upwork isn't always sunshine and clear skies with money raining from the heavens the truth is freelancing on upwork is extremely hard and most people struggle to win jobs i've personally made over 780 000 freelancing on upwork and while on the surface that looks amazing what you can't see underneath are all the failures struggles and sacrifices that i've gone through to get here i thought a lot about this and i realized there are five things that i wish i knew before starting freelancing that would have helped me grow insanely faster starting with number one my self-worth no matter what anyone tells you upwork is not a race to the bottom in fact whatever your current rate is i encourage you to go ahead and raise it you see there's a misconception among new freelancers that the only way to win your first job is to bid the lowest rate i promise you that every client on upwork is not trying to take advantage of you and knowing your self-worth will prevent that from ever happening i really wish i had known this when i first started freelancing on upwork because my first job was twenty-five dollars an hour and honestly i should have started with a rate of fifty dollars per hour for my skill set don't get taken advantage of and don't try to win jobs by offering the lowest rate believe in yourself charge what you're worth and prove it the second thing i wish i knew about freelancing before starting is that great portfolios win jobs so when i first created my upwork profile i basically copied and pasted everything from my resume and linkedin and while telling a client what you can do for them is important showing them is way more important for example i've needed help with my youtube thumbnails for a long time and i recently hired some freelancers to help me out can you guess where i found these freelancers if your answer is upwork or fiverr then you're wrong and that's because i actually found them both on twitter okay i know what you're thinking why in the world would this guy hire freelancer on twitter i wanted to work with both of them because they both have amazing portfolios i could see the results they generated for other clients which gave me the confidence i needed to hire them this means that you need to put a lot of time into your portfolio and upwork making sure that you have at least three to five portfolio items so if you want to impress clients and stand out among other freelancers then you need to create a personal portfolio as well listen it's no secret that i love upwork and make the majority of my freelance income on their platform however you need another method of generating leads and a portfolio that you always have full control of now there are two really simple ways that you can do this first you can set up a static portfolio webpage that showcases examples of your work order number two which is my favorite you can set up a simple two-page website one to host your portfolio and the other page for a blog this allows you to showcase examples of your work and create content around your skill set and it only takes a few clicks to get a portfolio up and running on platforms like hostinger which actually has an amazing deal going on right now for premium shared hosting after clicking on my link in the description hostinger. com forward slash josh prince tech you are brought to this webpage where you can get premium shared hosting and a free domain for just 2. 99 per month that's quite big impressive now to help you get an even better deal if we select premium shared hosting and enter coupon code josh prince tech then you will get an additional discount and it's also important to mention that you can select other durations like 12 months which has a much lower cost of just 33.
36 after you get signed up from here you can start creating a wordpress portfolio with just a few clicks select claim domain and i recommend using. com because it's the most used and recognizable then enter a domain name to check the availability this one is available so we can click claim domain and after entering contact details we're good to go now we can easily start creating a portfolio website let's click on setup start now i'm creating a website for myself it will be a portfolio website and i'm a beginner but have some experience select wordpress for the platform click continue now we can choose a theme which makes creating the portfolio very simple i'm going to select the personal portfolio theme choose my domain which we created earlier make sure you choose a server location that's close to you and then click finish setup and there we go the portfolio site is live and ready to be customized so don't procrastinate and get started today if you want to stand out as a professional freelancer click on my link down below in the description and use promo code josh burns tech to get a huge discount the next thing i wish i knew about freelancing before starting is that you need to be ready for imposter syndrome it really doesn't matter who you are because everyone experiences imposter syndrome at some point in their life as a full-time freelancer i often have self-doubt that i'm not good enough i've been lucky everything i've built will come crashing down and eventually i'll be right back in a 9-5 job it's actually so common among freelancers and mine is often caused by overthinking no matter how great of a job that i do on a project i always think there's a chance i'll get a two-star review and it will kill my upwork profile it's that brief moment after typing your review for a client hitting refresh and waiting to see what review they left you and don't even get me started on comparing yourself to other freelancers who have more earnings and five star reviews than you have i used to constantly compare myself to other freelancers and even youtubers until i realized how bad it was for my mental health and all the negativity that it brought into my life don't compare your chapter 1 to someone else's chapter 20.
