Speaker 1: In today's video I'm sharing the process of translating on Upwork for an entire week. Coming up. Hello and welcome back to the Freelance Verse. I actually just recovered from like over a week of illness and I'm finally back to work and to making videos and I couldn't wait to get back here. This is just a quick reminder to appreciate health because I feel like when we get so caught up with work and our daily lives we sometimes forget to appreciate that. So if you are healthy at the moment appreciate it. It's really important. Anyways a few weeks ago I made a video on Fiverr and it did really well. It's by far the most viewed video on my channel. It actually just hit 2000 views yesterday. That's insane 2000 views. But it's also the number one spot in the search results when you look for Fiverr translations on YouTube. So of course this is very popular this series and I want to continue. So today is the second episode of I translated on blank for a week. And today's platform is Upwork. So I'm going to work from today Sunday the 22nd of November I think until next Sunday on Upwork. I'm going to do my best to earn as much money as possible. I'm taking you along giving you updates daily on how it's going. I'm excited to see what Upwork is all about. I have no idea about it. I've never worked on it. Never used it before. Make sure to watch till the end of the video to see how much money I managed to make. Let's get signing up. So we are on Upwork. Unlike the Fiverr video I actually have no idea about Upwork. I never used it as a selling or buying website. The first thing I like to do just check out the kind of like the competition. So I'm going to go with German translation or German translated and see what's out there. So we have Tudit, Maximin. Okay so you can see the job success, the rate and like how much they supposedly earned. How many jobs they did. Seems to be all between like 20, 25. Okay Paul is a bit more. 35. Okay everything around 30 euros. 20 to 30 euros. Okay so we will probably also go with around 25 to start with. Oh there are... Ah okay there are paid memberships as well. Yeah we're just gonna try the free one for this week but apparently there is a paid one as well. I've never heard about it. Let me know if you're interested in a video on that. We will just sign up for now. I'm gonna sign up with the email here. I'm gonna enter all my information. Username. It just suggests one. We take the first one. It seems okay. I don't want emails and I agree. Okay so we set up the account. Now let's see what happens next. Hi Adrian. Thanks for your interest in Upwork. As the world's largest talent platform we connect millions of businesses with independent professionals like you. To get started all you need to fill is... All you need to do is fill in your profile. That's what I thought. I hope this doesn't take as long as Fiverr. It took forever. Oh I can upload my LinkedIn profile. That's useful. Yes we will do that. Okay the LinkedIn function doesn't work. That's a bad sign. When I click the link it just continually looks for different links and then it says request too long. So that doesn't work. So I'm just gonna upload my CV instead. The resume also doesn't work. Okay already a very annoying start. I'm gonna have to do this manually then. So what is the main service you offer? Translation. It has its own category so we're gonna choose that. Select up to four types of work. General translation. Legal no. Medical no. Technical yes. Which languages can you translate? So is it the source or the target? It doesn't really... It doesn't say anything so I'm just gonna go with English. Okay translation English. German. French. German. Do they have German Switzerland? Do they have kind of a... No they don't have a distinction. That's unfortunate because that would be important. Anyways moving on. What skills do you offer? Translation. Editing and proofreading. Subtitles. Okay what is your level of experience in this field? I'm relatively new. I have substantial experience. I have comprehensive and deep expertise. Five years experience as a translator plus two in the language industry. So seven all in all. So I'm gonna go with expert. But of course anyone can click anything here. So what is your English proficiency? I'm gonna go with fluent. What other language do you speak? Native. Oh and I saw that they also have Swiss German. Swiss German sign language. What? No. They have Swiss German sign language but they don't have normal Swiss German. What? So hourly rate. Let's go with 25. As we have seen before upwork fee five euros. Every hour of work they take five dollars. I didn't know that. That's an extreme fee. Upwork fee is 20 percent. Okay that's good to know. I didn't know that. That would be a definite no-go for me personally. We're gonna go with this just for this experiment. Title. I'm gonna go with English French to German translate. Highlight your top skills experience and interest. This is one of the first things clients will see on your profile. So I'm just gonna fill this in quickly. Okay I filled it in with my languages. I focus on the fact that I'm Swiss. So if someone is really looking for that they would find it through my profile. 9 out of 11. So I think it's gonna go faster than for Fiverr. That took way longer. Add a profile photo. I'm just gonna add my CP picture if that's possible. I don't know. I'm not a fan so far of the website at all. The signing up process is very tedious. Nothing seems to work properly. It's already the third time that the website freezes now. I'm gonna use another more casual picture. Hopefully that works. We take your privacy very seriously. So I need to enter my address. I'm gonna blur this. Preview profile. Okay if that's everything then it went very fast. Just not smooth. Looking good. Make any deployment history. Everything is in. Okay yeah. I'm gonna submit profile. Congratulations you're now part of Upwork. Okay so it's already approved then. Here you can create direct contracts. Securely create contracts and easily collect payment for non-Upwork project. Okay that's interesting. So there is a feed apparently with jobs that are interesting to me. That's cool. My profile is now public. Oh 60 available connects. I remember someone asked me about connects. It's interesting that apparently I have 60 connects. Maybe to write people on here. So I assume that this is really a bidding website. So not people will contact. I have to actually bid on stuff to get chosen. But we're gonna leave it here for day one. We set it up. I'm gonna look into it a bit off camera and see that tomorrow I will be better prepared and know what's going on. And then we will bet on a few things. So yeah see you tomorrow. So I'm back. It's technically day three. I mean yeah I guess we have to say it's day three. Because yesterday I tried to log in and it just didn't work. I don't know what was the problem. Probably it still had to get confirmed or something. Now today it works again. So that's how these weekly challenges work right. You never know what's gonna happen. So it's day three that we can actually start. Yeah I assume that no one will contact me on Upwork. It's different from Fiverr. So I thought today the best thing to do would be to get in contact with some people. Or trying how this works actually. So let's just take the first one for example that's on my feed. I don't know if this is relevant for me. Let's just open it. So this was posted 10 minutes ago. Important do not bid if you're not use 100% human translation. Okay that's good for us. This show post should only be claimed by the contractor who helped us. Okay. Anyways native Cebuano. Okay my feed is not for me then. English to Hawaiian translator. Okay that's weird. So I'm pretty sure in my profile I said which languages I offer right. I'm sorry I'm confused. Anyways let's go to find work. We want to we want to do something right. Okay it brings us back here. Let's go with this one. English to German small e. Hi I need a German translator for a small document. 470 words 15 dollars. Interested translators please apply. Okay now this is now 470 words. Let's check what that would normally be. That would be about 50 to 60 dollars for this job. And they want 15 dollars. Quite bad but let's try. I just want to try. So oh okay required connects to submit the proposal to. So I was wrong. I thought like every connect is one proposal. But apparently they cost different amounts. So this one costs two out of our 60s. So let's see. Submit the proposal. Each job requires up to six connects. You can get 20 free connects to get started. I got 60 actually. Okay purchase additional ones for 15 cents each. So your general profile will be submitted with this proposal. That's good. We want to do that. How do you want to be paid by project? Because it's small right. 15 I bid. Three dollars they take away. Twelve dollars will actually go to me from 470. My CV is already shared. So I'm just going to write a little introduction here. Okay I was just checking if we know a name by someone. But I don't. So I'm just going to go with hey there. Or let's go with good afternoon. And then I just wrote a very standard small one. I want to see if this works. I said I'm new in Upwork. I'm a professional German translator with five years of experience. I will be glad to help you out with this translation job. Please do get back to me if you're interested. Attachment. I don't think I need anything because my CV is already attached. Let's just see. Submit proposal. Okay done. We submitted our first proposal. Very cool. No it says no. But I just proposed someone. I don't know. Strange. Very strange this site. I haven't really found my way through it yet. But I want to submit another proposal today. And then we go on to the next thing. Let's go with this one. English to German translation for baby pet and home product descriptions. Let's go with that. It's again $15. So I'm just going to do the exact same thing and see what happens. Okay I've just submitted the second one. And that's it for today. I hope we get some maybe an answer by tomorrow. See you then. So I am back. It's day four. As you can see I just logged in. Well I logged in throughout the day as well. And I actually installed the app on my phone. So in case anyone would contact me I would get a notification and not miss it. So as you can see here on this page I just did basically what I did yesterday. I sent proposals. As many as I could. As you know yesterday I didn't really figure out how the site works. How I find the jobs that are relevant to me. Now I found this filter by category. I don't know why it's so hidden. But as you can see here you can actually filter for translation. English, German. The no hires button. So it means that 66 jobs. No one was hired yet. Because that's essentially what I want. I don't want jobs where people are already hired. That makes no sense right. So these 66 are kind of relevant to me. But then you see like this one two to four dollars an hour. And 20% goes to Upwork. So there's no point in doing that. But for example this one that I just did. It's $30 an hour. And they are just looking for a business translator English to German. So sounds good. And I actually wrote a bigger and more in-depth proposal text than yesterday. I read a few articles that said it's really important what you write there. But now I actually wrote the email that I usually would write to a potential client. None of the proposals from yesterday were accepted. As you can see here in the overview of proposals. That one is now in archive. So I assume they chose someone else. And one is still active. Oh actually now there are four active. Because I did them today. But this one is from yesterday. That's essentially all we can do today in terms of jobs. But I also read that it's quite important to do this test. What was it called? The Upwork readiness test. Apparently this gives you kind of a badge or a tick on your profile. And then you rank higher when you send the proposal. So it says it's 10 short questions. So I thought I could just do this. One thing that I still haven't figured out is why some jobs are way more expensive than others. As you can see now I have 45 connects left from my 60 in the beginning. And some of them that I applied to today they were only one connect. But then one was four connects to pay. So I don't know if the person that puts up the job decides how much you have to pay. And then even one job came up where I couldn't even apply. Because I didn't have the paid membership. Anyways for tomorrow I'm gonna try to figure out why certain jobs cost more than others. And I'm still gonna continue sending proposals. And hopefully we will get our first job by tomorrow. Talk to you then. Yes so I'm back on the site. And as you can see I'm not at home. I'm at the co-working space. But it's fine. So unfortunately we didn't get any responses yet. Still I'm not sure why. But throughout the day I submitted more proposals. It is actually day five now I think. Yes yesterday I submitted more proposals. But I see now a lot of proposals as well where there are like these restrictions. You know preferred qualifications like this one. At least 90% score. Of course I can't have this because I haven't had a project yet. So it's a bit unfortunate because these are the really interesting projects. And also location Germany. That's a bit weird because it doesn't matter where I am. Yeah so it seems to be really hard to get started. And I've heard from many people that I'm just tired of proposing an upwork. And I already get it after a few days. It's really frustrating. Because you don't even get an answer right. You just try your best. You try different approaches with different emails. And yeah no one really answers. As you can see in my proposals there are four I think still open. Now it's Friday afternoon. So I'm just gonna check if someone proposed something here that could be interesting. For example this one. English to German. Translating needs for website articles. General business topics. That would be perfect. So I'm gonna try and propose to that. And what I did today is I undermined the price a little bit of what they offer here. You know it says what they expect. So here I will cover 20 now. I don't recommend that at all. And I would never do that. But just for this experience I want to try it. Because I want to find something at least this week. Don't do that if you want to build a sustainable business. That's not a good approach. Anyways we'll write this and then I'll get back to you. Either after that or tomorrow. So I'm back to my office and to this camera view. It is day seven. It is the what is it 29th of November. I did spend yesterday and today with sending out proposals still. I sent probably about 10 more. But I didn't get any replies. So all in all I didn't make any money this week. I'm sorry if I disappointed you. But yeah it's not easy on Upwork apparently. I currently have six open proposals still. So there is still a chance that I might get any job. But it's definitely hard to get started. I find it harder than on Fiverr. Because here you really have to go after them. On Fiverr you have to hope that people see you. And you have the chance you can just share your profile on your LinkedIn or your network right. I haven't even done this in my Fiverr video. This would have also boosted the sales I think. Whereas here you can't really do that. So me personally if I had to choose between them I would definitely pursue Fiverr. Even though they say it's worse paid. So yeah I wouldn't choose any of them. But I didn't find... Yeah I didn't feel myself at home on Upwork. Also the site wasn't really for me. Maybe also just translation is not the best thing on there. Because I know that people make six figures on Upwork. It depends. Depends on your expertise if it's for you. I think I have now nine connects left. So I did spend 51 connects in one week. And it didn't lead to anything. And then after that I think I would have to buy connects. So that's also something to take into consideration. You either buy the premium membership or you have to buy connects to continue. So it can probably get expensive quite quickly. So yeah that's it. Unfortunately my total is zero euros. Yeah and I have not gotten any message. Not any... Like most of them are just rejected or are now archived. So I also looked on a couple of Facebook groups how to properly address people on there. And made some adjustments in the 10 that I sent out yesterday and this morning. But yeah nothing worked. I hope this gives you an insight that it's not easy. So I was always under the impression that anyone could start easily on pages like Upwork. But it's not that easy. Because a lot of people require you have many jobs already completed. Which of course you don't have in the beginning. Anyways hope this was insightful. Let me know in the comments if you do make a living on Upwork. And how you started. I would be really curious on that. And I see you next week with another video. Bye bye.