Easy Jobs on Upwork for Beginners With No Experience

Upwork is an incredible platform for those who want to begin to make an income outside the 9-5 grind that dominates the economy right now. It allows you to make a profile and get work from sellers who want you to complete small, one-off projects for them. It’s similar to the Fiverr platform – and they both have their pros and cons for freelancers.

It can seem difficult to get your start on Upwork. There are thousands of available projects, and it can be intimidating to look at all the profiles and ratings of other established sellers that are competing for the jobs you’d like. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of some easy jobs on Upwork, and some tips to get your freelance career started.

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Table of Contents

Creating an Account on Upwork

To create an account on Upwork, follow the steps on their website. They will first ask for your name, expertise, hourly rate, educational background, and several other specifics.

Then you’ll need to start creating winning proposals and build up your profile. To do that, you will need to learn how to find the easiest jobs on Upwork.

Building Up Your Profile

While you’re just starting, it will be very challenging for you to access the sorts of jobs you want to do there. But that’s okay because there are many excellent Upwork jobs for beginners—easy, low-level jobs that you can get to build up your profile at first.

Watch Upwork’s video on getting started here:

Get Ready to Do Some Grunt Work

“Grunt work” is a little tough to define because it isn’t just any single kind of work. Grunt work can be a lot of things, but at its core, it is any work that combines low pay, moderate to significant time commitment, and little to no skill requirement.

This can look like several different kinds of work. Sometimes grunt work will come in the form of research, where a writer wants you to compile a dataset of the top 500 food blogs on Google. Often, these will involve some kind of data entry or data translation, basically taking existing information from one format into another.

No matter what it is, grunt work is seldom pleasant, but it will start to increase your ratings if you do it effectively.

Easy Jobs to Look For On Upwork

Once you have built up your profile on Upwork, you can start shooting for easy jobs that pay well. Here, we’ve listed work that still involves a low amount of skill but often requires more experience and higher ratings before you can earn real money from them.

All of these could be considered “grunt work” as defined above but are distinguished by the pay level that can accompany experience and high ratings.

Native Language Jobs

Several Upwork jobs are geared specifically toward native speakers of a given language.

Perhaps it’s a Mandarin speaker who wants a native English speaker to review their English language manuscript and check on grammar. Perhaps it’s a French speaker that wants a native Amharic speaker to make some Amharic language outreach materials feel natural and casual. Or perhaps it’s something different entirely!

The point is this: even if you don’t have many skills that feel marketable, your native language is something in which you certainly have expertise. This knowledge provides you a level of distinction from other users on Upwork without skill or rating distinction.

Location Based Jobs

Location based work is similar in quality to native-language work in that everyone lives somewhere, and that place distinguishes you from other sellers on Upwork, even when your skills do not. That said, this is one of the least common options on this list, especially if you live in a low-population area.

Typically, this kind of work will involve either testing or locally-based knowledge. If an app developer wants to know more about how their app works in New York City, for example, they might post a gig like this on Upwork. In other cases, sometimes someone wants to learn more about a city for a piece of art, or perhaps as a “local guide” for an upcoming visit.

Data Entry

One of the best easy jobs to do on Upwork is data entry. This refers to any job that revolves primarily around entering data into a database.

The trouble is that there are many sellers out there who offer these services since they don’t require many skills. That said, buyers are often willing to pay extra for a seller that’s reliable and highly rated.

Once you’ve built up an Upwork profile, you can start to sell data entry services at higher prices that better reflect your state of experience on the platform.

Transcription

Transcription jobs are another excellent source of low-skill work that buyers want to be done well. Typically, this will involve them sending you an audio file that they want you to transcribe into text within a relatively quick time frame.

Because there are a few transcription sellers on Upwork, buyers will often pay more for someone better rated.

Content Writing

Finally, content writing is in high demand, but buyers almost always want to see a history of previous written work before they’ll invest in your services on Upwork.

If you can write at a native language level, and have some previous writing samples (or can create some samples) to show to potential buyers, you’ll have a good head start at getting freelance writing work on Upwork as a beginner.

How to Get Competitive Bids

The proposal process isn’t all about your ratings and experience. Often, buyers will go with the seller that has the highest quality bid as well. You can ensure that your bid falls into that category by following three following main guidelines.

Bid Fast, Bid Low

Focus your time on the most recently-posted projects. You want to get your bid in quickly. Also, you’ll get access to more jobs if you bid lower than other sellers for similar work.

Invest Your Time Wisely

Time is a precious resource. Don’t waste your time on bids that are clearly out of your league. Instead, focus on bids you have a realistic chance of winning.

Craft Your Bids

While you should bid quickly, you also should spend a little time on each of your bids to tailor them to the individual buyer. The best way to do this is to create excellent template bids and then tweak them with buyer details on a bid-by-bid basis.

Conclusion – Easy Jobs On Upwork For Beginners

As you can see, Upwork can be an excellent platform even if you don’t have much experience or marketable skills. Is Upwork good for beginners? Although it can be tough to find easy jobs on Upwork, there’s plenty of opportunities for you to succeed on this platform.

Easy Jobs on Upwork for Beginners With No Experience

Creating an Account on Upwork

Building Up Your Profile

Get Ready to Do Some Grunt Work