r/Upwork - Success on Upwork 6th month - 14K earned (Comprehensive)

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Original Article: r/Upwork - Success on Upwork 6th month - 14K earned (Comprehensive)

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Quick back story. I am following up because a user reached out to me regarding the past posts. They originally wanted to ask me some questions but tbh I'm not religiously on here very much. I missed there message for awhile but when I finally reached out (really late after) they replied back:

"Finally got myself 2 client. One of them being 4 figure/month Thanks for your success story 😍😍It was my motivation. Reading it every day morning and night"

I'm really glad those posts helped out and It inspired me to do the 6 month (ish) update on the trials and tribulations of freelancing. So without delay here we go. (Past posts can be found at bottom of this post)

Making it to Month 6

Marking the 6th month on being on upwork was a really big accolade for me. I didn't think I could actually avoid getting a "real job" by sticking to it. Keep in mind I am only on upwork as of right now I haven't even tried any other platform. I had managed to keep one major contract for 6 months going and a few random ones here and there. I wasn't trying to work full time at all I prefer keeping it around 15-20 hours a week at max. I do work elsewhere but upwork income can literally pay the bills.

End of a major contract

My biggest contract ended at 6 months. This was due to the employer automating my job and it becoming a bit more obsolete. I was honestly expecting it to happen months ago and was more thankful because I was tired of doing it. However that was a big earner for me and I didn't prepare any other backup plan because... laziness. That was definitely something I should have been prepared for but I think I do better under pressure. On a positive note I believe it helped when clients saw I closed a high volume contract with 5 stars but I was only a couple hundred short of being "top rated plus".

Apply Pressure

There really wasn't much I could do but keep applying for more jobs. Interestingly though I had a client who hired me about a month earlier and was still restructuring or something, basically they said the project wasn't ready yet. That job however was high value and worth a lot. I then put more pressure on that client to give me actual work or I would not be available. This was all diplomatic and professional of course. A high risk strategy but they finally gave me the project to work on although it was short lived. They are still a client but the workload is sporadic.

Job Hunting

I went back to job hunting and just applying to whatever I could see that I was interested. I still following all my rules from the 1st month on upwork. I vetted clients, denied a lot I just wasn't interested in, had a few invites but overall I just wasn't really getting any interesting leads or responses. It was a lot less than usual but I still kept applying, usually just copying and pasting a 3-4 sentence prefab paragraph related to the specific type of job I was applying for. The major thing was to ensure you never applied and looked desperate even though I was feeling a bit down during this time that I wasn't being hired as much as usual.

I made a rule during this time to not work any contract that paid less than my 2nd lowest rate. I knew that would devalue my work and have me racing to the bottom of the contracts.

Learning new Skills (And getting paid)

You know those annoying ads that are always talking about learning a new skill so you can market it to your next employer? Well I'm kind of going to advocate for that with one exception. I expect to get paid when I learn a new skill. So I started a business sel...

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