Getting Top Rated Plus or Expert-Vetted on Your Upwork Profile
Many freelancers wonder how they can get a Top Rated Plus badge on their Upwork profile, which leads to more invites, more clients and ultimately more money.
I’ll break down how I achieved getting that status and I’ll discuss how you can take your profile a step further and get the Expert-Vetted Badge which is the highest rating badge you can get on Upwork.
It’s going to take time and consistent effort and it won’t happen overnight, but it’s worth it when you’re getting multiple job invites on a daily basis and never have to use your Connects again.
What I’m sharing today is focused towards freelancers that have already started working on Upwork. I’m not going to tell you how to build your profile from scratch or how to get your first client in this post.
This is for freelancers that have had at least a couple of jobs on Upwork, they’ve had their profile approved, and they want more invites to jobs, and they know that Top Rated will help them get there.
First, let’s take a look at my profile. I currently have the Expert-Vetted and Top Rated Plus badges. Expert Vetted takes more time and you have to receive an invite to it once you hit a certain level of experience.
There’s not an exact dollar amount of how much you have to earn but here are the factors that Upwork looks at for Top Rated Plus and Expert Vetted status:
Your Job Success Score. Mine fluctuates between 99% and 100% and that’s normal even if you aren’t getting negative reviews.
Your 12 Month Earnings. My most recent earnings were $222k.
Number of clients who would recommend you. For me, this number is 88% and that was enough to get top rated plus and expert vetted badges, I’ve always had a rating above 80%.
Percentage of Long-term clients. I usually have about 70% of my clients stay with me long term. So I would recommend shooting for over 50% long-term clients.
Upwork likes freelancers who are establishing long-term relationships with their clients even though the fee is lower because in the long-run they get more money from you and of course your business grows more too.No account holds. Follow all the rules no matter how stupid. Don’t work with clients outside Upwork if they first contacted you through Upwork through a job post. It’s not worth losing your account.
Top Rated eligible weeks. You only need to be eligible for 16 weeks. That's just 4 months.
Your Response Rate. My average for responding to invites is usually 2-3 days, especially on weekends. That’s been enough to get clients but if you can reply within 24 hours, I recommend it and if you’re not busy with a bunch of clients yet, then you should definitely be replying sooner. Also, make sure you reply every time you get an invite, Upwork won’t recommend your profile if you’re not responding to invites or messages.
Finally, I’m not sure exactly the impact of this, but your conversion rate does affect how often Upwork recommends you. Your conversion rate is how often you get hired after being interviewed.
When I first started taking Upwork seriously, it took a few months to get Top Rated, then another few months to get Top Rated Plus. Upwork actually breaks down what qualifies you for each.
Here’s Upwork’s explanation of what makes you eligible for each Tier: https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049702614
In my experience of getting Top Rated status, there’s been some other things that I think are important for your success.
The first thing I think is important is to take on some short term projects in the beginning in order to get reviews on your profile and more projects completed. Don’t stop taking on long-term clients, but add in some short terms as well.
Upwork also has a feature now where you can have a client give you a review while you’re still in the contract. Take advantage of that.
Ultimately there are no hacks for beating the system if you aren’t providing a high quality service to your clients.
So that’s the prerequisite to any of this. You need to develop skills that businesses want to pay you for and you need to keep developing those skills and get better and better and faster.
The skills you’re selling as a service is one part, but you also need good soft skills.
That’s actually one of the things they look at for Expert-Vetted. Soft skills means things like communication skills, time management, and service. Upwork wants their clients to have a positive experience working with their freelancers.
No matter how good you are at editing logos or writing, you’re still going to get bad reviews if you don’t have good soft skills and clients don’t enjoy working with you.
So humble yourself and work on all of those skills. Don’t be the freelancer blaming the client for all the bad experiences or bad reviews or you won’t get hired. Take some responsibility.
Yes, I get it, there are some crappy clients. I’ve worked with some. They’re the kind where no matter how good of a job you do and how much responsibility you take, it’s never good enough and they are just a mess to work with. But I’ve also seen many times freelancers putting all the blame on a client when the freelancer themselves had some issues.
Getting positive reviews, or at least ratings, is very important for your job success score.
Thankfully, Upwork no longer punishes you if the client leaves no feedback. They’ve realized that many clients don’t because they don’t get around to it, not because you did a bad job. But it’s still important to get positive written reviews when you can.
To get positive reviews, you have to control your frustration when certain clients are difficult and be willing to work with them, while still protecting yourself. But don’t just put your hands up and walk away and then get a bad review.
It’s worth it to just finish the relationship on a good note by being willing to make the product better even if it means less money for you, so you can get a good rating and find better clients.
That way, you’ll just get better and better at vetting clients first before jumping into contracts, and you’ll reduce your chances of working with difficult clients.
Make sure you have as many meetings as possible up front so that you’re exactly on the same page as the client about what they want. Most issues that I have experienced could have been avoided if the freelancer took more initiative up front to make sure everyone was on the same page with the deliverable and the responsibilities of each party. Make sure you fully understand what the client wants before you say yes to that project.
Some clients are pickier than others, so just treat them all as if they’re picky just in case and make sure you really get in their head up front.
So, from optimizing your profile, which I discuss in other posts, to getting good reviews, you will be on track to go from Rising Talent, to Top Rated to Top Rated Plus to Expert-Vetted.
Just be patient with the process, it could take a year to get top rated plus. It took me 3 years to get to Expert-Vetted. It was completely worth the pay cuts I took up front in order to secure positive reviews on all my jobs.
I have maybe two or three 4 out of 5 star ratings and all my other jobs have 5 stars. I’m at 162 jobs now, and I did have a few negative experiences but luckily they didn’t leave any feedback. I have worked with some crazy clients but it’s much more rare now because I’m better at vetting.
Even when you’re charging a low hourly rate, still vet. It’s not worth having the negative feedback on your profile. Make sure they respect how you want to work, when you want to work, and that they trust your expertise.
That’s it for today! Make some optimizations, and start working on those badges.