How to find Long-term Clients on Upwork Part 1.
There are three ways to do this. I already posted the first one where we focused on working with the new clients. Below is the second way where we will be working with the old clients:
- Search for a project that you can do. Big, small, doesn’t matter.
- The client needs to have a previous job history with good feedback.
- If the project is about building or doing something from scratch (e.g., eCommerce website, SEO on the new website, etc.), then this client can potentially become your long-term client. That’s because the completed website will always need updates in the future, so you can pitch in your maintenance plan after finishing the website. Similarly, if you do a good SEO and show results on the new website, the client will most likely stick with you.
However, if it’s a project that just needs updates/fixes on an existing project, then you need to look at the following factors:
- Look at the client’s previous job history and find projects similar to the project you are applying to. For example, if you are applying to a WordPress project, then you will look for all the WordPress projects the client has posted in the past.
- If you found similar projects in the client’s history, then look at the name of the freelancers who have done those projects.
- If all the freelancers are different, and they all have good feedback, then this is probably not the client for you.
Why?
There is a category of clients who just want to get their work done at the lowest cost possible and don’t care who does it. Think about it: Why do they post a new job related to a niche if they have already worked with a freelancer previously in that same niche? Why don’t they hire the same freelancer?
Here is my experience with one of those clients. It was a website hosted on a development URL, and the client wanted some fixes/changes done to it.
So, I got the job, finished it, and she sent a few more tasks. I did those tasks, too. Then she closed the job and left great feedback. I thought I got another long-term client.
Then something strange happened. As it was the development website, I thought I would get another task from her to make it live.
After a few days, I was just browsing new jobs and found a job posted by her. Do you know what the job was about? It was about making the website live. That baffled me. Why would someone do that? Why couldn’t she ask me to make it live? Maybe she didn’t like something about my work? I was hardly a month old freelancer and started doubting myself.
I was curious and wanted to understand the reason. I looked at her past jobs and found that she had used multiple developers to do her WordPress projects, and all of those freelancers had received great reviews.
That’s when I decided that I would avoid such clients because my vision was clear: I wanted to work with clients who believed in long-term relationships.
PS. A few days later, she returned and told me that the freelancer she had hired to make the website live messed it up, and she wanted me to do it. I felt triumphant, but I excused myself. She might have stuck with me after that, but looking at her history, I didn’t want to take chances. You can call me naive, but I knew what type of clients I wanted to focus on.
There are always exceptions, and your experience may differ. But it’s doubtful that they would stick with you if we look at the history of such clients. But if you are just starting out, then it’s totally fine to work on any project you can get your hands on for the experience.
Remember: You just need 2-3 good, regular clients to make your freelancing journey less stressful. And as you start getting stable and predictable income, you can hire more people to delegate your work to and build your business further.
