I made my first $1000+ on UpWork with AI Automation, and I don’t think it’s great…
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So last month I got an UpWork Job offer to work on an n8n workflow. I had never used UpWork, but guys like Nick Saraev and Liam Ottley, who are the biggest AI influencers, recommended it a lot, so I thought it would be amazing if I could gain some profile authority on it. These guys are paying me $28 per hour on UpWork, which is not a lot, but considering that I don't have any experience and this was my first paid n8n gig. I think making $1,000 in 40 hours was pretty darn good. So now that the project has finished, we are in the maintenance stage. I thought, let's try to get more UpWork clients with the money I made. And damn, it's kind of a shithole at this point. So I search for terms like "AI automations, n8n, go high level, Claude code, AI agents etc" A few jobs that were pretty decent and were providing more than $30 an hour got filled with 40 proposals, and guys placing 100 connects paid within minutes. To be very fair, 100 connects is $15, so these guys are literally placing bets of $15 for a job that they may or may not get. So if you are placing 10 proposals like this, you are spending like $150 per day, and that too, where you are not guaranteed if you're gonna get a client from that. I don't know, it's kind of insane. I'm pretty darn sure that if you spend $100 per day on Meta ads, you will get better results than this, and you will not have this much competition, at least. For lead gen, I think I won't prefer UpWork. I'm gonna maybe run ads and scale my YouTube channel. Right now, I have 2k subs on YouTube and 600 on Instagram, so I think I'm just gonna scale that and go organic instead of quite literally betting on these platforms only to get UpWork rich. But I would love to get your opinion. Are you using UpWork? Is it actually making sense for you budget-wise, and is it a good marketing tool now, or is it too saturated and you're not using it anymore? submitted by /u/No_Evidence1611 |
