Recently, I got the ‘top rated’ status on Upwork. Upwork is a global freelancing platform where business and freelancers can meet and work remotely on projects. You might question what is this top rated status is all about?

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Advantages

Well, this status has a couple of advantages for freelancers, such as

• A badge on your Upwork freelancer profile
• Personalized tips to strengthen your profile
• Exclusive invitations to submit proposals
• Private access to the Top Rated Community forum
• An exclusive job-digest email to make it easier for you to find attractive opportunities

The most important requirement to get the status is to keep a job success score of at least 90% for a couple of months. This score is, as you might expect, calculated by the amount of projects that have been successfully finished divided by the total amount of projects.

After, I shared my update I got questions from some people on how I got this done or “how I got any project at all?”. Yes, I know there is quite of lot of competition from all over the world and it’s not easy.

Tips

However, I can give you my tips to get started on Upwork:

• Have a complete profile and set your availability.
• Respond to job invitations and it’s best to do it within 24 h. Upwork keep statistics about these which you can view in “My Stats”.
• Only do projects, you are (pretty) sure you can do. It might be tempting to submit a proposal to a project that looks really cool, especially if you are low on budget. But how sure are you that you can really do it? Even if you can do it, but the project will take at lot longer than the client requested (i.e. because you have to update your knowledge) it might be better not to do it, since the client will not be totally satisfied and the review won’t be great.
• Be modest in your salary requirements for your first projects. For me it was not so easy to get my first projects, since I didn’t have any reviews that they could use as a reference. I realized I needed some good reviews, so I applied to a lot of projects with a lower rate than my ideal rate, to increase the chance that a client would offer the project to me. It think it worked, since I got my first projects and after that I became easier to get other projects as well.
• Communicate with your client regularly. Some clients wants to communicate daily, others weekly, so this depends. The same applies for the type of communication, some via Upwork and others via email or Skype. You can just ask him/her about this so both of you are sure about this.

Hope, you will find this useful. Please let me know your experiences or questions!