This Simple Make.com Automation Generates $20K/mo on Upwork

what's going on guys in this video I'm going to show you a very simple make.com automation that I created four or five months ago that's been generating well over 15 to $20,000 every single month like basically Clockwork and it's incredibly simple um there are two components to this system the first is we have gp4 open AI which is filtering and processing the jobs for me which I'll show you in a sec and then we also have air table which is where I'm dumping all of the records into and that's what that looks like and so

in the next few minutes I'm just going to walk through exactly how I built this my rationale for building it um and how it actually like makes me the money that it makes me so let's get into things first things first um there is an RSS feed module which you can use to connect to upwork upwork has um an RSS feed kind of feature that allows Freelancers and people applying to jobs like me to create very specific job queries using Boolean connectors and then just query the RSS feed like every hour or two to see

if there are jobs that match those specifications so I'm going to leave the link in the video description feel free to poke around and kind of learn more about the way that RSS feeds work in upwork but suffice to say it's just a way to get away from the um upwork kind of user uh interface and then kind of you know do things that scale outside of it and so you see here at the very top I have a URL setup it's htps www.b.com AB feed jobs RSS that's going of like the the syntax and

then question mark Q equals and this is the query that we're putting in and all I did was I put in automate the purpose of this was to be as broad as humanly possible for my target category because um I'm doing the filtering later on using AI so I you know if you think about it logically it makes sense to go as wide as humanly possible on the front end so that top of your funnel is really wide and then to narrow it down uh using AI there's no point to filter ahead of time here

because you know I've just I've just been I've just sort of like um accepted them going to use AI to do this filtering I'm sorting based off recency that just means that uh the most recent jobs come first makes sense right because people on upward typically just hire within the first 24 hours if you're there within the first 24 hours great if you're there within the first two hours even better um job type is both hourly and then fixed budget and then I have just a list of sort of like price ranges here that I'm

acceptable uh that I'm accepting with a few um you know API parameters and that sort of thing so yeah I'm returning 200 items at a time honestly it's normally like 10 or 15 because I query um as you see here once every 90 minutes so I usually don't need to go any more than that in terms of the rest of this automation exactly how it works first I'm parsing the description uh that's just because the description comes through an HTML so I use a parse description HTML to text module which you can find right down

here to turn uh that HTML just into plain text and strip away you know all that stuff the next module is basically the secret sauce the entire system and this is why uh it works so exceedingly well there's a module here that I've just called filter job and it's this this module here if you go to open Ai and then you go to uh create a completion yeah there you go create a creates a completion for the provided prompt or chat so it's this one here um and then you access I always like to use

the GPT 40613 endpoint although you know you might be watching this like a year from now in which case I'm sure there's like plenty of other endpoints maybe in GPT 5 who knows um and so you know if you want to always be using the most upto-date one then just for model select uh gp4 instead of a specific model number and then here's the prompt that I've set up I have a system prompt that says you're an intelligent administrator that filters jobs and next I have a user prompt that basically just explains who I am

and what I do what sorts of jobs am I looking for now I pitched myself as an operations agency I mean really I'm sort of like a oneman consultancy at the moment but I just find it performs better this way uh that builds out Outreach systems CRM systems project manag systems no code systems and integration so just giving it some some background context and then I'm giving it some instructions below is a job description filter it for relevance true or false in Json some of the platforms we use include and then I just gave it

a big list of platforms that I'm familiar with if relevant write a short introductory Icebreaker this is important because it saves me a ton of time applying to these jobs and I'll show you what that means in a minute then I say note API Integrations are good since we can develop them using no code we don't develop full stack apps we don't use Python telegram blah blah blah we don't work on very tiny projects these are basically just things that you would say hey I'm not interested in this you know Mark these as irrelevant and

that's just because all of the projects that I've ever done on these platforms tend to suck people just don't really understand what's involved they charge way too much money that sort of thing and then for the Icebreaker or introduction component I have some example client projects here that I've worked on and I just use that as sort of just like a you know draw from this um when you're when you're pitching now the next thing I do is I just give it a bunch of examples gp4 and other related language uh models tend to perform

really well after you give them at least two or three examples of the input that you'll be giving it and then the desired output and so in this way it's called like in context learning you're basically like training it uh just within one prompt window to you know learn and kind of like assess your preferences here so for instance this is um me Ro user and then I just paste it in an upwork job description exactly how it comes from um the upwork RSS feed so it learns the formatting and then the way that I

am uh pushing this out is I have like an assistant uh prompt next and then I teach it basically what Json format I want it to use so result in this case is false reason this is about writing nothing to do with systems and then Icebreaker because it's false there's no Icebreaker the reason to do it this way and the reason to have it right a reason is both because you want it to kind of walk you through its thought process so to speak um if you ever need to do any debugging or logging uh

it costs like an exceedingly small amount of money to do this just like a few extra cents uh well probably like a portion of a scent or something like that um and then I find the performance is usually a little bit higher if it has to like speak through its own rationale uh and then I just yeah I just like rinse and repeat basically all I did was I just ran the RSS feed once and then I just looked at the jobs and I manually categorized them and then yeah I did this like four or

five times um this is an example of a job that looks good to me air table expert needed I do tons of work in air table if you did not already guess by the fact that this whole RSS feed system is built in a table um this is what the output is going to look like so result true reason involves automating air table which aligns their experience and systems no code tools Icebreaker and then I have a very particular uh sort of like approach I like to take to applying to these jobs I'll always say

something like hey I'm confident I'm the guy you need for this and it's very putting my balls on the table so to speak uh but I find it works extremely well and then I'll always put some like huge social proof sort of deal so in this case I use air table to manage a copyrighting company that is around 800k a year we make heavy use of interfaces and well that's actually more now we make heavy use of interfaces and some less known air table features I also routinely build air table flows databases Etc so um

if you guys kind of see where I'm going with this I'm using it to build like a brief little introductory Icebreaker that'll seem very customized to the job specifics uh that I can just use to paste into the application window next is some more examples more examples and I'm not going to beat a dead horse but suffice to say at the very end what I finally do is I have one user prompt with the title and then the description that I'm pulling from the RSS feed I have a token count 250 with like a pretty

low temp because I want it to be uh pretty consistent and then yeah and then I'm off to the races now the best way to work with gp4 or just like any type of AI completion models that arep putting in Json so always just add a parse Json module after so go down here and click parse Json it's just connected hypothetically the Json string that you're looking for is under choices message content and you can already see it here so all this pars Json module is going to do is it's going to turn result false

into basically like a make.com object like this reason whatever result false Icebreaker yada yada and that's just so that we can use it later on then uh I check to see if the job is relevant if it is we can proceed uh if so then we will get the budget of the job using just a bunch of like um I guess like true or false switch stuff so if description contains the word hourly range then it's probably an hourly range job if it doesn't contain the word hourly range then it's probably a fixed price job

if it's an hourly range job then we're getting the split of a get of a split the word description and divided by you know or cut by this hourly range thing I'm not going to go super deep into that um because you know upwork tends to change this every once in a while and so sometimes I got to jump in here every few months and then make make a few edits uh and then just because of the way that the like in my upwork RSS feed I have a column called um like budget and then

I have another one called like hourly range so just because of the way that I've set my own up I need a router here that cuts between hourly and then Project based jobs and then if it's an hourly job then I'll set a payment model to equal to hourly I'll set a budget Min budget Max all the stuff here uh which basically just pulls from fields in the RSS feed and at the end of it I'll add an hourly job where I'll get the title I'm removing the word upwork just because there's no point to

including that upwork always appends the word upwork to all their jobs the description that we parsed earlier the date posted introduction is an icebreaker and uh the Icebreaker is what we generated previously and then you'll also see that I have a template here and uh the template is just like a copy and paste thing that's very long and very exhaustive and my rationale behind this on upwork is always the vast majority of people are only going to read the first paragraph and think ah this guy really knows his stuff I got to work with him

but there are some people out there that need just a little bit more context and for the people that need a little bit more context I'll always just like add a giant like almost like a CV essay style thing uh and so this is what my one of my templates looks like I offer some case studies and that sort of deal which is pretty helpful um then I offer the Job Link and then the Min budget Max budget country skills whatever and I click okay all right so that is the make automation you'll see there

are some remnants of other systems that I've built and other approaches this is still very much a draft so just kept these down here but ideally you would clean this up a little more I'm going to save my changes uh CU you know I made a couple of tiny ones there and then I'll go back to the suppork RSS feed and here's what it looks like and how it works we got the title in this column the description in this column I've added a status field equal to intake for all new jobs that come in

and this is just so that I know which jobs I've applied to which ones I haven't so there's intake applied irrelevant no longer available there's a button here with a URL column and if I click this I basically go directly to that upward job uh then there's also space for a loom video now I don't do loom video for every application but there's some applications out there that are very very high value I'm talking like 15 20 $30,000 in you know let's say a 3mon period uh for jobs that I feel or in it that

are extremely high value what I'll do is I'll actually jump on that page I'll click that Loom button which I'm not going to do now because it would screw up my recording uh and then I will just like explain who I am and what I do and then when I'm done with that I will paste in the video URL right here so let's just say this is hypothetically Loom URL I paste it in and then there's a copiable message um column where all I need to do is just copy it and then paste it into

the job description and here's what it looks like Hi here's a video I just order to walk you through this and a few other systems I run for seven figure companies then I just paste the video in um so this copyable message is basically like a formula field which concatenates whatever my introduction is uh the video URL and then the template at the very end um and so this way it's literally just like hey copy paste copy paste if anybody has any additional questions to um you know anything that I've done or or whatnot or

maybe they just ask additional questions like the upper question field I mean I'll I'll do do the manually um but a lot of the time I'll just like copy the loom video URL in those cases and I'll just say hey you know I'd love it if you just took a look at this this is going to blow your mind uh and I always just lead like extremely extremely strong because I find that that helps um okay great so to answer some probable questions here if you've made it this far what is the reason why you

do an approach like this as opposed to just do it all in upwork well there are a couple the first is that you get to track everything upor is an awesome platform but it does certainly lack a few tracking features make it difficult to know how many proposals have I sent in the last little while how much money have I gotten from these proposals um What proportion of my searches are like irrelevant or or whatnot um number two on upwork itself their filtering process is kind of it's like procedural it's based off keywords and so

you can't actually get flexible like we can with AI like because I use an AI filter for instance um I can if a job has the word air table in it you know if I'm doing things procedurally and I try and like look for a keyword like air table and use that to add to the thing it'll always just add that to my upwork RSS feed right but if I use AI to do it AI is flexible enough that it'll look at it and and see the word air table and it'll say h this job

may have the word air table in it but is it a project about like Building Systems for air table it might not be maybe it's just uh you know like recipient needs to understand air table but it's actually a job about social media marketing or something that happens extremely extremely commonly and so upwork still uses these procedural filters for the most part um by getting your data into another platform like air table we are capable of using artificial intelligence to filter the jobs and then just to give us a little bit of a helping hand

uh the other benefit is of course we can uh proceduralized a lot of the Icebreaker stuff so we can apply to job significantly faster than if we were just doing everything in upw workk uh keep in mind that the vast majority of people on upwork are going to be copy and pasting applications and that sort of thing um and you know competition wise a little bit of customization always goes a long way but I've personally found this to be a really good balance between just like high volumes of applications and then uh still maintaining like

a reasonable level of qu quality and then providing the ability to record a loom video is super important too because yeah like I mean I I think the average value of a lot of my upward contracts for Automation and consultation operations and stuff probably around uh like $2,000 but every once in a while one will come by that's like 15 grand or maybe it's like a recurring relationship where now I have like a bunch of clients that have been paying me three four five $6,000 for the last half year like the value of that contract

36k if it even gives me a 1% higher likelihood of getting it by recording a quick little loom video that takes me like literally two minutes then I'm going to do it and this system allows me just to do all of that while also still maintaining um High Velocity so yeah I hope that makes sense uh again we got the air table here then we have the upwork RSS jobs to air table um system over here if anybody has any questions about how this stuff works or just wants to bounce some ideas off me feel

free to leave a comment down below uh otherwise like subscribe do all that fun stuff and I will catch you on the next video thank you very much bye-bye