Thursday, January 26, 2017

Fiverr Success Stories – Building A Profitable Business On Fiverr

Honestly:

Making money online can be hard work.

But today I am going to share one readers success with you.

Not long ago they read one of my tutorials and took action.

Now they have built a highly profitable business on Fiverr.

So today they are going to show you exactly how they did it, so that you can achieve the same!

All you have to do is follow the steps below-

What You Will Learn

  • How to build a profitable business on Fiverr
  • What kind of skills are in-demand on Fiverr
  • How to quickly start selling on Fiverr
  • How to rank your gig at the top to start receiving clients
  • The strategy for raising prices without risking of losing your clients

With that said, I am going to hand the writing reigns over to Liudas to share his strategy-

The Underutilized Freelancing Platform – Fiverr

Several months ago I found this post on MatthewWoodward.co.uk “Make Your First $1 Online Today With This Step By Step Case Study“.

At that point, I was just learning about freelancing trying out sites like Odesk, Freelancer, Elance.

I was getting very frustrated because getting a job was extremely difficult.

A typical scenario went like this, you find a job listing, usually there are 10 skill requirements and the pay is less than what you could get at McDonalds.

You try to apply to that crappy job, but your chances of getting hired are slim because you don’t have reviews.

When I read the tutorial about Fiverr it immediately clicked with me.

I knew that it is crucial to get reviews if you want to get a chance of getting orders and it was all covered in there.

I have used the tutorial as my roadmap for my freelancing journey and so far it is responsible for making me a modest $1,128.00

Yes, it’s nothing much and I would probably have earned so much more, if not some of the roadblocks that I hit, which I will cover later in this post.

fiverr-success-earnings

The potential is there and it didn’t take me long to start receiving more orders than I can handle, but let’s start from the beginning.

Once I read about how to make serious money on Fiverr I started implementing, here’s how it all went and here’s what I learned.

Picking A Service To Offer

The first thing for any freelancer, either you are looking for jobs on Fiverr or not, is to pick a service that you can offer.

The service has to have a huge demand and you need to have the skills/tools to deliver it.

Here’s a short list of in-demand services that you can start offering on Fiverr:

  • Writing content
  • Transcribing videos
  • Logo designing
  • Ebook cover creation
  • Video creation
  • Voice over recording
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • WordPress help
  • Coding help
  • Web traffic

And there’s many more.

fiverr services

A good rule of thumb, if there’s a category on Fiverr, then there’s likely to be a demand for that skill. From this list you should find at least one service that you could offer.

If you don’t have an in-demand skill then spend several months developing a skill that you are interested in.

These days there are so much free information on the web that makes learning a new skill extremely easy. You could learn your new skill within a few hours easily.

I won’t tell you what skill to develop, that’s up to you. It’s important that you would at least mildly enjoy doing it because you will need to start doing it daily.

Even though I had no idea how to do it, I chose video creation, just like in this tutorial, to be more specific whiteboard animation.

I purchased VideoMakerFX, learned how to use it and got started.

Creating The Fiverr Gig

Once you have a skill that you are happy to offer as a service, you then need to create the Fiverr gig. It’s by far the easiest step.

creating your fiverr gig

Start out by searching for 5-7 top sellers, who are offering the services you want to offer.

You might be amazed, but even some top sellers have pretty mediocre gig descriptions and titles, but they are still doing very well so don’t overthink this.

You want to pick the parts that you like from each of your competitors gigs and craft your own Fiverr gig, but don’t copy it word for word.

Title

The title doesn’t need to be fancy, just tell them what you offer as clearly as possible.

If you plan to deliver your service within 24 hours it’s a good idea to mention it and I highly recommend that you offer 24 hour delivery.

Category

This is pretty straight forward, find the category that best fits your gig.

Gallery

You need to upload an image that’s 550 pixels wide and 370 pixels height. I wouldn’t put too much effort into it because once you upload the gig video the image becomes irrelevant.

The video will be the main thing that people will pay attention to and it will also be your thumbnail.

Still, if you offer design services it’s a good place to showcase your work.

Description

I have seen gigs that have a couple lines of text and do pretty well, but I believe it’s better to write an elaborate description.

State what are you offering, why should they order from you and write down your rates.

Looking at some other well performing gigs for inspirations is a good idea.

You might also integrate some of these copywriting tips to help you stand out from the crowd.

Tags

You can have 5 tags in total. They are important for ranking your gigs in the search results.

Screenshot 2015-03-11 21.29.20

You want to look at the same top gigs in your niche, scroll down to the bottom and check what tags they are using.

Copy the most relevant ones.

Duration

You want to set the delivery time to 24 hours, it’s very important because that’s a huge factor for attracting clients.

If you aren’t able to deliver the gig in exactly 24 hours there’s a little bit of flexibility, a buyer can only cancel an order after 3 days once it’s late.

So, in a sense you have 4 days to deliver an order.

Sure, the faster the better, but if you see that you won’t be able to make it just let the buyer know. The worst thing you can do is ignore him.

Communication is key, it can help avoid negative reviews and many clients will come back with repeat orders if you treat them with respect.

Instructions For Buyer

Set up the details for the delivery. It’s nothing special just let the buyer know what you need from him to deliver your service.

For example, to create a video I need a whole script or at least a general idea from the buyer.

If you’re selling articles you need a topic, if you are designing logos you need some guidelines etc.

Video

According to Fiverr, gigs with a video preview get 220% more orders.

So it would be silly not to have one, especially if you are choosing to sell videos.

Screenshot 2015-03-11 21.37.37

I recommend taking your phone and shooting the video yourself, or create a short presentation and do a screen capture video.

What to remember when recording the video:

  • Your video can’t be longer than 60 seconds
  • Show off your expertise
  • List out all your benefits
  • Mention that this is available exclusively on Fiverr

If you cringe just thinking about the idea of shooting a video, then by all means hire someone on Fiverr to do it for you.

It’s a small investment but it will have a big return.

Setting up the whole Gig shouldn’t take you more than an hour.

As I already said this is the easiest step, it sure is important to have a good gig page, but it’s not enough to start getting orders.

Without reviews, you can promise people the sky and they still won’t buy from you.

How To Find Fiverr Success

There’s a huge paradox on Fiverr. You can’t get sales without reviews and you can’t get reviews without sales. Just like with jobs and experience.

In this fiverr tutorial by Eze John, it is advised to create dummy Fiverr accounts to buy your own gigs and send some traffic to promote your gig.

To me, that sounds pretty extreme and very black hat.

To get the ball rolling, I thought of a different strategy. I contacted some friends and asked them to buy my Fiverr gig and I was giving them their money back.

Getting Fiverr reviews

This is a great way to get the ball rolling and you can start getting positive reviews instantly.

But I got tired of explaining to my friends what I’m up to, so I looked for a different way.

I searched for people who already know about Fiverr and have the same problem as I do.

I found a topic on the Black Hat Forum, where people are exchanging reviews.

Or you can use Facebook groups like this one to exchange reviews with other sellers.

How do the exchanges work? Well, there are two types of them. The direct exchange is when you find one person and you buy his gig and he buys yours.

A three-way exchange is when you find two people and person A buys from person B, person B from person C and person C from person A.

The direct exchange is considered risky though I didn’t have any problems using it. Still, the three-way exchange is becoming the standard.

Buyer Requests

Another legit way to spread the word about your gig and get those first crucial reviews that increase your gig rankings are Buyer Requests.

Buyers who don’t find a gig that would suit their needs or are just too lazy to search sometimes create a buyers request, where they say what they want to be done.

If your gig fits the description and you think you can do the task, then you send in your gig.

For extra chances of getting the job, I would also recommend writing a private message telling them that you would be willing to do it at a discounted price.

It’s up to you what road do you want to take.

  • Do you feel comfortable creating Fiverr accounts and buying your own gigs?
  • Maybe you better do review exchanges
  • Or you can do it the white hat long and boring way by finding real clients

Whatever you choose as long as you’re getting reviews you are golden.

After getting my 8 reviews, I started seeing some action. Slowly I started getting a sale once a week.

Depending on the competition in your area, it might take more reviews than that but keep on grinding until you start getting organic sales.

That one sale a week turned into two sales a week, then three and at one point I got seven sales in a day.

I reached a breakthrough, all I needed was to continue working, but then I made a mistake that set me back to square one…

How To Raise Your Prices Without Losing Your Clients

I was over booked, I was getting an average of 3 orders per day, tons of messages asking me about my services.

It was clear that it’s time to raise my prices because I couldn’t keep up anymore.

This all happened before Christmas, I thought I will take two weeks off and after that I will raise my prices.

Those two weeks, turned into three, because I had some health issues. After I went back I ramped up my rates and increased delivery time to five days.

The result, I stopped getting orders. Only my previous clients were ordering, I hoped that it will help me to slowly get back on track.

At that point I was very close to reaching Level 2 Seller rank on Fiverr. I have heard stories that once you reach Level 2 the revenue increases.

So I waited until I finally got it, but sadly I didn’t start getting more orders.

I started looking for some answers and lucky enough I got in contact with Eze John, the author of this tutorial.

He pointed out that my problem is that I increased my delivery time. That’s all.

I should have left it to 24 hours instead of 5 days. So, right now because of that mistake I’m not getting many orders, I’m waiting for my gig to get picked up again.

What To Do When You Have Too Many Orders

So what is the right way to act when you are getting too many orders?

If you are already a level 1 seller, I recommend starting out by adding some extras.

For example, in the beginning, I synchronized videos with voice overs for free. Now, it’s a $5 extra.

fiverr gig extras

I would go about introducing these gig extras one by one and see what effect it has on the amount of orders you are getting.

Once you have the gig extras and still too many orders, then you start raising your prices.

For example I was charging $5 for a 3-minute video.

Now I charge $5 for a 1-minute video.

If you write content, then you go from 1000 words for $5 to 800 words for $5.

Obviously, for every service the process will be a bit different, but don’t make the mistake like I did to immediately jump to the rates you would like to be getting.

Increase your prices very gradually and soon you will reach the level where you start getting paid the big bucks.

Remember to not increase the delivery time!

Building Your Long Term Business

Fiverr is quite unpredictable with how much work it’s going to send you.

As a freelancer you don’t want that, you want a stable stream of new clients and a predictable income.

So, focusing on long-term clients is a good idea.

Honestly, I would recommend looking for ways to get in touch with your clients off Fiverr, even though Fiverr is highly against it.

Think of Fiverr as a lead generation machine for your freelancing business.

Funnelling customers from Fiverr to your personal email will help you to build a much more stable and reliable freelancing career, where a single negative review or ranking fluctuation won’t leave you without any income.

The funnelling can be done by adding social media profiles to your Fiverr account or adding a link to your website (you can create this using about.me) in the portfolio section and asking people to go there to find your contact details.

With time you will build up a client base that will provide you with more work than Fiverr does.

Wrapping It Up

Fiverr is a powerful system, even though the name can sound like there’s a limited earning potential, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are more and more serious freelancers choosing to start their career on Fiverr.

If you subscribe to the Fiverr newsletter, you will find that a ton of people start out with Fiverr success stories and end up opening businesses later on.

So the potential is there, you just need to take advantage of the platform.

As with anything, it takes time to get started but it’s completely worth it.

If you have any questions about getting started with Fiverr, please ask in the comments below!

Fiverr Success Stories – Building A Profitable Business On Fiverr was originally published on Matthew Woodward



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