One of the first challenges a freelancer encounters at the beginning of their career is getting their Upwork account approved. In today’s Freelance University episode, Nick breaks down how you can do this with a few different strategies.
This video is part of Nick Tubis’s educational series, Freelance University, which anyone can personally subscribe to by clicking here. Additionally, you can subscribe to Nick Tubis on YouTube to keep up with Freelance University and his other videos as well.
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Transcript:
According to CEO Stephane Kasriel, Upwork gets 10,000 new signups every single day. Isn’t that crazy? So what does that tell you? It tells you that having the ability to freelance on Upwork is an exclusive club.
Not everyone gets approved. Only 2% of applicants actually get approved and today we’re going to talk about how you can be in the 2%. Today I’m going to share with you some little known insider hacks that will massively increases your chances of getting your Upwork account approved.
But before we dive into that. Let’s talk about the most common reasons why Upwork accounts get disapproved.
The way Upworks works is that it’s a marketplace. One side of the marketplace is clients. And the other side is freelancers. So Upworks main goal is to create balance between the amount of jobs posted by clients and the amount of freelancers they have with skills that can handle those jobs.
What they don’t want to happen is have an oversupply of freelancers with the same skillset because there will be way too much competition for freelancers and and not as big of a demand from clients.
So its actually a good thing that Upwork is strict because it really creates less way competition for us.
This is by far the number one reason why freelancers accounts aren’t approved.
The second most reason why your Upwork account might not be getting approved is because you’re not filling out your profile out completely or correctly. I’ve seen this happen a ton to new freelancers. They kind of half ass their profile and it causes them not to get their account approved.
Upwork’s system analyzes every new application and if they see a section that isn’t filled out it could be flagged. So this could be not filling out your skills, portfolio, etc.
So make sure that you’ve really taken the time to fill out your profile and made sure that everything is filled out.
The key to setting up a good profile is filling it out in full. Your title on your account should be skill-based, highlighting the different services that you specialize in.
A lot of top freelancers will plug in their top three favorite services they want to provide in their headline.
The profile description should be about building as much credibility as you possibly can.
You should highlight all the different skills and services you can provide and utilize specific keywords so that your profile can rank high in a search.
If you want help setting up an Upwork profile that sells, you can check out our Profile Secrets Masterclass guide at the link above or below.
This class goes into extreme detail and reveal every hack that will help you set up a profile that attracts the highest paying clients.
Now lets talk about some of the more advanced Upwork approval hacks to getting your account approved if you’re still not getting your account approved.
The first one is to broaden out your skillset to something more general. For example lets say that your skillset is SEO but there is an over supply of SEO freelancers and you can’t get your account approved. Broaden it out to digital marketing, landing page design, WordPress. Things that are related to your core skillset. This is a great way to get your account approved because now you aren’t applying for hyper competitive jobs.
You can always change your skills back to that more specialized skillset once your account is approved.
The second strategy that you can use that is highly effective is something called BYOT.
That stands for Bring Your Own Talent. This is a major insider hack that is a total game changer.
Bring Your Own Talent is when your clients brings a new freelancer to Upwork. So what you would do is have an existing client, friend, family member, or someone in your network set up a client account and then invite you using the BYOT feature.
This works the majority of the time because Upwork’s algorithm likes when a freelancer is hired on their platform. It builds trust with them, plus they don’t want to turn down free money. Upwork gets a cut on every transaction of their platform and this kind of handles their vetting process for them.
Both of these strategies work extremely well, and if you’d like more help with this the Profile Secrets Masterclass also comes with a guide called Upwork Approval Hacks that covers these strategies as well as some other ones in more detail.
You can grab it at the link above or below.
I hope this helps you and I will see you right here tomorrow!
Nick Tubis 