The REAL REASON You Can’t Get Your First Job on Upwork!

Good evening, and thank you for joining us. I'm Todd McGiggles. Breaking news.

Authorities have just discovered secret, never-before-seen TikTok footage of an unsuccessful Upwork freelancer. Brace yourself. This content may be disturbing.

Yo, it's Chad with five A's - because A. A. A.

A. A. They 'bout to pay me!

Just signed up for Upwork. What's my rate? $300 an hour - obviously.

Bro, what? ! Work examples.

. . ?

Whatever, bro. Send it! I sent out like two jobs - I'm so tired right now.

Let me tweet it out. Yo, I'm putting in that Upwork grind, making that skrilla for real. I just got a client message.

Busy though! Busy 'bout to get Sparkly Unicorn status on My Little Pony's Princess Palace! It's Day 4.

Didn't get a job yet. #UpworkDoesn'tWork bro! It takes most people weeks or even months to get their first job on Upwork.

I'm Evan Fisher. I've earned over 1. 5 million in my first four years freelancing on Upwork.

And we're about to shorten your learning curve. You want your first job on Upwork and you want it ASAP. So I'm going to share with you my four golden rules to winning your first job, including my 3x3 Method that I think you're going to love.

And I'm even going to give you my advice on how you should set your Upwork rate. But first let's talk about what people are doing wrong: ChaAaAad, with five A's - wanted to charge crazy rates right out of the gate with no justification. He didn't want to put in the effort to look at what successful people were doing well, didn't include work examples in his proposals, sent only two proposals out and thought, yeah, that's going to be enough.

He wasn't responsive to clients. And then he didn't even get on the phone with them when they did show interest. He was literally putting more effort into social media than into getting jobs.

That sort of person cannot be successful. I'm going to go ahead and say, don't do that. I'm also going to tell you what you should do and especially how you should approach pricing.

And you've done the Upwork readiness test and you've 100-percented your profile. Then you're ready to start sending proposals. So let's get into those four golden rules of getting your first Upwork job, folding rule.

Number four, set up My Feed as your long list. You want to use Upwork's advanced search function to catch everything in your niche. Set up your searches, then save them because all of those then feed into My Feet.

If you have, for example, PHP and Web Development and node. JS as three separate advanced searches that you have saved, those are then going to feed into My Feet and all of that then aggregates. Check the link in the description for a guide to setting up Upwork advanced searches.

Golden rule number three, you want to follow the three by three method. It stands for three downvotes, three times a day. You want to win a job, this is literally how to do it.

This is going to massively speed up your daily workflow and help you shortlist and apply like an animal. Give the thumbs down to three irrelevant projects in a row at the top of your My Feed long list, then go down your long list and put a heart on the good jobs. Keep doing that until you get to your next three downvoted in a row, because that tells you here's where you last checked your job listings.

Now you go over to Saved Jobs and this is now your shortlist. So you apply one-by-one and remove them from the Saved Jobs list until you've applied to all of the saved jobs that you shortlisted. Do that three times a day and you will get a job.

I'll get into pricing in just a second, but first, if you're getting value here then actually don't subscribe to the channel, but first check out some of my other videos, because they're basically a step-by-step tutorial of how to make hundreds of thousands on Upwork. And then if you think they're useful too, then maybe subscribe. Golden rule number two: Speed is critical.

Think of it like this: you lost your keys, they're somewhere in your house, but you just don't know where! You spend 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour maybe, looking for them. And guess what?

They're always in the last place you look right? Of course, because you stopped looking when you found them! The same concept applies when Upwork clients are looking for someone to do their job.

If you're one of the first people to apply to a job and you're a good fit, then they might not even talk to anyone else because they found you. So what does that mean for you? For now, you only apply to jobs posted in the last 24 hours.

The number one golden rule: Pricing low on your first couple of jobs is okay. All of the gurus say, "don't price low on your first job," but here's the number one thing that no one else is going to tell you: it actually is totally fine and actually will help you go FASTER. My first job that I ever did on Upwork was a $200 fixed-price job.

This was for something that other people were charging $1,500 to $3,000 for. My second job was an hourly job at $30 an hour, which was pretty low for my niche. But guess what?

My third job was at $75 an hour. And within five weeks, I was booking work at $100 dollars an hour. And then the sixth week, I booked work at $120 an hour.

Start with slightly lower than what you're comfortable with to deliver value to your clients, and you'll build to where you want to go faster. And on that note, if you want to book more work faster than just ask! I'm going to respond to every single comment on this video.

So answer me this: What is your #1 question about Upwork that you want answered? Put your question in the comments section below and you will get an answer. In the meantime, remember: Persistence wins jobs.

Don't quit! Sometimes even I go for weeks without a new project. If you want to win your first job, you've got to keep going until you win it.

Your target is to apply to a hundred jobs. Also, accept that you're going to make mistakes along the way. You should actively seek to make those mistakes so that you can learn from them because that's going to unlock your ability to scale.

And next, we're going to talk about how even though I made TONS of mistakes along the way, I was able to scale my Upwork earnings from zero to almost $500,000 a year in under four years. And how you can do it too, in this video right here.