I Charge $2.5k For a Service Which Can be Done at $500 on Upwork

To my surprise, Upwork was filled with many link-building job posts, and compared to writing jobs, these paid more. However, it’s important to note that link building takes time, and since my SEO skills are much more stronger than my writing skills. So I choose link-building jobs.

As Toni Koraza said in one of his articles, even Fortune 50 companies hire on Upwork, and I believe that because I have come across job postings with upwards of a $20k in budget.

Companies with high budgets like such want optimized, credible, and reliable freelancers. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one on Upwork because I was inactive for one year on the platform, had no JSS Score, and made barely $1k on the platform because I chose to go after writing clients initially.

So I sent proposals to only a few link building jobs that knew what they wanted and seemed to have a reasonable budget to hire and even to some posts like this:-

Within a couple of weeks, I got a few replies. However, some weren’t invested in for the long term, which meant we didn’t got to decide on a budget.

But soon enough, one particular client was curious, and they started to ask me about the work on a long-term basis, and I understood his/her requirement.

Below we’re talking about the budget (They didn’t mention any budget in the job listing)

The clients hired a ‘pro-link builder’ for $500 a month and for which I usually charge $2.5k per month.

Later, when I asked, he/she shared the work their freelancer was delivering to them. Soon I understood what kind of links the freelancer was generating, and there I clearly understood why the client was happy with his work.

The backlinks that he generated up to this point were backlinks from sites whose DA (Domain Authority) was manipulated. Because of that, the client’s website domain authority was increased, making it seem like backlinks were working.

However, after 4–5 messages, I tried to get my message clear, but as I would expect, there was no deal in the making.