- Introduction
- Generating Great ideas
- To Outsource or Not
- A Buyer’s Guide
- Bonus
- Summary
How to find, repackage and republish TOP SELLING works selling as many copies as you like keeping 100% of the profits and never having to pay a penny in fees or royalties!
How To Steal Great Ideas.
Bit of a shocking title, isn’t it?
So, let me put your mind at ease and assure you, right from the outset, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with stealing other people’s ideas!
Let me guarantee you that people have been pilfering GREAT IDEAS since man first invented the wheel.
Virtually nothing is invented from thin air, almost everything is an improvement on, or variation of an existing design. People will often identify a need and invent a product or service to fulfill it BUT the solution is always a variation of, or improvement on, something that already exists.
Thomas Edison Held a world record of 1093 patents for inventions such as the light bulb and phonograph but in actual fact he invented only a fraction of them. He had teams of people searching out great ideas!
His greatest challenge was the development of a practical incandescent, electric light. Contrary to popular belief, he didn’t invent the light bulb, but rather he improved upon a 50-year-old idea.
In 1879, using lower current electricity, a small-carbonized filament, and an improved vacuum inside the globe, he was able to produce a reliable, long-lasting source of light.
The idea of electric lighting was not new, and a number of people had worked on, and even developed forms of electric lighting. But up to that time, nothing had been developed that was remotely practical for home use.
Edison’s eventual achievement was inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe, and economical. After one and a half years of work, success was achieved when an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread burned for thirteen and a half hours.
By stealing other people’s ideas Edison went on to make his millions.
The first public demonstration of the Thomas Edison’s incandescent lighting system was in December 1879, when the Menlo Park laboratory complex was electrically lighted. Edison spent the next several years creating the electric industry.
Thomas Edisons Muckers
Already, by the time he moved to Menlo Park in 1876, Thomas Edison had gathered many of the men who would work with him for the rest of their lives.
By the time Edison built his West Orange lab complex, men came from all over the US and Europe to work with the famous inventor. Often these young ‘muckers,’ as Edison called them, were fresh out of college or technical training.
Unlike most inventors though, Edison depended upon dozens of ‘muckers’ to build and test his ideas. In return, they received only workmen’s wages. However, the inventor said, it was “not the money they want, but the chance for their ambition to work.”
The average workweek was six days for a total of 55 hours. Nevertheless, if Edison had a bright idea, days at work would extend far into the night.
By having several teams going at once, Edison could invent several products at the same time.
Still, each project took hundreds of hours of hard work. Inventions could always be improved; so several projects took years of effort. The alkaline storage battery, for example, kept muckers busy for almost a decade. As Edison himself said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
What was it like to work for Edison?
One mucker said that he “could wither one with his biting sarcasm or ridicule one into extinction.” On the other hand, as electrician Arthur Kennelly stated, “The privilege which I had being with this great man for six years was the greatest inspiration of my life.”
Historians have called the research and development laboratory Edison’s greatest invention. In time, other companies such as General Electric built their own laboratories inspired by the West Orange lab.
It is ‘Edison’s greatest invention’ that we shall be exploring in this book and how you can work in exactly the same way as The Great Man to build your own publishing business.
You’ll see a million ‘Gurus’ on the web telling you how to ‘make it big’.
How many of the gurus sell the ‘same ol shite’, repackaged and reworked? They make big money from stealing others’ ideas but in this instance the stolen material is fundamentally flawed!
I can sum up most of what they write on the back of a postage stamp: “Develop a product or service and sell it”.
The main point is that they never TELL YOU WHERE TO GET THE BLOODY PRODUCT!!!!
I have built a formidable, online business developing and selling products, but more importantly, I have built systems to STEAL GREAT ONES, repackage them and sell them for amazing profits!
For example, I found one particular product, which was selling extremely well offline and was marketed by a reputable company (no names to protect the innocent!). I made the required changes that you’ll learn about in a minute and… Bingo!
I launched my NEW PRODUCT on the net at $97 per copy and sold over 2,000 units in twelve short months… Do the math!!!
I have no qualms about ‘stealing’ great ideas… and neither should you!
Every year bookshops, music stores and galleries sell hundreds of thousands of copies of works that are based on someone else’s ideas, reworked and simply reprinted… and the original work they stole from was based on yet another person’s idea!
This domain has LONG been a secret stockpile of content for savvy insiders to plunder for profit. In fact, entire multi-million pound companies have been built around content that is now FREE to anyone who knows where to look!
Generating Great ideas
I am constantly amazed at how many people have no idea how to come up with ideas for products or services. What you need to do is to find someone who’s got a cracking idea and then steal it, repackage it and resell it!
Firstly though, you’ve got to find that fantastic idea to steal.
Remember the old saying “There’s no such thing as a new idea?” It’s true. Just ask Thomas Edison.
There are a number of ways that I find great ideas to steal:
- Offline Successes: If something is selling like hotcakes offline, then chances are you can make a packet online by selling a similar product or service.
- Competition: If you see that lots of people are doing something similar to what you’re doing, then that’s great because it shows that there’s a demand for your product or service.
- Feedback: Ask your customers what they want. You’ll be surprised at how many great ideas they’ll come up with.
The main thing is to keep an open mind and be willing to try new things. You never know where your next great idea is going to come from.
To Outsource or Not
One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make when starting your own business is whether or not to outsource certain tasks.
Outsourcing can be a great way to save time and money, but it can also be a headache if you don’t do it right.
Here are a few things to consider when deciding whether or not to outsource:
- Cost: Outsourcing can be cheaper than hiring employees, but it can also be more expensive if you’re not careful.
- Quality: Make sure you’re outsourcing to someone who knows what they’re doing and can deliver the quality you expect.
- Communication: Communication is key when outsourcing. Make sure you’re able to effectively communicate your needs and expectations to your outsourcer.
Ultimately, whether or not to outsource depends on your specific situation and needs. Just make sure you weigh the pros and cons carefully before making a decision.
A Buyer’s Guide
When it comes to buying products or services online, it’s important to do your research and make sure you’re getting the best deal possible.
Here are a few tips to help you navigate the online marketplace:
- Read Reviews: Before making a purchase, take the time to read reviews from other customers. This can give you valuable insight into the quality of the product or service you’re considering.
- Compare Prices: Don’t just buy from the first website you come across. Take the time to shop around and compare prices from different sellers.
- Check Return Policies: Make sure you understand the seller’s return policy before making a purchase. This can save you a lot of hassle if you’re not satisfied with your purchase.
By following these tips, you can ensure that you’re getting the best possible deal when shopping online.
Bonus
As a bonus for purchasing this book, you’ll receive access to our exclusive online community where you can connect with other like-minded individuals and share ideas and strategies for building your own successful publishing business.
So what are you waiting for? Get started today and start stealing great ideas!
Summary
In conclusion, there’s nothing wrong with stealing other people’s ideas as long as you’re adding value and not just copying blindly. By finding, repackaging, and republishing top-selling works, you can create a successful publishing business and keep 100% of the profits. Just remember to do your research, be creative, and always be on the lookout for your next great idea!
However, not everything he created was a success.
One concept that never took off was Edison’s interest in using cement to build things. He formed the Edison Portland Cement Co. in 1899 and made everything from cabinets (for phonographs) to pianos and houses. Unfortunately, at the time, concrete was too expensive, and the idea was never accepted.
The greatest failure of Thomas Edison’s career was his inability to create a practical way to mine iron ore. He worked on mining methods through the late 1880s and early 1890s to supply the Pennsylvania steel mills’ demand for iron ore.
In order to finance this work, he sold all his stock in General Electric but was never able to create a separator that could extract iron from unusable, low-grade ores. Eventually, Edison gave up on the idea, but by then, he had lost all the money he’d invested.
BUT HE KEPT GOING!
And thanks to his system of generating ideas and reworking them into patentable products through his dedicated team of ‘Muckers’, Thomas Edison became immensely wealthy. His legacy? You wouldn’t be reading this without his inventions!
So, how exactly are you going to come up with products and services that will sell well?
Here are some useful suggestions:
- The goods you propose should enhance products already available in your chosen niche. The reason I say this is that if you have decided on an area for which no product already exists it is:
- Impossible to gauge that market for the product you propose, and
- There is no existing product to rework. This means spending an awful lot of time, effort, and expense in research and development. In the time it takes to develop a new product for a ‘virgin niche’, you could have reworked three or four for an established market.
- Products you propose should be connected to a field that you know has a market.
There are a couple of methods I use to locate a previously untapped niche. One way is to start thinking and come up with a list of some products that you have often wanted but never found.
You can rack your own brains and also ask others who may have decent ideas. Once you have thought of a few such products, you go searching for them. The second way is to find some unusual products and see if anything of the kind is available.
Now you probably have a better idea why the last suggestion advises you to work with products related to an area that you know about. Else, what appears to be an awesome idea to you may well be ‘old hat’ to the very people you think will go for it… I’ll show how to check out if your idea is a non-starter in a minute.
Utilize your work experience:
There may have been some occasions when you hoped you had a particular product, which could make work a lot simpler.
Are you a salesperson? Maybe you require some items to help manage your brochures better; or perhaps some product that teaches you how to improve workflow.
Do you have a repetitive task that you’d wish a piece of software would do for you? Possibly you have often wished for an added pair of hands or some product that could accommodate different things while you worked on them.
Try to conjure up every amazing product or service that you’ve seen people utilizing in their line of business – all of these are the product of someone’s great imagination.
Look around your house or use your hobby:
Similar to work, there are often times when you may have hoped you had something to make your work easier or add value to your hobby. Take a look at some things that are already available. Do they bring to mind any products, which would be indispensable 5 years from now?
Hear what others are saying:
When you speak to others about their work and hobbies, you will repeatedly notice that people impulsively tell others about how they wish they could purchase certain things.
If they are aware that you can supply such items, in all likelihood, people will tell you what they want. And even if they don’t, you should come right out and ask them. People will rarely think that they can source these things on their own.
If you or your friends and family, on trips abroad, have ever happened to come across certain things that people use there, or which are available in foreign shops, then this could be a great area for new ideas.
Whatever such products you come across on foreign trips, which are not readily available, would do if you can establish a marketable niche.
Study trade journals:
Trade journals are an exceptional supply of information. These may not help you find items to deal in, as the goods are already available in your country. However, this does help in the elimination process so that you do not end up handling products that have no market.
By having knowledge about what is available, you can better judge where it fits into your portfolio. It may even inspire you to come up with yet more related products.
Apply creative lateral thinking:
If you aren’t finding it easy to come up with fresh ideas from existing ones, attempt the exercise of conjuring up different uses for a common, everyday item.
Take the humble house brick. Majority of the people can think of various uses, but essentially, there are only two – using the brick as a building material (for e.g. making walls, pathways etc.), or as a weapon (for e.g. to throw at retailers’ windows, knock someone’s head with etc).
But those who actually tax their minds, and who think apart from the obvious (lateral thinking), are the ones who really come up with fresh ideas and unique uses such as: brick door stopper, ashtray, holder for matches, match striker, using bricks as steps in a ladder, vehicle jack, ruler, tyre wedge, feet warmer (after a little time in the oven), paperweight, added in the toilet cistern and used as a water saver, stand for cooking dishes, animal hobble (with a rope or cord), stepper for exercising can you come up with some more?
Well, use this Lateral Thinking for information products. Come up with GREAT IDEAS and then see if anyone has produced A GREAT PRODUCT that you can rework and repackage. Better still see if anyone has come up with an average product that you can greatly enhance.
You’ll generally find that the latter is the case, as the vast majority of stuff out there, that’s making BIG MONEY, is distinctly average. You will be able to produce a much better job using my system and therefore, potentially make a stack more cash… providing your marketing is up to scratch!
Which it should be by now!
Are any of the ideas any good?
Making the effort to come up with a product isn’t going to do you any good if it’s not going to sell. It could get worse if you actually made the effort to locate produce something, and then realized there were no buyers for it!
That won’t earn you any money, or any friends.
You have to evaluate each product that catches your fancy with regards to its marketability. Simply because an item enjoys tremendous sales for one author does not essentially indicate it will do well for you too.
You need to make sure your lists are of the right target audience; for instance, you have to build those lists and establish joint ventures and But as I said, this book is all about stealing great ideas and creating great products for lucrative arenas. Marketing your great product is a whole new ball game!
I have even discarded many ideas because I considered the market to be flawed: a type of computer software for self-hypnosis, as I foresaw various kinds of legal problems; and a crossword puzzle software, in which every square had to be clicked to disclose the letters beneath. It appears that people would rather write using a pen.
How to Spot Hot Products:
Perhaps a surefire way to evaluate whether or not a certain item will sell is to go through ClickBank.
Choose an area that interests you and check out the products. The ones that appear first at the top of the list are the best sellers, and ClickBank provides limited stats like:
PAYOUT STATS: $earned/sale: $ 33.18 , %earned/sale: 50.0 %, %referred: 62.0 %, gravity: 448.3
How The ClickBank Marketplace Works
ClickBank boasts over 100,000+ affiliates so it’s a great acid test as to what really is selling out there.
Every product listed in the ClickBank Marketplace is associated with a sales commission rate. Commission percentages range from 1% to 75%. On any one sale, the minimum commission is $0.25 and the maximum is $100.00.
In the Marketplace, products are ranked by their “productivity score”. To preserve the integrity of their system they do not publish the formula for the score, or the score itself, but they do say that it is a function of these four factors:
- $Earned/Sale: Average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale. Note that this is the net earned per actual sale, and so it is impacted by refunds, chargebacks, and sales taxes. (Effective 28 July 2005, unfunded sales, such as returned checks, do not impact this number.)
- %Earned/Sale: Average percentage commission earned per affiliate per referred sale. This number should only vary if the publisher has changed their payout percentage over time.
- %Referred: Fraction of publisher’s total sales that are referred by affiliates.
- Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks, we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.
All factors are combined and adjusted such that more recent sales activity is given greater weight. Products are not listed until at least one has been sold.
To improve their Marketplace ranking, products must show a history of reliably converting referred traffic to paying customers over the past 8 weeks. Products that maintain a higher ranking naturally attract more affiliates and make more sales overall.
How to Spot Hot Niches:
The other reliable method I use to establish the popularity of the marketplace when creating an Internet product is to do a search on Google Keyword Planner to see how often it’s searched for.
To give you an idea of what’s selling, I just did a search on: Internet marketing and returned a result of: 302,021
Now compare that with porn: 5,026,206
As opposed to basket weaving: 2,726
So what’s an average result for a popular product?
I look for anything over 20,000 searches as a starting point.
There are hundreds of niches you probably didn’t even know existed that are searched for every day, and there are products that you’d expect to see hunted down with surprisingly few searches.
If you’re excited about an item, ask people in that niche their opinion – email busy site owners or popular newsletter editors and then evaluate the answers.
If all but one says yes, you must keep an eye out for the one who said no, as he might have said that to discourage you and may well be planning to do it himself.
Perhaps I’m suspicious without reason, then again, perhaps I’m not.
So we’ve managed to track down a GREAT IDEA, of a GREAT NICHE. Now all we need to do is track down the GREAT PRODUCT and rework it.
So the BIG SECRET to stealing GREAT IDEAS!!!
I take an established, hot-selling product and simply have it rewritten! That’s it, not rocket science is it?
I know the product is either popular in its own right or it has a wide market as established using the methods just outlined.
I have a team of people on hand 24/7; reliable, hard-working, competent writers who will turn a brief around in a matter of days or weeks (depending on size) and best of all… they charge just a few hundred dollars to produce best-selling material.
To Outsource or Not to Outsource?
Good question, but very easy to answer.
To my own detriment I’ve spent many years working till the small hours when I could have been sitting on the beach, playing with my kids or taking my wife out to dinner.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and its hindsight, which moved me to produce How To Steal Great Ideas.
I’d often pondered on the possibilities of paying someone to do my work for me, but being a fully fledged control freak could never imagine letting or even thinking anyone could ever write as well as me, let alone come up with some ideas which were as good as mine.
How wrong I have been, so to answer this question:
I would have to say yes, 100% no shadow of a doubt. Outsource your work, sit back, watch your business grow before your very eyes and count the $$$$s in your bank account as they roll in.
However, before you rush out and hand over your hard earned cash to first so called copy writer or web developer, you need to take advantage of my mistakes, read on to discover HOW NOT to make the same mistakes I have.
You can now benefit from my years of wasted time and energy, let others build your business for you.
Outsourcing Your Project Through Upwork: A Buyer’s Guide
Upwork is one of the many freelance sites on the web where you can hire freelancers to do all the work related with having a website.
Whether you need someone to develop a site for you, or do some programming, maybe create content for your website, or even do some graphic and art designing; you can get it all done through Upwork. In fact, I am a regular buyer on Upwork and other freelance sites on the net, and I have no hesitation in saying that Upwork is perhaps the best.
Upwork has 11 different categories under which you can post your project. These are:
- Website Design
- Graphic Design & Art
- Software & Technology
- Writing & Translation
- Sales & Marketing
- Administrative Support
- Audio, Video & Multimedia
- Management & Finance
- Legal
- Training & Development
- Architecture & Engineering
In addition to these main categories, each category has its own sub categories. Thus, as you can see from the above, all your website development, creation, and management needs can be met by hiring service providers from Upwork to do your project.
Currently Upwork has over 50,000 service providers in all their 100 categories (including sub-categories). Although there are a few novices and amateurs on Upwork, largely, their service providers are top professionals from their field, who are excellent at their job.
You can hire any of these service providers to do your project and can expect to receive work of the highest quality.
Apart from getting a staggering choice of professionals, the best part about hiring through Upwork is that you can hire these professionals at very competitive rates. In fact, many a times, you can literally outsource your work for as less as 1/4th the cost that you would have paid to hire someone to work for you full time.
Using Upwork is very simple and above everything else, it’s FREE! You simply need to sign up with Upwork and create your buyer’s profile, after which you are given your ID and password and you’re all set to go.
Here’s what you need to do to post a project on Upwork:
• Visit Upwork and click on the link where it says ‘Post a Job’.
• The page you will now be directed to provides all the information about using Upwork; the benefits of hiring their service providers, what it costs you, and their different categories. But if you’re simply interested in posting your project, you need to click the circle on the right side of the page that says ‘Post Your Project’.
• After this you will need to enter your username and password and you will be directed to the page where you start with your post. If at this time you do not have a username, you can click the link that will take you to their sign up form and then proceed from there.
• To post your project, you have to choose a category, and then describe your project in a manner so as to give all the required information to the service providers. Here you have a choice of two levels of projects. You can either post your project as a Basic one, which means that all the service providers in your category will be able to bid on your project; or post it as a Select project, which means that only Select service providers will be able to bid. By posting a select project, you will get better proposals for your project as Select service providers have to pay more to elance as fees and commission, and thus you will get only the serious bidders. However, you have to pay a $25 deposit for posting a select project, whereas the basic one is free. This $25 is only a deposit and is returned to you once you have awarded the project to any provider. This indicates that you are also a serious buyer and are not just trying out elance. Elance even gives you an entire month to award the project and only takes the deposit if you haven’t awarded the project after that much time.
• Once you have selected the project level, described your project, and confirmed your posting; your project will be posted immediately. Soon after you should start receiving some bids.
This is the procedure at the time of writing for posting your project on Upwork, and is also described in detail on the site itself.
You will receive numerous bids from service providers and it can get pretty tough to pick one. But Upwork provides good details about service providers to help you to pick the right one. Along with the respective pitch and proposal of each provider, you will be able to see their Upwork rating (maximum of 5.0) and read the feedback reviews left by other buyers for those service providers. By reading these reviews, you get a good idea about the quality of work the provider does, their professionalism, their rates, how good they are at meeting deadlines, how good they are at communicating with clients, and also their level of expertise. By evaluating and comparing all these parameters, you can choose the service provider who best meets your project needs.
Once you award the project to anyone, you should ask them to sign a contract before starting work. Upwork has some sample contracts that you can choose from. If any service provider refuses to sign the contract, you should not just walk away from them but run!
From personal experience I have seen that it is not best to award the project to the lowest bidders. Sometimes you will get bids that are very low and you may be tempted to award them. However, if you choose any service provider based on only their low bid for the project, you simply cannot expect the best quality of work. ‘You get what you pay for’ is something I have learned the hard way! And this is not to say that a low bid indicates low quality of work. What I am essentially suggesting is that you should review the proposal in its entirety and only then award a bid.
Unfortunately, even though Upwork works perfectly most of the time; there are times when you may get fleeced. Not by Upwork, but by some service providers. There have been instances when I have paid advances for a project, only to have the service provider disappear with my money or give me really shoddy and incomplete work. Although most service providers are thorough professionals and honest people (the feedback review that we give them certainly helps to keep them honest and is one of the biggest weapons available to Upwork buyers), you may come across some providers who simply do not care. But Upwork customer care comes to the rescue here too. If the service provider is active, they will intervene and help you to sort matters out. Upwork also has the credit card details of all service providers, so worst come to worst; they may be able to charge their card for your money.
But here’s a little something that I have come up with to help myself. There was an instance where a particular service provider took a considerable advance from me but did not give me any completed work. After a few weeks, they stopped responding to my mails entirely. I created another buyer’s profile, posted a lucrative project, and invited that particular service provider to bid on it. Voila! He placed a bid, got in touch with me, and I had my man! A little sneaky I’ll admit, but immensely effective.
And while we’re on the topic of money, the one thing that really pisses me off about Upwork is their billing and payment system. Their procedures for authenticating your credit card can test the patience of a saint. But with the introduction of PayPal as a payment system, this too seems to be working out just fine.
All in all, I have had positive experiences hiring freelancers through Upwork, and you could very easily too.
Bonus: A Service Providers Guide To Upwork: Earn Money Through The Internet
Try surfing the Internet and you are likely to find hundreds of money making schemes on the web; some even promising to make you a millionaire in no time! But unfortunately, most of these money making schemes are making money only for the people running the schemes. However, I have been fortunate to find a legitimate way to earn a decent living through the internet – via Upwork.
Upwork is a website which is like a marketplace where many buyers post hundreds of new projects each day. These projects are posted under various categories namely:
Now the way to make money is to become a service provider on Upwork under one or more of the above mentioned categories, get projects from buyers, complete the projects awarded to you, and get paid for your services. No, this is not one of those schemes where you do nothing but still earn money (whether there are actually any such schemes out there or not is another matter altogether). But if you are ready to work for it, there are thousands of dollars to be made through Upwork every month.
To become a service provider, you need to visit the site and sign up by filling out a simple registration form. You have a choice of four types of subscriptions. If you simply want to browse the projects and see if Upwork is for you, you can choose the free ‘Courtesy Listing’ which will give you an online presence but you will not be able to bid on any of the projects posted by buyers. An ‘Enhanced Listing’ (for writing and translation category and paid monthly) will give you an increased presence and you will be able to bid on 3 projects.
However, if you want to become a full time service provider on Upwork, then you can choose from their ‘Basic Professional Package’ or the ‘Select Professional Package’. The Basic Professional package costs $145 for the entire year, where you get 80 leads every month. And the Select Professional Package costs $350 per year, where you are allotted 120 leads every month to bid on as many projects.
A Basic service provider can only bid on Basic projects, whereas a Select service provider can bid on Select projects as well. Select projects generally pay more than Basic ones and thus the Select subscription costs more.
In addition to the subscription fees, you also have to pay a commission on all your earnings. Upwork charges a commission.
This may sound like a whole lot of money that Upwork charges its service providers; first the subscription fees and then the commissions. But being a service provider for more than a couple of years now, I can readily say that all the charges and fees are well worth it. Where else would you have access to hundreds of new projects every week, with a scope of earning thousands of dollars each month for such a low subscription?
And if you are fortunate enough to get a few regular clients through Upwork, you can also work directly with them and avoid paying the Upwork commissions altogether.
Creating Your Profile
Once you have subscribed to be a service provider, you will need to create your profile and portfolio, for the buyers to see. Your profile should list all your qualifications and what you are best at. Your portfolio should provide samples of your work, which the buyers can go through and get an idea about the quality of work that you do.
The Bidding War
To get projects, you first need to bid on them. You have to browse the projects in your category and then place a bid on the ones which you think you can do. When placing a bid, you have to quote a price for the project and also place a proposal as to why the buyer should accept your bid and award you the project. In other words – make a good pitch. Along with your pitch and quote, your buyer gets to see your Upwork rating and read the feedback reviews that other buyers have left for you. All these parameters help them to pick a winning bid.
When I had just started out on Upwork, I did not have any rating or reviews as I had not done any projects through Upwork. So, the best way to make your pitch attractive to buyers is to quote a lower price than what other service providers are quoting (if it is a Basic project, you will get to see the bids of all the other service providers). Once you get a few projects and start to build your Upwork rating and feedback reviews, you can command a better price for your work, provided you get good reviews and maintain a high rating.
The one thing that you should be careful about is not to price your work too low just to get the project. Buyers may view a low quote as an indication of cheap quality and may thus decline your bid altogether. If you are not getting too many projects, you should check the bids of winning service providers and read their pitch to know how you can improve yours.
Money Matters
Once you have completed a project, you need to invoice the buyer for the amount specified in your bid. The buyer will either pay you through the Upwork billing and payment system or through PayPal. If you are paid on Upwork itself, the money will be deposited in your Upwork account and then you can get it transferred to your bank account via wire transfer or requesting a physical check from Upwork. Upwork allows you to make one free withdrawal each month, with subsequent withdrawals attracting a fee.
Personally, I have seen that majority of the buyers are genuine and honest people who will pay you your money at the completion of the projects. But since I was burned a few times, I have started taking a 50% advance from the buyers which reduces my risk of non-payment considerably.
One thing about the Upwork invoice system: you should never issue a duplicate invoice under any circumstances. Upwork charges their commission on every invoice issued and does not recognize the concept of a duplicate invoice, which is why you should not re-issue any invoices.
Summary
There it is!
This HAS TO BE The Most PROLIFIC, PROFITABLE, Yet SIMPLE System Ever… and it makes me literally TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS A WEEK.
Step 1> I find a great product or seek out a profitable niche that has an average product servicing it
Step 2> I use my team of writers at Upwork to rewrite and repackage it for minimum investment
Step 3> I market my new product through the methods outlined in The Wealthness Blog
Step 4> I count my cash and enjoy my life!
And as explained earlier, if you don’t want to incur the costs of employing a writer then rework your first product and I’ll guarantee you that you’ll wished you had employed a professional writer!
Anyway, you can invest the profits in the next project made from the first so you’ll still be ‘in pocket’
WITH THANKS: To all the people in the world without whom I could never have stolen their ideas!
Thanks to the two freelance writers who contributed to this book at a cost of $200
I’d also like to thank my payment processor for depositing the TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS made for selling this GREAT IDEA into my account!
And finally I’d love to thank the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee for making all this possible… LOVE TO YOU ALL!!!
The toughest lesson to learn is probably the one you thought you had already learned.