I am gonna provide you an Up-work cover letter that you can apply word for word even if you are a total beginner who is never won a single Up-work job. Before we get into the cover letter itself, first I’m gonna tell you my story of how I discovered what I was doing wrong as a beginner trying to win my first Up-work job. I started out on Up-work just like you. No client reviews, no Up-work job history. I uploaded a photo, entered some work experience, and a two-paragraph profile description.
Then I just started sending proposals, one after another after another. I sent over 100 proposals. and didn’t get a single response. I exhausted over $45 on Connect and I almost gave up, but my family was depending on me to succeed and I had to make it work. So I had to figure out where I was going wrong.
I had basically copy pasted my LinkedIn profile. It was a disaster, absolutely terrible. I consideration, why not develop my profile by learning from the best? So I signed up for a course on sales copy writing. And by the time that I read through step one, I knew exactly what I was doing wrong.
My profile was focused on me, not on my client. I do this, I help with that. I use these systems to get the job done. The one thing that I learned, assume that your potential client doesn’t care about you. They care about them-self. So I totally overhauled my profile and changed it from me focused into client focused.
Then I started sending out upper proposals again. I sent about 20 more proposals and I got a response. It was magical. It made me incredibly happy. I felt like I was on top of the world, but they didn’t hire me. So maybe overhauling my profile helped, but it wasn’t everything. I went back to the drawing board. This time, I looked at my Up-work hourly rate. Was it my rate that was scaring people off? I had listed my rate at what I wanted to be making, but that got me wondering!
What are other people doing?
I did a bit of searching, and it looked like I was charging around about what everyone else was charging in my space. I thought, well, this is normal, so I’m trying to charge what they charge, right?
Clearly, the other people who were already on Up work had an advantage over me. They’d been on Up work for a long time and had a ton of reviews. I didn’t. At this point, I had to win work to just get started earning. So I dropped my hourly rate to half of what I’d normally want to charge.
But then I was like, wait a second, what if I get locked into a job where I’m working for cheap and it’s like an enormous project? I want to work, but I don’t want to work for a low price forever.
Low price small jobs great work! +
Maybe… Once I get some good feedback like the other people have, then clients will see I’m good and I can raise my rate. So at the same time I lowered my rate, I also decided to stop bidding on big jobs until I could charge a higher price.
So I started sending proposals again. I sent another 32 proposals, and guess what happened? I got two potential clients sending me messages, but they both hired someone else. But instead of just accepting the loss and keep trying, I did something different this time. I softly quizzed the potential client why she hired someone else, and she told me the other freelancer displayed me some work examples that displayed he was a better fit. Wow, I did not have any Up work clients, so I did not have any work examples to be able to show.
Thus I consideration, how am I supposed to show work examples when I do not have any clients? That is when I checked out my profile again and I discovered something incredible. You don’t have to have an Up work client in order to upload work examples.
A work example could be just something I made. I felt like I had the golden ticket at this point. After I did not have any clients, I just fictitious an imaginary project, pretended that I had a client, and just started making some examples of work that I might do if I had a client who needed that job done. They were not amazing, but I wanted to make them as good as I possibly could so that potential clients could see that I knew what I was doing.
I went ahead and created three solid work examples for the kinds of jobs I was trying to apply for, and I uploaded them to my profile. So at this point,
- I had revamped my profile,
- lowered my rate,
- stopped applying to big jobs,
- created solid work example.
The final frontier, my cover letter.
I took everything I learned from my sales copywriting training and put all of my effort into writing awesome cover letters. I made sure that I customized every cover letter, focused on the client and their frustrations, showed them I was motivated and excited to work together, showed them examples of the work that I could do for them, and gave them a super clear next step to take if they wanted to work with me.
And you know what happened? I won my first Up-work job. Here’s the free cover letter I promised. It’s all yours, but only if you promise to do the same things that I did first. Here it is. Hey Jane, this project sounds really exciting.
I know it can be a rocky road to finding the right Shopify developer that has the skills you need, and who is actually motivated to work closely with you, and that you can trust to get the job done right the first time. I am not like most others who take on as many clients as they can then run off and disappear for weeks at a time.
Instead, I intentionally target a smaller select group of clients that i can work closely with so we can get the exact results you’re looking for without you having to struggle through it every step of the way. So if you’re looking for a motivated, safe set of hands to take the weight of this project off your shoulders and work with you to get the job done right, then let’s have a chat.Thanks for reading this article!
