I've been working on Upwork for 2 years and I feel like I've hit a plateau, could you answer my questions and give me some advice ?
I'm a social media marketer. I offer content strategy, content creation, video editing and community management services. My Job Success Score is 100%, I am top rated, and my response rate is 4-8 hours. My total earnings visible on my profile are $10k + .
Over the past 2 years, I've done okay-ish. Lately, however, since May 2026, things have been unbelievably slow. Very few invites, very few profile views, and very few proposal views. I haven't changed much about my profile or how I use Upwork, using the cover letter that consistenly landed me jobs, my profile about section has been the same, my intro the same. I just update my case studies in my portfolio when I have a new nice one with good performance. I want to understand why Upwork is no longer working for me.
I have a few questions for people who are more experienced than I am or perhaps more up to date than I am with how the platform changes :
- Do keywords and "optimizing your profile for SEO" really matter ? Does it matter if my About section and Work History sections are keyword heavy or not ?
- What works in a video intro? What has worked for you in the past? Has anyone commented on your video intro in the past ? My profile video is not edited at all, it's just a 2 minute video I took with my phone. But I've gotten compliments on it from clients. Do you think I should change it to something more edited ?
- How do you structure your cover letters ? What do you put in them ? Mine is super concise and straight to the point and I put in a link to a Loom video and a link to my Canva portfolio and then I attach my case studies as PDFs. I personnalize based on the information in the offer. Do you do something different? Do you have a template you follow ? If yes, would you mind sharing that with me?
- For people in social media, what do you include in your portfolios ?
Thank you in advance to anyone who took the time to share info with me!