Freelancing on Upwork, Filipino VAs, and $60k a year

Some of the people trying to break into freelance copywriting do it backwards or flat out wrong.

They buy a $500 course. They hire a coach. They consume endlessly and bill nothing before giving up.

I want to tell you a better way and tell you about my pal Marcus instead.

We met on Discord a few years back, on some obscure social media marketing come-up channel with a bunch of other hungry guys. This was when I was flirting with the Rank and Rent business model.

Marcus isn't on Twitter posting threads about copywriting. He doesn't have a newsletter, a personal brand, or a single testimonial from a Fortune 500 company. He's also never even gone to college.

What he does have is a dead-simple Upwork operation that spits out $50,000 to $60,000 a year like clockwork.

Here's his whole model, no upsell attached:

Marcus niched into general social media content. Captions, short-form copy, blogs, video editing, content calendars. Unglamorous stuff. He wins jobs on Upwork, takes the job, then hands the actual writing to freelancers from the Philippines via OnlineJobs.ph. He pays them $2 to $5/hour for the arbitrage and charges clients $35 to $55/hour per project. He QCs the work, manages the client relationship, and pockets the margin.

He runs it like a one-man agency, working with speed and volume, and never revealing to clients that he has a small team of VAs immediately turning around his gigs (Upwork clients hate working with agencies).

Volume is the whole game. Without it, you won't make a livable income.

And here's the thing, most freelance courses and coaches out there really only teach volume, not what it takes to actually scale and make consistent income like what Marcus does. Even the very best freelance copywriting courses(the ones you might've seen heavily marketed on social media only really teach volume).

So I say this as an insider: save your time and money. Once you understand that volume is the way, you understand how to beat 90% of other freelancers who don't have systems in place.

Marcus just had the genius to add agency arbitrage on top. No course taught him this. He did enough jobs to see the pattern and was cool enough to share it with me. And here I am sharing it with you.

And a little secret? Most successful freelancers operate this way.

So here's how to replicate it for yourself, step by step:

Land your first 3 to 5 jobs at any rate, just to build reviews. A $150 project with a 5-star review is worth more than a $1,500 project with no review.

Buy Connects aggressively. Upwork's algorithm rewards active bidders. Treat Connects like an ad budget, spend them to make money, not to save money.

Niche down hard. "Copywriter" or "General freelancer" is a crowded search. "Email copywriter for SaaS onboarding sequences" is not. The narrower you go, the less competition and the higher your perceived value.

Apply volumetrically. Marcus used to send 15 to 20 proposals a week when he started out. His close rate was initially maybe 20 to 30%. That's still 3 to 6 new clients every single week. It's a numbers game dressed up as a skill game. Today he likely sends more proposals and closes closer to 40 to 50% due to the discovery algorithm favoring him.

Build a sub-contractor bench early. Find 1 to 2 reliable overseas writers before you need them. When volume spikes, you flip to agency mode instead of burning out.

Do this seriously and you can scale it to low 6 figures. You'll replace your job, fire your boss, and never need freelance advice or coaching again.

Now, what's the catch? Because there are a few.

The financial cap is real. Arbitraging Upwork at $50 to $60k/yr is solid income, especially since it's all online. And if you really streamline the system, there's nothing stopping you from relocating to somewhere like Chiang Mai, living in a fully furnished villa with in-house maid and cooking services while only working three hours a day. But freelancing just doesn't compound the way a product or an audience does. You're still trading time for money, just more efficiently than most, especially with Marcus's model. Freelancing will rarely get you to 6 figures, let alone 7 or 8. And I'm personally only interested in giving my time to assets that will net me 7 to 8 figures.

There's also no moat. Anyone can copy this, especially the hungry hoardes of people from the global south. Marcus's edge is that he showed up and stayed consistent, especially at the bottom of the market when Upwork wasn't as crowded. But he doesn't have ownership over the platform or the idea, that's the ultimate drawback of freelancing. If ten people read this email and do exactly what he does, the market gets slightly more crowded.

Client dependency is a quiet risk too. Upwork can change its algorithm, raise fees (they already have, Connects didn't used to exist), or a long-term client can vanish overnight. You don't own the platform or the client relationship in any deep sense.

And freelance copywriting skills, while useful, don't automatically transfer to higher-leverage work. Rev share deals, consulting, building your own offers, you'll need to invest in that transition deliberately, and it's usually not more freelancing.

So is freelancing a good long-term play? As a foundation or a backup, yes. Use the cash flow to buy yourself time or buy back your time. Build an email list on the side. Develop an offer you own. Or perhaps to piggyback it onto an agency.

Short-term? Don't waste your time.

As for me, maybe I'll get back into running a one-person Upwork agency once my brand is fully built out and doesn't need me to sustain it. At that point it'll essentially be free cash flow, if it isn't super saturated in a few years.

For now, I don't have the bandwidth between building and selling my own offers, writing my first copywriting book, doing my masters, and growing this list past 10k.

As Confucius once said, "the man who chases two rabbits, catches neither."

Hope you never buy a freelancing course again, they're all the same.

Till next,

Fathi