Back when little JMO was just a freelancing tadpole…
I made the mistake virtually every new freelancer does. That makes freelancing 10X harder than it has to be. Awful clients. Projects you hate. Getting paid pennies. It’s easy to see why so many people give up on it.
My mistake was taking any and every client I could.
I built a weird e-commerce app for a guy.
Jackin’ around with creating PDFs in PHP for another.
Hacking WordPress for yet another.
I didn’t enjoy any of it. So, I procrastinated HARD. Clients got pissed. I had to refund a couple, because I just couldn’t bring myself to finish. And, they weren’t paying me much to begin with.
It was miserable.
Then, I built a membership site for a guy.
And, I really enjoyed it.
And, I decided to do only that… not out of some genius insight about marketing or freelancing. But, because I was just sick of doing all the other stuff. But, what I discovered is that the more I just built membership sites.
The less I procrastinated.
The more I got paid.
The easier getting clients became.
And, the happier I was.
It all went hand-in-hand.
That’s the trick. The first big step as a freelancer. Figuring out your niche. That “magic” elixir of what you love doing, that you’re good at, that others are willing to pay you to do for them.
That’s when the freelance “dream” becomes real.
And, it take some thinking…
And, some experimenting.
Trust me, you’ll be 1000x happier as a freelancer if you spend some time figuring out what your niche is… instead of doing what most do, which is either just be a “generalist” who tries to be everything to everybody.
Or, focus only on the muney.
And, try to grunt your way through it.
In any case, once you figure out what your niche is, NOW you need to find those clients… who want exactly what you have to offer. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to consistently find your perfect clients on Upwork…
The largest freelancing platform on the planet.
The exact kinds of projects you want.
The exact budget.
The highest quality clients.
I show you the strategy I use to filter through all the trash on Upwork to find the diamonds in the rough… in lessons 4 and 5 of Module 3 in my Freelancing on Upwork course on SkillShare.
And, it’s more than applying a few search filters.
It’s an entire strategy for consistently finding the best projects at any given time. Since, there’s always so many projects in and out of Upwork.
Anyway, you can start taking the course on my free tutorial site here: https://johnsfreetuts.com/upwork101/
Later,
John
