My First Month Writing on Upwork
For the unfamiliar, Upwork is a site that connects freelancers with clients. I’ve been thinking about diversifying my writing more and stumbled across a thread about Upwork on Twitter a little over a month ago. I decided to take a look. The site is clean and relatively easy to navigate, with a bit of practice. Setting up a profile takes some time, but it’s important to get that right. To save time, I reactivated a LinkedIn account I hadn’t used in years, updated it, and uploaded it to Upwork. If you don’t have a LinkedIn, you’ll have to slog it out entering your work and education history. If you’ve been on the fence about getting on LinkedIn, it might be worth it to kill two birds with one stone. You’ll also have to set up payment and tax details and verify your identity.
Once I got set up, it was time to try to find some work. I’ll admit that I found it a bit challenging, at first. The hardest part was setting a rate. Writing isn’t valued the way it should be, in my opinion, and there are a lot of lowball offers on the site that I wish people wouldn’t entertain. There are also people literally looking for someone to do their homework for them (write college application essays, term papers, presentations, etc.). I realized pretty quickly that I was going to have to develop a quick draw system to thumbs down job postings that didn’t smell right. Once I got the lay of the land, it was…
