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The Strategy I Used to be a Successful Freelance Software Developer in Upwork

Desiree Peralta
Code Like A Girl
Published in
5 min readJul 16, 2020

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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I have been a Software Developer since 2015, all of the jobs had been for companies that hired me as a full-time developer, but I never thought about starting to work as a freelancer until this year. In fact, I didn’t know that you could even make much money online by developing for clients, I always thought that a full-time remote job for a company was the only option if I wanted to work at home.

A friend told me that he was working as a freelance developer for Upwork and I was curious to see if there would be a job that fit my profile, and I was quite surprised to see that there were even writers’ jobs, so I decided to work on it.

Many people want to focus from the beginning on making thousands of dollars in a month on a project, reading from people who make a lot of money a month, and when they start and don’t see results they are disappointed that what they expected to do is not working.

Rather than focusing on making a thousand dollars, you should simply be focused on making a start. Create a base and a good profile that allows you to generate money. Focus on being good enough that clients want to hire you, and then you can focus on making money.

This is the strategy I used to earn my first $1,000 dollars and create a good profile so more clients wanted to work with me:

Be flexible with the payment rate

Don’t worry about the money at the beginning, all the failures that I hear from my friends about hating Upwork are because they create a very high expectation on what they want to earn from the start, but then can’t find any clients. The reality is that it doesn’t matter if you are a professional in any area, if you don’t have a way to prove it, you have to start from scratch, and in Upwork, the experience there is what matters.

So the first thing you have to focus on after creating a good profile is receiving reviews. You can go for “hourly pay” and “fixed-price”, in my case I went for the fixed-price and made it clear that I could negotiate the…

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Published in Code Like A Girl

Welcome to Code Like A Girl, a space that celebrates redefining society's perceptions of women in technology. Share your story with us!

Written by Desiree Peralta

Turning ideas into reality. Programmer by profession, Writer by passion. Finance and business advice. | Weekly money advice https://dessyperalt.substack.com/

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