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Hey everybody I would just want to welcome you guys to our first Facebook live session. There is a slight audio delay around probably 10-15 seconds between what I'm saying and it actually appearing on the Facebook wall so just take note of that.  So let's see here , I'm still waiting for this to appear on the wall. Okay, so now it's finally appearing here and just making sure we have everything set up and that we are good to go. Just give me one moment here. Okay and I'm just making, just double-checking everything here. We have 15 viewers right now. Okay and it's up, let me check the comments here. Okay here we are, we are good to go. Sorry about that.

This is our first Facebook live session so still making sure that everything is working correctly. It takes around like I said 15 seconds for us to actually see anything between what I see in the comments and I can hear myself I had to make myself there. Between what I see in the comments and what we're going through what's actually going on so we have 23 live people so let's get started with the presentation.

So today we're going to talk about avoiding Upwork suspensions. By the way if you have any questions about this just feel free to type in the comments. I might not see the question right away but because it may take some time there's a bit of a lag but I'm going to answer the questions maybe at the end or when I do see, when actually do see the questions.

Okay, so here we go, so first of all I just wanna say, tell you guys about what's going on.

• So Upwork's trying to improve the freelancer quality right now. It's been happening for the past few months.
• In the past, last year they release the rising talent, badges top-rated badges and they personally review an account. So that the rising talent and the top-rated badges are very important badges right now. Because if you do get those badges there's a very good chance that you will get hired very easily, very quickly. So if you can get those badges that's very good. And they're also manually reviewing accounts. What that means is that they are looking at accounts. If you're applying for an Upwork account now they're gonna manually review your account and then accept or deny your account depending on your qualifications.
• And the third thing that's going on right now is that they are suspending freelancers right now. There are a couple of reasons that they're suspending freelancers. We've seen this in the past couple of months. And around October this guy, Garnor M, who's the community manager for Upwork released a statement saying;

 We're going to start closing the freelance account of some users with a history of not delivering winning proposals to clients. These are freelancers who despite many attempts aren't showing the success one would expect and are likely falling into one of two buckets. One, the opportunities available on up work are not a good match for the freelancer's skill set. Or two, they might be violating our terms of service specifically our policies on circumvention.

So by circumvention that means, that the most cases, I've seen like this are when freelancers are mentioning Skype or PayPal even without the client asking. In fact if you mentioned PayPal all you're probably automatically going to get suspended so just don't even mention PayPal at all. Same thing with Skype. Skype is okay but you shouldn't be the first one to just give out your username unless it's talked about the messages. So make sure  it's in the natural flow of the discussion where you give out a Skype username. It's allowed but you just have to be careful that it doesn't seem unnatural when you're giving out, giving it out. But what we're focusing and yes even Skype is a, Upwork is trying to prevent freelancers from going outside their platform as you know they charge 20%, 10%, 5% freelancer fee. So they're trying to keep you guys and all freelancers inside the platform if  you go on Skype then that means you can talk about being paid directly outside of the Upwork platform and go, you know, just bypass the 20-percent fee. And that's why they're suspending those freelancers.

But today we're going to be focusing more on the opportunity, on the first bucket that Garnor's talking about, the opportunities available and Upwork  are not a good match for the freelancer's skill set. So you can get suspended even if you have existing inactive contracts. Even if you have jobs in the past. Even if you have the RT or rising talent badge, you can get suspended. You can get suspended even for accounts that are up to three months old we've seen freelancers had three month old account that they haven't been getting jobs recently and they got suspended. And even if you have a 100% complete profile so these do not prevent you from getting suspended.

So you don't want to get suspended. As much as possible don't get suspended. So how, if we look at the technicalities of how freelancers and are getting suspended based on findings in over 20 cases. So I've looked at over 20 cases of freelancers getting suspended and what I've found is that Upwork is suspending accounts that have a conversion rate of less than 5%. So that means that, let me just  move on to the next slide here, here we go. That means that if you apply to 20 jobs in one month without being hired, there is a chance you're going to get suspended. So 5% is 1 in 20 and if you're getting hired at a rate of less than 5% there's a good chance you're going, well there is a chance you're going to get suspended. If you applied to  continuously for jobs for two months so let's say you've applied for  40 jobs and have only gotten hired once or zero times then there's a very good chance that you're gonna get suspended. So this 5% conversion rate is very important for you to keep track of. So if you haven't been hired for 10, if you've applied for 10 jobs and haven't been hired for any of those ten jobs then you have to start being careful and as you get closer to 20 you have to get even more careful.

So you're, what you should be doing as a freelancer is you should be increasing your your conversion rate. Meaning you should be getting hired more as much as possible. So how do you increase your conversion rate. There a couple of ways to do this.

• First of all read the job description is carefully. And make sure that you only apply to jobs that you have a high chance of getting hired for. If you're applying the the old strategy with Upwork was you just you know you have 60 connects that means you can apply to make 20-30 jobs a month and you just use up all your connects that was the old kind of the old strategy with Upwork. But now with these new changes we shouldn't be doing that anymore.
• We should only be applying to jobs that you have a high chance of getting hired.
• And a way to do that is by prioritizing reputable clients by applying to jobs that don't have 50 other applicants applying to. That if you're a beginner you shouldn't be applying for expert level jobs and so on.
• Some other ways to make sure that you increase your conversion rate and that you get hired more are by keeping your profile at a 100% you know you want to add those portfolio items, take those skill tests add those skills.
• And try to get a rising talent badge even before your first job. We've seen a lot of our students in the virtual assistant boot camp get a rising talent badge even before they got their first job so it is very possible if you have a very strong profile from the start from the get-go.
• Also create killer cover letters and profile overviews. So put a lot of effort into your profile overviews. Put a lot of effort into your cover letters so that when a client sees it, they don't just discard it that you actually capture their attention that it's personalized for that job listing so put more effort into the different job listings.
• And the last bullet point I have here is two specialized and to stand. Specialized which will help you stand out. When you specialized what you're doing is you're focusing on one specific area rather than applying to 10 different kinds of jobs or 20 different kinds of jobs and that helps you stand out and get hired.

I'm just going to answer a question here by Dorothy, I have a complete profile but currently have a job outside of Upwork, can I put my account on hold so I won't get suspended. You, we haven't really, our information isn't 100% complete on things like this right now. However what I can say is that you should change your availability there's an Upwork availability, change it if it's currently available you may want to change it to the third one which is it something like unavailable or only as needed or something like that so change your Upwork availability so that it reflects on Upwork. And then when you get back, when you get back to Upwork  since your current you currently have a job outside of work when you start applying for jobs just be aware very aware of the 5% conversion rate. So you have to be using these tips  in this video so that you don't get suspended, all right.

So Upwork says, if you do get to suspended, Upwork says that you can get in touch with their customer support however we haven't seen anyone get un-suspended so far. Everyone has getting suspended and a couple of people have tried to appeal, they've emailed customer support and said can I get my account un-suspended and the response so far has always been the decision is final. So if you are currently suspended you can email customer support if you want. But my advice is to wait until we have more information and see if we can get and we can get some accounts un-suspended before you email their customer support.

In the meantime, you know, in the meantime in the end you may still get banned. It's very possible get suspended you get banned for Upwork. The good news is that there are other freelance web sites out there there's onlinejobs.ph, there's freelancer.com, there's golance.com and you can also go direct to freelancer that's also an option for you.

Some freelancers have been asking me if you can create a separate Upwork account technically that's possible however take note that it is against the terms of service for Upwork for you to do that. And if you, if you get caught they're just gonna ban your account and if you repeat the same mistakes you did during the first time that you had your Upwork account you're just going to get suspended again. So just take note of that.

I have a couple of people here who are watching, who have are asking how to apply on Upwork, we're going to provide a link, well let me just find it here, and let me just paste it in the comments on the page, how to apply, how to get work from home jobs. Okay. I'm going to, I'm just going to paste a link there for our free course on how to get work from home jobs all right.

I'm going to leave a couple of minutes open for questions for you guys. We had a couple of questions, Dorothy, Thank You Dorothy you've asked some good questions. I'm going to give you guys a minute or so to ask some additional questions. If you do have any because I know that there is a delay. So let me just see if we have any pending questions here. So Anton Lee look at the link I've provided. Thank you guys for coming, good morning I  didn't say good morning, thanks Camille, for reminding me. Chris Data and Jay Almonte  please check out the link I provided. There a couple, there are four thumbs up here. Let's see here I was going to see if you guys have any additional questions, otherwise we're going to we're going to end this here. And so Jay you'll see the recording, I discussed it in the, a couple of minutes ago you'll see in the recording what people are getting suspended for I’ll provide the recording Camille and Jay so you can watch it again.

But ultimately accounts are getting suspended on Upwork but isn't the end of the world. It doesn't mean that you cannot succeed in freelancing. In fact there are so many other platforms out there, like I said as you can see on the screen, there's onlinejobs, there's freelancer there's golance. I know there are more platforms coming up you can also go direct to client. There is still a huge opportunity for you to go freelancing even though Upwork is getting very strict right now with their policies regarding freelancers that doesn't mean that you will not be able to succeed.

A lot of our students in the virtual assistant boot camp who have enrolled, they're saying a lot of success even with Upwork. If you want more information about that I'm going go link to this in the comments here. So that you can find out more about this course but we do have a free course which I already linked. But even if we don't talk about Upwork, all these other platforms there's a huge opportunity for freelancers for working at home and, you know, achieving your dreams by working at home.

All right it seems that we don't have any more questions on the topic. You'll be able to watch the replay. You guys have a good morning and a good start of the day. Now how do I stop this here up there is, end.