not to win the entire job with one proposal, it’s to start an engagement.

So really go for that, and that itself may set you a side, and the fact that you want to have a conversation with them, you also want to have a discussion with their project before you get the job.

The big success in a proposal.

Now here it is.

The big secret to success in a proposal is to actually start doing the job. Do the work in the proposal!

Let me give you a couple of examples.

If someone ask me to write a sales script for a tele marketer that is going to call and sell life insurance to senior care homes, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to write the first two paragraphs on that script and an example of what it might be and I’m going to put that right in their proposal. This is what I think would be a great way to get their attention. I would also come up with the top 3 question that I may ask them. And I would also give them the 2 objection that I would expects, and how you would handle them.

No one else is going to do that so I really believe that this is so rare, you are going to stand out so much.

Now let’s look at another example.

What if it’s a programming job? And they are saying “I need a program that will do the A-Z”

And you can say “Well here is the codes that I think will actually work” And actually include some of the programming code in it.

Or if someone ask for a logo, instead of giving them examples of logos that you’ve done for other people, say “here is what I’m thinking, here is some of my initial thoughts for your logo, what do you think of these?”

Now I don’t want you to spend a huge time doing that, just spend an hour at the most.

You probably thinking “I’m giving them the work for free?” Trust me my friend, this is how to win the job. Because the deal here is, while everyone else is telling them how great they are, and why they should hire them, and what they did for everybody else. But what you are doing is you are showing them work that you can do for them. They are seeing the work, you are showing them what you are going to do for them, that’s why they get excited about your work because they are thinking “Oh wow, I like that work” or “Wow, I like that logo” let’s say you’re writing a business plan, now I’m not suggesting that you write the whole business plan, but you could list the outline of how you would to their business plan. How easy would that be? It wouldn’t even take you that long.

I want to tell you that not many people are doing this. So if you do this then you will separate yourself from everybody else. And I believe that even if you don’t win the job, they are going to remember you.

Pricing.

Everyone thinks that the pricing is the most important thing (it isn’t) and people often think that you have to compete with the best price. Not at all!

If you can help it, don’t be the top price, but also don’t go for the bottom. I would put yourself somewhere between the average and the top, somewhere in there, even closer to the top, that’s fine because you are going to impress these guys so much with how you write your proposals because you’re demonstrating what you are worth.

Time Management (quantity vs excellence)

So when I’m talking about time management, I’m talking about writing proposals. So you could go out and say “You know what, today I’m going to submit 20 proposals” well, don’t try and do it my way, you are going to work day and night to get 20 proposals in.

Go for 3-4 great ones, 3-4 jobs that you actually want and do the proposals like I’m suggesting.

Proposal Format.

The proposal format should include an opening that stands out, it creates curiosity, it’s memorable and it is attention getting.

Your goal for the opening is that they keep reading their proposal.

Imagine if you had 10 proposals to read through, that would be boring right? And a lot of these people that you want to work for are highly successful business people and they don’t screw around, so if you lose them, then you lose them, so get that going

Doing the job.

The second thing is to do the job!

Here’s what I’m talking about.

The big secret is to DO THE JOB, start doing the work.

Let’s say that I got a job on writing, I would do a couple of things to the person who is looking to hire me.

Example:

-“Here’s how I see the opening paragraph of this article that you want me to write”

-“Here’s how the blog entry is going to go”

-“Here’s the coding format that I’m going to use”

Give them an example, it have to be about them, this can’t be examples of what you’ve done for other people. It must be about them and their project business.

Experience & Testimonials

(In the proposal)

And then we get in to experience and testimonials.

So you notice the first two things here, when someone writes a job or a project, and you are going to bid on it, it makes sense that you tell them about you right? But people just care about themselves. These clients, they care about their own success and their own business. So that’s why your opening statement needs to be attention getting and about their success, and that’s why you start doing the job immediately. When you talk about them and their business you have their attention, and now you say:

“Here’s some of my experience and testimonials”

Very important! You may be thinking “well, that is already in my profile, I just tell them to go look at my profile” this is another secret, smaller secret but also important, list out your experience and your testimonials including the 5/5 ranking that you got and including the quote and put it right in their proposal.

Now you may say: “Well it doesn’t make sense, they should just go to my profile and read that” well… they not going to go to your profile and read it.

And even if they do, how does it possibly hurt you to list that you got 5/5 rankings?

Approach to the job.

Then I talk about my approach to the job. So this is different. Approach to the job is different than doing the job, doing the job is that you really want to begin to get in to the needy greedy of the actual work.

The approach to the job can be more of an outline, so if I’m going to be doing a marketing plan for someone I will list 10 steps to the marketing plan, and I list them out.

Ask to meet.

And then something that is very important at the end of your proposal is to ask to meet with them.

Some people try to win the job in their proposal, and it doesn’t make sense. And if you’re bidding on the right jobs there’s a big commitment, and they’re goanna want to talk to you weather you want to talk to them or not, they want to talk to you before they hire you. So that’s why it’s very important that you ask to meet with them. And remember, you normally dealing with online freelance community, so you should say something like “I’m happy to discuss this with you by phone/Skype or email”

My experience has always been on phone or Skype, and that’s worked very well for me.

Okay, now let me bring up some sample of my proposals.

I’ve kept a script of my proposals, and I’m going to share some of them with you now.

And I’ve outlined sort of color codes here.

So let’s look at one here. And as you can see I have this on a word document.

Example 1: Script Writing.

Example number 1 is script writing. So this was someone that wanted help with a sales script. You can read the blue text on the top where it says “Hello, Let me start by….”

So I tell you, this wasn’t quite as great in opening as I’ve done to my other ones. But to me this is what catches them.

And then I go in to examples of my work with testimonials (as you can see in the red text) and you can also see that I list out 5/5 ratings.

Then I go in to doing the work.

So what I’m saying in the blue script is “Let me give you an idea for my initial thinking for your script”

I’m sure nobody else is doing this.

Example 2: Training Program.

This one is a little bit more catchy. And this is the opening “I won’t waste your time with a generic proposal or generic bio of myself”

So what I’m doing here is I’m basically feeding in to the fact that I know they’re reading a lot of resume and proposals.

Then I’m layout of what I’m going to do.

So I start with my direct relevant experience and then I provide my rankings and reviews.

Then I give them my approach.

And after that, I close it with a call to action wanting to speak with them.

Example 3: Marketing Director.

In this case I wanted to write something compelling, and I said,

“I see you already have a number of proposals in, and truthfully I doubt a written resume from me is going to look that much different than some of your other qualified candidates.”

So I think I now got their attention. What I said next is,

“What I’d really like to do is share with you a 3 minute screen cast video I just made for your project”

So I’m actually doing something that others not going to do. So you separated yourself just by making that extra effort. I’m making a video and showing him how I’m going to do the job.

After that I call for the meeting.

And then I continue to go down and list my accomplishments.

And then along with my experience.

First Meeting.

Ok, now we got a meeting, and now what?

Now, if you have a sales background, you probably comfortable with it.

But if you don’t have a sales background then that’s okay. I want to give you the sort of the process to follow.

And I want to incurrence you to be yourself and don’t worry about if you’re not a sales person.

On your first meeting you have to act professional. Don’t be over excited, and be super happy and agree with everything they say. But most importantly, just act like a normal human being and have a nice discussion.

The second thing is, you do want to build rapport. You have to match the tone with the person that you are speaking with so if the person wants to shot the brief or have a little bit of small talk, then go ahead and do that, that’s absolutely great.

Now here’s what’s going to happen in the stage of your meeting, the person you are talking to may take charge and say “I want to ask you a few questions” or “You mentioned this in your proposal, let’s talk about it” and

if they do that then that’s okay. But if there’s an opportunity for you to take charge, and they are sort of laid back, or if they just say “Tell me what you are thinking” or “Tell me more about yourself” then I recommend that you introduce quickly what you do.

Give them a two minute background on you (you can pretty much just use the proposal that you share with them) then talk some of your accomplishments and how you had success in the field whether it be writing or programming or whatever it is just talk about what you do and why you are passionate about it.

And what you want to do is, quickly turn that and start talking about their business. Say this for example “from what I saw on your project, and what I looked up on your website, this is what I understand about your business”

And then you turn that into asking them questions that focus on their business and background. And good sales people know that it’s always better if your prospect (the person that you want to sell to) you want to get them talking, and what you want them talking about is the business and the project. If they are happy to talk about their business then keep it going, if it seems like they are annoyed that you’re asking them

So many questions (which I never see happens) business people like to talk about their business and they will let you know so much and you will find out information that you would never know and you can use it to your advantage.

After they tell you specifics about the project and what it’s about and what they try to accomplish, share with them what you’re thinking about the job.

You should for example say “You know what I’m thinking? I would recommend this, this and this for you” and then get the response for that.

So if you’re talking about a website design, you should say something like “I’m thinking that we should have the focus on your first page, and trying to get people to fill out their contact information”

So you start sharing your thinking about the project.

Winning The Job

Let’s talk about winning the job.

And up to this point, it has been all about approaching prospects, starting your communication with them, and you got your proposal stage where you’re trying to engage them, they responding to you so you’re having that first meeting, then you are on a presentation mode where you say “This is what I recommend we do” and hopefully at that point they going to say “Let’s keep going” or you’re able to close them and say “when do you want to start?” and then you need to have that discussion about terms.

You also shouldn’t be too easy. What I mean by that is, don’t just roll over when clients are asking for something. Because if you give them everything they ask for without any pushback it makes you look weak and they may lose some confidence in you. So if they ask you to lower the price, you can say

“I can lower it 5% but I would need a down payment to start the work” something along those lines.

Starting The Work.

First of all take note that you need to hit any deliverable and deadlines (so they’re excited about you) and you might get immediate extra work. So you want to hit those and get them done a little bit early.

Here’s an example. This was a programming job/gig that I’ve done. When you hit those it’s going to boost the trust that your employee have on you, and get them excited about you and don’t be surprised if then that opens extra opportunities. Your best opportunities for more freelance work are with the people you currently working with.

Another tips is,

Insist on meetings, discussions. Be proactive, and don’t look like your hiding. Let’s talk about communications. You don’t ever want to look like you’re hiding from them. Remember, these people are investing in you and so make them feel really good about you. And they may or may not have face to face meetings but you could send them a email report on the items that you’ve worked on.

Congratulations!

You have gone through the whole book. I really hope that this information will help you, I know a lot of my students that are making a living with this information and some of them even quit their job. I really hope it’s going to go really well for you, and please have patient because these stuff really takes time, success doesn’t come overnight.

If you want to have a look at some of my online courses you can go to Udemy. Go here: https://www.udemy.com/user/esman-fakhro/ to see my courses.

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