Workload Management (Weekly Tips #1)

[robovlk]

It doesn’t take a long time after your gig gains some attention and orders start rolling to find yourself facing a challenging problem: What is the best way how to manage the constant influx of customers?

I’m going to share my current Fiverr workload management strategy, which allows me to easily stay on top of my backlog and NEVER miss a deadline. If you have your own tips and strategies, it would be great if you shared them with other in the comment section below.

Mind Your Deadline

By far the most important thing you have to do is set a realistic deadline that will allow you to complete your projects on time and without any rush. Are you able to deliver the order in 5 days? Then make sure your deadline is a few days longer than that. Your goal here is to not only meet the requirements but to overdeliver and surprise your client with the high quality of your services.

However, once you do this once, you absolutely have to be able to do it again in the future. You would be surprised how quickly clients get to fast delivery times, and how surprised they can be when you finish the order just a day or two later than you usually do.

Keep Your Clients Up-To-Date

Your clients have spent their hard-earned money on your services, and they are now waiting for the results. You can use the waiting time as an opportunity to demonstrate the quality of your customer care.

Right after they make an order, it’s a good idea to write something like this:
“Hi, thank you for your order. It should be completed in # days. I will get back to you in approximately # days and let you know how everything is going.”

You can then write something like:
“Hi, it’s me again. I just want to let you know that everything is going smoothly and your order will be delivered in # days.”

This way, your clients are never left wondering when they will receive their order, and they will surely take a note of your attentiveness and helpful attitude.

Keep a Work Schedule

Relying solely on your Dashboard to manage your how you do your work is seldom a good idea. In my experience, the best approach is to use something like Excel to carefully plan when you do each order, so you know how many orders you can accept before you ran out of time to complete them. Again, always keep a few days extra, so you have some room to space in case you get an order with Extra Fast Delivery.

I’m attaching a spreadsheet that I personally use to manage my Fiverr orders. It contains a column called “Date”, which is used to plan when you would like to complete the order. The other columns should be fairly self-explanatory. Obviously, the spreadsheet is modified to fit my needs as a writer. Feel free to customize it to your liking. One cool thing about it is that it automatically calculates your final price, average earnings, and it can even estimate how much you are likely to earn in a month.

Don’t Be Afraid to Take a Break or Extend Your Deadline

So, your work schedule says that you can’t accept any extra orders, but they still keep coming? Congratulations! You are obviously a very popular seller. But what’s the best way how to give yourself some extra time to complete everything?

You have three options: you can extend your deadline, activate the vacation mode, or pause the gig. Each of them has its own pros and cons that you should be aware of.

• Extending the deadline: the main advantage of simply extending the time it takes to complete your gig is that it keeps it from disappearing from Fiverr’s search engine. On the other hand, customers are likely to choose a different select, once they see how long it would take you to complete the offer. This could negatively your gig’s ranking.
• Activating the vacation mode: many sellers swear by the vacation mode, while others advice to not use it at all in fear that their gigs might lose their rank. In my experience, activating the vacation mode for just a day or two is a risk-free way how to give yourself some extra time. However, keeping it active for a long time can easily kick your gig out of the search engine. At least, that’s my own experience.
• Pausing the gig: unless you truly are not interested in the gig anymore, there’s really no reason why should ever pause it. Stick to the prior two methods and use the pause function only for your gig management.

Conclusion

As you can see, it doesn’t take that much to manage your overall workload and ensure that you never get swamped with work that you wouldn’t be able to complete. If you have any useful tips that you would like to share with others, please, do so in the comment section below.