Advice To The Webmasters From A 250+ buyer

[hypnodoc]

I’ve been here on Fiverr for a long time and bought a lot of outstanding as well as a bit iffy gigs.



I’ve been buying a lot of gigs for my website: articles, scripts, plugins, traffic, links, you name it…



Here’s what to look out for:



1.) PURCHASING WEBSITE TRAFFIC

I have yet to find a seller that actually delivers real human and useful traffic to your website. Especially the ones claiming to be able to get you 10000+ laser-targeted real 100% human visitors from U.S.A. (or anything similar).



Don’t trust any of them. The traffic is usually very elaborate bots or at best pop-under traffic. The latter can be useful to increase you Alexa ranking but that’s all it’s useful for. It will not get you any Adsense clicks, it will even get your Adsense pay-per-impressions rates to go way, way down. So much so that at the end of the promised traffic, you won’t even cover the cost of the gig!



Never do “SEO optimized” Google search keyword traffic. There is 99.9% chance the “visitors” will be bots - and dangerous at that because many “clever” bots are now programmed to sit and wait on your page before “clicking” (or better following a link on your website, which will many times be your Adsense ads, if you have them. This is very bad because Google might suspend and ban your account if their algorithm suspects foul play, which this actually is.



Some of the FaceBook and Twitter posts might work, but don’t expect too much traffic. If the service is actually legit, it is probably spamming their FB or Twitter account so badly that the followers don’t even pay attention any more.



The only time I got real traffic was when I used one seller’s service where he put my link under his viral YouTube that was on the same theme as my website and one time when I put my banner on one seller’s blog, again on the same theme and he actually had traffic coming to it. But in both cases I didn’t get a lot of traffic during the period and the benefit didn’t really outweigh the cost. However, if you desperately need to get traffic from a Fiverr seller, I suggest this is the route to take.



2.) MAKE SURE YOU ALWAYS LOOK FOR PERFORMANCE REVIEWS RATHER THAN JUST "OUTSTANDING EXPERIENCE"

Again, when purchasing a performance gig, look for feedback that talks about performance.



I noticed that a vast majority of buyers don’t really know what they were supposed to get from a gig.



If I purchase a post on someone’s FaceBook wall, where he has 20,000,000 followers/likes/whatever, I expect at least some traffic from there, not just a nice screenshot with my link on that page. Most people, unfortunately, give 5 stars with exceptional feedback for exactly the latter, I suspect. I have never had any real success with those jokers. I did get “traffic”. It was invariably extremely low-quality at best and fake at worst.



3.) BUYING LINKS

Don’t do it.



The more Google animals (Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird) they state, the worst. Keep away or use at your own peril. Sometimes it can even work for a while, but Google will invariably catch you and them (because, let’s face it, for $5, who’s really going to go the extra mile to make sure all the content is 100% unique, that the links are placed within such content, that the biggest percentage of those links are direct “URL” links and just some of them are anchored and so on…



They usually use cheap software to “blast” your links to blogs or private networks. This just doesn’t work like that any more.



4.) THINK ABOUT IT… WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Just think about it for a second… If you had 20,000,000 followers on FaceBook or Twitter, would you sell $5 gigs to post people’s junk websites to them?



I didn’t think so. So don’t they.



5.) GIGS I FOUND TO USUALLY BE OF GREAT QUALITY AND TO ADD THE MOST VALUE TO MY SITE

• Illustrations and most graphical - they can vastly lower your bounce rate and get your readers to go through your articles. A contextual image, especially original and illustrated, will not only stop your visitors in their tracks, but also increase your rankings in Google.
  
  
• Video - Short video summations of the content of the article, presented by a beautiful girl… priceless!
  
  
  
• Video intros - I found an amazing intro I now use in all my instructional videos
  
  
  
• Expert articles - The best articles I had written were, of course, by experts in the field. So, I have my medical articles written by a medical doctor, I have my internet marketing articles written by internet marketers and so on. Sometimes you have to look harder, but usually they are there, waiting for you. I found that sellers that say “I can write about anything” write more general and lower quality articles. That isn’t to say they are bad grammatically or in spelling, but they usually (not always, but usually) lack that “juicy meat” that I want to present to my readers on my website.
  
  
  
• Software creation - I think that the software developers are brilliant. Again, it depends who you get, but I only had the highest quality software designers here on Fiverr. They are fast, punctual, and extremely willing to do the job perfectly. Sometimes they won’t come very cheap but it’s worth it. I found that programmers from the USA and former Russian federation-associated countries are for some reason by far the best and most reliable. Unfortunately, and I’m just saying exactly as it was from my experience, programmers that come from India tend to be more clever in the business sense and you will almost invariably end up paying much more than what you originally thought (usually via purchasing more gigs as they “realize” the project is harder that thought at first). So always explain exactly what you want, with images if you have to and ask for an estimate. One guy in particular, he is from Bulgaria, always made me a spreadsheet with each module, telling me how much time it will take him and how much it will cost. And he never was a second late and I never paid a penny more than he said it would cost.
  
  
  
  I hope this helps you spend your fiverrs productively and beneficially.
  
  
  
  Have a great day,
  
  
  
  Hypnodoc

[futurepocket]

Very useful post and very true. You wont believe how many messages I get a day of people asking me to rank them on the first page for $5… Firstly its not some magical button and secondly its a lot of work… You get what you pay for as with everything else in life.

[urrising]

This information was very helpful. Today I do my research and so should others only because I want to get much of it right the first time. This kind of information allows you to miss as many land mine as possible. Thank you very much for the info. It is my first time and do not have money to waste.

[tsweezey]

Reply to @z99zoom: Would you consider perhaps to stop spamming in each discussion. It actually works against you in many cases. And I’m pretty sure you actually want clients right? If so, please join the discussion and share your expertise. That is much more likely to help you gain work than just spamming a forum.

[tsweezey]

In my experience, buying links, traffic, etc., is just a complete waste of money. Each site owner has a responsibility to embrace the most basic and fundamental onsite/offsite SEO/SEM strategies (keyword diversity, directories, etc). But beyond that, there are no shortcuts folks.



Google’s goal is to rank and present relevant content… it’s not to reward those that optimize the best. And frankly, Google is quite pleased that they can determine relevancy pretty well on their own. If you want to rank well, work on creating such great content and value that is so compelling that others want to share. As it relates to SEO, the biggest rewards often relate to how well you’ve prepared your content from a keyword perspective. For example, if the page is about USB drives, mention thumb drives, flash drives, etc.



As for “likes” and “traffic” you just have to think about the mechanics here. Any “likes” you buy are just fakes (what else would they be?). If you want to by fakes so that your page doesn’t look like new visitors are showing up early to a party, then fine. But don’t expect that these “likes” will translate to increased revenue or views.



I think that one of the biggest traps is assuming that, somehow, the rules of business on the internet are void from the standard principles of doing business prior to the internet. True, once upon a time, search engines acted somewhat as a “great equalizer” when it came to ranking big businesses next to the smaller mom & pops that were creative with their SEO. Those days are largely over.



Even “Content is King” is overplayed now. Now, it’s "Good, compelling & relevant content is King."



To be clear though, SEO is very important, but quickly getting a very bad rap due to the predatory nature of many providers. The next time somebody tells you that they can get you to rank on page one, do this… go to Google, type SEO and search, and then ask the provider why they aren’t on page one. Even better, watch for this… most solicitations for SEO service don’t mention a company name, and the email addresses is always from a free service. Why? Because they can’t get their own company to rank on page one.



What @hypnodoc mentioned is pretty sobering advice, and as @futurepocket noted, there is no “magic button” and that good SEO work is very time consuming and methodical. But again, the value of SEO is limited if you don’t have the content to support it. It’s really nice to see such an honest discussion from the perspective of both buyers and sellers.



Just my 2 cents 🙂

[isaacroot]

Reply to @tsweezey: Thank you for sharing your advice. As a web designer I agree completely. People Spend a lot of money on link building and traffic only to get penalized when Google changes their algorithm. Its like the spammer who you criticized above: He may be promoting his business, but by doing so in this setting he is only making himself seem less credible.