If you are interested in learning potentially how to make some extra money as a sideline this post may help.
Fiverr is a website where you can go and order a huge range of technical jobs or gigs as they are called there.
There are tens of thousands of people advertising their services on it. Have a look and see here.
There are many gig marketplaces out there. You may or may not have heard of them and opinions of them online differ. From people thinking they are slave markets, to people who make a decent living from them and everything in between.
I am a natural geek have been for decades. All things online fascinate me and I love exploring underneath the hood.
I look at Fiverr and I ask myself – “How could I make an additional income stream from it”.
I don’t plan to stand up for the gig economy except to say on PeoplePerHour where I put in similar efforts I now get at least two decent website projects a month from putting in similar attention to building my reputation there and delivering speedy decent quality projects.
The gigs on Fiver don’t have to be $5. This was the original model years ago – you can now buy gigs on Fiverr for hundreds of dollars and even thousands in some exclusive cases.
Why does Fiverr Exist?
Now I haven’t spoken to the CEO of Fiverr but I assume Fiverr exists for the following reasons
- To make money – they make 20% of every gig sold. so the more they sell the better. No surprise there.
- To ensure that the people who are selling the gigs (this is a Fiverr term for jobs) are selling decent work or else people will stop coming there and Fiverr will get a bad reputation. So good reviews and lots of work are a pretty good indication of this.
No surprises there as this is why most companies exist.
Fiverr Uncovered
So for the past 6-7 weeks, I have done a lot of research into Fiverr. I really went down the rabbit hole.
This of course mainly Googling, reading the Fiverr website’s instructions itself, and watching a lot of YouTube videos where people vaguely claim they make lots of money there (which in most cases I don’t believe and I hope you wouldn’t either).
I also looked at a LOT of the gigs which are ranking in Fiverr’s own search for sellers and their activity and orders and found the following
The top performers on Fiverr tend to have the same characteristics
- They have sold a decent amount of projects. Sometimes hundreds but 50-90 isn’t uncommon.
- They have lots of positive 5-star reviews. Some are even real some I suspect are crowd sourced.
- Have lots of “Likes (read hearts) on their gigs. You can get a heart without doing the gig. Again a lot of crowd sourcing there and there are quite a few FAcebook groups that source this. I joined a few as part of my research and they are busy little warrens of activity.
- And in most cases, the top people have work in their gig queue as well.
The cynic in me suspects that a lot of the people at the top may have gotten there by shady means, mainly crowd sourcing work and reviews. But I believe that people still come to Fiverr and are looking for decent suppliers.
Cracking Fiverr
So when I popped my head out of the rabbit hole I really wasn’t much the wiser how I could get to the top seller point. If for instance, you look at “website design” on Fiverr you will see close to 72,000. gigs posted.
How the hell could I even get eyes on a gig I post there. I dived back in the rabbit hole to look at Fiverr Levels.
Fiverr Levels
Fiverr moves people through 4 different levels – New Seller. Level 1 Seller, Level 2 Seller and Top seller.
Here is some information on how to get to Level 2 with Top Seller being decided by them or you can ask and hope they push you up there. The levels are basically driven by sales, the value of sales, and customer satisfaction.
So to improve your visibility it takes sales.
Don’t burst into tears at not being able to do this let me clarify nobody said you had to wait for these sales. Ask people you know to buy your service on Fiverr.
Fiverr Strategy
This is what I did over the past 6-7 weeks while burrowing in rabbit holes.
For a few small jobs from my full-time business, I asked trusted clients to buy them on Fiverr.
My net income to date is $422 and this was enough to become a Level 1 seller on March 15th. This is the day in the month they roll people over to new levels. No big party as the target is Level 2 and possibly Top Seller.
Now you may snort $422. FFS Kieran that isn’t much.
No, it isn’t. But this is part of a plan and I have a strategy.
Interestingly in the $422 above there was one US job from someone who searched for someone from Ireland only. I asked her why and that was her search criteria as she wanted a native English speaker A large percentage of the people on Fiverr are from non-European countries and selling pretty low. nothing wrong with and a lot of the top sellers are selling low and in volume.
My next target is to get to Level 2 which means selling 40 more gigs and earning a total of $2000 along with the quality metrics. I plan to do this by:
- Continuing offline in Grange sending simple brochure sites to buy my service on Fiverr.
- This alone will easily exceed the earnings mark with the hard part meeting the 40 extra mark.
- Once I get there I will increase my prices across the board.
Now yes you are paying Fiverr 20% of every job. You say what a waste. But I will eventually factor in the 20% into my pricing and live with it.
I am pretty sure people on Fiverr don’t just pick the cheapest gig.
If that was the case all jobs would have the same low price. People are naturally inclined to look for both price and quality and in the example above someone looked for a seller in Ireland (yay me!). So other metrics count like that you have delivered projects, gotten reviews and so assume (in most places rightly) that you have
This Sounds Exhausting and Time-Consuming
Let me be clear on a couple of points from this post. I am not spending every waking hour on Fiverr. Fiverr is a push marketplace (unlike a lot of the gig marketplaces like Upwork where you bid). So people come and order so until you get an order there isn’t a whole lot you can do. I am fuelling orders at the moment from budget websites from Grange.
Secondly, I can live without Fiverr – having earned $422 that is clear. I am pretty busy with work anyway and in fact. the past 18 months have been my busiest ever. But I am a firm believer in working hard to open up other income streams when you are busy versus when you are quiet.
To get to this I suspect the main trigger is earnings and not just the Level 2 $2000 which is modest at best, I suspect Fiverr will push me into a point of more visibility and organic orders will start arriving. IF a gig owner is making Fiverr 10K a month I am sure they will reward him as her earnings make them money as well.
For me, process and procedures are important in everything I do and no reception in Fiverr. So for Fiverr I am working (again in my spare time)
- Create 3-4 simple templates to base my budget sites on.
- Developing a slick reply and workflow for Fiverr customers which helps my normal business anyway. Speed of reply is a Fiverr metric as well.
- Automating a lot of tasks in my workflow for budget sites to avoid impacting high-value work.
So this is the current state of play.
I currently am selling very simple (still nice) sites to new Grange clients via Fiverr. It actually solves a problem for me and for them in one fell sweep as I am developing a very slick process for delivering pretty decent sites to clients while attacking Fiverr.
I will report back in a couple of months on how all of this is going and share progress and income too.