How to Write Upwork Cover Letters that WIN JOBS!

what's up everyone welcome to Josh burns tag riding compelling and attractive job proposals is one of the most critical elements and getting consistent and long-term work on upward if you were struggling to get jobs on up work or if you've had a few jobs but you're finding it difficult to build a full-time income then this video is for you I'm going to show you the exact step-by-step process that I use when writing job proposals to capture clients attention fast and show them while working with me is the best option for them providing the most value unlike most upwork tutorials you'll find online from freelancers so you don't have much earnings on the platform haven't had any user activity in forever or just don't even work on the platform anymore but they're trying to give out tips to you I'm personally one of the top freelancers on all of our work I've worked with over a hundred clients and have earned over five hundred thirty thousand dollars in just three years I've been featured on works website I'm in there marketing campaigns I'm the top freelancer an IT and networking category that has over a hundred thousand freelancers in it and my profile has tons and tons of five-star reviews and great feedback as well and just like a lot of you I face the same struggles when I first started my freelance journey I submitted tons of proposals without being noticed I tried to underbid on jobs I made so many mistakes because I just didn't have any experience and honestly I didn't know what I was doing when I first started out my goal is to help you avoid the mistakes that I made and share everything with you that has worked for me and getting me to where I am today as a freelancer in this video I'm gonna change the way you think when writing job proposals putting you in the perspective of the client and their needs please take notes when watching this video go back and re-watch it and most importantly implement the tips I'm giving you something that I mentioned constantly on this channel is putting in the work and executing rather than just consuming my content you're already on the right path by consuming content that will make you better and move you forward however you have to consistently put in the work and execute which is going to continuously move you forward to the next level and next level and make you better as a freelancer I love hearing about your freelance success stories and I also feature those in a lot of videos as well so please continue leaving comments with those this channel has helped tons and tons of freelancers all around the world to earn life-changing money take control your pay rather than relying on an employer for raises have complete job flexibility high-paying skillsets and all that I'm asking a return from you is smashing the like button and calming down below so this video will get promoted more freelancers all around the world let's go ahead and get started writing job proposals that will prove to clients why you're the best freelancer for them before you ever click submit proposal you first need to fully identify if the job is right for you now I have a specific process that I use when determining if a job is right for me I've created a video on that in the past it's one of the best videos in my entire channel I'm gonna link it at the top of the screen so be sure to check that out so do I use job proposal templates I get asked this question a lot on my youtube channel and the answer is both yes and no having pre-canned templates is usually not the best idea because you're throwing away your chance to be creative original and custom tailor your job proposal for each client so for the no part of my answer using a pre canned template to bid on every single job that you submit a proposal for is something that I do not recommend and for the yes part of my answer you're gonna have certain sentences and certain phrases that are in all of your job proposals I have a text file saved to my computer that contains the main selling points that are repeated in all of my job proposals that are copy and paste in if you choose to do this as well first copy it into a Word document to avoid spelling and grammar issues after I paste in the main selling points I then custom tailor my job proposal for the client at hand so now we're gonna jump to up work and I'm gonna write a job proposal breaking it down into sections that you can easily implement for yourself as well so I'm gonna use this job that I was invited to bid on because it's something that falls directly into my skill set and it's a typical job that I do on up work as well my hourly rate at $100 an hour is a little bit higher than what they're estimated the high end of the budget is however they're really eager to get started and it's something that I do a lot the very first thing that you should do which should be obvious but most of us including myself get impatient at times is to fully read the job description before you start constructing your cover letter you need to fully read the job description so that you can build your cover letter around what the client is looking for and even more importantly make sure that you have all the necessary skills for the job as well if the client has been on the up work you also need to look at what the client has paid other freelancers to make sure that your price range is something that they would consider so this is a new client on up work so I can't do that specifically they have three posted jobs but haven't hired anyone yet if they were an established client in this blank section here it would show previous jobs that they had and if they were an established client this is what you would see under client history and then what I would do is go through their job history you can see this one's at seventy-five dollars an hour look at the skill level for the job that I'm bidding on if it's an expert level job and they paid 75 dollars in the past then I could definitely place my bid at 75 dollars an hour or a little bit higher as I mentioned earlier I have another video which I will link above that I recommend you watch after this video where I dive into how to submit the write-up work job proposals in your case when searching for a new job you would click Submit proposal as I said earlier I'm gonna leave my $100 an hour rate now a lot of you are gonna see this and have a question about it as well so the 20% up work service fee is only for the first 500 dollars that you make with a new client after you pass 500 dollars earned with a client and trust me you're gonna make over 500 dollars with most of your clients most of my clients have made thousands of dollars even over ten thousand dollars with after you pass five hundred dollars with a client this 20% up work service fee drops down to 10% so in that case I would be earning 90 dollars an hour rather than 80 and then furthermore after you earn $10,000 with a client and if some of you don't think that's possible go to my profile look at my work history I have so many clients I've earned over ten thousand dollars with after you pass ten thousand dollars with a client your upwork service fee drops down to 5% so for any new freelancers out there that see people constantly complaining about upwork service fees trust me they're 100% worth it it drops down really low after you make earnings with clients trust me as someone that's been on up work for over three years and has made over five hundred thousand dollars the fees you're paying for the platform all the clients they bring to you it's more than worth it alright so now I'm gonna scroll down and this is where we're going to construct the cover letter alright first I'm gonna copy and paste my template again this template contains things that are repeatable things that I say consistently in my draw proposals to prevent me from having to type those things out the repeatable things every single time those are copied and then pasted so I'm gonna open my text file copy the text jump back to my cover letter paste in my template and now we're gonna start constructing the cover letter tailoring it specifically to this client so we're gonna write the cover letter and step-by-step sections as you can see the first section is to grab attention and hook the client fast the first and by far the most critical part of your job proposal is the first one to two sentences where you capture their attention you need to capture the clients attention fast then creatively and focus on standing out when clients are looking through a job proposals submitted for their job for each freelancer who submitted a job proposal the client will see their profile photo their name their title their hourly rate earnings location and most importantly the first one to two sentences of their cover letter this is why the first one to two sentences are so immensely critical it's your chance to grab their attention and give them a reason to click on you before you even have a chance to have your cover letter and job proposal viewed by a client you have to give them a reason to click on you and after we write this section we're gonna jump to my upwork employer account and i'm gonna show you the winning job proposal submitted by alex my youtube video editor who's editing this video i'm gonna show you his job proposal that jumped out at me and caused me to hire him alright so now we're thinking about how we can jump out and stand out among all the other freelancers most of them are gonna start out by saying I have X amount of years of experience in this technology but we're gonna do something different we want to capture their attention we want to jump out at them so I try to use something different for each client but this is something that I would say when viewing your job details it really jumped out at me so with this first sentence we're using an action word by using jumped and we're telling them that their job details really jumped out at us now what that's going to do is it's going to give them confidence that this is something that you're really calm and in doing it's something that falls in within your skill set with the next sentence go directly into what they're looking for this specific client is working on a tool for ETL and also high availability and disaster recovery so I'm gonna go ahead and hit directly on their job details so I'm gonna say I have extensive experience in ETL development utilizing SSIS and other as well as implementing always on high availability and disaster recovery solutions for large clients so now we grab their attention with the first sentence telling them that their job details really jumped out at us and then we dive directly into why the job details jumped out if you looked at the job details one thing they mentioned is needing to start immediately latest by this upcoming Monday so I'd like to keep my job proposals pretty condensed but I'm probably gonna go ahead and add it in since it's something that they really are focusing on I also reviewed my calendar and I'm ready to get started immediately this Monday 3:16 so I feel really great about this first section and it accomplishes everything that I'm looking to do by grabbing their attention and hooking them fast so I'm gonna go ahead and delete this section title off move everything up to the top and now before we move on to the next section what I'm gonna do is log into my upwork employer account and I'm gonna show you the job proposal that was submitted by Alex who I hired as my video editor alright so now we're logged into my upwork employer account and we're looking at the job I created when I needed a video editor for my YouTube videos there was a total of 19 proposals submitted for this job and we're gonna go through and look at the winning one so again when looking at each freelancer that submitted a job proposal we can see their profile picture their name their job title their hourly rate how much they've earned their location and then the first one to two sentences of their cover letter that's why your first one to two sentences are so critical so let's take a look at Alex's who I hired let's go ahead and read Alex's first one to two sentences so here's something that could actually go back and add into my cover letter you can see that he opened up his cover letter with a friendly statement saying hello and then next he says I'm a professional video editor and motion graphics artist and lost angellist and your posts really jumped out at me so saying that the post or job details really jumped out at him that's something that I just added into my cover letter which we just wrote the first two sentences a moment ago so something else I was really powerful and led to me clicking on his draw proposal is this next sentence ideas for your channel be yourself there's no one on earth like you what makes you so special the fact that he took the time to go ahead and throw ideas and advice for my channel that really jumped out at me and it made me click on his draw proposal so again you have to be creative and you have to be original think of ways to get them to click on your job proposal that's exactly what Alex did his attractive and compelling cover letter that led to me clicking on his draw proposal has in turn led to him making over $10,000 with me as a video editor so I'm gonna go ahead and add in a friendly greeting as well I was invited to bid on this job so the clients name was actually in the job details and here's a pro tip for you if you weren't invited to the job what you can do to identify the name of the client is you can go look at their job history go look at the job history and look at reviews that freelancers have left for the client most of the time and the freelancers reviews for the client they mentioned the name of the client that's a pro tip for you to help you identify the name of the client and then you can add their first name into the cover letter within your friendly greeting alright so now we're ready to move on to the next section which is examples of work clients want to know that you can deliver high quality work on their project and will want to see specific examples of your work relating to the project right after the attention-grabber and hook that causes the client to click on your proposal next dive right into an example of your work that directly relates to their job or project this is where you're going to build your credibility with the client something that I do frequently is briefly describe a previous project that I completed successfully using keywords from the clients job overview and then link the job directly below as well so let's go ahead and do that now so this is one section of my template that I've actually needed to update for a while and we're gonna do that now because I added in a new section below this one to build credibility so in this one I want to focus on work that I've specifically done that relates to their project ok so here's what I wrote I've successfully completed numerous sequel server tl and high availability projects for clients on the up work which have five-star ratings and great feedback as well please review the jobs linked below that are directly related to your job details and what I'm gonna do now is jump to my up work profile and grab some links to jobs that I've completed successfully that directly relate to their job okay here's the first one that I'm gonna use this was actually one of my largest projects on up work data system engineer but the reason I'm gonna use this is it specifically focuses on ETL development which directly relates to the clients job now I'm going to go directly to the job and to do that I need to scroll down and click on View entire job post now from this point I should be able to copy out the URL and we will paste that in our job proposal if you get a warning message like this just ignore it this isn't linking to contact information it's only linking back giving you an example of the job that we completed one thing that I would do is actually make sure the client can get to this job and to do that I'm logged back into my upwork employer account now and we're gonna try to go to that URL and there we go I was able to successfully get to this job from my upwork employer account verifying that if I put this am on job proposal in the cover letter that the client will be able to see this job so now that I've provided an example of my eto development I need to grab one for high availability as well here's a great one we can use sequel server always-on configuration and monitoring suggestions this directly ties into the high availability portion of their job details I'm going to navigate to the job copy the URL jump back to our job proposal and paste in this job ok so now I have two really good examples of my work that directly relate to the job details and what they're looking for this shows the client right from the start that you can give them what they want from you if you're a new freelancer and you don't have previous jobs on up work to showcase then use an example from a previous job that you held or a project that you completed it doesn't have to be something that you did on the upward it's immensely important to get right to the point and show them why you are the best freelancer for their job when I hired Alex as my YouTube video editor he didn't have any previous experience on up work at all he was a brand new freelancer with zero reviews what linked me directly to his portfolio on his website which had a lot of his work that he's completed through his career think of something creative that you can do as well to give examples of work that you've done so now we're ready to move on to the next section and further build of credibility so in this section my main focus is to give a summary of my experience and highlight some of my achievements as well I'll start out by explaining that I've been a senior sequel server DBA database developer and database engineer for over seven years next I move into some of my achievements stating that I'm consistently one of the top sequel server of freelancers on up work in terms of hours and earnings as well and I also describe how I was selected by up work as a top freelancer in the IT and networking category and I've been featured in the marketing campaigns on the front page of the website in this section try to keep it condensed as well mine is honestly a little bit too lengthy however it's been working for me I like the way it's constructed so I've been leaving it at the link that it's hot however I would try to keep this as two to three sentences max so now that I've built credibility with the client my next step is to explain what separates me why they should hire me it's time to give the client reasons why they should hire you out of all the other freelancers who submitted job proposals briefly and I mean briefly because overall you need to keep your proposals pretty short if you're writing long cover letters clients will not take the time to read your entire life's work and I'm saying this from experience when reviewing job proposals that were submitted on my jobs in two to three sentences max mentioned the reviews and feedback on your profile if you have them the number of jobs you've completed or even your education if you're just starting out basically use any achievements accolades or anything that will make you more appealing than other freelancers and if you take a look at my cover letter now you can see how I did that please review my profile where you will find numerous five-star reviews and raving feedback and then I'll also describe my youtube channel how many subscribers I have and minutes watched as well again in this section use anything that you can think of that would separate you from another freelancer trying to get the same job now we're ready to move to the next section and sink the hook in further so again in one to two sentences max give them a reason while hiring you is the best decision don't start out with this is why you should hire me think creatively and make it a real reason that would hook them take a look at how I usually do this if you choose me you can be assured that you are getting top-notch expertise in sequel server as well as someone who will complete your jobs correctly the first time I use this to build their confidence in me that I will complete their job successfully and ultimately be a good return on investment for them they are spending their money or their businesses money on you and want to know that it will be a good investment for them I don't know about you but personally I don't like to waste money the client definitely doesn't want to waste their time and money on someone who can't deliver on their projects successfully so again in this section be creative and think of a way to sink the hook in further now we're ready to move on to one of the most important sections which is the call to action it's immensely important not to leave the client pondering contemplating your proposal and likely moving on to the next proposal this is where you want to think like a copywriter and cause them to take action I usually do this by using a statement similar to the following let's jump on an initial 10-minute call free of charge so that we can discuss your project in more detail and identify how my skill set will work best for you and provide immense value to your organization as well not only does this give them a call to action by telling them that you want to jump on a call saying let's jump is an action or immediate phrase indicating that you want to get on a call ASAP but if they do want to set up a call with you it will also give you the chance to learn more about their project identify if anything was left out of the job description identify if it's a good fit for you and determine if the client will be good to work with this intro call is so important for you in setting yourself up for success it's been instrumental in my reviews feedback and overall success on up work as a freelancer the initial call allows me to determine if I still want the job after grabbing their attention I really can't stress enough or convey in words how important your client reviews client feedback and job success score are on upward you need to get as many five-star reviews as possible with great feedback as well for example I recently built a home gym at my house and I purchased equipment on Amazon when looking for dumbbells for my home gym I considered a few different ones I look through the ratings and feedback to see what customers were saying about the one set was cheaper but the reviews were not the best in the product reviews most customers stated that there were quality flaws it didn't last as long along with other issues the one that I purchased was flooded with great reviews and tons of happy customers which gave me confidence in the quality of the product which ultimately led to me purchasing it this is exactly how you need to think about your upward profile and your client feedback so now we're ready to move on to the next section which is professional closing be professional and friendly with your cover letter closing I always use best regards but you can use anything similar as well or you can even thank them for taking the time to read your proposal and this goes without saying but you should always be professional and friendly anytime that you communicate with a client soft skills and business and freelancing are just as important as your actual skill set being kind and friendly will build relationships with your clients that hopefully will result in long term work I have tons of clients on up work that I have consistently been working with for years that should be your goal to get to a point where you don't have to constantly search for new jobs after you get some long-term clients you're then able to build a steady and consistent stream of income and the jobs will start coming to you always put yourself in the perspective of a client and consider what you would expect from a freelancer if you were the client once you get to a point in your business where you need help or you just need to delegate a task that you don't have time or expertise in create a client account on up work and however freelancer to help you this will be an eye-opening experience and will completely change the way that you work as a freelancer because you will be actually in the perspective of the client and identify things you need to start doing better as a freelancer hiring my video editor has been huge for me and how I handle my upwork client relationships be sure to scroll back through your cover letter see I've already noticed that I'll need to delete this section title off go back through your cover letter one more time and make sure everything looks the way it needs to if you have any attachments that you want include and I'll give you an example of something that I usually include I have screenshots from when I was an up works marketing campaign that was featured on the website I have screenshots of those and I usually attach them so I went ahead and attached them this first one is a screenshot when I was featured on the front page of the website and this one is from a social media post and if you want to see what those look like here's the first one this is when I was featured on the front page of the website and here's a social media post on Facebook where I was featured as the cover photo and there was a post about me as well and after you've went through and double-checked everything you're ready to click Submit at this point you've put yourself in the best position possible by breaking down your cover letter into sections putting the time in putting the work in into constructing a great great cover letter and this client may go with another freelancer they may go with another freelancer based on price they may choose one that submitted a proposal earlier than you did you never know however if you consistently construct your JA proposals and cover letters the way that we did in this video you're gonna put yourself in the best position possible to win jobs long-term this specific client may go with another freelancer however the next one could choose you you have to be patient and you have to be consistent in the way that you construct your JA proposals and cover letters there's so much that goes into being a top-rated and hiring in freelancer this is definitely one of the best and most important freelance videos that I've ever created on my channel before you get that opportunity to work with a client on up work you have to know how to hook them and how to capture their attention in this video gives you the exact steps that I have used personally to get over a hundred clients on up work and most of those clients have offered repeat and long-term work it's not gonna be easy and it shouldn't if it was easy then everyone would be working from home making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year tons of people will get frustrated and then give up and throw away an opportunity that can drastically change their lives like freelancing has done for me I am 100% self-made as a freelancer I invested so much into developing my skills and sacrifice a lot to be where I am now I want you to know that it's possible for you as well before I started learning my freelance skills I had no idea how to work with a client I was in the same position as many of you I built so many times had way more losses than wins had tons of setbacks but my perseverance determination and resilience can be going still to this day I get five star reviews and excellent feedback from clients but I always reflect on the job and think about everything that I could have done better I am never content with my work and that's something that always takes me to the next level prevents me from plateauing and you were gonna fail often have losses and setbacks but all those things are gonna be learning experiences they're gonna make you stronger and make you better long-term failing is one of the best ways to get better and learn so don't be afraid to fail being afraid to fail prevents so many people from ever going after their dreams by I know all of you have what it takes to be successful freelancers so putting consistent work grind and let's get to work on this in screen I recommend checking out these videos and be sure to hit that round subscribe button for weekly tech videos and hit that notification bell so you don't miss anything thank you for watching and until next time [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Josh Burns Tech

Views: 122,911

Keywords: upwork proposal, upwork proposals, upwork job proposal, upwork cover letter, upwork tutorial, upwork, how to write proposal, cover letter tips, how to write a cover letter, how to write a proposal, upwork proposal tips, upwork for beginners, upwork tutorial for beginners, upwork profile, upwork skills, up work, upwork.com, how to use upwork, how to start freelancing, how to write cover letter, how to write upwork proposal, cover letter, upwork profile approval, upwork tips

Id: kPKMJY2Ije8

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020