How to Get Your First Upwork Job (The $500K Proposal System)

My biggest client on Upwork paid me over $100,000, $100 an hour. I scaled their ad account from $500,000 a month to $750,000 a month whilst tripling their ROAS. The job post that started it all, one sentence, just one: I need a top PPC expert to set up and manage a large AdWords account. No brief, no details, no budget, just that. Every other freelancer who saw that post scrolled past it, no information, probably a tire kicker, probably doesn't know what they actually want. Next. I didn't scroll past it. I clicked on the client's profile and looked at one number: their spending history. It was over $100,000 spent on Upwork. The average hourly rate paid? $40+. One sentence. That's all that the brief was. But I knew where to look in order to qualify them. And that's the difference between freelancers who earn 5 figures a month on Upwork and freelancers who fight over scraps. The thing is, guys, most people on this platform are looking at the wrong things. They read the job title, they check the budget. If the number looks too low, they skip to the next one. If the brief is too short, they skip. And they wonder why they can't land a decent client. The money on Upwork is not hiding. It's in the jobs that everyone else scrolls past. And today, I'm gonna show you exactly how I find them. Live, on screen, the exact system that I use every single day that's made me over half a million on the channel. So this carries over from my previous video. Speed is your first leverage. Before I even open Upwork, I already have all of the best jobs that are available that have dropped overnight, that have dropped right now. It is 10:36. There was a job come through here, as you can see, at 10:33. They're live in my inbox. I've got notifications set for the categories that I care about the most. By the time most freelancers log in and start browsing, I've already applied to the best ones. If we have a quick scan of things that have come through, the latest one here for an AI automations engineer, they're hiring. That looks full-time, and I would avoid that because of the location and, you know, the spend amounts. But we'll get into that a little bit later on. I always leave them unread if I don't like them because I know that then I've reviewed them. That's a little tip, just, it's obvious, but it's what I do. I don't mark them as unread, whereas if I'm going to apply, I mark them as unread while I do some research. We'll get to that as well. But when it comes through to this, if something catches my eye, I'll open it. If I can't find anything in here, I then move on to active search. Which we'll also get to. Now, when it comes down to how you get these notifications, there's a mixed bag in here. You can see, so somebody declined one of my proposals. I was notified about that. That's great, thanks for that. I've got an interview that I should definitely answer to because somebody has asked me to apply to their job, which is the most qualified you can get. And also there's some really good projects inside of here. $134K spent, meta ad specialist for B2B SaaS lead generation. I've scaled Salesflow, I've scaled Claramensis. I've scaled multiple individual SaaS companies over the years, and this is a job that would fit me perfect. This is— this may very well be, uh, during this video or after, one that I apply for. But how do you get these notifications on? Well, head over to Upwork, click the bell icon at the top right, see all notifications. This is— you'll see this is exactly the same thing that I saw in my inbox a second ago at 10:33, the one that I didn't like. And then you hit job alerts. Under job alerts, you go to alert preferences, and inside of here you can set the preferences that you want. Send me instant job alerts by email, alert me about all jobs, set minimum fixed rates. I've got a $3 minimum fixed rate for some reason. You don't need to do that, you can have it set as none. Some people put placeholders in and we're going to cover it. But once you have that, it will be— every single project will be sent to your individual inbox, and that will give you the critical speed advantage that you need over every other advertiser. It's the biggest mover of the lever that I have seen when I'm using Upwork, which is why it's number 1 on this Now, notifications catch the obvious ones, but the real money and scalability is in the jobs that you have to go looking for, because some of them slip through the net. They don't land in your inbox because of the categories that people select and the way that Upwork actually works. So I'm gonna show you exactly how I search to maximise my reach. Let's go. So this is the search page. If you wanna find it, just head over to here, Find Work, then the search bar will pop up. So I'm gonna search for Google Ads management because that's the service that I after. Now, I— so I search for the Google Ads management. First thing that I then do is I filter by country. So I only want projects that are in the UK, that are in the US, and that are in Canada, let's say. For you, maybe different. For me, this is where I want to focus my, my efforts and energy. Not because other countries aren't worth it, but because in my experience, the quality of client and the budgets tend to be higher in these three. That's where I go when it comes down to the hourly rate. Like, when it comes down to here, you can start high. So you can basically apply a filter of a $50 an hour rate, and most recent, best matches, most recent, 40 minutes ago, Meta and Google Ads expert. Let's open this in a new tab. Let's look at this in a new tab. Let's just go down a bit more. It's remote, they want a full-time job. I would avoid that because of that, although sometimes you can then twist their arm, which is important. So, you know, you could apply for them. Now I've opened two. What you can also do is then switch back to best matches. This was 10 hours ago. This looks really good as well. High-ticket items. I've done yacht sales, I've done everything, so I could fit into this, which is good. You've got these here. You can see they've spent $47K. Um, I'll get into some of those a little bit later on. But what I do is I've done that, so I've now found those 3. So I now go back, and then what I would do is I'll set my maximum hourly rate at $50 an hour, and I'll set my minimum at $40. And what this will do is it'll bring up new projects unless they fit. So that's the same one because they were underneath. Now I go $30 to $40. You get the picture. I'm not going to keep doing This one keeps popping up because of their hourly rate being $15 to $60. It fits both of these categories, you see. So you have— maybe you want to be a little bit more expansive with it in terms of the numbers that you use, but I use them. And like, this one didn't appear the first time when we, when we did it. So you can see how the hourly rate function actually helps. So that's great, but you can just obviously go without it. As I scroll, I'm not scanning and reading every post in detail yet. I'm just looking for signals. I'm looking for things like the amounts that they've spent, their reviews, the you know, the country that they're in. They're looking for a virtual assistant, doesn't match the job, like the job search, which you have to bear in mind as you go through. But I'm just scanning and I'm trying to take a look at what the most recent jobs are that have this in these locations. 1 hour ago, Merchant Center suspension, I avoid it. But you can see here clearly how I filter. Google and Meta conversions tracking expert, £9K spent, based in the UK. Client's estimated budget, $20. Again, now there's something that I'm trying to show you. That is an incredible lead. So for this one, I'm going to love heart that and I'm going to come back to that later on. But as I'm scrolling pulling, right? I'm trying to do it. And what I was looking for is, you know, this here, this sort of wording. Avoid it like the plague. Terrible client. I apologize if you watch this video and it's your job post, but that just— no exceptions. When people write in caps and stuff like that, like, it's like PTSD. You— I understand exactly what the client is going to be like to work with. I never apply for jobs like that. I never apply for jobs from agencies. If an agency is hiring on Upwork, they're looking for cheap labor to mark up 3 times. You're the product, not the partner. I want to work with businesses directly, and that's where real relationships and real retainers come from. So we, you know, you continue with this, with the filtering. Naturally, there's another one there from Canada. That's, that's absolutely fine. The point is you can see that you can manipulate this in order for you to be able to target the highest paying jobs. Like if I selected $1K to $5K, you can see here these projects, they all have substantial budgets around them. That's how I search through the individual jobs and filter through the system. You find a lot of jobs that way that aren't triggered via email notification. Now here's the thing that separates someone who earns 5 figures a month on Upwork from someone who's just fighting over the tiniest projects, and almost nobody talks about this, and I'm going to show you. Inside of here, we come down, these are the Upwork notifications. Look, they're still coming through. I need to be applying for these, not recording this video. So as you come through, you'll find something like this one here, and this is an incredibly good example of where you could have a mismatch in what you been thinking about in terms of the job post. You look at this job, you see a brief summary. I've used the random fixed price. They actually tell you the problem, which is amazing, right? There's that— so that they actually pre-warn you and say, hey, I didn't know how much this is worth, so I'm going to stick this in here. But inside of the client's profile, we get indicators. They're based in the UK, they've had 587 jobs, they've spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars on the platform. Their hourly rate is low. This is a red flag, okay? And they're in fashion and beauty. So the only red flag out of this is their hourly rate. In terms of what you do from here is a decision for you. Monitoring this data is absolutely critical. This is a high-paying client that is highly likely to hire you on Upwork. You can see very, very clearly the contrast between the depth of their job brief which is not much, increasing brand visibility and driving sales through targeted marketing. You can see from that that that's it. But an inexperienced Upworker will see this and bounce. They will see the $10 price tag and bounce. They won't even read it. The experienced Upworkers like myself will see this. When you've been on a platform for 12 years, you, you commonly use it. The challenge with this client is going to be to get them to pay me a retainer that matches my expertise and, and standards and levels. For some of you, going to get $30 an hour from them that pays you $1,000 an hour would be a piece of cake. That's the average over 16,500 hours. Some of them will be $2 an hour, some of them would have been $20, $30 an hour. But the point is, you can find it by looking through here, fixed price projects. Look at that. Customer service needed to provide WhatsApp and chat support. They paid $7 an hour for that. Fixed price, you can see $60, $13 an hour there. More than double the average that we saw. That was the, that was for a Google Ads manager too, which is interesting. Evidently failed there. So the point is, is like there you've got double. If you were on minimum wage and you were looking to, for a job here, you could apply for that at, I don't know, $15 an hour. Let's say $20 an hour. Give them their expertise, tell them that you need 20 hours a month to manage it or whatever, and bang, you've got yourself a client that pays you $400 a month. That is how it goes when it comes down to the Upwork job hunting process. Everyone looks at the budget on a job post. That number means almost nothing. The number that actually matters is what they've spent, their reviews. Click on their profile, look at total spend on Upwork, look at average rate paid, A client who's posted a job at $15 an hour but has historically paid $40 an hour, for example, and spent $200,000 on the platform, that's a completely different prospect than what the job post suggests that it is. And you will end up on the merry-go-round hamster wheel, only applying for the big jobs where they're extremely saturated and missing these golden nuggets like this. I once found a client who posted a $10 project, literally $10, like this, exactly like this. And I almost laughed, checked the profile, $400,000 spent on Upwork, average rate $50 an hour. They didn't just— they just didn't know how to price the job, which is exactly what this individual has told us here. I had no idea that this was going to be here in terms of like the actual— actually saying, you know, I've used the random fixed price. But it shows you they just don't know how to write the job post. They don't know how to quote it. That's an opportunity that everybody else would have missed. And this is exactly what happened with my biggest client. One sentence brief, no budget detail, but the spending history told me everything that I needed to know. Stop reading the job post and start reading the client. So they've done that, the spending history checks out, they've got budget, they pay well. But what that doesn't mean is that they're someone who you actually want to work with. Believe it or not, this is something you'll learn the hard way if you don't take my advice and experience on board here. You do not want to work with every client, especially on the Upwork platform, because when you win projects for Upwork and you keep— you have to keep them on the platform obviously. So you're in a position where you held over a barrel to some degree. No matter how professional you are, if the client just has it in for you for whatever reason, or something happens— you are human after all— then negative reviews harm what future clients think about you. So what do I do? I go through— I'm going to pick a different job for this because we've done this. Let's go back to the email inbox and let's go to the Meta Campaigns Manager. They've only spent 2K. But let's have a look. Let's use this. We'll use it as an example. If not, we can always go back to the other one. So here you see this from a perspective of reviews. Here, their average review rate is 4.78 out of 3 reviews. If you look at the reviews here, it is never given any feedback, or she's never given any feedback. They've got job— multiple jobs in progress. Let's go and try and grab a bigger one that has more spend. This one, I think that this one was part of the video earlier on, so First thing you look at is obviously the overview. I mean, 64 reviews and 5-star. First thing I'm going to do is apply for this job after this video. But when it comes down to, to this, you look through their reviews, everybody says stellar stuff. This is our second time working with Nicholas, and once again, that's the freelancer review. But this one above it is exactly what I wanted to show you. Boris, you know the name of the guy that's likely to be on the other end depending on if it's a company account or what, but Boris. So when you send your message, you personalize it and you name, you say the name Boris. Boris, saw your job post, did it. Very brief, very blunt, but like you saw in the previous video, but you do it in a way that is designed to ensure the application's as effective as possible using what's available. And these are all green flags. Now let me try and find one that would be a red flag. I'm not going to waste too much time on this. We'll see if we can find any of these that are a red flag. That's a red flag to me. No feedback given. They haven't got any closed jobs, really. No feedback given. That to me is always a red flag, but it doesn't— it just— they can just be new to Upwork. They can just be new. So I always check their reviews from previous freelancers, not just the star rating. I always read what people actually said, get the name, Boris, etc. Are freelancers saying they were responsive, clear with feedback, easy to work with? That's a green flag. Other complaints about scope creep, late payments, impossible expectations? That's your sign to move on and skip them. A 5-star client with great reviews and big spending history, that's your dream job. That's where you invest your connects. Now, if it passes that test— reviews are solid, spending history is right— this is where I go further than anybody else applying for the same job. In some cases, this is where I go one step deeper, right? So they have given us the business name in this individual instance, okay? What I want to do is I want to come across if I know more about their business than any other freelancer would do. So I'm going to go into Perplexity. I'm going to ask it to do deep research. In fact, let me just get the, get the URL. So I grabbed this SimpleTix. I've turned on deep research, hit the plus icon, turn on deep research, and I'm going to say— in fact, I'll give it the job brief. I'm applying for this Upwork job. SimpleTix need a PPC manager. And I want some details of competitors and their company achievements so I can blow their socks off with a 2-minute loom. So what I would do is try and spell properly first and foremost, but I would fire that off. This is deep research. So what I would do now is I would continue with my job hunt. I wouldn't stop there whilst it's looking and doing this because it can take a minute or two. To go through and find us this. If you want to be efficient, you want to keep moving. So I would continue to go scroll through job posts and find it. But what I'm actually going to do here is wait. I'll come back to you as soon as the individual searching is done. So the report is done, and SimplyTix here is— was a bootstrap company turned private equity-backed event ticketing platform targeting attraction farms, theaters, museums, and schools. So this gives us a lot of information. Paid search built from scratch. Arkham Ventures took SimpleTix from one sign-up via paid search to over— this is your opening hook. So they've worked with Arkham, they've worked with a company called Arkham Ventures before, which is interesting. That's probably a case study on their website. Would I mention it? We invest in private companies positioned for sustainable growth. No, so that's the— okay, that's the investment company. Signups. This is the opening hook. They already know PPC works and they need someone to optimize. So we can say that. We don't— I don't know if I trust that because it doesn't say anything on the, on the site that's in any great detail. But yeah, they— well, there you go. Okay, that does show that we looked into it, so I am going to use it. Core product USPs, same day payout, head-to-head comparison. Okay. So we're good. So what do we do? We apply. And that's exactly what we, we need to do next. Before I apply for any job, I throw it in Claude like that. If they've got the website, we know who their competitors are, what their positioning looks like. Sometimes I'll even check their socials. I was doing that a minute ago. They've run offers. Have they posted recently? What's their tone of voice? All of this feeds into my proposal on my Loom. By the time the client watches the video, they're thinking, this person knows my business better than the last agency that I tried. That's the whole point. You're not just applying for a job, you're showing up prepared while everyone else is showing up generic. So let me just quickly send this Loom. I'll do it live. Hey Aaron, Michael Elliott here. I'm a top 1% Upwork freelancer with over half a million earnings on the platform. I have a YouTube channel where all I do is speak about PPC and AI and discuss and teach people exactly on the best methods. Now I've done some research on Simplitix. I'm not gonna— Simplitix, I'm not gonna lie. And say that I didn't use AI to do this, but I always like to go one step further when it comes down to my application. I don't just want to go into things on a whim without any backed information. I understand that you've used PPC before when it comes down to using Occam. Um, they helped you scale to 3,700 signups by 2025, so you know that PPC works, and that's the leverage for us in terms of moving forward. When it comes down to the reviews, etc., all of that is great, but what I found really interesting about this this was actually the comparison in terms of the competitor table. Now, going after Tixfox, Eventbrite, TicketSpice, TicketTailor, Tixfox, and Excel Events— going after these is gonna be extremely— I don't want to say easy, but a lot of this stacks up. Your payouts are quite, are quite strong in comparison to what it looks like for everybody else. When it comes down to the individual, you know, revenue in terms of their declining revenue, like, you can see that there's an open gap for somebody to come through here with a fresh set of eyes and it's powerful ammo for your, for your PPC strategy. To prove that I am who I say I am, you can see here that I've handled nearly £40 million in ad spend in the last, what, 3 years? Just over 3 years. And I feel like I can knock this out the park for you. I don't have too much in terms of context around this, but I'm highly ROI-driven, I'm detail-oriented, I'm communication-heavy. Working with me will be a breath of fresh air in comparison to other PPC freelancers and agents agencies that you've worked with, and I don't think you'll find somebody that has the experience that I do that's available and willing to commit in the way that I am. So I can't help you unless you drop me a message, ping me a message, and we'll go from there. Speak soon, Aaron. Bye. So that was a decent loom, wasn't the greatest loom, because inside of here I'd phrased it as if like it was for an Upwork VPC proposal, so it spoke as such. So if he's got a keen eye, you might see there that I've used it, but I didn't hide it, I didn't lie, which is not always my approach. Not that I lie, but that I won't always show him what I found using the AI tool. I just decided to do it there so I didn't have to remember from memory. Aaron, I can see Occam— is that how you spell it? Occam made PPC work for you somewhat, but I know that taking it to the next level Add some Upwork proposals. When I'm adding these Upwork proposals to my application, just to step in here, I don't always add all of the larger ones. I add reasonable size ones as well because I don't want them to be too scared and off-put by large projects. So I try and pick a big one, then the medium ones alongside it. Proposal sent. So guys, then I do exactly what I've just showed you in the previous video and live on screen right now. Short message, punchy, 4-5 lines maximum. That prove that I am who I say I am, that I've done my research, and a 2-minute Loom packed with information that shows that you've looked into their business. High energy. I already understand who they are, what they do. That combination is deadly. The right job, the right research, and the right proposal is why I've earned over half a million dollars on the platform alone. And critically, here's what I want you to take away from this: stop reading job posts the way that everybody else reads them. The title doesn't matter. That business there, you wouldn't have known that they were private equity backed if you hadn't have dug deeper into the business. The title don't matter. The posted budget doesn't matter. The length of the brief doesn't matter. What matters is the client behind the post. What have they spent? What have they paid? What do their reviews say? What does their business actually look like? My biggest client posted one sentence. One. If I judged that job the way that most freelancers judge jobs, I would have scrolled right past it. Instead, it became $100 an hour and over $100,000 paid to me. The money on Upwork is not hiding, it's just in places that most people don't bother to look. Between this video and the last one, you now have the complete system: how to find the right jobs, how to qualify the right clients, how to write Upwork proposals that make them reply, and how to show up in a way that no other freelancer on the platform is showing up. This isn't theory, This is how I built a business that earns over half a million dollars from a single platform, you know, starting with 3 grand in the bank and a baby on the way. If I can do it from there, you can do it from wherever you are right now. Now I want you to go and do something. Go to Upwork right now, sort out all of the settings I just mentioned, find a job post that looks worthless, low budget, short brief, the kind of work that you'd normally scroll right past. Click on the client's profile, check their spending history. Check their average rate paid. Then come back here and tell me what you found. I guarantee at least one of you is about to find a client worth 10 times what the job post suggests. The money isn't hiding, you just have to know where to look. My name's Michael Elliott. I'll see you in the next one.