You can find the free Starter Kit Course at selfmadewebdesigner.com
The Upwork 'Notice' to me
The reason for this podcast
Upwork's Article on Job Success Scores
How to be a Top Rated Freelancer - support information from Upwork
My Own Advice I Didn't Take that I now Regret (learn from my mistakes)
7 Things Really Bad Freelance Web Design
my article laying out the warning signs of a bad client
How to Sniff Out Nightmare Clients
If you have a hunch that this client won't work for you, you are probably right.
6 Amazing Project Management Tools for Web Designers
Be diligent and intentional about managing every project you work on.
How to Start A Freelance Web Design Project The Right Way
You can’t have enough questions for a new client when you’re first getting started on a project.
Thomas J Watson Jr's famous quote
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
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Chris Misterek 0:02
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the self-made web designer podcast. I've got some sad news. And no, I am not talking about the mustache that I have decided to grow largely based on last week's guest, Patrick, who had a glorious mustache. And if you haven't seen him on YouTube or our interaction on YouTube, I want to encourage you to go look at it, just so you can be inspired like I was to allow your top lip to grow hair while the rest of your faces somewhat clean-shaven. But that's not the sad news that I bring to you today. The bad news is that this last week, I found out that I lost my top-rated Freelancer status on Upwork. And this is huge for me. If you followed me for any length of time, you know that I'm a huge Upwork advocate, right like I've been on some of their advertisements. I've made a good deal of money on the platform. And I encourage people to try to do the same. Because I think that there are a lot of great clients out there a lot of great projects and a lot of great freelancers. But here, I found myself with the notice that I was no longer top-rated. And this can mean a lot of bad things, right? A lot of clients aren't willing to look at anybody who isn't a top-rated freelance, and they won't give anybody else the time of day. And so it was a punch to the gut. And it made me take a step back and ask some pretty tough questions about how I got here, in the first place before you go thinking that this is some rant about how Upwork did me wrong and nobody should use them and I was fooled. That's not what this is. This podcast is a case study into how I lost my top-rated Freelancer status and how I'm planning to get it back. And whether or not you're on Upwork or have lost your top-rated status, if this doesn't relate to you specifically, what will relate to you is the fact that as a freelance web designer, you will inevitably face situations that are really tough to navigate through and are incredibly discouraging. And what you do with those situations will make or break your freelance web design career. So we're going to take a deep look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw open the closets, we're going to look at the skeletons, we're going to talk about the things that I did that I shouldn't have done, we're going to talk about the things that I should have done that I didn't do. And ultimately, we're going to talk about how I plan on getting my top-rated freelance status back on Upwork. And I know it's gonna be helpful for you, whether you're using Upwork or not. And so I'm excited about diving into it, even though I'm a little bit nervous about getting this vulnerable. Okay, so before I changed my mind. Let's do it.
So let's talk a little bit about how up works rating system works. When I first started with Upwork, they only had the five star rating system, right? And we're all familiar with that if you get five stars, you're, you're great. If you get, you know, two or three stars, then your average, if you get one star, then you're no good. But they found that that system wasn't actually helpful when it came to figuring out how good a freelancer was, and determining how successful they might be on the next client's project. So they came up with a new system called the job success score. And it's a score that they use to tell other clients how well this Freelancer has done on their past projects. The details of how they score freelancers is somewhat secretive. And the reason for that is they're trying to keep people from gaming the system. In other words, They want you to genuinely be a good Freelancer not to have figured out some system that makes you look as if you're a good freelancer, but you've actually just figured out how to play this game. Okay, so number one is getting good private and public feedback from every client that you have. So the public feedback is what you see, it's the five stars, it's the comments. He was great, they were great. She was great, whatever. But then a client has the opportunity to give private feedback if the client is unwilling to say something negative that everyone else is going to see. So they ask questions like why was the job ended? Was it ended because the freelancer didn't do a good enough job and then it will ask how likely are you to hire this Freelancer for a project in the future? And how well you score on that question plays a big role into your job success score. The other thing that holds a lot weight with the job success score is how much repeat business you have from the same client, they guess that if you are getting a lot of repeat business from a client, then you are doing a good enough job that that client has no need to look elsewhere, right? Like that's an indicator of the fact that you are a good Freelancer who knows what they're doing. Another aspect of it is how often you are interviewing and then getting the job. So if you're interviewing for a lot of jobs, and yet coming up short or being told no, that makes it look as if you don't quite know what you're doing interacting with clients, and so they're gonna ping you negatively for that. Obviously, there's a lot more that goes into it. And I'm sure that there's some type of crazy algorithm that they are fine tuning and working on but those are kind of the main points. And if if you're asking my opinion, it's not a perfect system, but it is a good system and I believe that Upwork is the diligently trying to make it a system that adequately shows the capability of freelancers. They are looking to genuinely try to put the best freelancers in the best situations for them to get the right job, and they're not trying to punish you. They're not trying to make it difficult for you. They're just trying to figure out how to make their platform, the best platform, it can be for all parties, and they've, they've made some decisions and change some things in the past that have upset a lot of people and and listen, you know, it's a tough job to figure out how to have, you know, hundreds of thousands of freelancers, potentially millions of freelancers, and yet give them a fair rating on every single situation because there are so many nuances. When it comes to how well somebody did a job, right? It's it's pretty tough to calculate and it's pretty tough to just have a mathematical equation for how successful somebody actually was. was at doing a project. But I believe that Upwork has done a great job. I believe that their system is one of the best in the world. And I believe that they genuinely are trying to make it better. Now that we know a little bit about how the system works, let's take a little bit of a peek into how I feel like I lost my top rated status as a freelancer on up work. And listen, I had 100% job success score for years. It was always at 100%. And I always had good ratings and good feedback from clients, but then in 2018, and yes, it was nearly two years ago, I took a client that I knew I shouldn't have taken and they had all of the warning signs. They needed something done in a really short amount of time that I knew I was going to be sweating to try to deliver. They were really unclear about what they wanted and couldn't give me a clear direction on what I should be doing. For them, and I've blogged about this on the website, self made web designer.com and talked about the warning signs of bad clients, and even some things that bad clients will say that give themselves away as being a nightmare to work with. And so I want to encourage you, if you want to dig deeper into it, go go look at that blog post. But inevitably, I went against my better judgment, and said yes to this client, knowing that it was going to be a tight squeeze and knowing that they seemed like they were going to be pretty tough to work for and guess what they work. So a year goes by and the site has not been finished, even though they gave me that tight deadline, and I delivered it to them they ghosted me and so for months, I wouldn't hear from them. And then all of a sudden they'd get back to me and say, I've got a round of revisions for you and I tried playing along with it. At first I would do the revisions, I would send it back and then I wouldn't hear from for months again and then they Get back to me in a few months and give me another round of revisions that needed to be done. And this went back and forth for a year. And finally I said, Listen, you know, I'm sorry. But I don't think that this is going to work anymore. And so inevitably, what happened was, they gave me a bad rating gave me bad private feedback. And my job success score immediately took a hit. And here's the thing, I could blame the client, they were pretty tough to work with. But I knew better. This isn't their fault. This is 100% my fault. I did something I went against my own rules on what type of clients I work for. And it negatively affected me. So that was the first bad thing that happened. The other thing was that I left a lot of projects that were finished open, because clients didn't close them. So here's what can happen on Upwork a client I can hire you, you can do the job. And then the client can just leave the job open without closing it. When that happens Upwork looks at it negatively, okay, they're looking for jobs to close. And for you to get feedback from clients, one way or the other, if you're not getting those jobs close, it's going to affect you, negatively. And so, you know, I, for a long time, left jobs that people were happy with the work that I had done, but just forgot to, for whatever reason, close it. And and there's a lesson in this. And the lesson is that the job is not done until the project is closed. And you have feedback from the client. And feedback. Sometimes it's pretty tough to get from a client. I'm sure that they all want to give you feedback and all want to be helpful when it comes to that but life gets busy. And we talked about this last episode with Patrick as well about how to Make it easy for clients to give you feedback and a rating when the project is finished, it boils down to, you've got to be diligent, and you've got to be intentional with making sure that the projects don't just stay open that looks like following up and asking them, Hey, are you able to close this? That also means making it a little bit easier for them. So rather than having them write out something, why don't you just write a little paragraph of what the project was and how you did on it and say, if you'd like to use this, you can or you can change it and edit it however you see fit. That's not putting words into the clients now so that that's just helping them do something that they know they already want to do. They just don't have time for it. When my success score started to go down. I began reaching out to old clients and saying, Hey, you know, we did this project years ago and it's still left open, would you mind closing it and leaving some good feedback and some of them But about half of them didn't. And so then I had to go in and close the project myself, which isn't the best scenario, you always want the client to close out the project and be the one that initiates the rating, right? Not yourself. So that was another thing that affected me negatively. The final one was that I kept my availability to work on projects open. When I actually didn't have time for them. Inevitably, I would get a lot of invitations to interview but every interview that I got, I would have to turn down, right, I'd have to say no, I'm sorry, I'm too busy. Upwork looks at that negatively. If you're getting a lot of interviews, but you're not getting any hires or, you know, any confirmed projects, then they're going to think that you don't know what you're doing as far as interacting with clients and they want people on the platform. They want to push up the people who are consistently making money because it's their platform, right? They, they they want to promote the people that are using it the way that they would hope for it to be used. So rather than taking On more interviews, I closed my availability and said I'm not available until July, which is true. I've got plenty of projects on my plate right now I know that no matter what kind of interview I get for, no matter what kind of project it is, I'm not going to be able to take it because I'm slammed. So there you have it. There's there's the the nitty, the dirty reasons why I lost my top rated freelance success score on Upwork. And hopefully, that gives you a little bit more insight into how you can be successful as a freelancer on the upward platform. But more importantly, I want to talk about what I'm doing moving forward to make sure that I get the top rated Freelancer status once again. And the first thing and this is this is important, I think, for all situations like this is is number one, realizing that it's not the end of the world. And don't get me wrong, this this is a big deal. You know, the stuff that's been happening in our world today. It's a big deal, but it's not the end of the world, I have plenty of other ways of finding projects. As a freelance web designer, I have plenty of projects that I'm working on currently that I'm getting paid for. And so even though this might negatively affect me in one avenue that I find freelance web design projects, it's not everything. And it's a good lesson in the fact that it's it's pretty important to diversify, where you are getting projects from as a freelance web designer, if you are leaning heavily on any one platform, then you might want to consider looking at other ways to find projects as a freelance web designer, and there are plenty of other good ways whether it be local SEO, so people finding you who are near you in your same city. So having a website that tells people I'm in this city, I'm in this zip code, and if you're living For somebody in this city or zip code, and I'm your guy, that's one strategy. There's referrals, you know, encouraging past clients to hand your name off to somebody who's looking for something similar as to what you've done as a freelancer. There are other platforms out there. There's freelancer, right? There's Craigslist. People are posting jobs on Craigslist all the time. The bottom line is if you put all of your eggs in one basket, then that puts you in a lot of risk. And the same is true for clients. If you have one client that is giving you the majority of your income as a freelance web designer, and not client pulls out, guess what you are in trouble. You have to look at it as diversifying your risk as a freelancer to figure out different ways to find projects over time it's going to change in the early season, I was getting a ton of jobs from Upwork. As time has progressed, I'm getting less jobs from Upwork And more jobs from word of mouth. So more jobs from people that I've done work for who has passed my name along. So be diligent to diversify where you're getting projects from. Because if not, it will come back to haunt you when you least expect it. The other thing is, it's important to have patience. Because here's what happens when something like this occurs in your freelance web design world, you've got a bad situation that comes and it kind of knocks you down. The tendency is to say yes, to things that you shouldn't be saying yes to it's, it's to get nervous. And to be quick to accept projects or to maybe look for projects that are underneath the level that you know, you could be getting my encouragement to you is that that's a huge mistake. And I know this because I've done this before. I've had situations in the past where my confidence was hit. And so I ended up saying yes to a lot of really bad jobs and stuff. So that just begins this cycle of downward progression, you get a bad job. And so you say yes to another bad job. And so then you get frustrated and you get discouraged. And you say yes to another bad job. And that bad job gets you more and more discouraged. And eventually, you either have to go, That's it, I'm not taking any more of these bad jobs, or you end up quitting altogether. So the most important thing to do right now is to have patience. I know I'm going to get out of this, you know, like, I'm not gonna always have less than a top rated freelance success score. As an Upwork. freelancer, it's just a matter of time. But if I'm hasty, and I just say yes to whatever comes my way, it could end up negatively affecting me. So be patient and look for projects that are the right opportunity at the right time. So the right opportunities or jobs that I know that I can do a great job in. And listen, this is a little bit counterintuitive for me because I have been an advocate Kid of saying yes first and figuring it out later, right. It's the Russell Brunson motto, you know, like most of what we do, we didn't know what we were doing when we stepped into we just said yes. And we figured it out along the way. And if you have a track record of doing that, and and knocking out of the park, by all means continue to do that. But this is a little bit different of a strategy as a freelance web designer, this is a different scenario, you're in a season where feedback is highly important. And so a little bit of bad feedback is going to exponentially negatively affect you. So you are only looking for projects that are in your sweet spot stuff that you know, the client is going to love what you give them. The other part of it is the right opportunity at the right time. Is this the best time for you and my situation. This is not a good time for me to be taking on more projects and the right time also meaning the right type of client. Listen There are some clients that I interact with that I'm not a good fit for, because of our personalities, because they need a certain type of Freelancer that I am not. And inevitably, you might be the perfect Freelancer for them. So you've got to know yourself enough to know, Okay, I'm gonna have a hard time with this client. And ultimately, even though I know I can do a good job on their project, we're going to be frustrated with one another every step of the way. And so figure out what's what's your ideal client? What do they look like? Ask yourself what are they okay with and and what are they not okay with what would be a sticking point for them as the project gets done, and then look at your skill set and say, is my skill set one that works with what the client is looking for and the personality that they have, if you've got a very detail oriented client, and you are not a detail oriented freelancer, then you better believe that you're gonna have Have some tension in the relationship. And so you need to ask yourself those questions. And that comes from having a good intake system that you take customers through potential clients through and I blogged about this, there's a great resource that talks about all the questions that I ask the clients that I take on. I'll leave the blog in the show notes and you can have access to that as well. Another thing I've learned from this is that I need to be much more intentional with my time. And if if you're like me, you probably determine whether or not you have enough time for a project by kind of licking your fingers sticking it up in the wind and trying to figure out which direction the wind is blowing. If I feel stressed. Then I say no to projects. If I don't feel stressed, then I entertain the idea of actually working on the project with the client that problem with that is my feelings of stress are unreliable. There have been times when I haven't felt stressed. But I still had way too much to do. And I had no business, taking on projects. So for the next three months, I'm really going to work on dialing in the amount of time, every single aspect of a project takes me. And this is important in you know, I've tried to do this in the past but have been unsuccessful, but I really think knowing exactly how much time a project is going to take you with all the variables, you know, like, because there are so many different things that a web design project could include removing variables and putting variables back in, can make it to where it's pretty difficult to know exactly how much time a project takes. So I'm coming at this like a data scientist, almost, I'm taking the projects that I have. I'm estimating how much time each section of the project should take and then I'm going to be tracking the time that it actually takes on a platform called toggle. And then when this is all over, I'll go back and I'll compare notes, I'll see how much time did I estimate that this would take? And how much time did it actually take? And by doing this, it will actually set me up for success in the future. When someone says, Do you have enough time for this? I can look at what they're asking of me. And what I know from the past from the history that I've had with projects like it, if in fact, I actually have enough time to work on those projects. My encouragement is that you should probably be doing the same thing for yourself figure out try try to have at least a base knowledge of how much time a project should take you. Can you finish a full five page website, messaging, imagery, design, layout everything in a month? Can it does it take you 80 hours does it take you 40 hours? Like these are all questions that you should should be asking yourself and then testing, test it and see does it actually take me this long, I find myself under estimating the amount of time that I need to get something done. I'm very optimistic, what is definitely going to take me two hours, I guess it's gonna take me 45 minutes. But if you've got a little bit of data, you can keep yourself from getting in trouble. By knowing No, I know that this takes me two hours. And so I'm not gonna say it takes me 30 minutes. Another thing that this does is it helps you figure out how to get better at certain things, right, how to get more efficient and faster. And so another thing that I'm looking at is fine tuning my systems. So over the years, I've tried to create systems to keep my workflow in line, you know, so workflow being going from one aspect of a project to the next to the next, what does that look like, you know, so we've got the initial conversation and then we Go into inspiration. And then we go into wire-framing and messaging. And then we go into designing in some type of platform like Adobe XD, and then we go into developing or implementing into WordPress, so on and so forth. So I am looking at what is the most efficient way to do what I'm doing. because inevitably, the more time that I have to work on the things that are important to me as a freelance web designer and to the projects that I'm working on, the more success and the happier the clients that I have, will be. So for instance, I developed a messaging template that I'm taking my clients through, rather than just going okay, we've got our homepage. What do we want to say on the homepage? No, we we have a system that we walk through where we ask certain questions, and then we answer those questions. And that helps us determine what we're going to say on our homepage. And I'm happy Happy to give that template to you, as a link in the show notes, if you want to use this, then you're more than welcome to use my messaging system. And I will talk about my thought process and all of that in another episode, but for now, take a peek at it and see if it's helpful for you. And I'm also working on a project scheduling template that lets me and the client know what to expect and when to expect it. And part of my my failure with the one bad client that I had was that I didn't have set expectation of when they were going to be communicating with with me and when I was going to be communicating with them. It was whenever I got something done, they would hear from me and then I would hope to hear from them. But if at the beginning of the conversation with a client you can say expect to hear from me once a week and you try to set up touch points for the life of Project, you're much more likely to have a successful project. And you know, in an agency world, the people that are interacting with clients in this way are called Project managers. They're managing the project. They're the go between the people who are wanting the work to be done and the people who are doing the work. So they're making sure that communication is happening, and expectations are all being met. And if any changes need to be made that those are being discussed. As a solo freelancer, you've got to figure that out all on your own. And it is incredibly important to dial in that piece of what you do for a client. Because at the end of the day, if a client hires you, you go into the backwoods emerged three months later with the most amazing web design they've ever seen. They're probably going to be okay with that, but they would have rather you kept them updated along the way. So this is client management. This is taking them on the journey with you rather than saying Leave me alone, I'm going to do my job and you worry about you, right? Like you won't have a successful freelance web design business, if that's the way that you look at it. So that's what I'm doing. I'm going back and looking at my systems and how I'm interacting with clients. And And the final thing that I'm working on is figuring out ways to surprise my clients. One of the best books on customer happiness is a book called The power of moment by Chip and Dan Heath, and they talk about in order to give a client experience that they want to tell other people about. You have to do something that surprises them. For instance, take ordering food from a restaurant, right like let's say you go up to McDonald's and say, I want a cheeseburger. I want french fries and I want a diet coke and they give that to you and you pay. You're not gonna walk away going, this was the best service I've ever gotten. And this is Same is true as a freelance web designer, if if somebody hires you, and you do the job, and they pay you, like that's, that's base level you are you have to be looking for ways and this is what I realized for myself. You have to be looking for ways to come out of the Woodworks and do something that is really good for the client that they weren't expecting. So for me right now, that looks like how we are doing launch day. So instead of going Woohoo, we launched and I sent an email, your website is live Way to go, you know, I'm gonna look on, you know how to send them something in the mail to say, congratulations, you know, here's a gift. Thank you for working with me. You know, it's all about surprising them in a way that makes it seem like you're going the extra mile for them and we're not talking about being abused. We're not talking about scope creep. We are talking about doing something in such a way that the client walks away and goes Wow, I I will tell every one of my friends and colleagues about this Freelancer because of how surprised I am at the quality of service that they gave me as a freelancer.
Those are the things that I'm focusing on in my freelance business in this next season. And I don't know where you are right now, you could be going through something similar. Maybe it's not necessarily you've lost your top-rated status as a freelancer, but maybe you're having a hard time figuring out how to get your freelance business going, or maybe you've tried before to get some traction or some momentum and you just keep hitting wall after wall and you're getting discouraged. But listen, success doesn't come by accident. And a lot of times, we look at the things that are outside of our control, as the reason why we succeed or we fail. But here's the thing. Everybody has the same deck of cards. There's not a funnel Freelancer out there who is successful today who hasn't gone through a lot of hell in one way or another to get to where they are. The stuff out of your control will happen. It's inevitable. The question is, what do you do with that stuff? Do you allow it to knock you off your course? And keep you from going to that next place? Or do you say, you know what I'm going to learn from this. And I'm going to keep going. For me, I'm keeping going. This isn't going to be the end of my freelance story on up work or in general, I'm choosing to learn from this and move on. And you know, to be honest, success isn't about always winning either. And this is important as a freelancer. Success is just as much about the failures as it is about the wins, and how you learn how to handle failure will not only determine how successful a freelancer you are But it'll determine how successful you are in life. If you look at failure as an attack on your personhood and you know, an attack on your value and you allow it to get you down, you're going to struggle in life. But if you look at it as an opportunity to learn and keep going, you will succeed. In the end. I love what Thomas J. Watson said who started IBM, right? He was the CEO that saw IBM grow to the greatness that it is today. He said this. So would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You're thinking of failure as the enemy of success, but it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can, because remember, that's where you will find success. I hope going through a little bit of my failure has encouraged you, if anything, so that you can see that we all struggle. We all go through ups and downs in our freelance business, but to also know that wherever you are, keep going. I say this every week and I will say it as long as this podcast is going live, which will be for a long time. If you don't quit, you win. I can't wait to see you next week. We're going to have another amazing guest. And it's going to be fantastic. Tuesday night, midnight. It's going to happen. We'll see you then.