Upwork Cover Letters: Winning High Paying Clients
How do you write a great Upwork cover letter so you can close deals with high paying clients?
You’re likely overthinking it.
I’m going to show you a simple, often overlooked cover letter strategy that can help you avoid procrastinating or spending hours on getting those proposals out the door.
It’s easy to overdo it when it comes to writing cover letters. You think you have to list all your skills, all your past experience, and every result you’ve achieved for a client.
But the reality is that clients are already short for time. They don’t like sifting through full essay style cover letters.
All they want to know is whether you can achieve the result they want.
You can easily tell them that in a couple of sentences. My covers on average are only 1-3 short paragraphs, and I’ll walk you through an example cover letter in a moment.
But overall, my cover letters are made up of 3 simple sections:
Stating a past result that I achieved for another client that is very similar to the result that the new client wants.
A one sentence summary of how many clients I’ve worked with on that thing.
A question for the client to start the conversation and get clarity on their job post.
(This also gives them something to do and helps engage their interest.)
Then, I close with a thank you. It’s really that simple, and the shorter the better.
While it needs to be specific and show that you can do the job they want you to do, you want to communicate that in as little words as possible for 2 reasons:
Their attention span is limited
You want to send the message that you’re efficient and you’re not going to waste their time.
So here is an example of a cover letter I wrote for a client:
Context: This job was someone wanting to hire a YouTube strategist to grow their YouTube channel:
“Thanks for the invite (because they invited me to the job.)
I’ve worked with many clients in the real estate industry so I have a deep understanding of your content and audience. I’ve helped over 100 YouTube channels launch and grow. One channel I built grew to over 1 million subscribers in 18 months, bringing in over $100k in revenue per month. Another channel was in the real estate industry, and I helped them get a 4x return on their investment within 4 months, bringing in 30 qualified leads per week and $30,000 in sales in the first 3 months of revamping their channel strategy.
The best place to start would be for me to build out a full YouTube strategy so you have a blueprint for your channel’s success. A detailed outline of what I include in that strategy is here: google doc link
Quote: $2100
Let me know your thoughts on that strategy and whether it aligns with what you’re looking for.
Have you already started creating video content or are you starting from scratch? Are you looking only for help upfront to build out a strategy or do you want ongoing support while building your channel?
I look forward to speaking with you further to see if it’s a good fit. Thanks!
-Chad
Additionally, I’ll often link a pdf page I put together that has a couple case studies of successful past client work.
Now you’re probably thinking, “Well, if I had results like that, then it would be easier to write good cover letters, but I’m just starting so I don’t have quick stats or past results I can impress the client with.”
I am mostly teaching freelancers who have had some work experience even if it’s just an employee job, but regardless, it’s important to go after jobs that match the results you have achieved. Especially when you’re just getting started.
At the very beginning all you might have is an example of your work you created in school.
But there are always ways that you can extract results you’ve helped businesses achieve and match it to the jobs you’re looking for.
In my field, when I first started helping clients build YouTube channels, I hadn’t helped a client build one yet. I only worked on some and got some small results but that’s why I only went after jobs where they weren’t looking to get a million subscribers. They were only looking to get that first 10,000, and what they wanted more closely matched what I had done before.
You have to be willing to go after bigger and bigger fish over time. As you produce more results, it gets easier and easier to sell your services to bigger clients looking for bigger results.
When I first started, all I had was the credentials of having taken a high end YouTube training course from someone who was very successful on YouTube.
I paid a couple thousand dollars to get trained by someone who was successful at building YouTube channels so the strategies I had knowledge of were strategies that worked for others, I just hadn’t reproduced them yet so in my cover letters then, I would quote the training that I got and I would use the examples of the channels that my mentor built.
And yes, my rate was lower then, because I only had the knowledge but not the experience. With experience comes further knowledge, and higher rates.
The strategies I use now on YouTube don’t exactly match what my mentor taught me. Some of his lessons have survived, and some haven’t based on what worked and didn’t work when I started getting experience with clients.
But even at the beginning, keep the cover letter short and sweet and only focus on explaining the most relevant information to their job post.
And yes, you’ll likely have to go after clients that are looking for intermediate freelancers instead of expert ones, because without the experience you’re not an expert yet no matter how much knowledge you have from studying.
However, you don’t have to just go after beginner jobs with really cheap rates. You can start at $50 an hour, for example. That’s where I started when all I had was knowledge from training.
When I was charging that rate, I did have several years of work experience in the video production field. I wasn’t completely fresh out of college with no work experience, so I was able to use some of my actual work experience to justify my rates.
But now my rate is $150/hour for hourly work. I do mostly flat rates now and I sometimes get $200-$300 an hour for the time I put in.
Let me show you an example of a cover letter I would have written back when I didn’t have a ton of results yet to prove my worth.
So let’s say you’ve had a few years of work experience, (whether that’s freelancing or employee work), and you’re trying to break into a field where you have minimal results for past clients, but you have enough knowledge for it to be worth clients paying you.
Example:
“Hello!
Your job post stood out to me when you said ‘we’re looking for someone who has knowledge of the landscape and is ambitious to grow with us.’
I have extensive knowledge on how to create successful YouTube channels. I’ve worked with a few as a video editor and have seen what works and what doesn’t.
I’ve also had advanced training from successful youtubers who built channels that have over a million subscribers, and I would love to work with a company like yours where we can grow together.
As a video editor I was often a part of the marketing conversation with how to grow a YouTube channel.
Here’s one channel that we grew from 25k to 50k: (example link)
I’m passionate about the topic of your channel and understand that type of audience and look forward to discussing more about how we can work together.”
So you see how I didn’t have impressive specific results yet like, “I built a channel to over a million subs in 18 months bringing in 100k in revenue.”
Instead, my cover letter was more focused on my ambition, my training and knowledge, and my willingness to grow with them, meaning my rate is lower for now but may increase.
Also, I drew from experience I had as a video editor creating videos for a client’s YouTube channel. I may have not been the lead strategist on the channel, but I was involved in some of the conversations around the strategy so I pulled from that.
You have experience that you can pull from and communicate in a way where it shows you know something that can help them.
But it also comes down to your willingness to go after clients that are looking for someone more entry level that can grow with them.
That client was looking for a more entry level freelancer that had enough knowledge to be valuable, but was also willing to grow with them. That’s why I applied to that job.
And that actually represents a real job I applied to and became one of the first channels I helped build. Over the course of a year and half I helped build their channel from scratch, and then I had a solid result to use in future cover letters.
But it took time to build up that result, and that client was willing to take a chance on me.
There are clients willing to take chances on someone who doesn’t have a strong portfolio yet, but has enough knowledge in their field. Look for those clients, you’ll find them.
I’m so grateful for those clients that helped kickstart my freelance career because they were willing to take a chance. And yeah some of it was their own budget restriction because they couldn’t afford an expert that’s built over 100 channels.
As your Upwork profile grows with successful past jobs, it will be easier to submit cover letters.
But at first, keep your cover letter on the shorter side, even if you need to attach pdf’s that include your portfolio and experience.
Don’t put all that in your cover letter, just add it as an attachment. Those attachments are important when you don’t have many ratings and reviews in your profile. Also if you have testimonials from past clients or employers, make sure you include that in your portfolio attachment.
So there you have it. Hopefully that will get you started with writing proposals that will win high paying clients if you have some experience already, and high enough paying clients if you’re just beginning.
High paying is all relative to where you’re at in your career journey and your living expenses.
Be okay with the process of building up your income over time as you start producing more results, because it will be worth it in the end.
Your field might be different. You might not be a strategist working on 1-2 year SEO strategies that take time. You might be someone who just edits videos or writes scripts or creates presentations, in which case you have strong visual examples to prove your expertise.
In those cases, you don’t need years of results because you’re selling more of a visual product than you are a business growth result.
But ultimately, businesses are hiring you to grow their business so they still want to see how your deliverable helps their business grow.
Put all this into practice, and you’ll have a good chance of getting some great clients.