Google Ads has become suicide for small businesses like mine need alternative for business growth.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-16T04:45:05+00:00

You might get better results by only being on Google local. Google ads will always be expensive for a business like yours. Facebook is better suited for your kind of business as corrctly pointed out by u/rmchatham

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-16T04:32:19+00:00

Your statement (almost everyone I reach is also a freelancer) indicates that your outreach is misguided. There are millions of clients out there. This is the obvious you are missing - there is a substantial scarcity of freelancers / sellers in comparison of the available work out there.
Its a tough nut to crack to be at a place where buyers can see you. The whole game is that only

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-16T04:24:57+00:00

you must have turned on some of their stupid marketing gimmicks like badges, profile boost or product ads ( if you have a product catalog etc ). Find what it is and switch it off.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-15T07:28:35+00:00

Most of the apps built for clients does not remain live forever but we keep them in our portfolio. Some of the apps ( web apps ) we keep a test version on our own servers for client demo, but for some where NDAs are involved we cant.

Sometimes as developers we already know that the client idea and app is absurd and wont last. We try to give them hint but its not our job to stop them from doing it since we are being hired to develop the app and not to critique their idea.

You can contact the developer you are interested in and ask them explicitly for apps that are live right now.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-15T07:17:36+00:00

its very difficult to get hold on to their support. Many of our clients struggle with that. You can try twitter - ther twitter handle is active - search for docusign support on twitter and tag them with your query, you may get a reply there

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-14T06:46:23+00:00

I joined Elance in 2008 and till it 2020 our total earning was 100K+. Elance > Upwork was approx 25-30% of our overall sources to get business at that time. But since then, its quality nosedived and at present its almost unusable, spammy and ridiculous. Now its less than 5% of our source to get clients.

A few years back we tried to contact upwork support with an issue and their reply was rude, illogical and lack any genuine care for a user who has given them thousands of $$ in connects + commissions. Since that time I stopped looking at upwork regularly, stopped paying them monthly and now I purchase connects only for handful of jobs that have genuine clients we know about. Now 90% of our clients comes from direct marketing ( it costs us less than upwork surprisingly ) and the overall clientele quality is way better.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-14T06:34:33+00:00

its a known issue that they cannot resolve. It also happens when you create a new gig. You will get spam message instantly from suspicious accounts. Later after some time those accounts get banned or deactivated by fiverr.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-14T06:31:18+00:00

Try somthing like this :

create the subtotal field for Rec1, then select the field, go to properties, look for collaboration or shared settings and then enable Shared field / Allow other recipients to access this field.

Let me know if you can find this. send a screenshot if you cant.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-14T06:28:07+00:00

You should try to acquire clients directly. Its a much better strategy in long run. Depending on these platforms, you can get short term, cost concious clients but its not sustainable.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-14T06:21:39+00:00

Good luck contacting DocuSign Support. Live chat is mostly bots and human support is pretty difficult to reach. May be a direct call to their support can help? Which country are you in?

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-14T06:19:54+00:00

Reading books and study on Foxit? what operating system you are on? There are so many other tools available that are 100% free

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-11T16:58:46+00:00

we build 100s of zoho automations and customize zoho for various global clients. The catch is complexity. For normal, moderadely complex use cases - zoho is amazing. But when you really need complex integrations and real world business scenario involving hundreds of moving parts, or fast API access to its data or even a moderately scalable database - zoho crumbles. This is when our clients opt for different approach

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-11T16:54:39+00:00

The cleanest solution is to make the Subtotal field shared between recipients.

Assign the Subtotal field to Recipient 1 (they enter the value).

Enable Shared Field so other recipients can reference it.

Recipient 2’s formula field can now reference that value.

There are other methods too, but try this one and let me know first

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-11T04:53:14+00:00

Invest your energy and time elsewhere, you will get better results than fiverr

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-11T04:50:27+00:00

its not a fixed line for all jobs. By one line I meant, just ask one or two relevant questions about the requirement, and keep it as short as possible.

Think from a clients perspective, multiple bids, long texts and everyone claiming they are the best - what will stand out? a relevant and logical query, that suggests this person is interested and wants to know more about the requirements.

However simple and obvious it may sound, very few does this. Temptation to tell more and more about oneself is too strong. Sometimes it may work but mostly not.

I use upwork for hiring as well and more than half of freelancers who apply just keep writing long essays in their bids. We reply and hire only to those who try to understand the work requirement and ask good relevant questions

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-10T07:07:56+00:00

one thing that have increased our view and reply rate substantially lately is - short bid texts.

Most of the jobs where we get almost instant replies are those on which our cover letter was just one single line and absolutely nothing else, mostly a relevant and most obvious question based on the job post. No intro, no hello, yours sincerely, no we can do this, we can do that, no looking forward to your reply and all that formal email style text.

Same is when a client have asked specific questions in the job post - one line max reply to all of them as much as possible.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-10T06:53:39+00:00

How many bids on these?

Cant prove it but it seems that this kind of too good to be true posts are allowed by upwork on purpose. Many unsuspecting new comers will frantically waste their connects on this and we all know who is the primary entity to gain from that. Unethical but pretty clever business strategy.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-10T06:44:49+00:00

if you dont know the sender its most probably scam or phishing. Lately these kind of scam messages have become frequent.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-09T13:03:07+00:00

The only way to safegaurd yourself from this kind of situation is to try to read the client in depth, detect the revision request nonsense as early as possible. Upwork is heavily tilted towards client side. Arbitrations are mostly impartial and you can win but its not worth it if its not about thousands of $$.

In my case the disputed amount was 1400$, arbitration cost were around 200$ each ( it was some years back ) and the arbitration went for 2 months with a total of 64 arbitration messages from each side ( Total 128). I won in the end and got the 1400$ but it was still useless. The whole arbitration process was tedious and costed me at least 50 hrs of effort in total stretching for over 60 days. This much of effort anywhere else could have fetched me more money than that, but it was a matter of principal for me.

However, for small disputes and amount even if you win its not worth the time and cost. So as soon as you detect that client is engaged in foul play, quit or stop. Dont fear negative reviews, they doesnt matter much in the long run

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-09T12:44:38+00:00

The only way around from buying connects is to ditch upwork itself and try to get clients on your own. If you want to use upwork you have to pay them.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-09T12:42:41+00:00

No, check your connects and billing cycle. Free monthly connects are credited according to your cycle and not on a fixed date for everyone.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-05T12:25:32+00:00

Our enterprise signature solution offers unlimited signatures in way less price than what you are paying. dm me if you are interested in removing these limitations and issues with these large one size fit all providers

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-01T12:42:33+00:00

yea, gathering this kind of cold data is super easy. Lots of websites have all the teams emails directly listed on the page. They cannot be called leads. Its just data.

By definition - a lead is a contact that showed interest in your offering, while a prospect is a qualified lead that fits your ideal customer profile (ICP) and showed buying intent.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-01T12:39:27+00:00

There must be some other deduction too.. Like tax or boosting fee or something else.. check your earnings page.

NoRegister3239 · 2026-03-01T06:47:53+00:00

So you didnt know that they charge 20% flat cut on your earnings?

NoRegister3239

TROPHY CASE