miiila

Ah, great, thank you for tagging me!

You’re most certainly right, it used to work. I’ve been using out-of-office a lot, including having been in ooo most of Dec-Feb/March, and could still send offers to regular customers.

Wait! We mustn’t throw such violent thoughts into space. It’s relativity. It’s mutant manifestation. Sometimes, a wish is the chime heard on the wind. Depending on the listener - that wish may come true. Depending on the wind, it can be brutal. Do you realize what sort of disorganized, fragmentia could emerge by remaking Ferris Bueller? Ferris Bueller is the guardian to the cosmic portal. A teenage movie about delinquency with a moral center and grade - A humanity? That’s not a movie. That’s a miracle produced by the universe, sent here to protect us from ourselves. An audio/video ancient scroll, translated into 80’s lingo, complete with a modernized monastic chant: (Bow Bow chick … chick-a-chick ahhhhh) Ferris is a modern translation of Fergus. Fergus in Irish culture can be traced to Fearghuis (or Feargus) a giant appearing with mortals as a protector. Some believe him to be a spirit - or God- protecting the realm for those that share his story. His forms have included a lengthy run as protector and king of Ulster. Sworn to always protect - until he was replaced. Needless to say … they weren’t so protected after that. (There’s also a lot of “Lengthy” information on the size of his … let’s call it “Manhood.” Like, an uncomfortable amount of info. Like… who was asking to this extent?) By now, I’m sure you’ve made the connection. In its current form, “Ferris Bueller’s Day off” is our protector of this realm. Remaking it would act as a symbolic “replacement” ceremony, causing the realm to be totally susceptible to all sorts of badness. I ask you, “in the name of O’ Fearghuis, where does it stop? We, the small and pitiful of this fleshly tribe, have already tempted the fates by remaking Psycho. (Pause Scene: Seriously, does anybody remember that? The time that Gus Van Zant lost his ever loving mind, got drunk while watching “Swingers” and thought, “This loud kid would make an amazing Norman Bates?” Was that a fever dream?) It’s a commonly known fact that ideological and mythological deities loath the remake. We’re bending the spatial and temporal dimensions by eroding the ecosystem of preservation currently provided to us by such diverse and complex beings. Rumor has it, upon seeing the live action remake of “Dumbo,” Perun, Slavic God of Sky, returned to the Pantheon and denounced Polytheism. Denounced it! Reason cited? “There’s no amount of deities that can undo this dumpster pile. I’m out.” Great! So let’s hope the sky doesn’t need tending to. Pangu, the Chinese horned beast that came into existence from the same egg that birthed the universe watched thirty minutes of the “Carrie” remake and immediately posed the primordial existential question. He posed it directly to the Jade Emperor! The actual inventor of “something.” Who was all like, “because I said so.” Do you see the consequences of these actions? Remakes aren’t just bad movies, they’re a declaration of a divinity lost. It’s humans run amuck. Our muck runneth over. Please, please never suggest, even in the most hypothetical and passive sense, that “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” could ever be remade. But, if it pleases the God’s, I’d definitely listen to a sequel pitch. Ahh. “Let the Lord of Chaos rule.” He does anyway, doesn’t he. I’m fine with no remake, though. I’m not in the habit of watching them in any case. But if someone or something out there picked up on my not-wish for a Ferris remake, please make it an anime with soundtrack by TK. In which case I promise I’ll watch. Euh, I’m extremely off-topic now though and will leave to not get flagged 😉 and will study others’s processes quietly and from afar. There’s always something you could learn and procrastinate on implementing. 🙂

Hmm … Well … the biggest part of my process is making myself sit down and start, even though, all of a sudden, I feel an almost irrepressible urge to do things I don’t really want to do but should actually do eventually, or should already have done last week, or month, or year, like climb on the roof and clear the leaves from the eves gutter, repaint the kitchen, shine all the shoes, and defrost the fridge, in that or reverse order, or even things I usually would not ever even consider doing, like clean the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, sort my books alphabetically (they need to be sorted by colour, obviously), or go grocery shopping in broad daylight. Once I’ve talked sense into myself, and under the reproachful glare of NeeChee, the plushie cat, who doesn’t want to become homeless and sofaless, I’ll open a YT window, choose some music without lyrics (too distracting if you deal with words) that fits my mood of the day, or the job at hand, or both, and start. Once I’ve started, it’s all love, peace, and harmony, with rainbows and unicorns sprinkled all over, and the flow can be so zoney that suddenly I notice it’s dark, and check the time with panic-widened eyes, to see if the supermarket is already closed. Roughly about that. Very boring, I know. However. After I haven’t heard or read anything about Ferris whatsoever since years, I guess, or even decades, just yesterday, a friend mentioned the movie in a mail, today I read a reference to it in a Fiverr forum thread … if I happen to read or hear of it for the 3rd day in a row tomorrow, it must be the universe telling me something, a sign … that I should do something really outrageous, like … take a day off. That masterful artwork of a movie went under the title of “Ferris macht blau” here, by the way, which literally translates to “Ferris makes blue”. “Blaumachen”, “make blue” meaning, you may have guessed it, “skip (work/school/weekly hamster club meeting/…)”. I love my work. And I’m not a procrastinator – a nice lady in a Ted Talk told me I’m not a procrastinator but only have a procrastination habit! And now, I’m wondering whether a 2021 Ferris remake would be called “Ferris the procrastinator” instead of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” instead of going to bed …

Wait, people with a Business account pay for that? That is very strange because I had one “HESHE is a Fiverr Business client” recently and his first message was: Can you take (link to @frank_d video from the portfolio) and remove/replace the logo in video with mine, in next 6 hours (I kid you not, this is the beautified/simplified version, names changed to protect privacy). So he is business client? :thinking: I have a lot of profile names with blue thingy next to them in the inbox, all converted to orders but there is no significant change in order amount or income. Some of my gigs literally have no choice but to repeat in tags what is in the title so I did not change all of them drastically. image798×54 6.15 KB image787×80 7.75 KB And when I read here stats that people are sharing all my GIGs are underperforming all the time this entire year because I never had more than 1-5 clicks per day. My all-time best selling GIG peaks at 8-12 clicks. But all my GIGs are in the most overcrowded categories. Promoted, results first 24 hours image781×241 8.83 KB Just as an aside, this makes me remember a comment by someone who said he was told by support that the algorithm does change to avoid people trying to “beat it”, and this not in the ‘algo 2.0 for 2 years’, ‘algo 3.0 for 1 year’ sense but in the ‘what is true this week may not be true next week’ way. The entity algorithm 3.0 as a ‘major release’ surely will have “stickies” that remain the same, like “relevancy”, or “cancellations are bad, we don’t like cancellations”, but might play around with “lesser values” to keep things fresh and exciting for sellers who try to figure it out and adapt accordingly. That could also function as kind of an alternative “gig rotation”, not caused by shuffling sellers just so with an “everyone gets a turn every once in a while” attitude, but in a “let’s make fast turnaround sellers the freelancers of the week”, “this month is lucky month for sellers who edited their gig within the last month”, and so on. I just like the thought that they are having fun hanging out in their virtual conference room and debating whether to make a new change next week, or to reuse the change from calendar week 2 because no over-smart seller would see that coming, or to just let it run the same this whole month and work on 4.0. $149 for an annual subscription, so not really a hurdle for actual businesses. What’s more interesting though, is that you can add up to 50 co-workers to your business account to collaborate, etc. You can find the info in the help pages, there’s also an extra ToS version for Fiverr Business.

Just buy yourself a dozen new jumpers on Fiverr, problem solved! Regarding metadata, once I had issues with my gig, and discovered that somehow my language pairs (which I know I had chosen …) had been “reset” to nothing. Retrospectively, I thought, the most probable reason other than a very random bug, is that it somehow happened when they made some category update. I think it makes sense to check one’s gigs at every such update to make sure that all metadata are still there/as one wants them, even if one thinks one doesn’t want to change anything when reading about the category update.

That’s interesting to see, I’ve already written that I’m convinced that Fiverr 3.0 wants people to specialize somewhere above. It probably matters little to and for Fiverr if some people will make fewer sales because of it - as long as there are more than enough sellers in the respective category to absorb all potential orders. One of Frank’s important points was “make the buyer happy”, and I’m pretty sure it makes buyers (especially the more sophisticated, demanding, up-market, … ones) very happy to buy from sellers they think are specialised on their topic, or ideally from sellers that are indeed specialised on their topic. Had an order today for proofreading - I have one proofreading gig to cover all. He then asked to cancel it because he found someone who specializes in proofreading Website Copy… He sent the link to me and the person has a variety of “specialties” as well as a catch all proofreading gig. All have almost identical descriptions bar the one specialty keyword. Explained this to him and of course he was happy to stay with me then but the point stuck with me that I may be missing out because I don’t have proofreading gigs to specialize in every individual thing. Same could be said of translation, Marketing, SEO… I will market your dog toy business, I will market your cat toy business, I will market your pet toy business. This type of rubbish really annoys me and is completely unnecessary in most cases. Sure, specialization is a thing and some people do some things really well, but this idea of having 6 specializations is just a joke. The questions is now, do I rant about it continually or do I jump on board? Ah, yes, I can see that happening … and the question indeed is what to do, or if to do … When I started on Fiverr and saw all the almost identical translation gigs, like one person having a dozen of them offering pretty much the same (if not the same save “awesomest” vs. “perfectest” 😉 translation), I wondered if it has to be that way but settled for general and a handful of specialised offerings, although in fact I kept some of them mostly on pause and only used them temporarily, either to test ideas, or just for customers who’d specifically ask and I’d be fine doing that for. I had long stretches with only my main, general gig active, and usually only have a max of two or three active at any one point. My niche gigs are for things I really like doing and wouldn’t mind just doing, and the more it will shift from the general gig to those, the better. Maybe I’ll give up the general gig someday. With my current level, I could have loads of niche gigs, but making gigs just for the sake of dabbling in any niche imaginable … meh.

That’s interesting to see, I’ve already written that I’m convinced that Fiverr 3.0 wants people to specialize somewhere above. It probably matters little to and for Fiverr if some people will make fewer sales because of it - as long as there are more than enough sellers in the respective category to absorb all potential orders. One of Frank’s important points was “make the buyer happy”, and I’m pretty sure it makes buyers (especially the more sophisticated, demanding, up-market, … ones) very happy to buy from sellers they think are specialised on their topic, or ideally from sellers that are indeed specialised on their topic. There will be sellers who’ll copy what they see the top sellers choose as categories, and there will be sellers who’ll cover anything else that can be chosen. If there are topics that aren’t very popular among most sellers, there might be a chance there, as long as there is demand. Lucky those who’d choose unpopular topics out of their own volition and not just because they think their chances will be better there against the established/busy sellers. A bit simplified, if everyone wants to cover English, Music and Sports, and you cover Maths, Physics, and Chemistry (all the more if you really have a knack for it), the force may be with you.

Many of the things mentioned in above posts aren’t mutually exclusive. The “top 3 gigs on everyone’s screenshots on the first page” are probably owed to those gigs great performance, or the people who talk about gigs “glued” to their position, even despite the infamous “gig rotation” could also see that as confirmation of their glue theory, our results even change based on our perception, not just the facts, it’s pretty funny. Sometimes, when reading this kind of topic, I feel like checking over a long stretch of time to see and document what happens, but then, theorizing and other things seem like much more fun. 3.0 sounds good in any case, both the theory and the name, but my perception is also biased in favour of uneven numbers, so I can only hope that 4.0 will be short-lived, and am expecting great things from 5.0, obviously.

I saw pretty much the same as most people who posted screenshots. However, it was also my first time searching for backlinks, and I never clicked on or bought any. Probably the more intensive and often I’d search, especially after I’d already clicked some or even bought one, the more personalized my personal search results would get. I don’t think I get the same search results when I search for something I already “bought one of” that I’d get if it was a completely new search for me. This ranking that people here usually mean when they talk about their ranking and being on position x and page y, might be relatively similar for users who are new and a blank page for Fiverr, and different for users who aren’t a blank page but start to search for something specific and new for them, and very different for users who search and buy the service in question already since a while, the better Fiverr knows what to show them. At least, it makes no sense to not make it dynamic and try your best at matching if you have the option.

Definitely, and I don’t, I just felt like adding another opinion about the 12-hour thing specifically, since some people seem to see it as scary now, and unfortunately, someone reminded me of pirates today, and I always wanted to use that rules/guidelines quote, since IMO, it seems to often apply, whether in live, on Fiverr, or the forum … and … because I’m not above the Green Pearl pun, unfortunately 🙂 🌿

My take is that delivering actually late is a very big pain point but delivering past the 12-hour notification not much. I think the 12-hour notification’s first and foremost goal is to keep sellers from delivering actually late. They probably came up with it because many sellers do deliver late, not to torment sellers who always deliver before the deadline with the thought “Oh no, will my gig be dead now because I delivered at 14:07, and not at 13:55?! Should I just cut some corners next time to deliver before the dreaded 12-hours note?” Generally, of course, Fiverr wouldn’t want everyone to deliver in the last possible minute all the time, but if happy buyers are the highest goal, Fiverr also shouldn’t like it if sellers got too scared by that 12-hours “pre-deadline” to even offer 24-hour gigs anymore. My take is to plan and try to deliver with buffer as well and often as possible, but to not stress too much about crossing that 12-hour deadline sometimes, or even often if you do deliver a lot of 24-hour orders. There are so many factors interlacing that it’s hard to single them out. Deliver before that 12 hour message, if you can, sure. On the other hand, if fear of crossing that 12-hour line keeps you from offering a 24-hour gig that really would get you orders and rake in fees, or if your business thrives with regular 10- or 5-hour hyper urgent express orders with 3x the revenue for the same amount of time, and the associated fees for Fiverr … That notification is annoying, though, so, if you’re easily annoyed by annoying notifications, and I know I am, plan accordingly, don’t take hyper urgent express orders (unless the hyper person pays enough to cover your pain of receiving that notification), and deliver before that message pounces you. Many if not all of those notifications, I think, are mostly for sellers who don’t deliver a good customer experience anyway respectively who can’t discern and act accordingly on their own. For example, the requirement checking. You never have any issues with your gigs because you check your requirements late, your buyers are always happy? Well, great. You often have to ask for time extension because you check your requirements late? Well, you know what you should do, we know that buyers aren’t happy about time extensions, or, oh horror, late deliveries, and we remind you, to help you with this. Or the “buyer is waiting on an update” - unless, in some cases, they don’t, might even be unhappier if you do reply to their “Great. Thanks!”, since they get a notification too and have to check if their seller maybe has some important question, only to see “Thank you for thanking me!” 😉 The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Green Pearl, Miss Turner, Mister Around, and all you other dears! I might be completely wrong.

Regarding keywords in title and tags, we all read the "Fiverr wants the be the [big platform for physical goodies that we all know and love] of freelancing, or so I imagine, so one could speculate that what happens on that platform from a seller perspective might be interesting for those who sell on this platform too. I often get customers with keyword-stuffed titles and bullet points for their listings on that platform of physical stuff, or let’s call the listings gigs, since we’re more familiar with cool wording on this platform (it even gets cooler with full-blown concerts instead of gigs on the forum when people use Google Translate to communicate), and, actually, hey, let’s call them bullet points tags, just for fun. That platform itself doesn’t only officially tell people it’s not helping to repeat keywords but even that they should not repeat them. (Many people still do keyword stuffing, usually because of one or more of the following reasons: They don’t read, they generally do read (maybe even a lot) but read up on the relevant topic five years ago and are oblivious to the fact that things change sometimes, they read but think they know better, they read too much and believe too much of what they read, and a very tiny minority may have some insider knowledge/privileges and know exactly what, why and how they are doing or not doing something.) Then again … let me close with a quote from Fiverr from the Help pages, “Seo tricks for gig titles”: “A consistent keyword”, “repetition of keywords”, that does clash a bit, right, so maybe the two platforms aren’t that comparable, after all, or something might not yet have been updated, it does happen, or there may be more than one truth, that also does happen. Ultimately, we all need to pick our poison. All in all, I might like this bit best, and it’s easy to remember, too, almost like a Master Yoda quote, so I’ll use that as my major take-away from this thread:

Ah, I suppose, yes. I only had that happen once in all the time, that might confirm my impression that it would depend a lot on the category, or is due to a mix of optimizing and good luck perhaps. Or just good luck, who knows. The person saw the error of their ways right after ordering, I assume through my requirement page, and it happened “live”, so to speak, so at least it could be sorted quickly. Support canceled it, and I don’t think it did much. If you get that often, of course, it surely will have an effect, and also, it’s simply annoying, of course. Actually, why I came back to the thread though was to add something else that I forgot to post above. I’m convinced that one of the things Fiverr 3.0 loves is if sellers specialize. That would be the first thing I’d recommend struggling sellers. It ties in with your points of relevancy and matching, obviously, but I think it’s worth spelling it out.

I doubt that it will be possible to completely eliminate people messaging about something one doesn’t offer. If we take the example of someone looking for a php script messaging a script writer - the same person who’d not read a gig title, to not even mention the description, would perhaps also be the person who only types in “script” as they only think about whatever affects them personally, and they don’t even consider, or know, that something like a script writer exists. And if you have the “bad luck” that your gig shows up high for that general single search word “script”, you have them in your inbox. I got a request to make an app once too, at first, I was really surprised, but then I remembered that the word app actually is in one of my gig descriptions, then I remembered how search sometimes works, and also what kind of people I’ve seen use Fiverr over the years, and the surprise evaporated. Optimizing everything certainly reduces the chances of people straying into one’s gig and inbox who don’t have any business being there, but optimizing only goes so far. I’d also say that some categories, especially the more technical ones, probably suffer more from that than others. Another reason for those strays that I know from my category is what other people do, which you don’t have any influence over - other people who offer what you offer, and offer also the thing you don’t offer, and your gig is among those people’s gigs, so they might ask you for what those people offer even if you don’t. To express it more visually (and probably a bit fulsomely, or maybe not), if 90% of sellers in your category offer language A<>B, 70% offer several language pairs, and 50% offer “any language”, and you are one of 10% who only offers language A->B, it doesn’t matter how well you optimize, eventually there will be someone who’ll ask (or even order) a language, or a direction that you don’t offer. But apart from wasted time, it shouldn’t be a big issue, everyone should occasionally get one of those stray buyers, so they count against one’s conversion, but others get them too, so the effect should be negligible, in the bigger picture over time. That is, if you have optimized enough to not get a disproportionate amount of them through avoidable things like bad/mistakable wording, of course. I do get them seldom enough to not really think about it. Now, if I could eliminate those people in my inbox who tell me they can translate any language, that would be something worth optimizing for, but I fear that’s an optimizing that Fiverr would have to do 😉

There are quite a few thoughts that I think very probable from my own observations and experience and would agree with. Sellers might profit a lot from taking those into consideration. Some points seem overly simplistic, the thing that immediately stood out for me would be speed - while true in some aspects, it could clash too much with things like happy buyers, who won’t come back for refunds, or aspects like the introduction of the up to 90-days gig delivery time, but you said yourself you simplified, and the post is already very long, of course. Regarding I’d add that Fiverr also actively recommends specific sellers to specific buyers/businesses, directly, or by featuring them, which is certainly based on the combination of relevance and performance, though, so it’s not really important to even be aware of that probably, since you’d want to focus on relevance and performance anyhow. I’m absolutely with you on the point of relevance/matching, while I don’t agree that speed is such a big factor in an absolute way and suggest it is in a relative way (if you can be fast and good, sure, go ahead, but if not, ponder whether speed or happy buyers will ultimately benefit you more). But it’s a combination of several things, anyway, and for some aspects, categories, etc., different weighting might apply. Well, that’s definitely good news, I haven’t looked at anything the like for many months, good to know I didn’t miss anything useful 😉 that should save a lot of people a lot of time and make forum posts less repetitive. Happy Birthday, and thanks for taking the time for this, I’ll certainly take the time to read it again.

The seller might have been banned, however, they might have also deleted or abandoned their account, or something happened to them. Also, Fiverr might suspend accounts if, for example, a seller can’t verify their identity because they are in a country, where it’s difficult to get the form of ID that Fiverr requires, a suspended account doesn’t automatically mean that a seller is shady. I’d say being suspended is probably the most common reason for a seller with ongoing orders, though. I once ordered a gig without communicating with the seller beforehand, as it was all very simple and clear, in which case I didn’t see a reason to waste their and my time by messaging instead of ordering the gig. The seller never delivered nor replied, so I guess she either abandoned her account without thinking of pausing/deactivating it, or something happened to her, so she couldn’t (hopefully the former). After the gig got into “very late” status, I got the option to cancel one-sidedly (=not needing the seller to accept the cancellation request), and got an automatic refund to my Fiverr balance.

Is that the revenue before Fiverr’s 20% and the $139,36 spent on ads? Can you say how your “regular impressions” and inquiries/orders compare to the period in which you got those 17 orders? More, less, same as before using ads? Or, in other words, did you get those 17 orders on top of the orders, and impressions, clicks, you’d usually have gotten anyway, or more instead of, which is happening to some people, if I read posts right? And yes, thanks for sharing, everyone.

I’d been wondering whether the reported drop of “regular impressions” (by 100% for you, even) was real or some analytics bug, seeing how my conversion rate is stuck at 0.0% ever since the analytics are back (or are they, not sure if really all analytic stuff is back to normal yet). Since you say you didn’t get traffic for a week, it might be real, though, however, with “gig rotation” and everything, it’s so hard to tell, could be this, could be that … My category got the promotion option now too, but I’m wary of trying it out, having followed this thread… especially since I can’t promote the one of my three gigs I’d like to promote … I’ll wait until I’m not busy in any case, I guess, and on the other hand also not busy enough to be able to work on other stuff elsewhere, just in case “organic impressions” will come to a halt by using the promo feature and the promo won’t work satisfyingly either. This seems so opaque currently.

In case you’ve used the num pad of your keyboard, try the numbers in the top row instead, that has solved the issue for some people; if that’s not it, you’ll probably need to open a ticket , and patience, as support response time currently is slow, unless you’re a higher leveled seller, or a buyer, don’t know how it is for new users.

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I too want to believe, but I didn’t make the meme, just found it, so we’ll never know … however, that’s the very essence of belief, so all’s well 😉

The things support probably has to deal with sometimes … image510×600 116 KB

Your settings don’t matter there. You have to pay attention while you withdraw. You can choose whether to withdraw in your local currency or in US$ during the process. For me, after Fiverr introduced the option to withdraw in local currency, it automatically had switched to € but after I had chosen US$ once, now my default is $ again. I still pay attention, though, as I think it might revert back to € perhaps after a site or windows update without me noticing.

Last share, promise 😉 , off for the … workweekend now.