Upwork Connects 101: Everything You Need To Know

0:00 every business has overhead running costs rent electricity employees the internet and with remote businesses most of these costs have shifted towards various subscriptions and connects on upwork is your primary expense for running your freelance business on upwork and so in today's video I'm going to show with you everything that I've learned and all the best practices when it comes to connects that have helped me make over $100,000 on upwork and this hasn't just worked for me it helped Marco go from zero to earning over $110,000 on upwork for his marketing agency they help GE go from zero to earning over $8,000 on upwork in his first 2 months on upwork and they even helped Justin sign his first ever client on upwork after submitting just 10 proposals and by the end of this video you'll know exactly how to make every connect count how to avoid common

0:45 mistakes and wasting connects and how to utilize your connects as efficiently as possible but before we dive into the video I have a quick favor to ask from you last month our Channel got over 20,000 views which I could not be more stoked about but over 78% of our viewers were not subscribed to the channel and every single week I publish videos on upwork that basically go over everything I've learned from making over $100,000 on upwork and so if you want to make money on upwork consider subscribing to the channel cuz I have a ton in store for you guys so with that being said let's get into the video the first thing I want to cover is the reason that upwork connects even exist right the reason that it costs money to apply to jobs on upwork because if you're new to upwork and you all of a sudden see that it costs money to submit every single proposal then that kind of sus sucks at first right but once you fully

1:32 understand it it actually makes a lot of sense and I'm actually glad that they do it and so that's what I want to dive into first so upwork introduced The Connect system in 2019 with the main goal that they said of managing the volume of proposals that clients were receiving because if you think it's difficult to stand out right now when you're competing against 20 or 40 or maybe 60 different proposals imagine how difficult it would be if you were competing against 5,000 other proposals which essentially is what upwork was heading towards if they didn't switch something up because as platforms gain more and more traction and they gain more and more users those users are going to start submitting proposals and if there isn't any barrier of Entry right if it doesn't cost any money to submit proposals and anyone can do it for free then what the platform what

2:19 upwork would have been encouraging is they would have been encouraging lowquality proposals and a high volume of proposals right since there's also no punishment and so there's essentially nothing stopping people or there would there would not have been anything stopping people from submitting hundreds of chat gbt lowquality bad proposals to jobs and that is both a nightmare for upwork it's a nightmare for Freelancers because that makes you know highquality Freelancers who rate high quality proposals it makes it really tough for them to stand out and it's a complete nightmare for clients who have to sift through 5,000 proposals right that's a complete nightmare for absolutely everybody and so essentially what upwork was doing in 2019 when they introduced this system is they're making sure everybody who submits a proposal is

3:04 serious right because when you submit that proposal it costs money now so you've got some skin in the game right you've got something to lose and again I 100% agree with this move from both the Freelancers perspective and the client's perspective because from the client's perspective well they obviously don't want to sift through 5,000 proposals just to find a few good ones right so that's obviously bad idea now from the Freelancers perspective if you're a high quality freelancer and you're taking the time to write serious proposals and you're personalizing them and you're putting lots of thought into them then again a lot of those would just go to waste if they were competing against 5,000 other Freelancers and so again I think this is good for all parties here that we have a connect system it costs some money to submit these proposals so you've got a little skin in the game

3:50 here so how do you get more connects well the simple easiest way to get more connects is simply to buy them directly through upwork you can also choose upwork's freelancer plus plan and that's going to give you 80 connects per month but it's actually a lot cheaper just to buy them directly through upwork and so for context upwork freelancer plus pan is $4.99 right now per month and they give you 80 connects per month whereas if you just buy the connects directly through upwork you can get 100 connects with $15 right so you get 20 extra connects if you just buy them directly through upwork plus not to mention upwork freelancer plus plan isn't that great anyway I don't recommend it to people I don't use it and so I just buy connects directly from upwork it's cheaper that way and it's a lot simpler so that's how you can pay to get more connects but how do you get free

4:37 connects because that's what everybody wants to know and so the first way that you can get free connects is when you land interviews on upwork and so if you submit a proposal to a job on upwork and a client sends you a message back that's what upwork qualifies as an interview right and so if messages if clients are responding to your proposals and sending you messages then uport can sometimes Grant you bonus connects now they don't say publicly how many many connects they're going to give you or what the limit is because there is a limit but this is the first way that you can earn free connects and this also applies if a client sends you a message about one of their jobs and so if you get a direct message from a client upwork will typically Grant you 10 extra connects but again like I just mentioned they don't say the exact amount they're always going to give you and they don't say what the cap is they don't say what the limit is now another way to get free

5:23 connects is to get upworks Rising Talent badge when you get awarded upworks Rising Talent badge they give you 30 free connects as kind of a bonus now obviously you can't apply to get this badge there's no form you could submit to ask upwork to give it to you but essentially it all boils down to having a fully completed profile right so as soon as you create your upo profile fill out the entire thing every single section when clients are reaching out to you after you submit a proposal to them make sure you have a really quick response time that's going to help and make sure you're delivering high quality work when people are hiring you now another way to get free connects is simply by referring your friends to use upwork so if you refer a friend to use upwork and then they create an upwork account they fill out the whole profile and a client hires them for $100 or more once they get hired both you and the

6:11 person you referred are both going to get 40 free connects and we all know that upwork has been steadily Rising the amount of connects that it costs to apply to every single job and because of that it's never been more important to avoid making costly mistakes and wasting your connects and making sure you're spending your connects as efficiently as possible and so that's what I want to talk about next now when it comes to things that you can do to avoid wasting your precious connects the biggest one that I see most people do the biggest mistake I see most people make is submitting these generic copy and paste chat gbt proposals stop doing that if that's you you are wasting connects and if you want to know my exact framework for writing proposals and all the data that I have from submitting over 5,000 proposals which will undoubtedly save

6:57 you money on connects you can check out this video right here another mistake when it comes to connects that I see so many people on upwork making is boosting and so often times if you've been submitting proposals on upwork for a while I know you've seen this you'll see people who boost their proposals by like 150 connects or 250 connects or something insane and so I want to make it super clear that when you boost your proposal to get on that little leaderboard at the bottom with those four spots if you get in one of those four spots you're going to show up on one of the top four spots on the client screen scen right so when you submit a proposal on upwork your proposal along with everybody else's is just stacked one on top of the other on top of the other right and so when you boost it you are basically paying more connects to

7:42 show up in one of these top four spots on the client screen now there is absolutely zero no advantage to boosting your proposal 7 million connects and getting first place versus boosting it you know 25 connects and getting first place if you could get first place with 25 connects right you guys get what I'm saying and so I see a ton of people do this they boost their proposals with hundreds of connects and it's a complete waste and so if you're doing that don't do it now my basic strategy here is just to boost my proposal to to five connects more than the person that I'm boosting it above right and so if the previous first place bidder boost their proposal by let's say five connects then I would boost my proposal by seven to 10

8:29 connects right so two to five more and the simple reason I do this is so obviously a I can get above them right so whether that's first place second place third place right I want to bid uh or even fourth place I want to get on that leaderboard even if it's not first place and so that's the primary purpose is to get me on the leaderboard get me showing up as one of those top four spots on the client's screen and the second purpose is if I'm you know bidding uh boosting my proposal to get in spots one 2 or three then if I leave a g appap that's between two and five connects somebody can still get on the leaderboard but they can get on the leaderboard and be below me right so hopefully that makes sense to you guys right because if I get first place and I boost my proposal by 20 connects and the person below me boosted theirs by 16

9:17 somebody else who submits their proposal later could boost their proposal by 17 connects and they would still get on the leaderboard but they would be below me right so it helps me kind of stay on that leaderboard for longer and avoid spending tons of connects another mistake to avoid when using your connects is avoid submitting proposals to jobs that have red flags right so if you see a job and the job description has one sentence written and it hasn't put very much effort into it and there's lots of grammatical mistakes that's a red flag right that's an indication for me that a client isn't that serious another huge red flag for me is that if I go into uh if I see the job you'll see that each job has a score right it's got a little five star rating on it and that's actually the client who posted it

10:02 that's their rating right and so when every single time a job is is finished on upwork the client has the opportunity to leave feedback for the freelancer and the freelancer can leave feedback for the client and so a huge red flag for me is if I click on the job post and scroll down to the client's recent history and I see that they have a ton of bad reviews from other Freelancers I'm going to avoid submitting a proposal to these job because a even if they send me a message I already know know it's probably not going to work out it's probably going to be a complete mess and it's just going to save you more connects right another mistake that I see people making and this is especially especially important for people who have a pretty tight budget like you know you can't submit that many proposals um which is totally fine but you just you

10:47 know that you have a tight budget then a mistake for you would be applying to lots of like high ticket jobs right like lots of $5,000 jobs or $7,000 jobs or $100 an hour jobs like all those jobs are going to be a way more competitive and as a result of them being competitive it's going to be more difficult for you to get them and so what I recommend for people who are like on a really tight budget and honestly for most people who are just new to upwork in general I would say suggest the strategy of submitting proposals that only allow people in your country to apply to them right so when you submit proposals on upwork you look up your keyword on upwork and you search it in the top leftand corner there's something that says your country only check that box and then you're only

11:34 competing against other Freelancers and agencies located in your country and then after that I like to filter for fixed price jobs that are less than $300 and the basic reasoning for this is they're way less competitive I mean just so significantly less competitive than jobs that are $100 an hour or $5,000 or $10,000 or stuff like that right and so I would recommend submitting hyper personalized proposals to jobs that are fixed price under $300 located in your country only another mistake that I see Freelancers and agencies make is they're not tracking how many connects they're spending and they're not tracking their kpis kpis are key performance indicators and so they're the statistics that you're going to track that can basically

12:20 show you if you're on the right path to achieving your goals which for most of you is going to be signing high paying clients on upwork right in terms of kpis I would recommend tracking your view rate right and so if you click on your profile picture and then click on stats and Trends and then go to your proposal statistics and click 90-day view you're going to be able to see how many proposals that you submitted were viewed right so track your view rate and for this is going to range depending on what country you're in depending on your service your industry if you're boosting proposals your budget right but generally I like to have people at at least 35% view rate right so track your view Rate Check how many people are responding to your proposals how many people are getting on calls with you right like doing interviews and how many people are actually hiring you I would

13:06 also track how many jobs you're applying for how many connects you are using to apply to each job and those would be the basics right so track your kpis because you'll be able to improve them if you keep tracking them and so those are the mistakes you could make that would waste your connects and so now I want to talk about strategies and best practices to make the most of your connects and so first and foremost it's just doing the basics really really well making sure you're reading the entire job description from start to finish making sure you're including lots of relevant personalized details in your proposal that you read in the job description right making sure you're finding the job posters the client's first name which you can do by clicking on the job post and scrolling down in the client's recent history section and finding

13:51 feedback from the freelancer to the client where they reference the client's first name and then using that to start your proposal right so starting your proposal with hey John or hey Nico if you're applying to one of my jobs and so like just doing the basics really really well reading the job post personalizing it a lot especially if you're you know you've got a tight budget you're low onc connects personalize it as much as you possibly can another tip that you might not be expecting is that if you have a small budget right you know you can only submit let's say three proposals per week or four proposals per week at the maximum I would rather have you submit three proposals per week and boost all of them then submit four proposals per week now again this is a little bit situational it kind of depends on your Niche how competitive it is and how

14:38 qualified you are for these jobs there's a lot of moving Parts here but generally speaking I'd rather have you submit three proposals and then boost them the reason being if you are taking a ton of time and you're personalizing each proposal you submit and you're genuinely a good fit for these jobs that's obviously very important as well then if we can just get your proposals to get viewed they're going to have a lot better chance of you you know being hired right and so I would rather submit three proposals and boost all three of them and really increase the likelihood that these proposals are getting viewed by clients because again when you submit the proposal on up work if you boost it you're going to show up in one of the top four spots on the client's screen and so if we can really increase that chance you get viewed again the chance

15:23 that you get hired is also going to massively increase and so that's a little tip for you is obviously use your connects wisely you don't want to make the mistake of boosting your proposal like crazy and misspending but if you can tactically boost your proposal I would definitely recommend it and the last thing I want to leave you guys with is that there's no oniz fit solve solution for how many connects you should be spending on each job post now this really really just comes down to knowing your own data and so for me I know that my average client on upwork pays me over $2,000 right that's on average I have had some clients who've paid me over $116,000 but on average they pay $2,000 and so if I know that that means for me I can have a pretty big budget when boosting these connects and when

16:09 submitting these proposals because I know my data really really well and I know that my average client pays me over $2,000 and so if you can just know your data right if you have any recent history of being hired on upwork then I would just encourage you to again calculate the data see how much your average clients are paying you at the same time keeping track of your kpis and understanding how many proposals it takes for you to sign a client if I submit 100 proposals today I know around 50% of those proposals are going to get viewed I know about 20 out of those 100 are going to send me a message back and then I know that almost 100% of people show up to my calls right and so I would get seven calls and I know I close at 35% on upwork which means you know 2 out

16:56 of seven is 28% and so I would close two or three Deals right and so those are my kpis and I know if I close three Deals out of 100 proposals it takes me roughly 33 proposals to sign each client and then you can do the math from there to know how many connects you can spend compared to the average you know customer lifetime value of your customers right of the people who who hire you on upwork and so hopefully that didn't get too complicated for you guys it really is simple math if you can just kind of you can play this back and and check it out again and I also recommend keeping track of your kpis and knowing how many proposals it takes you to sign a client now obviously this is only relevant if you have enough data right so I would say if you've been hired on upwork by like five separate clients

17:42 then you have at least a decent amount of data to go off of and base your decisions off of and so looking at how many proposals does it take you to sign a client on upwork because from there you can do the math and you can know how many connects you can afford to spend on each proposal to acquire each client right so with that being said guys I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one