I'm gonna give you an Upwork cover letter that you can use word-for-word, even if you're a total beginner, who's never won a single Upwork job. Before we get into the cover letter itself, first, I'm gonna tell you my story of how I discovered what I was doing wrong as a beginner trying to win my first Upwork job. I started out on Upwork, just like you. No client reviews, no Upwork job history. I uploaded a photo entered, some work experience and a two paragraph profile description. Then I just started sending proposals one after another, after another. I sent over a hundred proposals... And didn't get a single response. I spent over $50 on connect and I almost gave up, but my family was depending on me to succeed and I had to make it work. So I had to figure out where I was going wrong. First, I looked at my Upwork profile.
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I had basically copy-pasted my LinkedIn profile. It was a disaster, absolutely terrible. So I thought, "why not improve my profile by learning from the best?" So I signed up for a course on sales copywriting. And by the time that I read through Step One, I knew exactly what I was doing wrong. My profile was focused on me, not on my client. I do this. I help with that. I use these systems to get the job done. The one thing that I learned? Assume that your potential client doesn't care about you. So I totally overhauled my profile and changed it from me-focused, into client-focused. Then I started sending out Upwork proposals again. I sent about 20 more proposals and I got a response. It was magical. It made me incredibly happy. I felt like I was on top of the world... ...but they didn't hire me. So maybe overhauling my profile helped, but it wasn't everything. I went back to the drawing board. This time I looked at my Upwork hourly rate. Was at my rate that was scaring people off? I had listed my rate at what I wanted to be making, but that got me wondering: I did a bit of searching and it looked like I was charging around about what everyone else was charging in my space. I thought, "well, this is normal. So I'm trying to charge what they charge, right?"
Clearly the other people who were already on Upwork had an advantage over me. They've been on Upwork for a long time and had a ton of reviews. I didn't. At this point, I had to win work to just get started earning. So I dropped my hourly rate to half of what I'd normally want to charge. But then I was like, "wait a second... What if I get locked into a job where I'm working for cheap? And it's like an enormous project. I wanna work, but I don't wanna work for a low price forever" "But maybe once I get some good feedback, like the other people have, then clients will see I'm good and I can raise my rate." So at the same time I lowered my rate.
I also decided to stop bidding on big jobs until I could charge a higher price. So I started sending proposals again. I sent another 32 proposals, and guess what happened? I got two potential clients sending me messages! ...but they both hired someone else. But instead of just accepting the loss and keep trying, I did something different this time. I gently asked the potential client why she hired someone else. And she told me... Wow. I didn't have any Upwork clients, so I didn't have any work examples to be able to show. So I thought, "how am I supposed to show work examples when I don't have any clients?!" That's when I checked out my profile again, and I discovered something incredible. You don't have to have an Upwork client in order to upload work examples!
A work example could be just something I made. I felt like I had the golden ticket at this point, since I didn't have any clients, I just made up an imaginary project, pretended that I had a client and just started making some examples of work that I might do, if I had a client who needed that job done. They weren't amazing, but I wanted to make them as good as I possibly could so that potential clients could see that I knew what I was doing. I went ahead and created three solid work examples for the kinds of jobs I was trying to apply for. And I uploaded them to my profile. So at this point I had revamped my profile, lowered my rate, stopped applying the big jobs, created solid work examples... ...and I even dropped a like on this video. Now it was down to the final frontier.
My cover letter, I took everything I learned from my sales copywriting training and put all of my effort into writing awesome cover letters. I made sure that I customized every cover letter, focused on the client and their frustrations, showed them I was motivated and excited to work together, showed them examples of the work that I could do for them, and gave them a super-clear next step to take if they wanted to work with me. And you know what happened? I won my first Upwork job.
