What should be a successful application for Upwork?

Question

Freelance

The essence of the topic is this.
Dear community of freelancers who work for Upwork (formerly Odesk), can you please describe what the ideal application for a project should be. It would be ideal if you attach examples of applications that brought you orders. Personally, I specialize in translations and front-end development, but I will be glad to see applications from other disciplines.
Thank you for your attention.

Answer 1

There are good examples here, but English is lame in them.
jff.name/odesk-write-cover-letter
jff.name/cover-letter-example-1
jff.name/cover-letter-example-2
I myself try to ask a few short questions about the project and indicate my previous experience.

Answer 2

It is necessary to respond quickly (or if the project has few answers), delve into the project and write to the point, without general phrases. Plus, we need reviews in the profile (and indeed a normal profile).
If a person writes about layout or mentions some technologies, send him links with examples of work so that he can be sure of your competence. A person asks on WordPress - throw some of the best examples on WordPress, asks on Joomla - throw on Joomla. If a person talks about full time, then write in the answer that he is ready to work full time (if you can, of course), in short, forget about template answers and use individual ones. If the customer is interested, he will go to your profile, there he will already see a list of technologies. If the task is for revision and the customer gave a link to the material - write to him about the jambs that you see in the code, the layout is always full of this (if the layout is good - praise, the main thing is to say that you have read it).
In my last project, a person had a site unfinished on Laravel 4 with the debugger enabled, I looked at it for the sake of interest, found a couple of internal links to the site api in the debugger log, found that one of these addresses gives an error, because they cannot find the method authorized user. And the address itself, logically, should not have been available to unauthorized people at all. He wrote that a filter is needed here before the address with access denial, at the same time he suggested switching to Laravel 5. Well, in general, he left a long footcloth in response. We signed a contract for $5,000. Before that, small projects were mostly for promotion, but the same thing works for them.

Answer 3

I'm not going to write an exact answer, just some thoughts.
To be honest, I did not understand the logic of many customers. It feels like they want to hear the same thing 10 times. For example, a person writes: I want a PHP programmer to finish a project. All clear. What do you want to hear in response to the question "Which part of this project do you fit best?"...

Answer 4

The ideal application is a myth. The application should be simple and short, but behind it should be a decent profile with an extensive portfolio, a high rating and a low price.

Answer 5

I went through trial and error, leaving applications impressed by the project)
Someone just "Hi, awesome idea! What I need to do to start working on it?", And someone in 2-3 sentences I describe who I am and what I'm doing. Projects received in both cases :)