How Freelancers and Companies Can Work on Upwork Without Blocking in 2024
When it comes to correspondence, the situation with English is more or less resolved thanks to ChatGPT.
Just copy the customer's message, write in ChatGPT “Translate the message text into English.” Now write your response in Russian and translate it into English in the same way. Then copy the neural network translation and send it to the customer.
Of course, AI can make mistakes, and so even here it would be better to check the translation manually, if possible. But these mistakes are usually not so numerous, and they are not so critical.
As for calls, no one requires you to communicate like a native speaker, but a person must speak clearly and distinctly, must be able to convey a thought in English. A Russian accent and pronunciation flaws will not prevent you from receiving orders.
What are the difficulties for Russians and Belarusians? How to create an account, how to withdraw money?
Officially, Upwork does not work with citizens of Russia and Belarus, but don’t rush to close the article — we’ll teach you everything.
You will need a foreign account to which you can receive payments in dollars. An individual entrepreneur or LLC opened in another country will do, as well as proof of residence in that country.
You will need a way to withdraw money from a foreign card to Russia. The conditions are different for each country and each bank, but there is a universal way – through crypto.
You may also need to prove that you live in the country where your legal entity is registered (in fact, you can easily live in Russia!). Usually, a utility bill is suitable for this. In addition, you may be asked to confirm your passport details; a Russian passport should be suitable.
Features of bank accounts and legal entities
Since we will need a foreign account and a legal entity anyway, let me tell you a summary of my experience. I will use Kazakhstan as an example.
By the way, if you are already in another country and you have a residence permit, then an account opened for a legal entity in that country will be suitable.
In Kazakhstan, it is better to open a limited liability company, not an individual entrepreneur. Since you will be engaged in foreign economic activity, your VAT will be zero. The income tax will be 3% if the turnover is up to 80 million tenge per half year.
You will also need several employees in Kazakhstan. It is important that these employees pay income tax to the budget of Kazakhstan in the region of 2-3% of your turnover. It is preferable to employ employees who do not live in Kazakhstan, so the taxes will be lower.
There is a law on the abolition of double taxation between Russia and Kazakhstan. Therefore, if you receive money for a limited liability company, you will not need to pay any taxes in Russia.
In this case, you will definitely need a separate accountant in Kazakhstan.
How to Position Yourself on Upwork and Find Your Niche
On Upwork, your competitors and clients are the whole world. In order not to spread yourself too thin, you need to decide what you are good at and ensure your positioning, find the right niche. Otherwise, you will have to compete for the development of a WordPress landing page with hundreds of programmers from developing countries who are ready to work for $3 an hour.
You need a niche where there are quite a lot of applications on the exchange, at least five per day. At the same time, it should not be very popular, the competition here should not be the highest.
At Unistory, we have chosen two main niches: AI and blockchain. Sometimes new technologies appear on the market, and developers who are able to do something with them can find orders with a three-digit hourly rate (in dollars, of course). This was the case with Webflow – at its peak, the cost per hour reached $100 dollars and higher.
If you don't know which niche to choose, open Upwork, set up filters and see how many applications there are for which technologies and what the hourly rate is. You can also see how many responses there were to these applications: the more, the higher the competition for the application. Accordingly, the higher the competition in the niche.
How to fill out your profile
Even if your company has 100 employees, creating an agency profile on Upwork does not make sense; it is better to position yourself as an individual. Regardless of whether you are a company or a freelancer, create a profile of one specific freelancer.
It makes sense for studios and agencies to create a CEO account and write that he, for example, is a developer.
Indicate in your profile a real photo, a real name. In the field “Country, City” put the country in which you have an account opened for withdrawing money from the exchange.
Please note: profiles on the exchange have a specialization. If you are engaged in software development, you do not need to indicate the specialization “legal consulting” or “video editor”.
We search for freelance competitors on Upwork, the best accounts. We copy-paste profile descriptions with minor changes. Or we get inspired by these accounts and write something of our own.
We fill in all possible fields in the profile, to the maximum. Even if there is nothing to add, for example, in the “Certificates” field – we try, find, add. Something must be added.
The exchange also has the ability to get a review from a third-party client with whom you worked outside of Upwork. Until you have a track record, that is, a history of orders on the exchange and feedback from them, you should use this opportunity. Find clients and add their reviews.
How to respond to applications and boost your profile from scratch
To leave a response to a request, you will need connections — Upwork's internal currency. There is no other way to leave your proposal on a job post. One response costs from 8 to 22 connections. You can buy as many connections as you like, one connection costs 15 cents.
When your profile is still fresh and there is no track record on it, leave at least 10 responses to requests per day. Respond only to low-budget requests, only on a fixed basis. At first, these will be requests with a budget of $50 to $1,000. Without a track record, it will be more difficult to get more expensive requests.
Make sure that the client whose application you are responding to has the Payment Verified checkbox. If it is not there, it means that the client has not yet confirmed their payment method, and there are questions about their basic solvency.
Increase the average check every month. So, we started in November 2020, and in February 2021 we were able to receive the first order for $ 5,000.
Make sure that after each order, customers leave you positive feedback. If the customer has not done this themselves, and the relationship with them is normal, you can “nudge” the customer to leave a review.
Ask the client if they have any complaints, and if they don't, ask them to give you five stars and write a review. If the client is short on time, offer this option: we'll write the review ourselves, and you'll copy and post it.
Over time, begin to move to orders with an hourly payment scheme, Time & Materials.
Some clients leave additional questions in the application and ask each potential contractor to answer them in the response. Never ignore this: expert answers dramatically increase your chances of closing the deal.
A separate question: how long should the response be? It is logical to do it this way: if the application is long and detailed, we make the response the same. If the application fits into a couple of sentences, we will also be laconic. On the other hand, sometimes even a short application can be answered in a long way, for example, if you want to show your expertise.
Lifehack: Set up notifications from Upwork via the Mail app on your iPhone. Regular notifications from the mobile app will not come due to the sanctions situation. However, you can’t do without notifications, you must respond to the client in a timely manner — Mail will help you out.
How to Use ChatGPT in Ticket Responses
At a certain point, our sales people wrote responses via ChatGPT. About seven responses per day, conversion to lead — 7-10%. Then we realized that it is better to write by hand and with soul. A month later, the conversion to lead increased to 15%, after three months — to 30-40%.
How you do it depends on you and your level of English. At first, you can rely on AI, but over time, it is better to start writing responses yourself.
Here is our prompt, with which we achieved 10% conversion from response to lead:
You’re an experienced freelancer working on Upwork and an expert at writing proposals for potential clients. You’ve been given the Upwork Request. You will then need to use this framework to write an intro: Review the core idea of the project (what/where/how needs to be done), show its understanding, in simple words, precise and informal but polite way. For example, ’So it must be a location-based mobile application that triggers an audio file when users enter specific GPS coordinates, right?’. Then refer to its specific parts with 2-3 concrete questions to prove your understanding of them and clarify non-obvious moments. Also, suggest relevant robust concrete technical ideas by mentioning specific technology and approach to their implementation.Conclude this paragraph by saying that you’re ready to start working immediately and can apply some ready-made components and documentation from your previous similar projects to win time. Keep it cohesive, precise and super specific without any general too subjective words and epithets.
Write a cover letter using previous framework for this request ***указываем текст job post’a***
Another point – you can write responses through the neural network in different ways. It's one thing if you write a prompt, add the text of the application and ask to write a response. It's much better if you write a response in Russian yourself and ask GPT to translate this text into English, and then check it manually.
Improve your technology awareness to write more relevant responses. Over time, you will begin to distinguish well between texts written by a person and a neural network. You will see that some requests are also written by clients via GPT.
In these situations, you can even joke and write something like: “We see that your job post is written using GPT, but in this case, the neural network has suggested the right technology stack, and we are ready to take on the job.” This technique has helped one of our salespeople get an order several times.
How do boosts work and should you buy them?
Upwork has a boost system. You can boost your response by investing pre-purchased connections into boosts. This will make your response higher when the customer starts looking at responses to their application.
It works on the auction principle: the more boosts the user invested, the higher his response. The first four responses that the customer sees are the ones with the highest boosts. If you did not invest enough at the auction, then your response with boosts will be beaten by competing freelancers, and the response will not reach the top positions.
If the customer does not view the response with boosts or your boost is interrupted, the connections will return to the contractor's balance.
If the response is viewed but the customer does not respond, the connections will be written off. Boosts do not guarantee that your response will be responded to. All they do is move your response higher in the queue.
Should I participate in this auction? The golden rule: if the response is well written and relevant to the request, it will not need boosts. A bad response, in turn, will not benefit from any boosts.
This does not mean that boosts should not be used at all. First, buy boosts if you have not yet pumped up your profile, this will increase your chances of signing a contract. Second, if the application is very “juicy”, you can also help the response rise higher.
But boosts cost money, so you shouldn't overdo it. Rely primarily on the quality of your responses. Boost the response only if you really want to get a customer. Our sales boosts only 1 out of 100 responses, and only by 20-30%, while the conversion to lead continues to please.
Integration with Vollna service
Service Vollna — an indispensable assistant for our sales. This is a platform where you can add a link to an RSS feed to transfer your filters for selecting applications.
Within Vollna you can also make additional filter settings that cannot be configured on Upwork.
The Vollna project's Telegram bot can send you all applications that match your filters and criteria. This is often much more convenient than searching for applications manually.
Upwork Fees
Clients pay a 10% fee to send money to Upwork. Contractors pay 10% to withdraw money from the exchange. As you can see, it is tempting to offer the client alternative payment methods that bypass Upwork. But you should not do this, otherwise you will not be able to “pump up” the account.
When we pumped up our profile and track record, we started accepting payments bypassing the exchange. By agreement with the customer.
At first, all payments should go through Upwork. Your main goal now is to build up a track record. This indicator of your account will grow only in cases when you receive money through the exchange. The total amount of payments you received through the exchange can also affect how high your response will be among competitors' responses.
Special from our sales: how to filter out bad applications
“Garbage” and non-targeted applications are one of the main problems when searching for a relevant job post. Thus, manual screening of non-targeted applications takes a lot of effort and time, which can reduce the productivity of the sales person on the exchange.
In order to automatically filter out non-targeted applications at the search stage, you can set up strict filters that will only display acceptable, adequate job posts in the search.
Naturally, the sooner we determine that the lead is inadequate, the sooner we can stop communicating and stop wasting time on a bad lead. That's why we came up with a system of adequacy criteria.
This filter system may be too strict if you are just starting to build your track record. But if you have already pumped up your account, we recommend that you also start evaluating customers and job posts using our system.
Lead adequacy criteria are divided into:
Critical. If there is at least one critical criterion, the lead acquires the status “inadequate”.
Side effects. They affect the quality of the lead, but can make it inadequate only if there are a large number of such criteria.
Critical:
The application text uses a large amount of caps.
Use of profanity/offensive words/racism etc. in the application text.
Direct or obvious indications that the application is a hire/outstaffing to another team.
The presence in the application of requirements for communication in a language other than Russian/English.
Direct or obvious signs that the project is a scam / adult / casino, etc.
The presence in the application of requirements for a stack that we do not write on or cannot be covered by outsourced guys.
The application contains a large number of grammatical/spelling/punctuation errors.
Direct or obvious indications that instead of paying for our services we will receive a “percentage of the project”.
Direct or obvious signs that the cost/timeframe of the project (specified by the customer in an obvious manner) is significantly less than what we will indicate in advance.
The client's account rating is negative (below 4.0) and has objective negative feedback (for example, the freelancer indicated that the customer did not pay for some part of the work).
Unverified payment method of the customer's account (Payment Unverified).
Side effects:
Poor (unclear / crooked) formulation of the problem.
Lack of detailed description of the task.
Empty customer profile.
Low customer profile rating.
Low value of Total Spent (less than $10,000) and Average hourly rate paid (less than $25/h) indicators in the customer's account.
Irrelevant technology stack in the application text.
The customer chose Entry Level.
Ideally, a relevant application has the following characteristics:
The price for the task is over $5,000.
The customer is from a developed country (USA, Europe, Canada, etc.).
Hourly rate from $20 to $50.
The customer formulated the project theme, the task and provided design/functionality references.
What other foreign platforms are there for finding customers?
Fiverr. If on Upwork freelancers contact customers, then on Fiverr customers themselves contact us. Therefore, a pumped-up profile is more important here than on Upwork. If your portfolio does not look impressive enough, it would be better to concentrate on Upwork first.
Toptal. The platform positions itself as a service for selecting top freelance experts. The service claims that it approves only 3% of applications from freelancers who want to work here. We haven’t applied to Toptal yet, so we won’t tell you more. If your profile is approved, write to me and share your experience 🙂
Clutch. In some ways it is similar to the foreign analogue of Runet Rating. According to our data, there are not too many leads from here, although the platform is famous. Clutch also has a minus for beginners – to place an ad, you will need a website or landing page. On Upwork, you do not need any accounts other than an Upwork profile.
I hope this guide will help you get your first big order on Upwork, and it will be a really cool project. You can see our cases, including those we did for clients from Upwork, on the website Unhistory.
In my Telegram channel, I talk about how AI and blockchain are used in different areas of business. Subscribe – we'll be in touchBy the way, sometimes I post vacancies for developers, managers and designers.
