I tried to tell them.
And I mean literally. A couple years back… I woke up one day to several cease and desist letters in my inbox from Upwork — which was weird to say the least. What in the world had I done? Turns out they were implementing a new policy regarding screen recordings of their site.
Now, it was suddenly a big no-no.
Of course, no warning.
No heads up.
Just a bunch of cease and desist letters followed by copyright strikes on my YouTube channel. In their defense, they did work with me on it and that kept my YouTube channel from getting taken down completely. But, I told the person I worked with at the time…
This is a big mistake.
How many people are going to want to make Upwork content after this?
It sure as hell made me think twice. It’s also why my Upwork content now doesn’t contain any screen recordings or screenshots — which, ultimately, YOU are the one who suffers on that. It’d be a lot better to see the interface as we talk about it… but Upwork says no.
Anyway, here we are several years later and Upwork is hemorrhaging cash.
A 27 million loss in the last 12 months.
That’s while freelancing, as a whole, continues to grow. You’d think the largest freelancing platform on the planet would be killing it right now. Nope. Now, understand… their revenue IS up. But, so are their expenses. And, what’s one of their biggest expenses?
Sales and marketing.
Upwork spent 163 million on it in the last 12 months.
That’s more than 1/3 of its annual revenue.
I won’t pretend to know all the reasons behind all this… but you can’t tell me that ticking off all the biggest Upwork content creators on YouTube hasn’t hurt. That said, this isn’t a call for you to boycott Upwork or anything — quite the opposite actually.
Because you don’t care about me — nor should you.
You care about YOU.
And the fact that Upwork is “down” a bit right now is a good thing, IMO. The fact that they’re likely looking for ways to bring in new freelancers without burning through cash to do it… is a good thing. It’s like the stock market… you buy when the price is low.
When everyone else is running away, you run toward.
My personal opinion is now is a great time for an astute, young freelancer to swoop in and make a killing on Upwork. Me and my “feelz” about my YouTube channel be damned. 😀
Two ways to get the info you’ll need to “strike” while the Upwork iron is hot:
Those are going to teach you a strategy specifically for NEW Upworkers — and answer the question: “How do you compete when you don’t have the Job History and Job Success Score that all the established Upworkers have?”
How do you get clients to hire YOU over them?
There is a way.
And, I’ve got a bunch of student case studies proving it works.
Anyway, I recommend making your way through both to get the complete picture. Sure, it’ll take several hours to get through all of that, but put it in context. Will 5-10 hours seem like such a big deal a year from now if you’re killing it on Upwork?
Grinders win.
Always has and always will be rule #1.
But, up to you.
As always, since the courses are up on Skillshare, you can get them essentially free. Because I’m a teacher there, they give me a special link for you that gets you a 1-month free trial of the site (the normal trial is just 7 days). With that, you get full access to all 30,000+ courses.
And, if you cancel before the month is up, you never pay a penny.
You can do that math on what I’m saying here. 😉
I created a page explaining the whole thing here: https://johnmorrisonline.com/skillshare
Later,
John
