I was recently digging holes in a yard. Never mind why. But it struck me; if I didn't have a plan, if I was just digging random holes, some deep, some shallow, and then tried to finished the job I was tasked with, what do you think would have happened?
Take a fence, for example. What if my job was to put up a fence in a straight line, but just dug holes wherever was easiest? Do you think I’d have done a good job? Think the person who hired me would’ve been happy?
Not likely.
That's because in order to do things right, you need a plan. You need to have an idea of the purpose of that hole, the location, and how deep each one needs to be.
On top of that, you also need to know how wide the holes need to be. I mean, if you were putting up a fence and needed a fence post hole dug, but you dug a hole that was more than three feet wide and six feet deep, what would you have?
A whole lot of extra work, soft ground, and the fence post would need a lot of extra support until the ground firmed up around it again.
In other words, you’d have a failure waiting to strike.
Freelancing on Upwork is kind of the same.
If you bid on any job you see that appears within your field of expertise, it's kind of like digging random holes without a plan.
That's why so many people get frustrated. They want to freelance, they want to make some extra money or start a business they can control, so they bid like crazy on anything and everything hoping just to get a few morsels.
They’re digging random holes and hoping the fence will look okay in the end.
Then they wonder why they get little to no response or traction.
You must have a plan. You need to know what to bid on. You need to be discerning. You need to know the location of that hole before you start digging.
Try doing it randomly and you'll keep making more work for yourself and never really get anywhere. You may end up having to redo the entire fence.
In freelancing parlance, you might spend hours upon hours seeking jobs and get nothing but silence. And silence in this world can be discouraging.