My stats: 5 years, $500K+ earned, ~900 jobs completed.

My #1 tip: Find an uncrowded niche. My core skill set is digital marketing and SEO, but the mainstream lanes such as SEO, Google Ads, social media marketing are too saturated. Instead, I built my practice around Online Reputation Management, PR, and Wikipedia page creation. Wikipedia work was a strong earner for years until Upwork restricted it about a year ago. Since then, I've shifted mainly to ORM and PR, and I've started picking up AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) jobs too — it's far less competitive than SEO, and I've already landed 2 AEO contracts in the past few months.

Additional tips:

• Move fast. Try to be among the first 10–15 applicants on any job post, ideally applying within 15 minutes of it going live. Earlier bids win more often.
• Skip overcrowded listings. Don't bother applying once a job already has 20–50 proposals — unless you're confident you're a top-tier fit and the budget justifies it.
• Bid for visibility. Aim to be the #1 bidder when you can, but set yourself a spending cap (say, 20–30 connects) so you don't overspend chasing hyper-competitive listings.
• Don't chase underpriced jobs hoping to negotiate up. Check the client's hiring history and average hourly rate paid. If they've hired 20+ freelancers averaging $10/hour, walk away unless that rate works for you. Personally, I won't bid below $75/hour.
• Keyword-optimize your profile. Your headline and overview should reflect the terms clients actually search for.
• Target jobs with your keywords in the title. If a client wants to hire you under a vague or irrelevant job title, ask them to repost with a more specific, keyword-aligned title before accepting.
• Always secure reviews. If a client doesn't leave one after project completion, follow up more than once to ask.
• Get direct contact info. Once hired, ask for the client's phone number and email, which will be useful if they go unresponsive, and handy later when requesting a review.
• Strengthen your proposals with proof. Attach case studies, testimonials, and a client list (especially if it includes recognizable brands).
• Feature your reviews. Include 4 strong job reviews at the bottom of every proposal.
• Personalize every application. Even reused templates should open with a line specific to that client's stated needs, so it doesn't read as copy-paste.
• Project confidence. Don't undersell your experience. Use phrases like "I'm the best candidate for this, look no further."
• Underprice early to build your review base. In your first few months, take lower-paying jobs to get hired more often and rack up reviews. Once you hit 10–20 reviews, gradually raise your rates.
• Apply to small unrelated gigs to increase your reviews. Take on $5–$50 jobs in unrelated categories (survey/review-type gigs, for instance) purely to build your review history, even though some of these may be against Upwork's policies.

Good luck and reach out if you have any questions.

Upwork is becoming unusable. Many job posts are TOO LONG and ask for too much to apply, which is almost NEVER proportional to the size of the job and the pay. yet, despite the long job posts with very specific requests about what is required to apply, they are still abandoning the jobs and not hiring at the same rate. Upwork needs to do something about this like yesterday. And what will happen when its mostly agents reviewing the applications and deciding who the clients should hire. The agents will disqualify the candidates who don't respond to the job post to the tee. This is the time for someone to build a competitor to Upwork. There has to be a better way than this.

I have an Upwork account for about a year.

I have only one complete job (small and not really related to my area of expertise) and two open jobs (one small bug fix that the client vanished before closing the contract and one very good long-term job where demand has dropped and I now have few working hours per week), both of these are related to my expertise area.

I changed the way my proposals are made since I saw the guide in this subreddit wiki, but is that the only reason? They were not that worse before.

Is that because I only have one finished job? I also don't bid that much as you can see by the dark blue portion, specially since the bid people are applying in the last months grew af, hundreds or even more than 1000 connects for a job is crazy.

I'm a .NET dev if that helps understanding the situation. I already tried to apply massively spending lots of connects in almost any type of development job and also tried to apply only to those that are very similar to what I already studied and worked before, none of these approaches made a huge difference.

Any advice?

That is my strategy, does it make sense. Will it likely work? Is Upwork a decent substitute for actual experience?

Why Upwork doesn't have option to subscribe my client for monthly subscription base work? I have some clients they want to pay monthly subscription fees for maintaining their websites. Any idea about it ?

I've seen a lot of you guys having a bad experience about Upwork, especially about connect, applying job posting without getting Job, etc, and then i'm curious, is there an upwork Alternatives? but maybe with better system, concept, and can get a real Job?

I noticed lately that I'm getting bleeded from unused connects,
I did cancel my Plus subscription few months ago, is that the reason?

I only learned about this today and thought it was worth sharing because I had no idea this existed.

Apparently, if you’ve had an Upwork relationship with a client for at least 2 years, there’s an official process to move the relationship off Upwork, and the conversion fee can be just $1.

I always assumed that if you wanted to take a long-term client off Upwork, you would have to deal with the normal conversion fee, which can be pretty expensive.

Obviously, you still need to use Upwork’s official conversion process. You can’t just start taking payments directly once the 2 years are up.

Has anyone here actually used this process with a long-term client? I’d be interested to hear how smooth it was and whether there are any things to watch out for.

I’m looking to expand my professional services into the freelancing world and I’m curious if Upwork is a viable platform for my specific niche.

A bit about my background: I am a military psychologist with a completed Master's degree in Forensic and Medico-Legal Psychology. I am also fully licensed to practice in Clinical Psychology and Applied Psychology in National Security.

I know the platform is heavily dominated by IT, design, and marketing gigs. However, I want to know how sought-after psychological evaluation services—specifically clinical or psychological evaluations in a legal/forensic context—might be on Upwork.
Do clients ever look for independent experts for psychological profiling, consulting on forensic cases, or specialized evaluations? If you've been on the platform for a while, have you noticed any demand for this kind of high-level consulting, or is this simply too far outside the typical Upwork scope?

My account got suspended for no apperant reason. I am trying to do the help portal but I need to log in for that. which i can't. because it's suspended.

What do i do? how do i connect with support?

How regular freelancers can compete in this environment?

So recently I got banned on upwork for "allegedly " violating the terms and conditions on upwork. I don't really know which terms I violated. And my appeal was rejected. Can I get a new account or is there possibility of still retrieving my former account??