Video transcription:
A lot of people will say, “Why Fiverr, Dale? I’ve heard all about how it devalues the marketplace and how it devalues freelancer services” What you have to think about is, what the system of Fiverr is and how you can use that to your advantage, and how you can find ways around it.
So, for those of you who don’t know what is Fiverr, it’s the world’s largest online marketplace for small services, you sell things called ‘gigs,’ which is your skill or a product, or something that you can do, and those base gigs start at $5 – you have to offer something for $5. Once you have offered things and you’ve completed more and more gigs, you then get access to more options, you unlock more abilities to do things, and you can offer your services for higher amounts of money.
Fiverr is definitely seen as a place to get things done, on the whole, quickly and cheaper rather than looking for someone to pay a lot more money to, and that’s what you need to bear in mind if you are going to be on Fiverr and how you’re going to approach in that way.
So, why should you use Fiverr? Well, there’s a few reasons for this. For a start, it has the most traffic of the freelance websites. You are looking at 40 million hits plus a month which is a huge amount of volume going through the website. Another reason is that it is a third-party. What this means is that they are the middle person between you and the client. That means there’s a lot more control, the communication is all done through them, and they also monitor the payments, so there’s very little chance of someone not paying you, and everything is kind of controlled within their medium, so that gives you a lot more of a safety buffer to work, and essentially, if you approach Fiverr in the way of offering a product, and I’ll explain more about this in a little bit, rather than offering yourself as a service or your skill as a service, you’re going to do a lot better on this website.
So, what do you need to begin? Well, essentially, you’re going to need a skill in line with their homepage offerings. Having a skill which falls in line with the graphics and design, digital marketing, writing, video and animation, programming, music, there’s lots of different things you can offer on Fiverr, so that is one thing you need to bear in mind, is do I have one of those skills that I can offer on Fiverr?
You also want to be quick and diligent with the skill. You want to have enough practice to replicate this thing quickly, and I would suggest doing this skill within an hour, and I’ll talk about this in a couple of seconds, and finally, you’re going to need a lot of patience. There’s not going to happen overnight. Fiverr is something that you are going to have to start at the bottom and work your way up.
Okay, so how exactly, Dale, are we going to do this? The first thing we want to do is we’re going to take this skill we have and we are going to template it. Now, what this means is, and I’ll get onto this in terms of specifics in a second, but the first thing you want to do is as I just mentioned, make sure it’s something that you can do essentially in under an hour, so something that you are very quick at, something that you know how to do well, and something that you can offer to a multitude of people knowing that nothing really is going to throw a curveball at you.
We’re also going to do, is the more you do of this, the more you’re going to archive everything, so say for example, you are selling sports logos. The more of them you do, the more you want to keep an archive of those templates because they’re going to come in handy when you come back in future to revisit logos that were very similar, or you can reuse a lot of fonts, a lot of designs, same with music and audio, and some other skills as well that you can offer, and then finally then, you need to be incredibly specific about your multiple if you want to do multiple gigs offerings, and this brings me on really to step two which is creating your specific product.
Now, I’ve given you here three examples of something that’s very bad to do on Fiverr, something that is better, and then something that is very good. So, say for example, you are a logo designer. Now, to go on Fiverr and offer your service as “I will design your logo” is probably one of the worst things you can do because you are factoring in an amount of time that you don’t know that is going to happen. Designing your logo is just way too broad, and you have to narrow that down. So, something along the lines of “I will design a logo for your sports team,” now, that’s a lot better because already, you’re narrowing down the potential clients and you are narrowing down your potential offering to something that you are a lot more comfortable with.
“I will design your logo,” someone could ask you anything. It could be very complicated, it could be elaborate, it could be in a field that you don’t understand. With this, now, you are narrowing it down to specifically sports teams which have with them very familiar look and feel that you know you can replicate, and then if you want it to go further, you would say something like “I will design you a sports team’s logo in the style of a professional NFL team.” So now, you’re really specifically narrowing down your product offerings to something that not many people are really going to be able to throw a curveball at you because they are very clear, the look and feel of the logo and essentially, what it would look like.
So, if we jump into Fiverr, I just want to show you a few examples of some very good products on Fiverr. So, this is a good one to start with: “I will draw you as a yellow cartoon.” This is obviously a reference to the style of drawing of The Simpsons using the yellow skin, and you can see here now, the seller, Eliana, is very popular on Fiverr and has templated this down to the point where you just simply give her an image of yourself, and then she replicates it like this to make you look like a Simpsons character. It’s very direct, you know exactly what you are getting, and then if you go into her gig offerings, you can see, by adding on extra gig elements which are very controlled, for example, in Premium, you say, I will do five characters; in Standard, you say, I will do three characters, and basic, you say, I will do one character. You’re controlling what you are offering, and you are stopping potential hiccups and unreasonable expectations from the client. So, it’s all about specifics and Fiverr.
Let us show you another good example here. “I will set up Google AdWords campaign in one day.” Again, it’s very specific. If you know how to set up Google AdWords for a campaign, the chances are, you have a very good idea in your head of the specific amount of time it takes to do all the setup. That makes it a very good thing to offer on Fiverr because it is not dependent on a client going back and forth with different amends and different requests. It’s one specific thing. You know how long it will take, and you can deliver it very quickly because you are very effective at doing it, and then again, so you are a copywriter. This is a good example: “I will proofread and lightly copy edit 1000 words of text.”
You are being very specific, you are not saying, “I will edit your copy,” which could be an unlimited amount of words, you are very specifically saying it’s 1000 words and that is all, and then in your multiple gig offerings then, you can work that up to 2000 words, 5000 words. You could get even more specific with copywriting. You could say, “I will do your Amazon product review for you.” So, you are nailing it down to just Amazon products and nothing else. So, again, the devil is in the detail and you really need to be specific in what you are offering. Otherwise, you’re just going to come completely unstuck and it’s going to be very difficult for you to get to stage three which is getting reviews.
Now, unfortunately, that is how it works on Fiverr. The more reviews you have, the more you work up the rankings and the easier it’s going to be for people to find you organically and use your service. So, when you initially start, you will have your initial five-dollar offering, and you need to get those reviews in because the more you have, the quicker you can move up to a level 1 seller, and then a level to seller. Now, one thing, couple of ideas for you, you could offer this to friends and family, maybe offer to refund them. Another thing you can do is email the support team and ask them to be on the front page for exposure. If you have a very unique gig on Fiverr, they are more likely to put you on the front page and that will put more eyes on your product offering.
Now, once you get level 3, you will have enough reviews at enough of a reputation that then you can start really having a lot of fun with this. You can set your own prices, you can offer a lot more money for your services because you have the reputation to back you up, but getting to level 2 is the hard part. Now, if I come down to some quick maths and takeaways here, so your financial costs. Now, to get on Fiverr, there is obviously no initial upfront cost, but you will need a way to be paid. Now, this is very commonly done through PayPal, but you can also do direct transfers to your bank accounts and other means. For every five dollars you make on Fiverr, Fiverr will take one dollar which is a 20% commission, so it’s a very high commission, particularly if you are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of work, but unfortunately, that’s the way it is. Now, on a base five-dollar gift, Fiverr will take their one-dollar commission, and then PayPal fees than would amount to around $0.42, so for every five dollars you make, you would be roughly making around $3.50, $3.60, so it is unfortunate that Fiverr’s commission is so high, but unfortunately, those are the rules.
Now, if we come over to time, Fiverr.com/levels will give you a good idea of how you get to that level 2 status. Okay, so here on the levels page, now, you will see here, when you start up, you can only have seven active gigs, you can only add two additional gigs up to a value of $20, and you can send a custom offer of up to $5000, but obviously, those are few and far between. The bulk of the traffic on Fiverr is going to be looking for your $5, $10, and $20 offerings.
Now, how do you get to level 1? You’ve got to complete at least 60 days as an active seller, so you’re looking around two months, you have to complete 10 orders, earn at least $400, and then throughout then, you have to maintain 90% order completion response rate and maintain a 4.8 start rating. Now, if you offer a specific product, it’s going to be a lot easier to do because the expectations of the client are not going to be through the roof.
Okay, now, level 2 is the big one. Level 2 is really where you kind of start to separate yourself from the rest of the field. You can reach a top-rated seller, but a lot of people online agree that level 2 is where you have a lot more autonomy to set your own prices and do what you want. So, you need to complete at least 120 days as a seller which is around four months, obviously, 50 individual orders, earn at least $2000, and then you have to maintain that 4.8 start rating along with a 90% rating on response, order completion, and delivery date. So, if we are looking at times, we are looking at 120 days, around four months, 50 orders completed, and $2000 earned. At a $40 base rate, you need to do 50 gigs. At a $20 base rate, you would have to do 100, then finally then, if you just offered your minimum five-dollar entry-level gig, you would have to complete 400. So, that would mean you’d have to do four a day, or if you can get it up to a base rate of $20, you would be looking at one per day. So, it’s going to be initially a lot of work upfront.
If we come over to the lowdown here in the takeaways, so, your first 4 to 6 months are going to be so tough on Fiverr, and this really needs to be a side gig alongside your main income. You’re not going to quit your job, set up as a freelancer on Fiverr, and offer your services for hundreds of dollars. As I have said before, you have to find a way to template and very specifically offer something that you can do very quickly with ease and replicate multiple times. You give this away as much as you can just to get the reviews in, try and get on the front page as you want, try and do something unique enough that the Fiverr team would think, yeah, we should put that on the homepage. It sounds pretty interesting.
There’s a lot of really kind of funny, wacky things that you can order on Fiverr. So, be very specific and be very creative in what you offer, and if you can do that, if you can do it very quickly, as I’ve said, aim for under an hour, obviously, this will change now and again because of client demands, but if you would be very specific, very quick, and you get those reviews in, you will grow on Fiverr, and then once you’ve hit the 4 to 6-month mark, yes, you wouldn’t have made much money, but you would have grown to the point where you can then offered your service at a much greater value and it’s something that could support you as a much bigger income.
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