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Support/Minor Vent/Others Experience?


poshlulla

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About 6 weeks ago, that stupid nasty virus that's going around finally got me. And proceeded to knock my behind right into a hospital bed. I had to cancel several orders because of that.

Tanked my stats, lost my level. And now I'm starting over, so to speak. Very little exposure, very few impressions.

Before I got sick, I had a fiverr business client who kept me very busy with a large monthly order. Sadly, she had to find someone else while I was gone.

It's sad and depressing with no activity on my gigs. Plus, my income is down which is painful these days with rising costs everywhere.

I'm trying to tough it out because I know its temporary. It's tempting to just deactivate the profile and find a regular job.

Thanks for listening!

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3 minutes ago, poshlulla said:

About 6 weeks ago, that stupid nasty virus that's going around finally got me. And proceeded to knock my behind right into a hospital bed. I had to cancel several orders because of that.

Tanked my stats, lost my level. And now I'm starting over, so to speak. Very little exposure, very few impressions.

Before I got sick, I had a fiverr business client who kept me very busy with a large monthly order. Sadly, she had to find someone else while I was gone.

It's sad and depressing with no activity on my gigs. Plus, my income is down which is painful these days with rising costs everywhere.

I'm trying to tough it out because I know its temporary. It's tempting to just deactivate the profile and find a regular job.

Thanks for listening!

Damn! I'm so sorry to hear about your struggles. 

I once told a guy on this forum that the focus should always be on putting food on the table. The basics need to come first. The guy was planning to quit his day-job for Fiverr, with very few orders under his belt. 

I think the same applies here: if you need to get a regular job in order to support you and your family, you should do so. At least for a while, until you land back on your feet. 

In this type of situation, I would probably keep doing Fiverr as well. If business is slow, that means you should be able to do both, for a while. If your Fiverr profile gets back on track and more orders start rolling in again, you could always quit the job and go back to freelancing full-time. If not, at least you'll have food on the table and a roof over your head. 

Like you said, it's temporary. Even so, I totally understand where you're coming from. Your situation sucks but don't give up and hang in there. 

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✔️Food on the table 

✔️ Roof

I'm okay to tough it out and wait for things to bounce back so long as I'm mindful of my spending habits. But my emergency funds are shrinking faster than I anticipated while I wait. If things don't bounce back within a couple more weeks (the cancellations should fall off the stats in another 2 weeks), I'll probably looking at a regular job and retire this account.

I'd go back to nursing. 12 hours shifts and Fiverr don't mix well lol.

Thank you for the kind words and encouragement!

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44 minutes ago, poshlulla said:

But my emergency funds are shrinking faster than I anticipated while I wait.

Indeed. Prices have gone up and previous estimates are out the window. I anticipated rapid inflation when the feds started printing like crazy during the pandemic, so I changed my saving goals and tripled my rainy-day-savings, expecting that my buffer back then would loose at least half its purchasing power. Seems it was a smart thing to do. Better not to take any chances, so if that's what you need to do, that's what you need to do. Even so, I really hope you make it through! 12 hour shifts are no fun at all. I've done them and then some. 

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Despite what happened to you, it's nice to read that you're back on your feed and you overcame the virus! I know you were just ranting, but I still wanted to share the thoughts I had when reading your post. 

54 minutes ago, poshlulla said:

I'll probably looking at a regular job and retire this account.

Of course, do what you have to do in order to keep up with the rising costs and not having to exhaust all the emergency funds you have. That's where @smashradio's advice really applies. However, I did want to say that retiring your account would be a waste. Your gig was functioning well before, who says it won't again? You have to start over which isn't nice. But contrasting with when you started and didn't know if Fiverr would be profitable; you now know it can be and that you can make it to be so. 

54 minutes ago, poshlulla said:

I'd go back to nursing. 12 hours shifts and Fiverr don't mix well lol.

My hat goes off to you! Doing such shifts for a demanding job like nursing is really impressive. Indeed, it doesn't mix well. I was wondering though, could you perhaps increase your delivery times? I noticed you have 2 days delivery now, which alone would be fine but in combination with such a high effort job obviously isn't. 

This might scare off some buyers who want a quick turnaround, but it might still attract buyers who feel you're the best fit based on your profile and reviews, so they're happy to take the longer delivery for granted. This would allow you to slowly but steady build your account back up again.

I'd completely understand if it's not feasible though! I just wanted to provide my 2 cents. All in all, I'd advise not to close your account altogether so that you can always fall back on it. 

With that being said, I wish you well and good luck in trying to navigate your way through it all ❣️

Edited by sabinespoems
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5 minutes ago, sabinespoems said:

Despite what happened to you, it's nice to read that you're back on your feed and you overcame the virus! I know you were just ranting, but I still wanted to share the thoughts I had when reading your post. 

Of course, do what you have to do in order to keep up with the rising costs and not having to exhaust all the emergency funds you have. That's where @smashradio's advice really applies. However, I did want to say that retiring your account would be a waste. Your gig was functioning well before, who says it won't again? You have to start over which isn't nice. But contrasting with when you started and didn't know if Fiverr would be profitable; you now know it can be and that you can make it to be so. 

My hat goes off to you! Doing such shifts for a demanding job like nursing is really impressive. Indeed, it doesn't mix well. I was wondering though, could you perhaps increase your delivery times? I noticed you have 2 days delivery now, which alone would be fine but in combination with such a high effort job obviously isn't. 

This might scare off some buyers who want a quick turnaround, but it might still attract buyers who feel you're the best fit based on your profile and reviews, so they're happy to take the longer delivery for granted. This would allow you to slowly but steady build your account back up again.

I'd completely understand if it's not feasible though! I just wanted to provide my 2 cents. All in all, I'd advise not to close your account altogether so that you can always fall back on it. 

With that being said, I wish you well and good luck in trying to navigate your way through it all ❣️

Thank you for the encouragement! I've got 4 kids at home so if I add 12 hours shifts back in - it's pretty much impossible to keep Fiverr. I know from experience that the quality would suffer on all fronts - home, work and Fiverr - just from juggling too much.

I'm sorta pinning my hopes on things picking back up after the cancellations fall off. and just bidding my time til that happens.

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2 minutes ago, poshlulla said:

I've got 4 kids at home so if I add 12 hours shifts back in - it's pretty much impossible to keep Fiverr. I know from experience that the quality would suffer on all fronts - home, work and Fiverr - just from juggling too much.

I definitely understand, that's definitely a hectic environment  😵

5 minutes ago, poshlulla said:

I'm sorta pinning my hopes on things picking back up after the cancellations fall off. and just bidding my time til that happens.

I also hope it will work out and again, the best of luck! 

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Sorry to hear about the situation you are in. After having a look at your profile, I noticed that you have setup only 1 gig, why not utilise all the available slots? Maybe setup additional niche specific gigs? For example something like "I will write articles for your health blog". You know just to split test and maximise options? And help Fiverr's algo help you? 

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1 hour ago, poshlulla said:

Originally, I turned off any other gigs I had

If you still have those gigs, look into polishing them a tad and unpausing them! One nice thing about this: That one quote about hitting rock bottom and no where to go but up.

1 hour ago, poshlulla said:

maybe creating a new gig or adding packages back in is the thing to try.

This is, indeed, a good time for a little experimentation. I would leave your main gig alone, but all the others? Pretty much open season for trying out something new/improved. 

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4 hours ago, poshlulla said:

About 6 weeks ago, that stupid nasty virus that's going around finally got me. And proceeded to knock my behind right into a hospital bed. I had to cancel several orders because of that.

Tanked my stats, lost my level. And now I'm starting over, so to speak. Very little exposure, very few impressions.

Sorry to hear. I am glad that you are feeling better now though. I experienced a really, really bad typhoon last Dec 2021 (We were thankfully safe, house was fine. We had a good supply of food and water. But we had ~3 weeks of no power) -- We did have a generator but we didn't leave it on 24/7. Mobile data was poor for the first 2 weeks (because a lot of things really got broken - communication poles and towers got toppled down). It was terrible and the worst thing I experienced. 

Anyway, what I did at the time was complete the orders I could, informed some buyers (whose orders would work for an extension) about my situation and they all gladly accepted an extension. But for several other orders really had to cancel (as they were time sensitive projects). I really saw the order completion rate drop to red because of that (As of course, expected).

What I did was inform Customer Support about my situation, mentioned the order numbers of all mutually cancelled projects. Sent them a news article from I think was Washington Post or NY Times about the typhoon and explained my case. They responded something along the lines of empathy but said that they couldn't promise if it wouldn't affect the stats or whatnot (From experience, reading around the forum, they always say this line -- I can't recall in verbatim but thats the gist).

And you know what! Right after the CS response, my stats all went back to 100%! Then I went on out of office mode. Jan 2022 came, returned back, everything went back to normal -- visibility of gigs were fine, inquiries came pouring in. I had a great start of the year on Fiverr. 🙂

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Not to say there should be a next time, as that is a terrible thing. But you can also consider reaching out to CS and see what they can do if you're ever faced with something dire like that.

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I agree with the many suggestions above from these good ol forum friends of mine! Keep your Fiverr account open, your regular customers likely would come back and getting orders from them would help your stats recover much faster. And multiple streams of income is a good thing. 

 

Hold on there and push forward. You got this.

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@theratypist thank you for the encouraging words! It sounds like you got really lucky. Not that no power for 3 weeks is lucky but that it could have been so much worse. 

I'm glad you bounced back so quickly! I think Covid doesn't count as a catastrophic act of god for Fiverr, otherwise they'd be inundated with requests. I'm going to polish and re-list some of my other gigs and just be patient. Hopefully, I can bounce back as you did. 

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6 hours ago, poshlulla said:

Polishing and experimenting I go .....

There's one other thing I'd do if I were you, "competition research"... the idea is to replicate what's already working instead of reinventing the wheel so to speak.

So, I'd search for terms related to my gig, and open up 10 (you could go for more, but 10 should be enough) seller profiles on my browser, specifically focusing on those sellers who joined around the same time as I did (exact month and year if possible) and are getting consistent orders (divide the review count by 12 to get orders per month, not an exact estimate since a lot of buyers don't leave reviews but still gives you an idea of how many orders they are getting every month), and then I'd look for the kind of gig titles they are using, the gig description, pricing, reviews, etc to understand what's working for them. Not to copy all that word to word but just to get an idea of why Fiverr gives them preference in search results. Once I have an idea of what kind of gig title, images, description, tags, pricing etc works, I will go ahead and see if my gigs have those factors successful gigs have and make changes accordingly... again, to be clear, I wouldn't copy them but rather try to understand the "skeletal structure" of what works.. once I am done with all my gigs, I'd post the links here on the forum in the "Improve My Gigs" section and request sellers in my niche to critique the gigs to cover anything else I may have missed... It's still a trial and error process though.. but the idea is to help Fiverr's system as much as we can in matching our services to potential buyers.. make it hard for the system to ignore you 😅

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