When my consulting work dried up many years ago for almost a year, I started freelance writing on Elance, as it was a much better platform for freelancing than Odesk.

It took a while to get enough projects in my portfolio to make it easier to win new projects, especially since I refused to compete on price, competing instead on value.

Then, Odesk bought Elance. At first, they said they wouldn't mess with what was working on Elance. Then, they merged the two platforms and rebranded to Upwork, to get away from the bad reputation of Odesk. Problem is, changing the name doesn't change the things that caused the bad reputation.

Long story short, I never did a single project on Upwork, though in fairness, some of that was because my consulting work picked up and I didn't have much spare capacity.