6 PRACTICAL TIPS FOR

UPWORK SUCCESS
F ARAZ A HMED

Copyright © 2022 by Faraz Ahmed.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TIP 1: How to find Long-term Clients on Upwork Part 1

TIP 2: How to find Long-term Clients on Upwork Part 2
TIP 3: How to find Long-term Clients on Upwork Part 3
TIP 4: Words to avoid in your Freelance Profiles &
Proposals Part 1
TIP 5: Words to avoid in your Freelance Profiles &
Proposals Part 2
TIP 6: How to Increase the Response Rate for your
Proposals on Upwork
BONUS TIP 1: Writing Winning Upwork Proposals in
2022
BONUS TIP 2: When is the right time to start Freelancing?
FREE EBOOK: Top Secrets of Becoming a Successful
Freelance Web Developer
About the Author
TIP 1: HOW TO FIND LONG-TERM
CLIENTS ON UPWORK PART 1
A typical Freelancer Routine:

1. Bid on a project.
2. Get the project.
3. Deliver the project.
4. Go back to #1.

If you are bidding on jobs day after day, week after week,
and month after month, then you are doing it wrong. You
will tire yourself out eventually by becoming part of the rat
race.

What you should be looking for are a few long-term,

regular clients who give you regular work, so you never
have to bid again.

There are three ways to do this. I am explaining my favorite

way first, which is what I did when I started freelancing:

1. Find small projects which you can do in an hour or

two.
2. Look at the client profile. Make sure it’s the client
with no previous projects on Upwork.
3. Write a stunning proposal and offer some value to
the client to prove to him that you are the right
person for the job. Example below.
4. Deliver the project with high-quality work.

Most people look at the client’s profile, and if the client has
no feedback or payment history, they don’t bid on the
project. I did the exact opposite because their job posts
would have less competition or proposals, and there would
be a high chance for me to land the job. And I knew that if I
provided quality work, then they would not go to any other
freelancer in the future if they had any new task.

That’s how I turned a $6 client into a $60k client, and it’s

still going. I am posting that job post and the proposal
below.

Job Description
Ajax has stopped working on <link>. Looking for someone
to fix.

My Proposal
Hi,

I looked at the website, and it seems that some scripts are

conflicting with each other. It should be fixed in an hour or
two ($6-$12). I’ve been working on PHP and WordPress
since last 5+ years. I am also a Zend Certified PHP
Professional (the top php certification available in the
market).

I am available via email/skype/phone. Let me know if you

want to proceed further.

Best Regards,
Faraz

Thought Process behind the Proposal

I looked at the website and found multiple jQuery files
loading.

Post Proposal
The client immediately awarded me the job after the
proposal and asked me to fix another issue, then another
issue, and then another issue. Forward to nine years, and it
is still going.

The above wasn’t a fluke. I repeated the same for another

project, and that turned out to be a $100k client. 75% of the
clients are still working with me since the last nine years.
TIP 2: HOW TO FIND LONG-TERM
CLIENTS ON UPWORK PART 2
Below is the second way where we will be working with
the old clients:

1. Search for a project that you can do. Big, small,

doesn’t matter.
2. The client needs to have a previous job history with
good feedback.
3. If the project is about building or doing something
from scratch (e.g., eCommerce website, SEO on the
new website, etc.), then this client can potentially
become your long-term client. That’s because the
completed website will always need updates in the
future, so you can pitch in your maintenance plan
after finishing the website. Similarly, if you do a
good SEO and show results on the new website, the
client will most likely stick with you.

However, if it’s a project that just needs updates/fixes on an

existing project, then you need to look at the following
factors:

1. Look at the client’s previous job history and find

projects similar to the project you are applying to.
For example, if you are applying to a WordPress
project, then you will look for all the WordPress
projects the client has posted in the past.
2. If you found similar projects in the client’s history,
then look at the name of the freelancers who have
done those projects.
3. If all the freelancers are different, and they all have
good feedback, then this is probably not the client
for you.
Why?

There is a category of clients who just want to get their

work done at the lowest cost possible and don’t care who
does it. Think about it: Why do they post a new job related
to a niche if they have already worked with a freelancer
previously in that same niche? Why don’t they hire the
same freelancer?

Here is my experience with one of those clients. It was a

website hosted on a development URL, and the client
wanted some fixes/changes done to it.

So, I got the job, finished it, and she sent a few more tasks.
I did those tasks, too. Then she closed the job and left great
feedback. I thought I got another long-term client.

Then something strange happened. As it was the

development website, I thought I would get another task
from her to make it live.

After a few days, I was just browsing new jobs and found a
job posted by her. Do you know what the job was about? It
was about making the website live. That baffled me. Why
would someone do that? Why couldn’t she ask me to make
it live? Maybe she didn’t like something about my work? I
was hardly a month old freelancer and started doubting
myself.

I was curious and wanted to understand the reason. I looked

at her past jobs and found that she had used multiple
developers to do her WordPress projects, and all of those
freelancers had received great reviews.
That’s when I decided that I would avoid such clients
because my vision was clear: I wanted to work with clients
who believed in long-term relationships.

PS. A few days later, she returned and told me that the
freelancer she had hired to make the website live messed it
up, and she wanted me to do it. I felt triumphant, but I
excused myself. She might have stuck with me after that,
but looking at her history, I didn’t want to take chances.
You can call me naive, but I knew what type of clients I
wanted to focus on.

There are always exceptions, and your experience may

differ. But it’s doubtful that they would stick with you if we
look at the history of such clients. But if you are just
starting out, then it’s totally fine to work on any project you
can get your hands on for the experience.

Remember: You just need 2-3 good, regular clients to

make your freelancing journey less stressful. And as you
start getting stable and predictable income, you can hire
more people to delegate your work to and build your
business further.
TIP 3: HOW TO FIND LONG-TERM
CLIENTS ON UPWORK PART 3
The third way is the easiest, quickest, and most
straightforward.

Just go to the job search page, and enter the name of your
niche followed by the word “long term”. E.x. “seo long
term”, “wordpress long term”, “content writing long term”,
etc., and you will see the jobs from the clients who are
looking for a long-term working relationship.

Then, it will be your proposal writing skills that will help

you win those jobs. For proposal examples, see my book:
farazthewebguy.com/free-book/

The more command you have over your skill, the better
proposals you will be able to write because you would have
faced different problems and found different solutions
working on your skill, which would help you immediately
come up with a solution after reading the posted job. To
gain experience in your skill, you can offer your services
for free in the freelancing groups.
TIP 4: WORDS TO AVOID IN YOUR
FREELANCE PROFILES &
PROPOSALS PART 1
Word # 1: “We”

Serious / long-term clients want to work with individuals.

The word “We” gives the impression that you won’t be the
one to do the work and will outsource it to someone else.

Serious / long-term clients know that there are usually

severe communication issues when that happens, resulting
in delayed projects because the developer stops responding
to the middleman, resulting in the middleman either not
responding to the client or giving silly excuses. This
happened to me twice, so now I immediately move on to
the next proposal if I see the word “we” in any profile or
proposal.

Tip: Use “I” not “we” for a better response rate, even if you
outsource the job.
TIP 5: WORDS TO AVOID IN YOUR
FREELANCE PROFILES &
PROPOSALS PART 2
The second word I want to talk about is “Sir.” When we
use “Sir” in our proposals, like “Hi Sir,” we show two
things:

1. The lack of confidence in ourselves.

2. The lack of professionalism.

The word “Sir” turns off some clients, including me,

because we think that if you don’t have confidence in
yourself, then why should we have confidence in you for
delivering our project?

It may look like a trivial matter, but if you start calling the
clients by their names, like “Hi John,” “John,” or even a
simple “Hi,” if you don’t know the name of the client, you
will appear professional and increase the range of the
clients interested in availing your service.
TIP 6: HOW TO INCREASE THE
RESPONSE RATE FOR YOUR
PROPOSALS ON UPWORK
The first 230 characters of your proposals are essential
because that’s the first part the client sees when you submit
a proposal. Use these characters for two things:

1. Use a term/keyword, which is NOT present in the

project description, related to the project to talk
about the project.
2. Ask a question related to the project.

Being also a client on Upwork, I have found myself

opening the proposals with the above 2 points first.
BONUS TIP 1: WRITING WINNING
UPWORK PROPOSALS IN 2022
The method still works.

I have always focused on bidding on the jobs by clients that

had the potential of becoming long-term clients because I
didn't want to be a part of the rate race. I haven't looked at
the Upwork jobs page since 2015. The last time I bid on
and won a project was in 2017, and that was also the
project by invitation. Most of my clients have been working
with me since 2013.

Last week, I came across a job that looked similar to my

first job on Upwork. Just for fun and out of curiosity, I
applied to the job to check whether the method I used to
nail every single job still worked. Below is the job
description and the proposal I sent.

Job Description
Hello. My website is using wordpress, and I've been having
issues with Error 404. It works only with plain permalinks,
but I need it to work with permalinks using postname so I
can better setup my SEO.

I need someone who is proficient with wordpress and who

had this issue before and resolved it successfully. As
mentioned above, the website is currently working using
plain permalinks, and I need help with making it work with
postname.

Thank you for replying to my job request.

My Proposal
<Client Name>, Most likely the issue is with the
mod_rewrite apache module. I will be happy to fix it for
you. Shouldn't take more than an hour to resolve it.

The Result
I was awarded the job after 24 hours and fixed the issue in
30 minutes. The client said that he would keep the job open
and may send more work in the future, so it could possibly
become another long-term client for me.

Things to Notice
Did you notice what I did in my short proposal? I simply
told him a possible cause of the issue to give him the
impression that I was a skillful and experienced developer.
I also told him the time it would take for me to solve the
issue, so he knew the cost of the solution upfront, helping
him make a quick decision.

You would have also noticed that I didn't mention anything

about myself. No experience, no qualifications, not even
my name.

If you have heard of the Pareto Principle / 80-20 rule, it

says to identify inputs that are potentially the most
productive and make them the priority, and that's what I did
in my proposal above. In other words: Always focus on the
project and not on yourself in your proposals. Clients really
don't care about your experience or portfolio. They are only
interested in what you can do for them.
BONUS TIP 2: WHEN IS THE RIGHT
TIME TO START FREELANCING?

If you ask me, I will say that you should start freelancing
after spending 2-3 years honing your skills. I would
recommend spending a couple of years working in a
company, which will help you learn skills at a quicker rate.
It will also help you improve your communication and
learn different aspects of your business because
Freelancing is also like a business. As a freelancer, you are
the salesperson, project manager, executor, accountant, etc.

The reason I got instant success as a freelancer (You can

read my story here:
https://farazthewebguy.com/overcoming-fear-of-failure/)
was that I had the five-year job experience behind me
before I started the freelancing journey.

During my years in the job, I moved around in all the

departments (even in the accounts department) because I
was a newbie who was highly energetic and wanted to learn
about everything.

My last year was in the sales department as a Business

Analyst, which helped me learn about the different
freelancing platforms and how to bid on them.

So to summarize: Find a job or internship, take on all the

challenging projects, and make friends with people in all
the departments, so you can learn about the entire business,
which will help you become self-employed in the future if
that's what you desire.
FREE EBOOK: TOP SECRETS OF
BECOMING A SUCCESSFUL
FREELANCE WEB DEVELOPER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Faraz Ahmed is a Zend Certified PHP Developer and CBT

Life Coach from Karachi, Pakistan, and the Top Rated+
Freelancer on Upwork. He has been using Upwork to find
freelancing opportunities for almost eight years now. With
over 11,000 hours of work completed, he’s a pro when it
comes to writing excellent freelance proposals.

He has also been mentioned by Upwork on their social

media page, as you can see on the next page:
ONE LAST THING...
I hope that you find the tips in this guide helpful for your
freelancing career. Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook
for more tips:

https://www.facebook.com/faraz.ahmed84/

Thank you for reading!