Alright, so you probably know that Fiverr is a place where you can pay $5 for all kinds of services. But did you also know that some people charge WAY more than $5?
In fact, my podcast interview today is with Kendell Rizzo, and she has built a six figure a year business with Fiverr gigs! And she charges hundreds of dollars for some of her packages.
Quite frankly, I was blown away by how much traffic Fiverr gigs can get for free, and how much money can be made.
As you will hear in this interview, one of the keys to Kendell's success was that she narrowed her focus to specialize in crowdfunding services. By finding her niche, she went from taking any kind of work she could find, to have so much work that she could be more picky…and charge higher prices.
Kendell was kind enough to provide a free worksheet to help you discover your niche right here.
You can follow along with Kendell at KendellRizzo.com. Or you can see her Fiverr gigs right here.
In fact, our very own Jake Cain was so impressed with Kendell's story, that he decided to create his own Fiverr gig to see what all the buzz was about!
One of the things that we specialize in is keyword research and content strategies. So, Jake created his very first Fiverr gig right here to help with a custom keyword research and content strategy plan.
Jake will not only provide you with a list of truly low competition keywords, but he will also provide article templates, suggested article types, and even a custom walkthrough video if you select the right package.
Check out Jake's Keyword Research Fiverr Gig Here
Read the Transcript
Click Here to Expand the Full Podcast TranscriptSpencer:Have you ever heard of Fiverr before? That’s a question I post to four different people. The answers from two of them might surprise you. Keep listening to hear those answers in just a minute.
Did you know that Fiverr.com is one of the most popular websites in the world? According to Alexa, Fiverr has an Alexa rank of 316 in the United States. This means it ranks 316th in terms of traffic, according to Alexa. Considering there are billions of websites out there, that’s a pretty big deal.
In my interview today, I talked with somebody that has built a six figure a year business on Fiverr, yup, on Fiverr. Kendell Rizzo started out as a freelancer doing just about any writing job she could find. However, when she finally narrowed her focus on the niche of crowdfunding, the number of clients she got grew significantly. In addition, she was able to charge higher prices. What I find fascinating about all of this is that she was able to use the Fiverr platform not to charge $5 of job but to charge hundreds of dollars per job depending on what was purchased.
During this interview, you will hear Kendell discuss how she got started as a waitress moved to freelancing and now has a thriving consulting business. She will share exactly how she got to where she is today by using Fiverr and other techniques.
If you want to learn more about Kendell, you can do so at kendellrizzo.com. Kendell has also offered a free downloadable worksheet to help with your crowdfunding campaign. You can download it at http://ift.tt/2pDaaum.
Before I jump into the interview, I thought it might be interesting to know if people outside the digital marketing community had heard of Fiverr before. I think sometimes we get stuck inside our little bubble and assume that of course people know what we are talking about when it comes to building websites. Of course, everyone knows what Fiverr is, so I ask four people that question.
First I asked Jake and Jason, both are my fulltime employees. I didn’t tell them this, but if they didn’t know what Fiverr was, I was going to fire them, no pressure guys. Hey Jake, do you know what Fiverr is?
Jake:Yes.
Spencer:Okay, what is it?
Jake:It’s a marketplace where you can get all kinds of random services for $5 or more.
Spencer:Or more? What’s the highest price you’ve ever seen charged on Fiverr?
Jake:Actually hundreds of dollars, I saw this morning for explainer videos. I guess it gets pretty high up there.
Spencer:Yeah, very cool. Sounds like you know your Fiverr stuff, you’re good. Jake passed with flying colors but what about Jason? Hey Jason, do you know what Fiverr is?
Jason:I do. It’s an online marketplace where you can go to hire people to do specific tasks for $5 and up. I have used it myself frequently over the last several years.
Spencer:Do you remember what the highest price is you’ve ever seen charged on Fiverr?
Jason:I’ve seen some higher prices, depending on the service. I’ve seen upwards of couple hundred bucks. I think myself, I have the most have ever paid for a service was around $75.
Spencer:You are a Fiverr expert, thanks a lot.
Jason:You bet.
Spencer:No surprise there either. These guys work on the internet everyday, but what about more normal people? I thought it would be interesting to hear the perspective of someone that doesn’t work online each day. Boy, I was not disappointed. I asked the most normal people I know, my parents. Please, know that both of these discussions were recorded separately, my mom and dad didn’t know the answer that the other one gave.
Hey, do you know what Fiverr is?
Dad:Fiverr?
Spencer:Fiverr, correct.
Dad:I have no idea.
Spencer:You don’t know what Fiverr is? What if I said Fiverr.com?
Dad:Fiverr.com, I have no idea. It brings to mind a person’s hand with five fingers. I have no idea what it is.
Spencer:That would be a pretty normal hand then, wouldn’t it?
Dad:Yeah.
Spencer:My dad had no clue what I was talking about but maybe my mom would know. Hey, do you know what Fiverr is?
Mom:What fiber is? Yeah, there are different kinds of fiber. There is fiber that we eat, there is fiber in technology.
Spencer:I’m actually saying Fiverr. Think of the number five with an extra R on it, so Fiverr.
Mom:No, I did not know what that is.
Spencer:What if I said Fiverr.com? It’s a website, have you ever heard of Fiverr.com?
Mom:No, I have not.
Spencer:Bottom line here is that just because you know about something like Fiverr doesn’t mean that the average person has. Even the parents of a fulltime internet marketer like myself think of fiber when they hear the word Fiverr.
Before I got started with the official interview, I found out that Kendell has run a few Ironman races. If you know what an Ironman is, it’s a 2.4 mile swim, followed by 112 mile bike ride, followed by a full marathon which is 26.2 miles of running. These are grueling races that take an incredible amount of training so of course, I had asked her about it.
Kendell:Yes I have. I’ve done a few half Ironmans and then I did one full last year, it was exciting. I saw you were at training for a marathon.
Spencer:I am training for a marathon, I have run several marathons before but I am trying to get a Boston qualifying time here in a couple of weeks, I’m right in the midst of it.
Kendell:Cool, which one are you doing for the Boston?
Spencer:As you can hear, Kendell and I actually went on a tangent for a while, like a couple of running nerds to discuss different races, etcetera. I won’t bore you with the details, however, we did eventually come around something that I think is useful for business, goal setting.
It’s good set goals and try to achieve them.
Kendell:I didn’t know this at first but when I started training for my Ironman, all of a sudden, I saw all of these parallels between work, training, and goal setting. It actually played a really nice role in my business and it also forces you to think outside of just business, outside of the internet. It’s a very different approach to goal setting but it all comes together. I enjoyed it, the process, more than I even had imagined.
Spencer:I’m the same way. I think what’s cool too is I always feel like man, I wish I had more time for my business but I really dedicate time to running. I think that it helps out because it gives me a nice break where I could be working really long hours everyday instead I’m like, well, I’m going to take this hour and a half or two-hour break and go run. The exercise and take my mind off things, it helps me feel a lot more refreshed.
Thanks for letting Kendell and I chat about Ironman, running, and goal setting for a bit there. If you made it this far, you’re going to love the rest as we dive into her business. I started off by asking Kendell what she was doing before she ever got started on Fiverr.
Kendell:Before I was selling on Fiverr, I was freelancing for a few months, just a few months on different sites, Elance, at the time it was Elance and a couple of freelance sites, mostly Elance and then obviously just word of mouth and things like that.
But before that, I was waitressing full time. I’m in Florida now, but when I lived in Chicago I was also working a 9:00AM to 5:00PM consulting job. I liked a lot of things about the consulting job, I liked working with clients. I liked helping people, the direct contact with people, and the problem solving but I didn’t like the format of the job as far as the 9:00AM to 5:00PM and the work setting of being in the cubicle.
There’s just quite a few things about it that I knew weren’t for me, that didn’t really feel right. I knew that I wanted to do something different and that’s why I had moved down to Florida. I wanted to get a fresh start and try something on my own.
You go back to what you know and so I started waiting tables just to make some money at first and then I got focused again and said, ”No, I need to get back to what I really want to do.” The easiest way to get started if you want to start your own business or make some money is freelancing because you can make money right away, you can jump right and there’s no money to start. That’s where I started before I started selling on Fiverr.
Spencer:What kind of jobs were you doing on Elance and Upwork?
Kendell:Because I just started and I didn’t really know what direction I wanted to go and I just knew that I wanted to work for myself, I wanted more freedom, and I wanted more challenge so, I did make the huge mistake of taking any work that I thought I was qualified to do whether I liked it or not.
It’s okay, I was working really hard a lot of hours but at the same time I felt, and even more so in retrospect that no clients are really taking me seriously. I was never able to charge premium pricing. I didn’t have a lot of focus. You know this, if you don’t have focus, I couldn’t go very deep on any given job, or skill, or client. I felt very scattered. I was working hard but I wasn’t going deep on anything.
As far what was I actually freelancing, I was doing business plans, marketing plans, all the way to just transcribing things and admin work, just really all over the place, some copywriting.
Spencer:At what point did you shift your mindset a little bit to either focusing on one area and how did you decide on what area to focus on?
Kendell:That’s a good question. When I was doing all these different things, while I was freelancing, when I was taking all the different jobs, I wasn’t making enough money and I was working a lot of hours but the one thing I did notice was that, I loved who I was working with which was like entrepreneurs, new business, and startups. I liked who I was working with, I just didn’t like what I was doing and I didn’t like how scattered it was.
I started asking my clients, “What’s on the calendar for next month, or what are you having troubles with, what do you need help with to try and see if I can any patterns that I can focus on.” Within a week, I talked to maybe four startups and of two of them said that they were going to do a crowdfunding campaign.
I instantly thought, “I’ve never done one before, if only I had a little bit of experience there. I wouldn’t be much help as someone to write a crowdfunding campaign.” I said no and then I was like, “Wait a second.” I started researching and I said, “I can do this, this is very similar to things that I’ve been doing.” I called them back and I said, “Can I please help you with your crowdfunding campaign?” I’ll do it even at a discounted rate because obviously I was being transparent telling them that I was new to this arena. It really took off from there. I started promoting my services as only crowdfunding services.
At some point, I actually thought it was like a joke because I went from taking really low pay to all of a sudden having tons of clients and being able to charge premium pricing, I really did.
One day I got a phone call from one of the top equity crowdfunding platforms and they asked me to consult for them. The owner of the company or one of the founders had a meeting with me on a Saturday morning. I remember going to the meeting thinking, “Is this a joke?” Nobody even wanted to pay me bottom prices three months ago. Now, I’ve chosen this niche and I really did.
I did dive deep. I worked really hard in that niche of crowdfunding. I did tons and tons of research. 24/7 I was learning new things and getting new clients but to have that phone call three months in, I was really surprised that it wasn’t a joke at all. I ended up getting a job consulting with them.
The niche has really taken off ever since. In the beginning, I might have even thought it was like a little bit of luck or lucky streak in the beginning but it wasn’t. When you choose your niche like that and you understand the people you’re working with, it’s just incredible the change that it creates in your business.
Spencer:You really moved from being a generalist to taking any job to becoming a specialist focusing on one really focused area and commanding higher prices.
I just wanted to emphasize this point that has been huge for Kendell’s business by actually narrowing her focus on just the crowdfunding niche, she was able to significantly grow the numbers of clients she had and was able to charge more. Finding the right niche is just so critical.
I then asked Kendell about how well her business is doing right now.
Kendell:When I was freelancing, as you said like a generalist, which is a really good way to put it, I was barely paying my bills. I was paying my rent and I was feeding myself and my dog and that was about it. The least amount of money I can possibly make to get by but then again when you divide that up by 60 hours a week, it’s a pretty low wage.
Now that I’ve chosen my niche, I charge $1,000 and up per client and also, it doesn’t take me that long to work on each client’s project because I’ve done so many of them. It’s easier for me to see the right path for each client in a shorter amount of time. When you charge $1,000 a client, let’s just say as starting price, and then that may used to take me a week and now it just takes me a couple of hours to work through what they need to do and how they need to go about it.
I’ve been working on Fiverr. I’ve always used Fiverr part time as a way to promote my services and see what works. I was on Fiverr for between a year and a year and a half. I broke through $125,000 in sales. I worked on Fiverr part time. It was a good income just by making that little change. I would say probably 10 times what I was making as a generalist.
Spencer:Awesome. You’ve mentioned Fiverr, of course, a little bit. We’re going to dive into that more here. How much of your business right now comes from Fiverr versus your own website and other sources?
Kendell:It’s always changing and of course as I try and grow my outside sales, the Fiverr becomes a smaller piece of it but maybe right now, I would say the split is maybe 50/50 about. Maybe Fiverr is a little bit less than that because Fiverr is my, I like to call it like my part time job. It’s what I start in the mornings with. I’ll do it for a couple hours. I’ll go through client work and then I’ll go on to my own website and different clients.
Fiverr has given me the consistency that has allowed me to take a little bit more risk or take some time to create e-courses and ebooks for crowdfunding in the afternoon or in my spare time. It’s been a really good thing for me.
Spencer:Maybe we should explain to people because I was in the same boat when I think Fiverr, I think five-dollar jobs, that’s how they started, of course. How are you making so much money on Fiverr?
Kendell:I didn’t know this about Fiverr either until I got started. When I first started on Fiverr, I knew that it was only $5 an order but I also knew that the orders, the customers come to you. I was wasting a lot of time bidding on jobs and going back and forth and negotiating prices, just a lot of back and forth that you have to do with clients. Then, I wasn’t able to spend time working on the actual deliverables.
When I started on Fiverr, I was saving a ton of time but I was obviously just charging $5 an order so you can only make so much that way. But I was making the order smaller so that people had to order a few of them to get what they needed. But that $5 limit is only for your first 10 orders. After that, then you can start charging more and then I think there are a couple more thresholds that you have to go through until you can charge basically an unlimited amount. I think now I can charge like I want to say up to maybe 10,000 an order, something like that by the time you add on all the extras.
Most of my packages are between $250 and $1,000, a piece. $5 is your trial run. You can still find a lot of people that sell for $5 on the site but it’s definitely not your only option if you’re a buyer or a seller.
Spencer:To be honest, I’m a Fiverr newbie, I’ve never sold anything on Fiverr. I have bought a couple of thing. I’ve purchased voice overs before on Fiverr for this podcast. I have purchased a unique birthday present for my wife on Fiverr, this is kind of an inside joke but had somebody sing happy birthday to her from a Fiverr gig and that was fun.
Kendell:Yeah, you can get all sorts of stuff on Fiverr. I haven’t looked around the site in a long time because obviously, I just log in and do my own work. But some of the times, I will see things pop up and it’s so funny the stuff that you can get done there. It’s like someone called it the other day like an Amazon version of services.
Spencer:Yeah, it is. If anybody wants to waste their time, they can go look at Fiverr. There’s some really off the wall things that are offered for $5, some are hilarious for sure. Here’s the bigger question, why Fiverr? Why did that even come across your radar as this is the place I should offer my crowdfunding services?
Kendell:Sure, that’s a good question. There were two reasons that Fiverr really appealed to me. The first one was like I said, I was wasting so much time with clients going back and forth from different platforms. With Fiverr, everything is in one place, even the correspondents. You can speak to all your clients in one spot. This really appealed to me, the amount of time that I could save if I sold on a platform where everything was nice and organized in one place and there’s set prices. Also, I was realizing when the employer was setting the boundaries for a project, let me see if I can come up with an example. You have children right?
Spencer:Yup, I do.
Kendell:Let’s say you wanted me to teach your kids how to bike, you hired me and you told me exactly what was the best way to teach your kids how to bike. This would be frustrating to me maybe because I want to use my methods because I know that they work. At the end of the day, I want your kids to learn how to bike. It was the same thing when I was working on other platforms. I would be hired but I couldn’t always provide the results because the employer was delegating how he or she thought that I would get to the endpoint.
I thought that I was finding these ways of getting results on crowdfunding but I couldn’t really execute them because I wasn’t in control of what I was delivering. That’s another reason that Fiverr appealed to me was because now, I was able to say, “This is how I teach biking. If you want to hire me, I can get your son or daughter to bike in a week using my methods.”
You would just hire me on a set price and then I provide the results. It’s the same thing with Fiverr, the boundaries of the projects are set by the seller. I was able to all of a sudden start providing results for my clients because I was in control of what was being sold. This was another reason I really like Fiverr.
The final reason was I noticed that people were crowdfunding, not only did they need someone to write the campaign but they needed a video, they needed a graphics done, they needed maybe a logo. They were very active on the site. It would just seem natural that they could also find a crowdfunding writer. I do some crowdfunding marketing, campaigns and materials. It would just seem natural that I would be a good fit on the site because they are there anyway looking for services.
Spencer:Absolutely. Fiverr is a huge site so there’s a lot of traffic there. Being able to offer a service that people are already looking for makes a lot of sense. What strategies have you used to perform well on Fiverr, specifically?
Kendell:I think the strategies have to be split in two because I think in the beginning, when you’re selling at $5, you’re going to be using a different strategy than when you’ve made it to the top level seller, which doesn’t take long. I think I was a top level seller within about a month and a half. I remember being surprised when I got it thinking, it was wasn’t too difficult at all if you’re providing value and you’re attentive to clients, they don’t make it difficult on you to get to that top level.
Strategies, they would be split into two parts. The beginning, when you’re just selling for $5 or even $10, or $15, or $20, I think your strategy has to be to standout. I don’t mean being like wild and crazy like some of the sellers are which is that’s their thing. But in the beginning, no matter what you’re doing, get very specific on your niche and then also get very serious about standing out because it is a crowded market. But if you choose your niche and then you also make a deliverable or a promise to the client that they really can’t turn down, you can get clients in no time.
For example when I first started, I said all my deliveries will come within 24 hours. I said that instead of writing one press release, I would write them two different press releases so they can have two different kinds to send out. Instead of writing just one email for an email marketing campaign, I said I would write three.
Obviously, this isn’t a super profitable, long term solution but in the beginning you’re just trying to get some positive reviews and get some experience. You still have the things in your portfolio, you still have that experience so you might not make top dollar off of doing this but it’ll definitely fast track you. I think it only took me a few days to get through my first 10 orders.
Just like any job where you have like an internship, any job that’s worth or place is worth being, there’s going to be a barrier to entry. This is how I got through in the beginning and I had great client reviews in the beginning so my sales grew really fast. That was my strategy for the beginning and then my strategy for growth long term or once you get up to those 100, 200, 300 plus orders was to package things. Instead of just selling 50 words for crowdfunding campaign or 100 words, I would sell a crowdfunding campaign with headers, graphics, and maybe a short ebook to how to execute.
When someone works with me, they can get an entire package instead of just giving this one piece of the puzzle. I try and give them as much as I can in creating these packages at every level. That’s my strategy for long term growth.
Spencer:That makes a lot of sense. Being able to take a look at who your competitors are and making sure you’re offering something maybe a little bit different or a little bit better so you standout, makes a lot of sense. Like you said the different packages, giving some bonuses or just providing values so that they feel like they’re really getting what they pay for, they are plus some. What about traffic? How does that work on Fiverr? Do you have to do a lot of work to rank well, is there like a Fiverr SEO?
Kendell:If there is, I don’t know about it. I haven’t done anything. To be honest with you, I think that if you choose a niche that’s your own and you also provide value, I don’t think there’s much more you can do on the platform. I have so many people coming to asking questions and ordering every single day that I’ve never had to go out and look for more traffic. I don’t know if they have certain SEO.
Obviously, I think they have algorithms but this is based on how fast you reply to messages, how fast you deliver your orders, making sure that your orders aren’t late. That’s more on your delivery and your availability than maybe words that are included in your copy or anything like that.
Spencer:That’s good to know. You haven’t had to do a lot of outside work really to make your listings visible.
Kendell:I haven’t done any marketing so far.
Spencer:I guess that does come back to choosing the right niche that we talked about a little bit where you went from focusing on a lot of different things to just crowdfunding. I guess that is important to highlight once again that if you can just narrow your focus and be the dominant player, if you will, in one small area, you can be the big fish in the small pond. That’s sounds like that’s made quite a bit of a difference right there.
Kendell:I was shocked at how many people would ask me to do other things for them. As soon as I decided that I was a crowdfunding expert, people would come and say, “Can you write my website copy?” I would say, “I don’t write website copy.” They’re like, “Yeah, but we want a professional.” It’s just like as soon as you choose one niche, people start seeing you as a professional. I think a lot of people are scared like, “I don’t want to say that I just do this because I’m going to miss out on this.” I definitely do not have to be like that at all.
Spencer:When it comes to crowdfunding, you’ve done a lot of client work. Do you have any sense of how well your clients are doing?
Kendell:Yeah. I’ve worked with so many different campaigns and different levels. Sometimes, just do that copyrighting. Here, I don’t really have a lot of control over the results because you deliver it but you don’t work on the execution.
When I work on the execution part, I have a really high rate of success because I always tell my clients we don’t launch until we know that we’re going to be successful because personally, I think that crowdfunding campaigns should be probably 95% successful because you should know that you’re going to be successful before you hit that launch button.
You should have your crowd ready and waiting and you should have your goal right at that perfect number so that you know you’re going to reach it. It’s just following the right steps in executing properly and not getting ahead of yourself. Sometimes, it’s good to have a consultant because when we’re in the weeds with our own company, it’s hard to see the forest from the trees.
Spencer:Are there any specific success stories that you’re able to share about either how much money people have raised or anything like that?
Kendell:Sure, there’s one that just finished. Her name was Talia, she’s super nice. She’s originally from Israel and then now she lives in New York and she was always travelling her whole life. She was not an engineer but a, I’ll have to look it up what her original job was but she had this internship next to a jeweler. She said, “Well, I wish I could combine my education next with jewelry.” She likes to create things so she made this jewelry where you can put any map from anywhere in the world, you put it in the computer and you highlight the area you want and she makes it into a necklace, or a ring, or a brooch, or all these different kinds of jewelries.
Her husband called me a day before she was about to launch. I said, “Okay, just have her call me tomorrow but don’t let her launch.” She called me and she ended up launching a week later instead of a day later, she raised 150% of her goal of $10,000 within the first 24 hours. It’s 24 hours or 48 hours. She closed out at I think $150,000 and her goal was $9,000.
Spencer:That is awesome.
Kendell:There is so much power in getting your list ready, getting everyone ready before you launch.
Spencer:At this point I decided to ask Kendell for an example of the types of things she would do on a crowdfunding campaign. I asked her what she would do if I had created a new pair of headphones for runners and I had a few thousand people on an email list.
Kendell:First, I would start by, we would be getting your, they call it a tribe or an audience or whatever you call it, we would get your tribe together, not only just your tribe, but any kind of the tribe that wants to see this product to come to life. We get them excited, we get them knowing that something is coming, that something is about to be released.
As far as working with me, you have a couple of choices, I can help you with the execution or I can just show you how to do it, teach you how to do it and you can have either a virtual assistant to it, or maybe you do it yourself, or maybe you have a staff that will do it.
There are different capacities that you could work with me. You would make that choice and then we would go ahead and start getting your crowd excited, we would be writing emails that would be going out daily up until the campaign so that people know that something is coming. When you’re crowdfunding, it’s almost like you’re getting ready for a party because the crowdfunding campaign only last 30 days.
You’re not trying to just get ongoing traffic on your site, you’re trying to get people to come between day 1 and day 30 and you want them to purchase. It’s a little bit different. We almost let them know something is coming and then almost just for letting them in on a secret. Like telling your friend this morning, “I saw a really good movie last weekend. I’m going to tell you about it tonight, remind me at dinner.” You’re telling them, “I have something good, it’s coming. You’re going to want to hear about this. I will tell you about it later.”
It’s what we’re doing with the crowdfunding campaign, we’re letting them know, “Hey guys, we were talking about running faster the other day, I got some headphones, they’re coming up. I think that they’re going to blow your mind.” Now people are like, “Oh man, I want to have these headphones that are going to make me faster.” Because I just decided your headphones also make me faster.
We start letting them in on that and then when we get closer to the campaign we say, “These headphones are going to be below retail price and I’m going to let my list in first so I’ll let you guys know on day one that we launched and I only have 60 headphone sets that I’m giving away at this price and then they’re going to go back up to retail price.”
It’s almost like you’re having a party, I’m the party planner and we’re trying to get people to line up outside the door so that by the time we open the doors, we’re not inside the store wondering, “Are we going to have customers today?” We know we’re going to because we see them outside the door waiting to get in and excited to buy the headphones. It’s the same thing with the crowdfunding campaign. We’re setting it up so that we know they’re going to sell off the shelf.
Spencer:I love it.
Kendell:It’s an event, people need to think of it as an event just like black Friday, they create the anticipation, they create the excitement. It’s the same thing for crowdfunding campaign.
Spencer:That makes perfect sense. Also, to go back to how you’ve grown your specific business, you mentioned before that maybe half of your revenue is on Fiverr and then half is other sources, I assume, mostly your website. What have you done to grow your website outside of Fiverr?
Kendell:I do have a lot of word of mouth clients. I know I keep going back to creating your niche but this is another huge benefit of creating your niche is that when you get into a very small niche, people tend to hang out with like people. If my client is creating a crowdfunding campaign, it’s likely that they know someone else that’s creating a crowdfunding campaign.
Anytime, whether it’s word of mouth or an article that’s getting published, I do a lot of guest postings so that I can help people learn about crowdfunding or help their audiences learn about crowdfunding to send them back to my website where they can get 7-day free course on crowdfunding.
This is really just meant to give them the basics in crowdfunding and how to decide if they’re a good fit for it, get through those beginning stages and then see if they’re ready to go on and implement more strategies and that’s when they could work with me one on one or else I have some e-courses that are really cool for building your list.
Basically, if I see a customer struggling or a client struggling and I see it happening repeatedly, I’ll try and create something whether it’s free or paid service that will address that. I have a crowdfunding workbook and then I also have a list building course for crowdfunding.
Spencer:Very good. You’ve shared a lot of really good tips here. Is there anything that maybe I missed? Any strategies either for growing your business on Fiverr or picking your niche or just any other general business strategies that maybe we didn’t talk about, that you’d like to mention?
Kendell:The only other thing I was going to say about choosing your niche which we just started to talk about which is, if you have a really strong niche, meaning not strong in the market but just strong, you know what you do and who you do it for. I don’t like the word interview because it sounds like you’re sitting down and asking them formal questions but make sure to, I guess, be curious with your clients and always ask them, especially on one on one situations. One on one is so much better because that’s when you get intimate answers. When you’re sitting alone with someone, when you’re talking alone with someone, that’s when people really start to open up.
When you get those clients, make sure to ask some questions, what are they struggling with? What are their real goals? Why are they doing what they’re doing? This is where I get a lot of my ideas. This is where I get a lot of my copies.
Sometimes, when you’ve been doing something for a long time, how do you write copy? How do you sit down and write about something you know so well? It’s supposed to speak to someone who doesn’t know about it at all. I get a lot of my copy from the words of my clients. I guess, in every step, asking your clients questions, being curious about what your clients are going through. That’s my biggest advice for niching because you create a really good niche but if you don’t know the audience, it won’t make a difference.
The more you can talk to your audience, even just asking them, what are you doing lately? What’s on the calendar for next month? Usually you can tell by what a client is putting off, what they’ve been wanting to do but haven’t done, usually that’s something that they’re struggling with. They might not come out and say, “I don’t have a crowd.” But if they say, “Oh I’ve been wanting to crowdfund but I haven’t gotten there yet.” You know that’s a pain point for them.
Spencer:That’s a really good advice, excellent. How can people stay in touch with you? Where would you like to send listeners?
Kendell:If they want to get in touch with me directly, they can go right to my site, kendellrizzo.com. There’s an easy context sheet, I love talking to clients or other freelancers one on one. I’ve always been more of one on one person but I also like more intimate conversation of what people are going through.
There’s a contact page that would be up on that website, they can contact me there. I like to share some things I’ve been through or tips that will help people move in forward with freelance and crowdfunding. That’s probably the easiest place to reach me. From there, they can find the crowdfunding information and things like that.
Spencer:If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review for me on iTunes. You can do that by going over to http://ift.tt/2kPOPeN. These ratings help me know that I’m doing a good job and helps other people discover my podcast. Thanks again for listening.
The post Podcast 125: Six Figures a Year on Fiverr? How Kendell Rizzo Found Her Niche And Built a Thriving Business One Gig at a Time appeared first on Niche Pursuits.
from Niche Pursuits http://ift.tt/2pcVv6K
There are a few things you can look at with your themes and how it pertains to site speed. First and foremost, as mentioned, plugins slow down your website. The more you have, the slower your site will be. I prefer to pick a theme that allows me to use a minimal amount of plugins to free up additional bandwidth and provide a great user experience.
