Earning $100,000 From Freelance | Zero to Hero

Nice to see you to be so pumped about the journey haha :)

Again I might come off as a dick talking about Fiverr but there is another thing that makes me mad about Fiverr is that Inbox response time rating.

It's an amazing feature for buyers to see who will respond faster - it's terrible for people offering service because you have to be online all the time. Shit would make me go crazy. It's like checking for e-mail box 50 times a day. Definitely not healthy.

Anyways - you are spot on about customer relationships. Just be careful to not be used by doing extra-free work (while sometimes it's reasonable). Just keep that in mind and set boundaries. Deliver great work and they will come back.
 
Nice to see you to be so pumped about the journey haha :)

Again I might come off as a dick talking about Fiverr but there is another thing that makes me mad about Fiverr is that Inbox response time rating.

It's an amazing feature for buyers to see who will respond faster - it's terrible for people offering service because you have to be online all the time. Shit would make me go crazy. It's like checking for e-mail box 50 times a day. Definitely not healthy.

Anyways - you are spot on about customer relationships. Just be careful to not be used by doing extra-free work (while sometimes it's reasonable). Just keep that in mind and set boundaries. Deliver great work and they will come back.
Thanks for your feedback and your time reading! I gotta definitely keep that in mind more. Thankfully my clients aren't dicks as of yet; one was very late with replies but that's it- incredibly nice people overall. Well, I mean, I've only had two on Fiverr, let's hope they only get better with time, lol. I'll definitely face a moron or two, but that's in the game I guess.

In the start, I gotta somewhat "overdeliver" to ensure good feedback in order to build some social proof that will help me along the way.

Something that really helps me is the mobile Fiverr app, something I should've mentioned in my last update. Downloading that was a damn good idea so I don't have to check my mail pretty much at all. The notifications pop up directly, as good as it can get. I also hate this shitty feature (inbox response time rating), but the big bummer is the 20% platform fee for me, so I am only complaining about that at the moment, lol. If I build solid clients I'll find a way to get them off Fiverr if they are/plan to be working with me long-term and with a high budget, not some five buck gig.

Thanks again for your feedback and time reading!
 
Hi yio, good luck with your journey. I love your enthusiasm.

I haven't used fiverr myself, but my daughter is looking at it for illustration work, so I'm very interested in your reports!

That 20% fee definitely sucks, as does needing to respond to messages super fast. Do you know if they take your location into account? Seems unfair if they can knock you down if a person on the other side of the planet messages you while you're sleeping.
 
Hi yio, good luck with your journey. I love your enthusiasm.

I haven't used fiverr myself, but my daughter is looking at it for illustration work, so I'm very interested in your reports!

That 20% fee definitely sucks, as does needing to respond to messages super fast. Do you know if they take your location into account? Seems unfair if they can knock you down if a person on the other side of the planet messages you while you're sleeping.
Thanks for reading and for your kind words. The 20% fee sucks, but honestly, if you take into consideration that Fiverr does the marketing for you, it's quite good. As long as you're on many platforms, this can be a full-time thing within a month or two, surely (freelancing, I mean). I simply installed the Fiverr app on my phone and I respond whenever I take a look at it. DMs aren't that frequent, maybe 3 or so a day right now. Worth noting I'm new to the platform as a seller, so that makes sense.

And no, they don't give a damn if you're asleep or not.

The more DMs you have, the more it won't matter to miss a few when you're asleep, because the volume of DMs you'll answer swiftly during the day will outweigh the rest; I've missed a ton of DMs and I still have a 1hr response rate. It's weird, if you miss a DM you can actually not respond at all to it; you may lower your response rate but your response time which shows publicly won't be affected, lol. Food for thought there, Fiverr's kinda broken.

Again, thanks for reading!
 
somewhat mini-update (+ IMPORTANT QUESTION)

Hey fellas, I was extremely busy the past while so I wasn't able to figure things out as much as I'd like to.

Here are the positives since the last update:

I built a relationship with BOTH of my previous buyers for long-term work, which is pretty great. One's for thumbnails (YouTube) and the other one is for something actually heavy-duty that needs extremely strong work in the digital marketing niche.

Will try to get a shitload of reviews from these fellas and I messaged them both to, if they order in the future, hopefully, of course, they split their order into smaller orders so they can boost me with some reviews. This will work for social proof, and they both agreed, so that's FAN-TA-STIC. Also, I'm over-delivering on the thumbnail work and doing pretty cheap stuff, the dude even left me solid tips worth thrice the gig, lol. Absolute legend, glad he's getting value back; the shit I'm making is normally worth ten times more than other sellers that might even know way less, kek. That's why being OG is powerful on such platforms, reviews mean practically everything.

Started collecting leads outside of Fiverr, that'll be to call later on and drive them off Fiverr to a personal website I'll make for freelancing services, Fiverr alone won't get me 100K anytime soon. And I'm HUNGRY for speed here; I need to get the big-paying boys outside of Fiverr as I build my social proof on Fiverr in different ways.

This cannot take forever, I've only made a few hundred bucks as of this challenge's start. It's also contradictory because I'd have to build up the reviews of my expensive gigs and sacrifice a portion of my income just to do recurring business within Fiverr for the expensive gigs for that very reason, however, I'll just let Fiverr do that for me. I won't push it any further on the expensive gigs, I frankly don't care. Too much work.

My goal at the moment is to get higher rates per hour as I slowly build my social proof up, do jobs that I know the best to be able to prove myself, and move forward with my "portfolio" being the work that I've done for all the previous guys that gave me the benefit of the doubt within this challenge. And we go from there. The rate will keep going up, will start doing more and more expensive gigs and booking thousand-dollar deals to make this all flow. It'll take a HOT moment, though. This all won't be for the challenge, I'll attempt to make a fantastic, strong brand out of this challenge at the end of it.

As for questions, please, anyone that has experience on Upwork (and Fiverr), let me know of a few tips here/DM or redirect me to valuable threads.

Looking for how to get started on Upwork , while on Fiverr looking for how to make Buyer Requests flow better/get more sales; I only get a sale every 2 or so days now.



thanks for reading, guys! Give me your feedback and reply so we bump this thread and get some value in here as well :)
 
Following your thread, good luck, mate!

The key is to get long-term clients who believe in you. Then, you might want to outsource some of the more tedious work.
 
Following your thread, good luck, mate!

The key is to get long-term clients who believe in you. Then, you might want to outsource some of the more tedious work.
Thanks, dude! You're spot on with these unwritten rules, haha.
 
A lot of us gave you some solid advice on how to get the ball rolling on upwork, even without reviews.

Communication skills is key. The better you talk, the greater the chances of getting an interview.

If you get an interview, you get 10 connects back, so at least you don't waste away your connects.

I can't stress enough how communication is important.

I once did a test where I posted a job just like the ones I was applying to, just to see how people bid.

I got 48 bids. Do you know how many were actually worthy of reading? 3

The rest were pure crap like "Hello dear, I can do job quick sir". Nobody reads those, especially on a good job where the budget is $300 and up.

I would also caution you to pick your rate wisely. Don't go on the low end. Start from $25 an hour. People with a decent budget will always skim through the low end offers simply because they think they won't get value.

The last job I got 2 days ago was from one that had a budget of $500. I bid $350. After I got it, the guy told me most of them were around $80 and he didn't even bother to read them. He also kept the contract open for future jobs.

You don't need a lot of clients like it is on fiverr. Three good clients per month will bring you close to $2,000 or more.

Just spend some connects first. Apply to 15-20 jobs. See what's your conversion and adjust your cover letter. That's all there is to it.

I often meet python devs in my line of work that make more than $10,000 per week from SIMPLE JOBS.

Don't get excited when you see a big spender offering a low paying job. Those guys are usually some type of agency or just outsourcing to make a profit. I usually don't apply to those, as the pay is 5-8 times lower.

The perfect client is one with a very low spent balance. Some people call them sleepers. They will always pay a premium, and often they have workload on a continuous basis.

I have an open contract with a real estate agency in UK for over 8 months. They provide weekly small jobs for automating their work. Total spent with me is shy over $5,000. Before working with them, they had $400 spent in total on Upwork from just one job, and no feedback.

If you talk like a normal human being, and not in a funny way like 90% do, you're all set.
People need work, not fluff talking.
 
A lot of us gave you some solid advice on how to get the ball rolling on upwork, even without reviews.

Communication skills is key. The better you talk, the greater the chances of getting an interview.

If you get an interview, you get 10 connects back, so at least you don't waste away your connects.

I can't stress enough how communication is important.

I once did a test where I posted a job just like the ones I was applying to, just to see how people bid.

I got 48 bids. Do you know how many were actually worthy of reading? 3

The rest were pure crap like "Hello dear, I can do job quick sir". Nobody reads those, especially on a good job where the budget is $300 and up.

I would also caution you to pick your rate wisely. Don't go on the low end. Start from $25 an hour. People with a decent budget will always skim through the low end offers simply because they think they won't get value.

The last job I got 2 days ago was from one that had a budget of $500. I bid $350. After I got it, the guy told me most of them were around $80 and he didn't even bother to read them. He also kept the contract open for future jobs.

You don't need a lot of clients like it is on fiverr. Three good clients per month will bring you close to $2,000 or more.

Just spend some connects first. Apply to 15-20 jobs. See what's your conversion and adjust your cover letter. That's all there is to it.

I often meet python devs in my line of work that make more than $10,000 per week from SIMPLE JOBS.

Don't get excited when you see a big spender offering a low paying job. Those guys are usually some type of agency or just outsourcing to make a profit. I usually don't apply to those, as the pay is 5-8 times lower.

The perfect client is one with a very low spent balance. Some people call them sleepers. They will always pay a premium, and often they have workload on a continuous basis.

I have an open contract with a real estate agency in UK for over 8 months. They provide weekly small jobs for automating their work. Total spent with me is shy over $5,000. Before working with them, they had $400 spent in total on Upwork from just one job, and no feedback.

If you talk like a normal human being, and not in a funny way like 90% do, you're all set.
People need work, not fluff talking.
Thanks for this.
 
A lot of us gave you some solid advice on how to get the ball rolling on upwork, even without reviews.

Communication skills is key. The better you talk, the greater the chances of getting an interview.

If you get an interview, you get 10 connects back, so at least you don't waste away your connects.

I can't stress enough how communication is important.

I once did a test where I posted a job just like the ones I was applying to, just to see how people bid.

I got 48 bids. Do you know how many were actually worthy of reading? 3

The rest were pure crap like "Hello dear, I can do job quick sir". Nobody reads those, especially on a good job where the budget is $300 and up.

I would also caution you to pick your rate wisely. Don't go on the low end. Start from $25 an hour. People with a decent budget will always skim through the low end offers simply because they think they won't get value.

The last job I got 2 days ago was from one that had a budget of $500. I bid $350. After I got it, the guy told me most of them were around $80 and he didn't even bother to read them. He also kept the contract open for future jobs.

You don't need a lot of clients like it is on fiverr. Three good clients per month will bring you close to $2,000 or more.

Just spend some connects first. Apply to 15-20 jobs. See what's your conversion and adjust your cover letter. That's all there is to it.

I often meet python devs in my line of work that make more than $10,000 per week from SIMPLE JOBS.

Don't get excited when you see a big spender offering a low paying job. Those guys are usually some type of agency or just outsourcing to make a profit. I usually don't apply to those, as the pay is 5-8 times lower.

The perfect client is one with a very low spent balance. Some people call them sleepers. They will always pay a premium, and often they have workload on a continuous basis.

I have an open contract with a real estate agency in UK for over 8 months. They provide weekly small jobs for automating their work. Total spent with me is shy over $5,000. Before working with them, they had $400 spent in total on Upwork from just one job, and no feedback.

If you talk like a normal human being, and not in a funny way like 90% do, you're all set.
People need work, not fluff talking.
This is amazing, thank you for taking your time into explaining this key information to everyone
 
A lot of us gave you some solid advice on how to get the ball rolling on upwork, even without reviews.

Communication skills is key. The better you talk, the greater the chances of getting an interview.

If you get an interview, you get 10 connects back, so at least you don't waste away your connects.

I can't stress enough how communication is important.

I once did a test where I posted a job just like the ones I was applying to, just to see how people bid.

I got 48 bids. Do you know how many were actually worthy of reading? 3

The rest were pure crap like "Hello dear, I can do job quick sir". Nobody reads those, especially on a good job where the budget is $300 and up.

I would also caution you to pick your rate wisely. Don't go on the low end. Start from $25 an hour. People with a decent budget will always skim through the low end offers simply because they think they won't get value.

The last job I got 2 days ago was from one that had a budget of $500. I bid $350. After I got it, the guy told me most of them were around $80 and he didn't even bother to read them. He also kept the contract open for future jobs.

You don't need a lot of clients like it is on fiverr. Three good clients per month will bring you close to $2,000 or more.

Just spend some connects first. Apply to 15-20 jobs. See what's your conversion and adjust your cover letter. That's all there is to it.

I often meet python devs in my line of work that make more than $10,000 per week from SIMPLE JOBS.

Don't get excited when you see a big spender offering a low paying job. Those guys are usually some type of agency or just outsourcing to make a profit. I usually don't apply to those, as the pay is 5-8 times lower.

The perfect client is one with a very low spent balance. Some people call them sleepers. They will always pay a premium, and often they have workload on a continuous basis.

I have an open contract with a real estate agency in UK for over 8 months. They provide weekly small jobs for automating their work. Total spent with me is shy over $5,000. Before working with them, they had $400 spent in total on Upwork from just one job, and no feedback.

If you talk like a normal human being, and not in a funny way like 90% do, you're all set.
People need work, not fluff talking.

You've given me an incredible amount of value with this reply. I was going through a completely different process to get my first Upwork job, seems like I wasted 2 hours; at least I figured out the layout of the platform. Your advice also can apply to some things I'm doing wrong on Fiverr; so thank you for that too!
 
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