Upwork Tutorial for Beginners in 2023: The COMPLETE Upwork Guide

0:05 hello everyone and welcome back to my channel Jennifer Marie where I talk about different ways that you can make money online as a work from home freelancer so I have many different videos on how to become a freelancer with upwork however upwork has changed over the past few years so I wanted to do an updated video about how to get started from square one as a freelancer on upwork I also want to note that I have not been sponsored by upwork to create this video however I do use upwork to sell my own Services as a freelancer and if you have a particular question about upwork that's very specific I encourage you to check out my playlist in the description below where I have videos on everything you need to know about upwork that you could search for

0:51 individually but in today's video I want to show you how to get started from Square One so here's a brief overview about upwork it's basically an online freelancing platform that connects clients who are looking for services with Freelancers from around the world so businesses or individuals who want a job done will post a job and say hey I'm looking for someone who can create a video for me or can create a YouTube thumbnail or who can transcribe this document and Freelancers with these skills will apply to these jobs so upwork provides a platform for clients to post job opportunities and for Freelancers to find work in fields like writing design programming

1:36 marketing and so much more anything you can think of that's a job is on upwork and upwork is international so I have been on upwork for quite a few years you can see here that my accounts verified that I'm top rated I have a hundred percent job success rating I've earned over 90 000 US dollars since I started and I provide voice overs for clients video editing a mix of different things so the first thing we're going to do is sign up and create a profile now you can only have one account with upwork that's very important I'm going to show you how to do this but basically we'll go to upworks website upwork.com and sign up as a freelancer then we're going to fill out all of our

2:22 information and create a profile what I just showed you was an example of my profile so you'll have to include details about your skills experience and your portfolio and make sure to highlight your strengths and showcase your work samples if applicable if you do not have samples of your work then I recommend creating examples of the kind of work you can create so imagine you want to sell your skills as a YouTube thumbnail designer then create some example thumbnails and put those in your portfolio Okay so we've gone to upwork.com we're going to click here on sign up now you can join as a client or a freelancer if you are looking to get hired you're

3:08 looking for work you'll select I'm a freelancer looking for work apply as a freelancer you can continue with Google or just put in your first name last name your email a password and your country of residence and then agree to the upwork terms of services and click create my account so now you will be asked to verify your email before you proceed so check your email and then click on the link to verify your address so once you've verified your email this will pop up you have to answer a few questions and start building your profile it only takes five to ten minutes and you can edit it later on we'll save as you go so just click get started a few quick questions first have you freelance before so you can put if

3:55 you're brand new if you have some experience freelancing or if you are an expert let's put I have some experience then you'll click next what's your biggest goal for freelancing do you want to earn your main income to make money on this side to get experience click next and how would you like to work would you like to find opportunities for yourself would you like to package up your work for clients to buy and this is with the project catalog or would you like upwork to act as a recruiter let's click the first one you'd like to find opportunities for yourself you can also enable that you are open to contract to hire opportunities where you could start with a contract and later explore a full-time option with a client

4:42 then click next to create a profile so how would you like to tell us about yourself so you can upload your resume if you have one you can import from LinkedIn if you have information about yourself on LinkedIn or you can fill out manually which will take around 15 minutes so now you're going to add a title to tell the world what you do again you can change all of this later but I recommend you put your professional role as the type of job you are interested in applying to and whatever it is you have experience in so let's say for example video editor next you'll add your experience so here you can put a title of where you have worked a company you've worked for the location

5:28 a description about your job experience if you have nothing to add you can click that and check the box and keep going I recommend to fill out as much information as you can next you'll add your education you don't have to have a degree adding any relevant education helps make your profile more visible so here you can put any school that you went to if you have a degree or diploma your field of study then you'll add your languages that you speak now you'll add your skills you have a Max of 15 skills I recommend you put as many as you can you can put in any software that you have Proficiency in if you're working as a graphic designer

6:14 of course you would put in Photoshop and things like that you might put in generic skills like audio editing I keep filling them in until you reach all 15 skills next you'll write an overview so write a bio to tell the world about yourself help people get to know you at a glance what work are you best at tell them clearly using paragraphs or bullet points you can always edit later just make sure you proofread now so you have to put in at least 100 characters here's an example of a bio and I recommend you can use any of these AI softwares to help you with this because you don't want any spelling mistakes so AI like Chachi BT for example can help you edit this

7:01 so here's a little example I am a professional video editor with over 10 years of experience in audio and video editing I have expertise in using Adobe and Corel video editing software to create high quality videos for various purposes I have produced short videos for YouTubers commercials and various clients ranging from entertainment to education I have a strong work ethic and take pride in my work I'm also friendly and easy to work with whether you need a video for your personal or professional project I can help you achieve your vision and goals and then I put in little bullet points like this guy did expertise in Adobe Premiere Pro After Effects Camtasia Corel video studio and Pinnacle Studio have produced edited and created over 100 videos for clients flexible efficient and produce work in a timely manner so if you do not have a

7:48 lot of experience working with clients I recommend you use this space to talk about your skills what are you good at what do you know how to do so if you are trying to get video editing jobs talk about all the software you know how to use if you want to be a YouTube thumbnail designer talk about the graphic design software you know how to use and if you haven't produced any videos for clients you could just erase this part and say that you've produced and created over this amount of thumbnails maybe that's for your own personal use or for friends it doesn't have to be for clients you can edit this later on just make sure that you have correct grammar punctuation and spelling now we're going to click next choose your categories

8:35 what are the main services you offer so they have suggested Services video and animation we can put that you have to choose at least one service that best describes the type of work you do this helps us match you with clients who need your unique expertise so you can see all the different types of jobs available there are so many different categories got audio and music production we've got product design art and illustration before you create your profile on upwork you can also go through and search different types of jobs and then choose to build a profile based on the type of job you are applying to next set your rate so here you're going to set your hourly rate now with upwork you may get hired on a fixed rate job

9:21 which means for example you have to create a video for someone they will pay you 500 to create the video that might take you five hours ten hours but you're charging a fixed rate of 500 no more no less now you also have to set an hourly rate some people will want to hire you based on hours and there's a time tracker app as well so just put in whatever you are expecting to make per hour maybe it's fifty dollars an hour this should be in US Dollars automatically you can see that there is a 10 freelancer service fee and this is great because it used to be twenty percent and recently this month it dropped down to 10 percent so that means if you charge fifty dollars an hour upwork takes only five dollars

10:08 an hour versus before when it was ten so you will make forty five dollars an hour next your ad your photo and location so you're going to put your country for your street address put your phone number and add a photo definitely add a photo okay it's very important and once you put in all your information click check your profile and now you have a chance to preview your profile before you submit it you can click on any of these icons to make any edits that you want I recommend you fill in as much information as you possibly can before you submit it and then once you're finished you'll click submit profile then it will say nice work your profile is ready

10:53 and you can view your profile or you can go ahead and browse jobs let's click on view my profile so now you have an opportunity to build on your profile and add even more information again it's really important that I know you could only have one upwork profile so do not create more than one over here on this side you can click the plus icon and you can add a video introduction if you want let's say you have a video on YouTube that showcases what this service are you can put that here you can also adjust the hours per week so you can say if you are interested in working over 30 hours per week less than 30 hours as needed you can edit or add languages you can add your education here and right here is

11:40 your portfolio and this is really important talent to add portfolios to their profile are more likely to win work so if you click here on add a portfolio you'll have an opportunity to add a portfolio project so let's say you're a video editor you could put examples of videos that you have produced or maybe you're a graphic designer you could put YouTube thumbnails design for example then click select template and then you could choose if you want to display images in a gallery style as a case study or classic then go to add details and then you would go ahead and add your images or your videos I have a more detailed video on how to add items to your portfolio which I've

12:27 linked you to in the description below so when you click on find work to search for jobs this will also pop up which says complete your profile and I really encourage you to complete your profile until it reaches 100 complete make sure to put in some employment history your portfolio education if you are able to create a video a video introduction any certifications or other experiences that you have before you start applying for jobs but you can do all of this later just click close And you can go ahead and start browsing for jobs so before I get into showing you how you can apply to jobs and search for jobs on upwork I want to show you this thing at the top that says get 80 connects each month if you join freelancer plus you

13:15 will start each month fresh with 80 connects there are some other benefits to the freelancer plus plan as well and that is a plan that I have on my upwork account now when you start off with upwork you get 50 available connects so what are connects well connects are used to apply to jobs on upwork you do not have an unlimited amount of connects to apply to jobs and this keeps it a little more fair on upwork because if you were able to apply to as many jobs as you wanted you could just copy and paste the same cover letter to a thousand jobs and that would make it very overwhelming for the clients when they are reading each application so this is a way to reduce

14:01 the competition and make it easier for clients to select a freelancer because they know the freelancer really wants the job if they're spending the connects to apply so what you can do is click on learn more and this will show you the membership plans so upwork is free you get 10 connects each month automatically you can buy connects as you need them for 15 cents plus tax each but as I showed you before you do have your initial 50 connects free for 14.99 a month you get everything included in the basic plan plus 80 connects per month you can also have your own custom profile URL so for now I'm just going to show you how this works with the connects you already have

14:48 let's say for example you wanted to apply to this job here when we click on it you can see you can send a proposal for six connects so even if you do not get hired for the job you've spent those connects you won't get them back if someone sends you an interview request then you can apply to the job for free you won't spend any connects but if you are searching and finding jobs to apply to you do spend connects so what this means is you want to search for jobs that are relevant to you that you have a better likelihood of getting and I'm going to show you how to do that so first of all let's just click here on the search icon and you can see that right now there are over 195

15:35 000 jobs available so we want to filter this first of all on the side you're going to filter by The Experience level if you have an intermediate level or an entry level click that okay let's put intermediate and entry you can also filter by the job type so if you're only interested in hourly jobs or let's say you're only interested in fixed price jobs then you can search by number of proposals and what this means is how many people have applied to the job as of right now so maybe you want to avoid the ones that say 20 to 50 because that means you are competing with a lot of people so let's say I'm going to select up to 20 proposals

16:23 you can also choose that you only want to work with payment verified clients and then we have client history so what this means is you can work with clients who have already hired people on upwork before or you can give new clients a chance for this example let's go with clients who have hired people before okay and now you can see that this has narrowed it down to 20 000 jobs which is still a lot so here you can also filter by connects needed so you can see there are only 71 jobs where you need two or less connects and then we have ones with four connects and six connects so if you're trying to only look for jobs with

17:10 a low amount of connects in order to apply you can use this as well but there are some jobs that require even more than six connects I've seen some eight connects job so you might choose to not enable this at all so you can see more jobs for this one let's click for connects or less so we still have this at under 8 000 jobs so let's type in video editing or whatever your Niche is and then click the search icon so you can see this has left us with 844 jobs you could go ahead and filter this down even more if you want or you might decide you want to work with one of these clients now when you're searching for a client this is really important

17:55 right here the review this client only has a review of 2.21 Stars based on three feedback scores so maybe you don't want to work with a client that doesn't have a great reputation maybe they will give you problems but this client for example they have five star rating they've spent over twenty thousand dollars and their payment verified so this would be a job that I would be interested in applying to so to apply to a job we're going to click on it you could see that they're looking for a video editor you can see the price they're willing to pay and so if you want to apply to this job you would click apply now you could also click save job if you want to save it for later and apply later

18:41 and this is where you submit a proposal you can see here you use connects to submit proposals you can see here this proposal requires four connects when you submit this proposal you'll have 46 connects remaining so what you'll do is you'll fill in how you want to be paid by Milestone or by project milestones are when you divide the project into smaller segments and you'll be paid for Milestones as they are completed and approved I recommend just selecting by project now here is where you would put in how much you are willing to do the job for this person has not put in exactly what

19:26 they're looking for maybe they're willing to pay thirty dollars per video you would have to ask more questions once you are in discussion with them but let's say for example this is what they want per video you can keep it at 30 you could say you would do it for less money you could say you would do it for more money or just keep it as it is I recommend keeping it as it is or going a little bit lower when you're first getting started with applying to jobs on upwork staying within their budget you can see that upwork has their 10 freelancer service fee so you would get twenty seven dollars for this job now you'll put how long will this project take so maybe it would take you usually I will put less than one month and here is where you have your cover

20:13 letter okay and as an example of a cover letter I always keep it short and sweet I don't put too much information I would put hello I'm interested in working as your video editor I have over 10 years of experience as a video editor and I'm proficient in Premiere After Effects Camtasia Pinnacle Studio and other professional video editing software I've produced over 100 videos for various clients and I'm able to work quickly and efficiently I have attached some samples of my work below and then you might put commercial video and then insert a link to your video on YouTube or wherever you have uploaded it educational video I look forward to discussing this project with you further sincerely Jennifer or your name so you can either insert links to your

21:00 work or you can upload it as an attachment if it's a video I recommend sending it as a link to YouTube or another reputable website and that way they don't have to download a large video file just to see your portfolio or if it's an image you can just attach it here so you would just drag or upload your project file keep it short and sweet tell them what you can do tell them about your experience but don't drag it on and on and on it shouldn't be more than one to two paragraphs here you have an option to boost your proposal I never really use this option so you can just click Send for four connects and that would send your proposal to this person and once you've submitted the proposal you may or may not hear back from the client if you

21:46 don't hear back from them they probably chose someone else and what you can do to review this is you could scroll down on your main page and here you can click on my proposals and this would show you any proposals that you have submitted and you could view the stats of these proposals under submitted proposals submitted proposals are proposals you sent which have not yet received a reply active proposals are proposals that you are discussing with a client so if a client chooses to ask you about your proposal that would pop up here under messages and you would be able to connect via a chat with the client here you would have any invitations to interview so maybe someone has a job and

22:34 they have sent it to you and you can interview and how the interviews work is basically you just communicate via messages with the client it's not really a formal interview maybe once in my life I had a phone interview via the messaging system but usually I just communicate with the client via the messaging and then once you have come to an agreement the client will send you an offer so they will send you an offer either for an hourly job or a fixed rate job and then you would accept that before beginning work be careful of any scams do not send any money do not pay anything to a client before starting work even if they say there's a one-time fee that's a scam you should never pay clients anything they should be paying

23:19 you so essentially this is the basics for how you get started on upwork how you search for jobs apply to jobs and what it looks like when you are creating a freelancer account if you want to know more information about getting paid about payment methods and all of that stuff make sure to check out my full playlist on upwork and you can search for those videos I've also linked you two specific videos in the description below I have been on upwork for many years I find it is an amazing platform I've always been paid for the work I have produced it's safe it's secure and I've always had a great experience with upwork so if you guys have any questions feel free to ask me in the comments section below and make sure to check out my other upwork related videos if you have any other questions thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in my next

24:06 tutorial foreign