smashradio

Thanks! My why is very similar to yours, but it also contains my own goal: make enough to never worry about bills again. I'm not embarrassed for including myself in my "why", or to set the bar high. It's good motivation. But my number one goal has always been to achieve my own goals doing something that truly helps my clients. It's the value that @melanielm talks about. Being a pro writer isn't a must to start a writing gig. It depends on what you're selling. The idea is to know your limitations and don't try to market yourself as something you're not. Being flexible is crucial. If a shark stops swimming, it dies. Exactly. My writing gigs cater to people with deeper pockets than my competitors. The reason is that I only want to work with the best. I want them to hold me accountable for every single word I write, and I want them to push me to do better. Working with "difficult" clients (and I'm not talking about unprofessional ignoramuses but buyers with higher demands for quality) keeps me on my toes. Just the way I like it. Finding your niche (or making it) is how to do business. Trying to be generic to reach as many buyers as possible will only have the opposite effect. Experimenting is not only good, but fun. As long as you're doing it with a plan. But that plan could be "I'm gonna try this for three weeks, gather the data, and see what came of it". I just did a price test where I doubled my rates. Lowered my conversion rate too much so it didn't make financial sense with the projects I got. Back to my normal rates now, after checking the data for a few weeks. Then I added a gig video (even though gig video audio sucks). That doubled my click-through-rate. Now I'm excited to see if it can increase my conversion rate to even higher levels than I had before the price increase test. Also, there's nothing wrong with changing your plans and adapting - so long as you have an actual plan. I haven't seen your work, professionally, but based on what I've seen on the forum, you're an awesome writer!

Indeed it is. I spend 1-2 hours every day trying to learn something new that can help me become even better at what I do. It takes effort and willpower to get good at something, especially good enough to make money from it in the long term. I don't always have a fleshed out plan for everything I do. But if you think you have a business idea that might work, it does help to sit down and think it through. But being impulsive can be fun, so I get it. I prefer to keep that beast locked up when it comes to work, and release my inner spontaneousness for other, less important projects.

Probably from some other new seller who believed the same lie right here on the forum. It's always been one of those myths that new sellers believe. It's easier to believe than "You have to be great at what you do to succeed" and then putting your back into becoming so.

After being on Fiverr since 2014, I've seen many new sellers on the forum, complaining about not getting orders, not being able to rank their gig, and not getting impressions and clicks... The list goes on. So I wanted to talk to you a bit about why this happens. There are a few fundamental reasons why new sellers will struggle on Fiverr. #1 – New sellers offering the same service as everyone else If you sign in to Fiverr only to make a gig in a category with 100.000 other sellers, you'll most likely fail. Imagine opening up a shop in a shopping center with 100.000 other shops! You're not going to get many customers, especially if nobody knows who you are. Solution: Do your research. Offer something unique. Don't be seller number 114.000 offering "WordPress web design" or "Minimalist logo design." Think about what you do best. Specialize. Instead of an "I will design responsive website in WordPress"-gig, how about an "I will design a stellar plumber website"? This is just an example. You can't compete against 114.000 other sellers doing the exact same thing. But you have more than one gig slot. Use them, and be more specific. #2 – Not being good at what you do A lot of new sellers have no skills to back up their promises. This is unfortunate. If you just started learning something, you're not a pro. If you worked all your life flipping burgers, you're not a "marketing expert." You're a burger flipper. Solution: Be honest about your skills, most importantly to yourself. Only then can you begin to improve, learn and grow into a career as a freelancer. You need the skills before you make the gig. I understand that life can be challenging. That you desperately need money to put food on the table. And you have my sympathy. But you can't and won't succeed in business if you're not truly good at what you're selling. It all starts with honesty in front of the mirror. #3 – You don't have a plan Doing anything in business without a plan will most likely lead to failure. Solution: You need to know why you're doing this, how you're going to do it, and who you'll do it for. A man with a plan is a man who can. ---- There you have it. My top three reasons why new sellers fail. And how you can avoid making them. Now go out there, make a plan, be bold and be extraordinary. If you're not already there, go learn how to be. Then come back with new and marketable skills you can sell.

That's false and this myth have even been debunked by Fiverr itself. You don't have to be online all the time. I'm active on Fiverr 4-6 hours a day while working. The rest of my days are spent elsewhere. I'm a top rated seller. I've never, ever, tried being online "as much as I can". This is simply false.

You're in perhaps the most competitive category on Fiverr: WordPress. Do you have a business plan at all? A strategy for how you're going to build your niche, sell your services and promote your business? What is your value proposition (i.e. why should buyers pick you over the 113.000 other sellers in your category?) What makes you unique? When you know that, you can begin to create a plan for your marketing. You also need to know who your clients are, what they need, and how you will solve their problems. The best way to market your gig is right here on Fiverr. You do so by building trust and credibility, having a perfect gig in every way, and constantly improving. You need to stand out. I like that you have a gig video where you show yourself and talk about what you can do. That's something many sellers skip, and it can help you stand out. But you should re-do the video with better audio quality and lighting. Hire a friend or expert with a great camera and good audio gear to record your video. Get a nice location to film in (perhaps there are some co-working spaces with nice offices you can rent for a day?). Or, if you have the money, give your office a fresh coat of paint, get a new desk and make it look like you really mean business. When it comes to your script for your gig video, practice, practice and practice some more; hire a language teacher online to help you with the pronunciation of the specific script you're working with. Showing off that your English is excellent will help ease buyers' worries about communication issues because you're not a native speaker. Why all of this, you ask? Because it will help you stand out. If I check out your gig and see you as a true professional – a serious businessman who has invested in their business – I'm more likely to trust you with my project. You're on the right track with your gig description, but there's still room for improvement. Hire a US or UK native proofreader to help you fix mistakes and make it look native. One thing that stands out to me and makes you look less professional is this part of your gig description: "Message me if my packages exceed your budget." That immediately tells me that you're not professional and that you don't have any reason to back up your rates. It tells me that you're a person open to being used and willing to work for less. There's a reason why you have the rates that you do. Don't budge. Stand your ground and be proud of your rates. Never, ever apologize for them. Here are some tips I wrote on improving trust on Fiverr as a new seller. They might help!

The automatic filtering works in mysterious ways. I would refrain from using the term "work outside of Fiverr" and instead use "I exclusively work right here on FIverr" or something like that, to avoid the filtering. Regarding scams: Fiverr is a massive platform with millions of users, focused on buying and selling services. Naturally, you're going to see a lot of scams, since it's a transactional website. It attracts scammers left and right because they know that sellers are alwasy eager to get more work, so it's easy to tempt them into doing something stupid. The good thing is that Fiverr catches these scoundrels fast. Whenever you see something you don't like, simply report it to Fiverr using the Report button in your inbox or on their profile. Fiverr can only catch the scammers they know about. And as always: if something doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. Here's some advice to identify and avoid getting scammed on Fiverr: Hope this helps! 🙂

You should focus on marketing your gig on Fiverr. Your buyers are here. Making your gig the best it can be should be your main priority. With all that said, LinkedIn would probably be the most relevant third party platform to market your gig outside of Fiverr. That's not marketing. What you're doing is called spamming. It's not going to get you any business.

I didn't say it doesn't matter. I said I was not too worried about it. If businesses start spending less on services because they have to save money, that will also affect me. I'm not too concerned because I started preparing for a financial crisis in 2020, and I've had two years to increase the size of my financial cushion. I get the chills whenever I see governments printing money like crazy (like they did during the pandemic/lockdowns to keep the markets up artificially). So it seemed like the smart thing to do: less investing in stocks, more investing in a rainy-day fund to keep me afloat if/when the shit hits the fan. And it appears to be some shit hitting the fan right about now. For now, though, it's business as usual, and I'm getting more business than ever here on Fiverr. But I'd hate being content with the situation only to get surprised when things start going the other way. But unless all your buyers have invested all their money in Fiverr stocks, the stock price won't affect you directly. It's the general market trend that is worrisome.

Directly, no. But if we take the general situation in the stock market as an indication, it's likely that businesses will start to scale down some operations. That could potentially mean less business for us as sellers, but I'm not too worried about that. I most certainly believe in the company, so I'm holding on to my shares. But I wouldn't invest my reserves at this point - not in Fiverr or any other stock - but it has little to do with Fiverr. The bubble we saw during the pandemic isn't likely to happen again anytime soon, but I'm sure the prices will rice rise *again when the markets swing the other way. But like both you and I mentioned, that could take years. I would much rather focus on building up a bigger cushion and making sure my portfolio is diversified with more physical assets at this point in time. But you're right: if you're in it for the long run and you have the money to spare, the entry point isn't bad at all, considering we were at 300 a few months ago. * Good lord, I need to learn typing all over again on this laptop. Also, note to self: stop thinking about food when typing.

You still have to follow the rules on the platform when offering free consulations. That means you can't share contact info or be in contact outside of Fiverr. The "consulation" would have to be done in the chat on Fiverr for that reason. One of the services I offer is SEO content. Sometimes, the buyer will want to know things like how many words they should order, based on their existing content and website, competition and so on. So I can help them by taking a look at their website, content and competitors, to give them an idea of what I think will be effective to achieve their goals. I'll look closer at what they already have, their competitors, keywords and goals. Then I'll provide my recommendations and explain what I can do for them to achieve those goals. All of that is done in chat. It's free, yes, but the end goal is to help the buyer decide on what they should order from me. So it's basically a part of my "sell", and not totally free, since my consultation is basically a sales pitch designed to help the buyer know what would work for them. My interest is always client satisfaction, so my recommendations are always real and I never try to oversell my services.

We're on our way into a recession. Investing in stock that has just taken a beating might not be a good idea. I'm a shareholder myself, and I haven't sold my stocks, since there would be no point right now. But if you take a look at the history of Fiverr stock prices, it's been going down and down since february 2021. Just since last month, we're down more than 17%. We're basically exiting the pandemic bubble. Most analysts at this point advise shareholders to hold. Even so, Fiverr can and will grow in my opinion. If you have enough money to speculate on stocks, after you've paid your bills and set aside enough for living comfortably with rising food prices, gas prices and possible food shortages, and you've already diversified your portfolio with safer bets like gold to have some security, Fiverr might not be your worst bet. But I wouldn't go crazy. And investing at all during these troubling times, should only be done after you've set aside a nice emergency fund and if you're ready to let the money sit for 5 - 10 years or longer. If you have a mortgage, I'd focus on that. I have a feeling we'll see lots of people defaulting in the coming years. I smell corrections left and right. 😂

Thanks! I'll do my best. Naturally, I didn't take my own advice and forgot a custom offer in chat, so I have to write a bit tomorrow, but that can be done from the pool. It's never easy. I used to feel guilty for taking days off. Telling my regulars I was going away made me grind my teeth. So it's something I had to learn over time. Disney sounds nice! Though wou would never catch me spending money there. I much prefer Portaventura in Spain. The roller coasters are my thing, not the theming. Also, I hate what they've done to Star Wars. 😂

I'm taking a few well-earned days off. It got me thinking: many sellers/freelancers struggle with this. Taking time off is scary, especially on Fiverr. If you activate the dreaded "out of office"/"I'm unavailable" mode on your profile, your gigs disappear from the search results. It can take days or even weeks before you get back to your regular revenue stream when you get back. Fiverr rewards sellers who sell. So by not selling, you set yourself up for less business, not to mention that the projects you would have picked up if you were available will go to other sellers. Even so, we have to take time off to stay sane. Here are a few tips to make your days off easier: #1 - Plan ahead Start planning now if you know you're taking a week off next month. Make sure you don't get overbooked. Increase your delivery times when appropriate. Make sure you include days off in case you need it on large projects. #2 - Inform your regular buyers if you have active orders/upcoming projects If you're currently working with some regular buyers on orders, inform them about your days off. They might expect you to be available next week for new projects or follow-ups. By telling them, they can plan accordingly, and you avoid getting questions from your regulars about a new project during your time off. Don't message sellers you don't have active or on-going work with. They don't need to know and you risk annoying them. #3 - Decide if you want to be available to take orders or not If you're just gone for a couple of days, increasing your delivery time might be a good idea instead of activating "out of office" mode. That way, you're still active and working on Fiverr. When you activate "out of office", you're gone from Fiverr. If you're willing to respond to all messages quickly while away, you can maintain some normality for yourself and your buyers during and after your time off. Make sure to follow #1 if you do this. If you're gone for more than a few days, increased delivery times may be unreasonable to your buyers and give the impression that you're slow. I tend to use out-of-office for anything more than a single day. If I just want Wednesday off to be with the family, I'll increase my deadlines on custom orders and gigs by an extra day instead. # 4 - Budget your days off Calculate your average hourly salary and how many work hours you'll miss by being off for your set amount of time per year. The amount you're left with should be added to your rates. If you miss 10% of your salary yearly because of days off, bake that into your gig prices. Don't forget that we tend to spend more while on vacation. Add that, too! #5 - Ramp it up! For large projects with longer deadlines, you could ramp up production a few weeks ahead of your days off. It can be a good option if you wish to clear your dashboard before going away but requires you to work more in the weeks leading up to your vacation. #6 - Time it right Try to take your days off when it's quiet on Fiverr. That means weekends, bank holidays and so on. Make sure you check when important buyer countries have their days off. It might differ in your country. For example, there is no bank holiday in western countries during the Islamic holiday Eid Al-Fitr, and while most western countries have days off during Christmas, this might not be the case in your country if you don't celebrate Christmas. And now it's time for me to sign off. This awaits me for the next three days:

If you have no idea, you should do research before you create gigs. Like with every business, you need to have a business plan in place before you start. Otherwise, you won't succeed. This might help:

As a seller on here since 2014, I've had all these. But you missed an important one: 11) The Scrooge McDuck-buyer – Will try to get lower rates like their life depended on it. Worse than the Wallmart shopper, since they would prefer you to pay them for the honor of getting to work with them if they could. Genetic combination of numbers 1, 2, 3, 7, 8 and 10. I mostly deal with 1 and 7. Since I'm a male, I don't think I fall victim to the number 9 buyer very often. Except that 60 year old author who wanted me to translate her book and move in with her. She was lonely. Very lonely. My most annoying buyers must be the number 11 (as described above) and 7s. Surprisingly, a lot of my buyers are 4s. The order lands with a message: "Please, do this. Here's the details... Followed by a detailed list and examples." This is my favorite type of buyer. As a buyer, I'm always 4. I'll plan days ahead of ordering. I'm currently working on a gig video involving 5 different sellers. The Evernote doc is now 29 pages long, with ideas, plans, task lists, dates, links to files, scripts, instructions to sellers, order numbers, and a summary for each seller to use while creating their part of the project. It's 60 seconds of video. So far, I've been working for 6 weeks on the planning stage alone. 😂

May sucked for me too. It's a lot of days off around the globe. If you lost access to gig promotion, that means your gig quality dropped. That could be from a negative, private review. You wouldn't know, if it wasn't for the consequenses. This is typical: a buyer wasn't happy, told Fiverr so in their private review, and things starts falling apart for the seller. Make sure to impress your buyers. It's the only thing that matters if you want to get your buyer satisfaction rate up again. Private reviews count way more than public ones.

Business is not meant to be "fair". If you expected Fiverr or the freelancing life to be "fair", someone must have given you the wrong impression. It's not fair nor is it supposed to be. It's a meritocracy. You don't get equal outcomes in business. Fiverr takes a lot of things into account when deciding if a gig can be promoted or not. I'd say the buyer satisfaction rate and general stats are the most important ones. Fiverr only wants to promote the best gigs that have a high chance of impressing their buyers. So if you've got some negative private feedback lately, that could explain this. Make sure to impress the heck out of your buyers, and you should hopefully be able to promote your gigs again soon! A pro tip: always over-deliver, be super-polite and deliver outstanding quality every time. If that requires you to increase prices or delivery times, do so. Maybe even add a day extra even if you don't need it, just so you can deliver early. Buyers like that.

We have 350 m2 (living room, kitchen, hallway, stairway, 1 en-suite master bedroom, two regular ones and one of them is my office, home theatre room, laundry room and garage + rooftop terrace (60 m2) + back yard. Sometimes I do envy people living in small apartments. Less work! Cats ❤️

Living alone clearly changes things up. In my house, I would have to have at least 6 robots. We have a big house and a baby, so that obviously adds to the workload. Your garbage situation sounds very nice, though! I envy you. Dishes: you have to put the it in the machine and take it out again. Floors - I'd need six Roombas just to vacuum and they would run constantly. Did I mention we also have three cats? Laundry - Duh! But you have to sort it, put it inside the machine, put detergent in it, then take it out, dry it (or put it in the drier) and then fold it and put it back into your closet. Garbage: That adds up to 8,6 hours per year spent on garbage. So if you spend five minutes a week on the Roomba (4,3 hours per year), 10 minutes on dishes per week (8,6 hours per year), 10 minutes on laundry (8,6 hours per year) and 10 minutes on garbage (8,6 hours per year), you're spending 30 hours on chores around the house per year. So it adds up. Lol

Per week for a familiy of three, eating four meals per day. One of us being a baby. I don't think 3 hours per week doing dishes is that unrealistic. Maybe madmoiselle could time herself doing dishes, to see how we would compare? 😄

I travel a lot and I usually stay at rather fancy hotels, since I'm a sucker for that type of luxury. You sure do feel important when working from a large chair surrounded by chandeliers and expensive golden furniture. If you're tired of your apartment, that can certainly be great for your mental health. But I prefer to work from home or the hotel room, to be honest. I get easily distracted. When it comes to having a housekeeper, I don't view it as a luxury. I view it as a sensible thing to do. The pleasure of watching someone else clean my house is one thing, but I'm actually getting more time to work, meaning I earn money from having the housekeeper here. Next step: A butler!

I bet you're thinking, "good lord! The man is a slob!" right about now. Hold your horses. Let me explain. How much time do you spend cleaning and on chores around the house per week? Let's draw up some examples: Cleaning floors: 30 minutes Dusting: 10 minutes Dishes: 3 hours Changing bed sheets: 10 minutes Carrying our garbage: 15 minutes Doing laundry: 15 minutes Sweeping: 10 minutes Cleaning toilets: 10 minutes That adds up to 4,5 hours per week. (I rounded it down from 4,6 for simplicity). Your mileage may vary depending on the size of your home and family, how much of a slob you are and other things. My point is: we spend a considerable amount of time per week doing chores around the house. Let's add those 4,5 hours together to see how many hours we spend per year. 4,5 x 52 = 234 hours. That's almost ten full days. Or roughly 2.7% of a year. Now let's see what you can earn if you work 234 hours more per year. Let's say you earn, on average, 25 USD per work hour. By cleaning, you've lost out on 5850 USD in revenue per year. But hey – you schlump of a couch-potato sluggard Mr Smash – you might say. If you don't clean, someone else has to do it. That's what my housekeeper...*cough*... I mean cleaning and laundry attendant... is for. Let's say this service costs you 40 USD per week. That's 2080 USD per year. That means you've earned 3770 USD per year by not cleaning your own house. So I don't. And if you earn more per hour worked than the cost of a Cleaning and laundry attendant, you shouldn't, either. Even if you earn the same as their salary, at least you don't have to clean. I don't know why I felt like writing all of this. The idea just popped into my head today while sipping on my drink, eating a steak dinner and watching my housekeeper do her thing: I no longer have to excuse my laziness. I can simply say it makes perfect financial sense. And it would be the truth*. * For my secret method of never cleaning yourself to work, steak dinner may or may not ruin the math. Your mileage may vary depending on how many asterisks you need behind "truth" for this to work.

Review-swapping is a thing. And it's not ok. I've even seen some top youtubers do it to make "30 days on Fiverr" videos. I'm happy to see Fiverr taking action against this sort of cheating.

I have thought about it, yes! I believe becoming an expert in this field requires decades of experience. The competition is fierce in the intelligence business, but I see Fiverr has not yet entered into this untapped resource. I will surely make market research optimize gig ranking day by day up up up so you can congratulate me. 😄 As a journalist and editor-in-chief of my very own newspaper, I know all to well how opinions can color coverage. I've made it a point to always provide fact based information. But even when you provide pure facts without opinionated wording, the stories themselves can also affect bias. The stories we choose to write about matters just as much as the words we put down. That's one of the reasons why I started reading the newspapers on the other side: to find story ideas that weren't affected by my own bias. I'm a personal conservative liberalist. I apply conservative values to my own life, yet I'm not religious at all, and I'm a firm believer in personal responsibility and freedom to live your way as you see fit, as long as you don't stand in the way of other people's liberty to do the same. Whenever I see something that would make me angry or have some sort of emotional reaction, I'll always check all sides of the story I can get my hands on. I wish more people did that. Herd conformity and lack of perspective are not only counterproductive; it's dangerous. Echo-chambers will do that to you.