5 (More) Tips For Regularly Making $1000+ On Upwork

And turning your side hustle into a legit job

Adriana Sim
6 min readJul 21, 2021

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Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Two short months ago, I wrote about how I made $800+ on my first month on Upwork. I didn’t stop there. May was a record month of $1,435, and June didn’t disappoint either.

I’m still a budding freelancer, transitioning from my day job to doing this full-time, so I don’t have it all figured out. But, if I managed to earn this much by only putting in 10 hours of work per week, I’m sure you can do it too.

This article will help you if you’re looking to plunge into the world of freelance writing, or better yet, if you’re already an Upwork newbie looking to up your game.

My experience on Upwork has been fun and diverse, although occasionally frustrating (I’ll talk more about that in a second). It’s safe to say that I’ve learned A LOT while experimenting with:

  • ghostwriting
  • writing website copy
  • writing in-app content
  • editing blogs
  • rating other authors (that was a weird job)
  • helping a coach write her newsletter
  • acting as a second pair of eyes to a seasoned author

In June, I was burnt out from juggling too many things and decided I wouldn’t be applying to any more jobs. Despite this, I still had my active clients reach out for more work. This goes to show that even if freelancing doesn’t bring a steady income, you’ll still have a base of clients to keep you afloat.

So here are the 5 (more) tips I can share for the aspiring Upwork freelancer:

1. Protect your Job Success Score (JSS) at all costs.

I didn’t think much at first about Upwork’s mysterious JSS ways. It grabbed my attention when it started dropping to 95%, then 90%, then (gasp!) 85%!

The thing is, with an 85% job success score, no experienced Upwork client will ever hire you. You’ll only strike luck with the platform newbies who don’t pay much attention to the numbers.

Upwork’s Job Success Score is confusing at best and downright unfair at worst. If you take a peek inside…

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Adriana Sim

In the process of GYST’ing and following my intuition. Gave up a career in medicine to pursue writing, blogging, and, most of all, living.