Freelancing is a great thing. You can choose your clients, do the kind of work you want, when you want. In theory. In practice, all job positions tend towards slavery. I don't even mean this to be edgy, but pretty much all companies become corporations and then start looking at how to extract extra revenue from workers without providing additional benefits or investing money in them.
Upwork is one of these freelancing platforms that promised a great deal but has over time steadily taken away the freedoms and benefits users had. For example, Upwork used to provide 60 Connects, which are virtual proprietary currency needed to apply for jobs, for free each month to each user, with those who subscribed to paid plans being given up to 140 a month. After client complaints about proposal spam, Connects were no longer doled out and now cost money. See the trick? Pay Upwork money to get a chance to get money. There's still money to be made on Upwork, it's just that now freelancer margins have become even narrower; if you bumble around, you'll end up working for Upwork instead of through Upwork.
Upwork has several algorithms, the most important one for freelancers being JSS (Job Success Score). It's not entirely clear how it works but its result seems to rely on worker's activity, money made, user feedback etc. over the course of past several weeks. JSS is what bumps the worker up in search results and creates a positive feedback loop: the more you work, the higher the JSS, leading to more clients looking to send work over. But, this also means the worker becomes trapped in this cycle of working 0–24 without having any job benefits, essentially becoming a slave to the algorithm.
It can be even worse because the worker can get overwhelmed with unpaid labor, such as replying to e-mails, doing voice chats, editing content the client isn't happy with etc. This absolutely wrecks any quality of life the worker might want to have. You can hardly take a break, because every time you lower your activity level, the JSS tanks and you no longer appear in search results. So, gaming the JSS algorithm appears to be the most crucial part of Upwork success. How does one do it?
Based on my 10 years of min-maxing the Upwork JSS algorithm, the key thing is consistency. You want to set up such a work activity level that you can comfortably sustain for years on end daily. However, this activity level should include at least one job proposal a day and at least one edit to your profile, no matter how tiny. The details on JSS calculations aren't all revealed to freelancers, but from what I gathered, this is what has the most impact, from most to least impactful:
When you think about this, it makes sense – Upwork wants new workers to have a fair chance at getting jobs, so they are given a JSS boost as long as they keep trying, with a small cache of Connects so they can apply to jobs. Keep in mind, JSS decays over time, meaning JSS represents a rolling average of how much you did these things over time, with a single day of frenzied activity giving just a small bump in your JSS. When a worker goes inactive, his JSS finds a stable level that probably has to do with account age, projects completed, etc, which would be in 75-90% range but those last 10 percent points, from 90-100, are exclusively given to active Upwork freelancers.
As said by one senior Upwork community manager, 40% of all Upwork jobs are invite-only and don't show up when a freelancer searches for them. So, even if you had infinite money to apply to any job you wanted, these 40% would simply be invisible to you. The goal of gaming JSS is to be invited to jobs as much as possible, which means maintaining JSS as high as possible.
There is a trick with availability, which is done by toggling a switch on profile or job search pages. Basically, the option is there to allow anyone to take a break without taking a major hit on his JSS, but it can be min-maxed as well. A freelancer can say "not available for new work until D-M-Y", which in my experience pauses or greatly slows down JSS decay. What this means is that you could have weeks with sustained activity and weeks during which you take a break.