As a developer living in the US my experience with Odesk is that you cannot make a living doing just Odesk. But you can still achieve good pay rate on certain projects if you choose carefully. I used to charge , for example $600+ for a 3 hour job in the weekend. and if you are lucky you may end up building relationship with your client and get other projects outside of Odsek.
If anybody looking to get into Odesk, this is my advice on how to get over the chicken and egg problem(You are trying to build your work history while clients looking for your work history).
Find projects that can be partially or even fully prototyped and send the live link in the bidding. If the project is genuine most clients will bite. If they don't , write off your effort as marketing expense!
Also never bid for a project if you think you cannot get a 5 star rating after the delivery.
You can see my odesk profile below , all my ratings are 5 star. No surprise!
A couple of years ago, I was away from the U.S. for a few months and thought I'd try to get some contracts online. I hadn't heard of oDesk and only knew of some others like rentacoder. I did the exact same thing you suggested, which is send a link to a prototype in my bid. With my awesome luck, I didn't hear back from either of the 2 projects I sent the prototypes for. I ended up finding a software company that was hiring locally.
If anybody looking to get into Odesk, this is my advice on how to get over the chicken and egg problem(You are trying to build your work history while clients looking for your work history).
Find projects that can be partially or even fully prototyped and send the live link in the bidding. If the project is genuine most clients will bite. If they don't , write off your effort as marketing expense!
Also never bid for a project if you think you cannot get a 5 star rating after the delivery.
You can see my odesk profile below , all my ratings are 5 star. No surprise!
https://www.odesk.com/users/~014c438dbb17ea9c46