Upwork Cover Letter for total BEGINNERS [FULL TEMPLATE!]

I'm gonna give you an Upwork cover letter that you can use word-for-word, even if you're a total beginner, who's never won a single Upwork 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 Upwork job. I started out on Upwork, just like you.

No client reviews, no Upwork 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 a hundred proposals. . .

And didn't get a single response. I spent over $50 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.

First, I looked at my Upwork profile. I had basically copy-pasted my LinkedIn profile. It was a disaster, absolutely terrible.

So I thought, "why not improve my profile by learning from the best? " So I signed up for a course on sales copywriting. 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.

So I totally overhauled my profile and changed it from me-focused, into client-focused. Then I started sending out Upwork 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 Upwork hourly rate.

Was at my rate that was scaring people off? I had listed my rate at what I wanted to be making, but that got me wondering: 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 Upwork had an advantage over me. They've been on Upwork 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 wanna work, but I don't wanna work for a low price forever" "But 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 gently asked the potential client why she hired someone else. And she told me.

. . Wow.

I didn't have any Upwork clients, so I didn't have any work examples to be able to show. So I thought, "how am I supposed to show work examples when I don't have any clients? !

" That's when I checked out my profile again, and I discovered something incredible. You don't have to have an Upwork 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, since I didn't have any clients, I just made up 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 weren't 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 the big jobs, created solid work examples. .

. . .

. and I even dropped a like on this video. Now it was down to 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 Upwork 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. See you in the next video.