so first I want to talk about mistakes because my journey going from zero to $100,000 Plus on upwork has been filled with them I've been inconsistent I've written terrible confusing proposals and I've even taken on clients that I shouldn't have taken on but obviously I'm not perfect and I'm just trying to learn as I go but the biggest mistakes that I've made and the biggest mistakes that I see other people making come on the writing proposals and the reason this is so important is because your proposal is the first thing that a client's going to
see of you and if you can truly Master the skill of writing proposals that convert you can quite literally print money from your laptop live wherever you want in the world and live your dream life so that's why I want you to watch this video and stick around till the end because I'm going to reveal the five principles to a winning proposal on upwork before we dive in I want to make it very very clear that the goal of our proposals is not to provide every single Last Detail and answer every single last question that
the client may be thinking no our goal is much much simpler than that the goal with our upward proposals is simply to get the client to click on the proposal read the entire thing click on our profile and then send us a message so that being said here are the five principles to a winning proposal on upwork the first principle that all winning proposals follow on upwork is that they take the context into account now this is especially important if you're just beginning on up Park and you need to ask yourself the question what is
the context that people view my proposal with within right when they click on my proposal and then they click on my profile do they see lots of reviews do they see client testimonials do they see case studies do they see that I have lots of money earned on upwork right or is it the opposite do they see that I have no money no case studies and no testimonials because depending on which side you fall on that will change how we actually write our proposals and like I said this is especially important if you're just beginning
on upw work even if your super experienc in your industry maybe you've been offering SEO for 10 plus years but you're just now getting on upw work you still need to mention that right away and just be honest with people tell them that you're super experienced with your service but you're just now starting out on upwork and then give them more and more context so that they can interpret your proposal properly and this just as well goes for people who have super super great upward profiles and lots of money earned mention that you're an upwork
veteran and talk about those things and your experience in your up proposal principle number two is social proof above all your proposals need to have some element of social proof in them whether that's reviews case studies client interviews testimonials talking about big companies you've worked for or even just your years of experience you need to incorporate at least one of those elements into your proposals but ideally three or more right and just think about it from the client's perspective if you got two proposals which one would you rather message the one with no experience and
no social proof or the the one that says they have 20 plus years of experience and they've worked with Starbucks Microsoft and Netflix right the choice is pretty obvious that being said if you don't have any social proof that's totally fine and there are two ways that you can overcome this number one you can go really in depth and talk in detail about your process right so do like do you like to start projects with a kickoff call with an onboarding form is there some other process you go through right talk in depth about that
process and what that looks like because that makes clients assume that you have lots of experience right because they make the assumption that if you have a very standardized process that you have at least some sort of experience and number two is that you can put a major emphasis on principle number three which is personalization your proposals need to be personalized especially if you lack social proof If you lack social proof the best way to make up for that is with Hyper personalized proposals and I mean three to five sentences of intense personal ization right
if they mention their company's name in the job description research their company find their website and again submit a hyper personalized proposal to that job when I signed my first client on upwork it was because the job description mentioned their app and their company name in the job description and so I went I pulled up my phone I downloaded their app from the App Store I played around with it for 10 or 15 minutes became a user and then wrote a hyper hyper personalized proposal that talked about my experience using their app if you already
have social proof then we still need to personalize our proposals to some extent but the process needs to be scalable right so it's a fine line to walk because we still need to personalize these proposals so that they convert better but at the same time as we get more and more clients we're going to get busy and so this process needs to be easy to scale so here are the two things that we do at my company to personalize our proposals at scale so the first thing is we always find the job Poster's first name
and we include it in our proposal so we always start our proposals with hey first name or dear first name and the second thing is we write a personalized first sentence right and so obviously that is based on the job description so our first line of our proposals looks like hey first a I'm confident I can help you with and then we talk a little bit about what they wrote in the job description that's easy it's scalable and it's simple the fourth principle to every winning proposal on upwork is that they use an email format
now I can promise you this nobody absolutely nobody wants to read your 1,000w essay of a proposal right like we already covered these proposals are designed to Peak the client's interest get them to your profile and get them to send you a message so RS are typically between 200 and 300 words they're simple they are well spaced they don't have grammatical errors in them we use shorter paragraphs and overall they're very unintimidating and easy to read now I've spent over $30,000 myself hiring contractors and employees on upwork I've reviewed thousands of proposals and I can
guarantee you that most proposals I see look like they're terrible they're big clunky paragraphs they have lots of grammatical errors in there and as soon as you open them up you can tell that they're awful and so obviously we want to avoid that our proposals should be easy to read well spaced out they should have no grammatical errors in them and overall they should be very unintimidating the fifth principle to every winning proposal on upwork is that they have a clear call to action now again this is where most people go wrong and if we
think about this from the client's perspective if a client posts a job on upwork you know these jobs often get 30 40 or even 50 proposals being submitted to them and so if a client posts a job and they're reviewing all the proposals they might read one click on the next one read the next proposal click on the next one and we want to interrupt that pattern right we want them to click on our proposal read the entire thing read our call to action and then click on our profile and send us a message and
so we should have one simple clear call to action at the end of our proposal and my personal favorite is to say this I'd love to learn more about you and your project is there a time this week or next that you're free for a 25 minute Zoom call right it's clear it's concise and it gets people to message us and there you have it those are the five principles to every single winning proposal on off work and so I can guarantee you that if you implement these steps you're going to get more views more
messages and you're going to close more clients on upwork and if you're interested in having me and my in-house team execute on these five principles for you feel free to book a meeting with me using the link below
