Connects and bidding math
Connects turned bidding into a budget. Most freelancers are spending that budget without ever having worked out the exchange rate.
The symptoms
If any of these sound like your last month, this page is about the cause.
Connects run out before the month does
You are buying more, or you stop bidding for the last week.
Your pipeline has a hole in it on a fixed schedule.
You bid on almost everything
A job appears in your category, you apply. There is no filter in between.
Most of the budget goes on jobs you were never the obvious choice for.
You cannot say what your reply rate is
You know roughly how many proposals you send and not how many get answered.
Without it there is nothing to improve, so effort goes into volume by default.
Connects changed what bidding is. It used to be free, so the only cost of a bad proposal was the time it took to write. Now every proposal has a price, which means bidding is a budget, and a budget you have never measured is a budget you are losing.
The useful thing about this is that it makes the whole problem arithmetic, and arithmetic is easier to fix than a feeling.
Work out your exchange rate
Three numbers. You probably know the first and have never written down the other two.
| What to count | Over what period | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Connects spent | Last month | What bidding costs you |
| Proposals sent | Last month | Nothing on its own |
| Proposals that got any reply | Last month | Whether anything you write is landing |
| Conversations that became work | Last three months | Whether the conversations are the right ones |
Connects spent divided by conversations started is your real cost per conversation. Most freelancers who run this for the first time find the number is much higher than they assumed, and that almost all of it went on a category of job they keep bidding on out of habit.
Volume is the symptom, reply rate is the diagnosis
If twenty proposals produce one reply, forty will produce two, and you will have paid twice as much to stay exactly where you are. Nothing about a reply rate improves by repeating it.
What a job is worth bidding on
The question is never whether you could do the job. It is whether you are the obvious choice for it, because the client is going to open four proposals and you need to be one of them.
- Does the posting have enough detail to write a specific opening? If not, you cannot do the one thing that wins proposals.
- Is there a budget, and is it in your range? A missing budget on a short post usually means they have not decided, and undecided clients hire slowly or not at all.
- Has the client hired before? A history with reviews tells you this is a real job. A blank client account is a coin toss you are paying for.
- How many proposals already? Past twenty, you are betting on being opened by someone who has stopped reading.
- Are you the obvious pick, or a defensible one? Defensible loses. Every time.
Write the rule down and follow it on slow weeks, which is the only time it matters. Everyone has a filter when work is plentiful.
The case for bidding much less
Halve your volume for two weeks and put the time into reading the postings properly and writing openings from scratch. One of two things happens, and both of them are useful.
If conversations hold steady, you have just halved your costs and freed up hours. If they drop, you have learned that your volume was doing real work and your filter was too tight, which is a much better problem than not knowing.
The cheapest proposal is the one you do not send
A job you skip costs nothing and takes nothing. Freelancers who track this usually find their best months had fewer proposals in them, not more.
The exit from the budget entirely
Every proposal costs connects. An invitation does not. That difference compounds, and it is why the freelancers who look like they are barely trying are usually the ones who stopped bidding years ago.
Getting found rather than applying is a slower project with a different set of moves, and it is worth starting now even while you are still bidding.
The moves, in order
Start at the top. The early ones cost minutes and the later ones compound.
- 01today
Count your last twenty
How many got any reply at all, including rejections. That one number tells you more than any other thing on this site.
- 02today
Write down your cost per conversation
Connects spent, divided by conversations started. It is the only price you are actually paying.
- 03this week
Set a rule for what you will not bid on
Write it down. A rule you have to decide each time is not a rule and will not survive a slow week.
- 04this month
Halve your volume for two weeks
Spend the time you get back on reading jobs properly. If the number of conversations holds, you just halved your costs.
Mistakes that feel like progress
Treating connects as the constraint
The constraint is attention, not connects. Connects just put a price on wasting it, which is arguably an improvement.
Bidding early on everything to be first
Being early helps only if the proposal was worth opening. Being early with a template is paying extra to be ignored sooner.
Boosting a weak proposal
Boosting buys position, not persuasion. It moves a proposal nobody wanted to open further up the list of proposals nobody wanted to open.
Measuring success in proposals sent
It is the one number that goes up no matter how badly things are going, which is exactly why it feels productive.
What people ask about this
Only if your reply rate is already good. Buying connects multiplies whatever your proposals currently do. If they are getting replies, more is more. If they are not, you are paying to be ignored at scale.
Being in the first handful helps, because the client reads the early ones with more attention than the fortieth. It helps a good proposal noticeably and a template not at all.
Boost buys position in the list, not a reason to open you. It is worth considering on a job you are genuinely the obvious pick for and never worth it as a way to compensate for a weak proposal.
There is no right number, only a right cost per conversation. Whatever volume gets you enough conversations at a cost you are happy with is your number, and it is usually lower than the one you are on.
Read these after
Find out what your profile is costing you
Seven questions, no account. You get a score, the three gaps costing you the most, and what to do about each one.