Why You're Not Getting Clients on Upwork (It’s These Settings)

Upwork sets you up to fail. There are default settings in your account right now that are killing your profile, and you probably don't even know that they exist. This video is going to fix all of that, expose them, and get you on the right track. So let's get right into it. I'm going to start with the ones that cost you and me money. I'm talking real money. I'm talking thousands of dollars a year money, and I wish I was joking. I'm talking about settings that keep taking your money on a loop long after you've forgotten that you ever switch them on. And even though it sounds like, oh, that would never happen to me, Upwork makes it way too easy to get these wrong. So stay to the end and I'll give you all 12 of them in a checklist that you can work through in 10 minutes. When I tell you that Upwork is a search engine, I mean that technically, not as a metaphor. That's what it is. It's not a job board, it's a search engine with a shop window attached. And every setting in your account is an input into who sees the shop window. The tactics change constantly— connects, pricing, boosted proposals, AI matching— whatever comes next. The settings sit underneath all of it. If you fix them once, they pay you for years. And this works whether you've never won a contract or you're Top Rated Plus and quietly watching your invites dry up. Let me show you what I mean. First, let's kill a myth, because if you've ever heard of the auto-refill feature on Upwork that auto-buys connects when they get low, it doesn't exist. But what actually exists is far, far worse, because it's real. Go into Settings, Membership, Freelancer Plus. That is $20 a month, and it renews itself every month without fail, forever, whether you used it or not. That's the card charge that nobody remembers agreeing to. Now, Plus is worth it in my opinion. It comes with 100 connects a month, which at 15 cents each is $15 of the feedback on its own. Plus your profile never gets hidden. And plus, if you see what I'm doing there, you can see what others are bidding. If you're applying every week, it's a tool, it's a weapon. If you signed up in January and haven't sent a proposal since Easter, that's $140 of subscription for nothing. It's not a scam, but it is a gym membership. Now here's the thing that people get wrong. They're like, hey Mike, it's only $20, whatever. That's not the problem here. The problem is the second setting, boost bidding. When you boost a proposal, you're in an auction. You set a maximum number of connects and Upwork can charge you up to that maximum. Connects are 15 cents each. And yes, that's my actual purchase history on the screen right now. So people, they set a high ceiling just in case for Forget about it and pay top price to get ignored on jobs they were never gonna win anyway. Run that on your own account. A $200 Connect ceiling is $30 a proposal. Most people are shocked at the annual number. You're not being aggressive there. You're paying faster to get rejected. And while we're on money, check out where it goes out to. Billing, get paid, 2 things. Your withdrawal method, a wire can cost you $30 a time, while direct deposit, it costs under $1. And your schedule set to weekly, you pay the withdrawal fee 52 times a year instead of 12. If you're outside the US, there's a third one, the currency conversion, where roughly 2% quietly disappears from every withdrawal. On real earnings, that's hundreds a year for choosing the wrong dropdown. Fixing all of this takes 2 minutes. Plus, keep it or cancel it, but decide on purpose. So bring the boost ceiling down. And unless you've worked with that client before or they're an exact match for your specialism, The answer on boosting is no every time. If your proposal wouldn't stand out unboosted, more connects just simply will not fix it. Withdrawals cheapest method monthly. Now that's the one with the financial consequences, and I needed to get that out of the way first. Luckily, this next one won't cost you anything directly; it'll just quietly delete you from the platform instead. You can have the perfect profile that nobody's allowed to see. Check this: not shadow banned, not penalized, just switched off. Go into settings. Then profile visibility, and there's 3 options: public, private, or Upwork users only. And at some point, you're gonna switch this off if you haven't already. And when you work out how long it's been off, your stomach is going to drop. And again, the reason always sounds sensible at the time. Full-time job, don't want this employer seeing it, booked solid for a month, whatever it might be. They set it private and then they forget. And here's the part that should worry you, even if you never touched it. On the free plan, Upwork can hide your profile All by itself. Go quiet for around a month, no proposals, no logins, and the platform switches you off. It doesn't send you a card. So if your invites died and you changed nothing, maybe nothing needed changing. Maybe you just went quiet. Upwork Users Only feels like the safe middle option. I don't know why that option even exists, to be honest, but it does. It doesn't mean discreet. It means you've deleted yourself from the open web. And Private goes further. You're gone from search inside of Upwork too. Invitations stop completely. That's my profile on page 1 of Google. No website, no ads, no SEO, one dropdown. Your profile sits on a domain that you could never outrank on your own, and people switch that off to feel private. You're not being careful. You're hiding from the clients that you're trying to attract. Set it public. It takes 10 seconds. And while you're there, make sure that your earnings are visible, because hiding your earnings doesn't read as modest. It reads as empty. All right, so those are the settings that protect you from yourself. Now I want to talk about the thing that people actually see when they land on your profile, and why most freelancers keep getting this wrong for some reason. Go and pull your profile up right now. If it looks empty or cluttered or confusing in any way, you're losing clients. And I'm not talking about the ones who read it and decided against you. I'm talking about the people out there who wanted to hire you and never messaged because you screwed up in the first 10 seconds. Bit harsh, but it's true. Your profile is a storefront, right? Somebody walks in, It needs to be clean, easy to scan, and intentional enough to guide them towards one specific thing. 3 mistakes, and the first one gets under my skin the most. It's your title. Most people write a job description: freelance digital marketer. Nobody types that. Nobody hires that. Your title is a search term. Google Ads manager for e-commerce brands, $100 million plus managed. Specialism, audience proof. The second one your overview. Upwork truncates it so you get 2 lines before the more link. And here's where everybody writes, hi, I'm a passionate X with 5 years of experience. Nobody in the history of this platform has ever hired because of that sentence. Open with a diagnosis instead. Most e-com accounts aren't losing money on bids, they're losing it on a search terms report that nobody's read in 6 months. That earns the click on more. The 3rd one, and this sounds smart, right? Leading your portfolio with your best ever project. The problem is it usually looks like you haven't worked in years. Newest and strongest are at the top. And then the setting that people don't think of as a setting, and this is your rate. The number on your profile isn't what you earn. It's a filter on who contacts you. Price yourself at the bottom of your market and the serious clients, they just scroll past. Because on this platform, cheap doesn't read as a bargain. It reads as a risk. Your rate is positioning. Set it like one. The same with your photo. It should be you, clear, decent background. Not a logo, not AI generated. That stuff disconnects people from the human experience. And by the way, every one of these settings is in a free checklist. The link is in the description. Perfect companion to this video. This isn't rocket science, guys. Most of it is common sense. You have to put yourself in the client's shoes. It's about being intentional because that's the first impression somebody gets when they land on your profile. Now, those were settings where Upwork's working against you. This next one, the problem is entirely you. And honestly, this one might hit a little close to home. Upwork asks how many hours a week that you want to work. That is not a preference, that's a filter. And I'm going to be transparent with you for a second. My invites dried up for months and it was completely my fault. Nothing had changed. It was the same profile, the same reviews, the same rate. And then I found out my availability sat on as needed, open to offers, where I'd left it during a busy quarter and never gone back. These are the beginner mistakes that I'm sharing with you here, so stay with me. 'Cause here's why that matters so much. Clients filter search results by availability and the rate. Recruiters and agencies filter by it hardest of all because they're trying to fill something this week. So the second you sit outside of that filter, you haven't lost the job because unfortunately you were never in the room where the job was being discussed in the first place. And this is the bit that took me way too long to understand. I thought my profile had gone stale. I thought the algorithm had moved on past me. But it wasn't that the profile had stopped working. It's that I'd literally told Upwork not to show me to anybody serious. As needed, open to offers is the most expensive piece of honesty in freelancing. And I'm not telling you to lie about your capacity. You're not signing anything. It's a search filter, not a contract. Nobody's turning up at your door with 40 hours worth of work and holding you to a dropdown. You have the conversation first. You like the project, and then you agree the hours. The same with the invitations toggle, right? You can switch invitations off completely. People do it during a busy month and never switch it back on. So availability to more than 30 hours, invitations on, and one warning while you're in there: the availability badge costs connects, and it keeps costing connects on a cycle while it's switched on. Worth it while you're actively hunting, a slow leak if you're booked solid and forgot about it. The same rule as everything in this video: on purpose or off. So it feels like we've been playing defense for this whole video, which is a little bit annoying, frankly. Stopping bad stuff, fixing things that shouldn't be in the way to begin with. Now I want to shift gears into being proactive because there's one thing here almost nobody talks about. The best contracts that I've won on Upwork I never applied for. Invitations are by far the most least talked about, most important thing on Upwork, and if you're not engineering for them, you're leaving enormous money on the table. There are 2 games here. The loud game is proposals, connects, boost, Applications. That little hit when a job post hits and you're the first in. Everybody plays it. It costs you money every single day, and it resets at zero every morning. The quiet game is every setting we've just covered— visibility, availability, title, and rate. It costs nothing, compounds, works while you sleep, and the two connect. Every proposal you send is a click-through to your profile. They read 2 lines, and then they go and look at you. If that profile doesn't back up the proposal, you've left the decision to Upwork, and they've just got another 15 freelancers. in that same list. For my first year, I only ever played the loud game— proposals every day, settings treated like admin. It worked in the sense that I ate, but it didn't work in the sense that I started from zero every Monday. Now I audit my own settings every month, half an hour, same discipline I'd give to a client's ad account, because it's the same job. You're not a freelancer applying for jobs, you're a listing competing for impressions. Proposals are outbound, your profile is inbound, and inbound clients turn up having already decided that they want Which is why they argue about your rate far less. Proposals are rented reach. Your profile is owned. Implement these and your profile works when you don't. But here's what I need you to understand. Fixing these settings is not going to make your profile explode overnight. But without making these changes, you will 100% stay stuck. It's as simple as that. None of this makes you better at the work. It makes you findable. And findable is the part that almost nobody is competing on. Everyone else is fighting over the same posted jobs with the same connects. You're the profile that shows up before the job gets posted. Proposals are rented reach, your profile is owned. Now, that checklist that I mentioned at the start— all 12 settings in order with exactly what to set them to. The link's in the description. 10 minutes and you're done with the lot. And if you're ready to go all in on this, how I actually write the proposals once clients can find me, watch this one next. I'll see you in the next one.