Fiverr is a place where you can buy and sell professional services.
The name comes from the original idea behind the service, which was that people could buy services for as little as $5. As the market has grown and attracted more advanced service providers, services that cost more have become the norm.
If you want to make extra money or even start what has been called a “Fiverr Business,” you need to know how the system works.
It has a lot of “tricks” that most people probably don’t know about.
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First Things to Know
Fiverr’s market is huge and full of different things. It’s usually not true that it’s only for cheapskates. If you have a great product, service, or skill, you’ll find that many sellers can charge more than $350 for it, even if it’s not well-known.
People want to know who YOU are. The biggest problem I’ve always seen is that the best people just share their knowledge. They don’t try to make it sound fancy; they use their real name and are honest.
You need to change what you offer to meet customer needs. This is the biggest mistake most businesses make. Instead of just telling people what you do, you need to show them how it will help them.
Everyone will, of course, have their own experiences with the platform. The rest of this is based on mine…
Fiverr’s Market
The size of Fiverr’s market is something that most people don’t really “get.” It’s huge.
It is thought that 8,000,000 sales were made on the platform in 2015 alone, which means that someone bought a gig every 5 seconds.
The point is that MOST people hold themselves back by telling themselves that the “market” isn’t that big or that it’s full of people from developing countries (able to work for a fraction of a Western person).
Even though these ideas might have some value, the fact is that most buyers on the platform are from the West (but not all), so if you can provide a good service, there’s definitely an opportunity.
I’ve learned that if you can offer a GOOD service at prices that aren’t too high, you’ll usually get a lot of customers.
The key to success is being able to make an offer that people want. I’ll explain this in a second, but you also need to believe that Fiverr is a big enough platform to support ANY service.
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People are interested in who you are.
I’ve found that the most popular “gigs” are made by people who have a talent or skill that other people want.
Usually, their offer is very personal (e.g., they use a picture of themselves as their profile picture) and they will describe their experience as simply as possible.
This is important because if you want to offer a service on the platform, using “yourself” as the product is by far the best way to do it.
In the “business” world, we’re led to believe that people want products that are as cheap as possible and that are made by faceless, corporate companies that offer rigidity and conformity.
This is true for a lot of people, but in the world of “online” services, it’s more profitable to offer YOUR service. You no longer have to hide behind an avatar or a fake name.
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Change what you’re giving
Last but not least, this is the most important thing I’ve learned about the system.
Most people’s BIG mistake is thinking that if they’re good at [insert skill here], people will automatically see that as good for their business.
Most people aren’t very smart, so you have to explain as clearly as possible how your service could help them.
This is called the “offer” in marketing and sales. It’s how you match a “product” to what a market really wants.
Most Fiverr gigs will have titles like “Portrait Photographer,” “Fitness Trainer,” or “Web Designer.”
They will work, but not very well. You need to give someone a reason to check out what your service can do.
This usually means choosing a “juxtaposition” or “niche,” where you focus on one market and get very good at it while ignoring the rest.
For instance…
“Amazon Product Photographer to Increase Sales,” “Increase Business Traffic with a Unique, Professional WordPress Theme Design,” and “Elite Fitness Training to Get Rid of Belly Fat in 3 Weeks” are some examples of headlines like these.
I can’t say enough about how important this is.
Most people will say that they are “content writers,” but they won’t list any real skills or expertise that the person who buys their service will find useful.
You need to be willing and able to “adapt” your offer to what people want.
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How I Used Fiverr
To show why the above is important, my friend helped me start selling services on Fiverr.
He knows how to work with software, help people with their computers, set up networks, trade money, and use Bitcoin.
Even though he put his name and information in the right places, his first “gig” was writing articles for “Forex.” Even though he got a few orders for these, the “Crypto” articles were what made him the most money.
There are a million crypto articles on Fiverr, so we didn’t do anything crazy. But we did give users the ability to see *exactly* why my friend would be the best writer for them.
Not only did he have real experience in the world of technology, but what was most important was that he had been talking with a “consortium” from London for years.
In the world of finance, a “consortium” is a group of people, businesses, or banks that work together for a common goal. No matter what, each person has their own plans.
The group that my friend was in was focused on trading currencies, but what was more important was that one of them had been playing around with Bitcoin. It turns out that by “dabbling,” he became a real Bitcoin millionaire in December 2017.
With this in mind, we changed my friend’s Fiverr profile to reflect this unique experience and insight, and a huge number of orders started coming in.
The first week, we made $500, and the first month, we made about $1,500.
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I have set up two Fiverr profiles in my own world.
Even though both profiles got responses, only one of them really took off.
This was a profile for computer support, which I had a LOT of experience with. It’s not only my job, but you could say it’s also a “passion” of mine.
The most important thing about this profile was that I knew enough about the market to offer very specific things.
I didn’t post “I’ll fix your computer for money,” but instead I worked on specific fixes for the software they might have used.
For instance…
I will use code to fix errors in a WordPress plugin, theme, page, post, newsletter, or WooCommerce.
I’ll improve Shopify’s conversion rates by fixing the code for the theme, page, newsletter, and CRM.
I’ll set up cloud VPS servers on Azure, AWS, Rackspace, DigitalOcean, and other platforms.
After I did this, I kept working on the site I had made for the thing and made sure that my name, face, and story were all on it.
Soon enough, people started coming to our service with questions. “Can you fix this WordPress problem?” “How do you add a logo to Shopify?” “My Shopify site won’t convert. Do you have any suggestions?”
I went above and beyond to answer any questions and made sure that any fixes we did were done on time and with “added extras.”
The “added-extras” we gave the client were full “rundowns” of changes they could make to their infrastructure to save money, get more traffic, make more sales, or speed up back-end processes.
As word spread about the changes we made, we started to make a lot of our processes more organised, using tools like Trustpilot and others.
The end result was that users could get the help they needed, and we had a reason to keep them up to date with new information, etc.
