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texvox

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  1. Responding to messages while you're out is probably what lead to your positive outcome vs. mine. When I left for 10 days in November it was to go Ukraine to rebuild homes in the far east of the country with some friends. I kept the "All buyers can contact me" option off when enabling vacation mode as I knew I would have zero wifi and likely no cell signal so I couldn't respond to any messages. Otherwise my pre-trip prep was the same as yours - extend delivery mode, wind it down and wrap up projects before I left, although I didn't leave any in the queue since it was going to be 10 days out. That'll teach me to try and offer humanitarian aid abroad 🤷‍♂️ Even when I am not in that situation though, I prefer to truly unplug not have to connect to Fiverr daily to respond to buyer messages. I find it distracts me way too much from focusing on my wife and kids, and even when I'm by myself it takes my mind away from rest. With my direct business it's no big deal - away message takes care of it and I can check maybe once every 3 days to make sure I'm not missing big opportunities. Here on Fiverr that's apparently too much to ask.
  2. My greatest accomplishment/highlight in Q1 was: greatly expanding my direct business outside of various platforms. Platforms are a great tool to have in the belt, but it's unpredictable and unwise to rely on them too heavily, and it felt nice to create some more "breathing room" in my business by continuing to diversify my sources. The thing I'm most grateful for in Q1 is: bouncing back closer to my average monthly earnings here on Fiverr after using "Vacation Mode" for 10 days in November literally nuked my gig (went from averaging $14k/mo and 25k impressions/week with a $17k peak in October to $2k and 1k impressions/week in November, $6k and 1.5k impressions/week in December). Getting back much closer to my old numbers which is great. I won't be using Vacation Mode ever again here on Fiverr. In Q2, I would like to improve: my overall business acumen. I'm not the most natural entrepreneur, but I'm growing every day. I'd like to improve my overall understanding of smart business practices in general. In Q2, I would like to accomplish the following in my professional life: work less, earn more. Continuing to raise my rates across all platforms as well as with direct clients to enable myself to be a bit increasingly more selective about the projects I take on while still meeting my income goals. In Q2, I would like to accomplish the following in my personal life: take the next steps toward first-time home-ownership.
  3. Sorry that you had to learn this lesson in this way @desmond_aubery. As @visualstudios mentioned, low-budget clients can often be very difficult to work with. I take the position that not every low-budget client is necessarily a terrible experience waiting to happen, but you have to vet them to the moon and back before accepting a project from them. Because this is so difficult to do I no longer offer any discounts to first-time buyers here on this platform (or off really). Discounts are a luxury, not a right, which I reserve for buyers that I have a good working history with. A properly timed discount can be a great customer service gesture for an ongoing relationship, but if someone is coming to me on day 1 asking for the moon for nothing that tells me that this person at the very least devalues my services. And at the worst? Well, you got a little taste of that (although it can get much worse; trust me on this). When I first got into freelancing an experienced freelancer made a joke that I didn't understand at the time, but I completely get now. He said: $5000 client: "Sounds good; invoice paid." $50 client: "Before we get started, let me tell you about how this project is going to change both our lives..." Extremely cheap clients tend to make a habit of over-valuing their own importance while under-valuing yours. I've definitely found this to be true. You need them and they need you. Both sides need to see the value of the other or the project quickly becomes overly-lopsided in terms of give-and-take. If they're coming at you like a leech they may very well just be a leech. Hopefully this lesson drives some great results in your future though!
  4. The biggest change I've made to my day-to-day operations to increase productivity for my business as a whole (including Fiverr, other platforms and my off-line direct clientele) is to limit the amount of time I spend working. I used to be the type of freelancer who worked "as many hours as it takes." While I thought I was "crushing it" by giving myself a long leash to work until projects were perfect, and I was proud to be "the hardest worker in the room," when I stopped and actually spent time auditing my days I realized that much more of my time than I thought was spent in distraction, or in working tirelessly to squeeze that last 1% out of a project before I delivered. In other words, spent inefficiently. At that point I resolved to work no more than 8 hours per day 5 days per week, and over time I have decreased my average daily working hours to 6, 5, and now about 4 hours on average. And now that I am working about 4 hours a day 5 days a week I am wildly more productive than when I was clocking in 8 hours a day 6 days a week. The reason? Setting a limit on the amount of time I can devote to something forces me to work much more diligently and use my time much more efficiently. Over the last 2 years of doing this I have found that I can accomplish as much or more in 4 quality hours of work per day, 5 days a week than I ever did working 8 sloppy hours per day 6 days a week. Simultaneously my annual business earnings have more than doubled during this same window.
  5. It changes all the time for me. I'm one of those "I like everything" people - yep, even country. It also depends on what I need the music to do for me. Yesterday I was on a hurdy-gurdy kick. A few days before it was a ton of epic bagpipe tracks. Last week Lecrae and NF topped my personal studio charts. I slipped a few EDM tracks in there and even an aria or two (Don Giovanni - can't go too long without Sam Ramey's pipes in my ears). This morning? Running through some of my favorite Hootie & the Blowfish tracks. Darius Rucker is the real hero over here, motivating me to finish this coffee and get after it 😁
  6. @lukesdesigns Like Ken I am also both TRS and PRO and I have had a 9 since the first day of rollout. Been bending over backwards to correct the "communication" problem the success score says that I have and getting a ton of great feedback and reviews since rollout and it hasn't budged.
  7. Agreed! I can dig in a little too deep when it comes to exploring new avenues on Fiverr as well. And as we're both voice actors I'm sure you can agree it's a very nice feeling to have this kind of earning potential at our fingertips without having to go and audition for project after project. There's still a lot of potential here, but I'd encourage you to venture out into that uncharted territory too! There are opportunities all over the place. Case-in-point, I had someone knock on my door to campaign for a local position ahead of the primary elections at the start of this month. Through some conversation I found out she's a commercial director and producer, dropped my profession, swapped a business card and I now have a very enthusiastic lead in the neighborhood.
  8. Yep. It’s going to be the same story on most of these platforms. Unfortunately in exchange for a piece of the pie they all take most of the “free” out of freelance and turn us into glorified employees without the benefits, begging for favor and hoping in things we can’t control. All the more reason to expand our direct businesses. I’ve really loved working on Fiverr and I’ll continue to do so but it’s become evident in the last year that getting too comfortable here has been my mistake.
  9. I am a TRS and PRO seller with a score of 9. Screenshot attached from my dashboard at the moment. My supposed "negative impact" detractor is "Communication."
  10. On top of some of the standard gig extras not being available, I am also seeing every custom gig extra I have ever offered showing up, including several that I deleted long ago.
  11. I make sure to do what I need to "stay free." As a buddy of mine pointed out, the FREE in freelancer comes from not being tied to your business as you would to an employer. The business should work for you, not the other way around. On that note - I am unfortunately finding it more and more difficult to maintain this type of healthy connection to my business here on Fiverr as they continue to increase the pressure to prioritize the platform, but I am still able to do so at this point, albeit it not as much as with every other place I do business. This could look like: - Stepping away for a day or two when/if I need to. Or just because. If I want I can shoot out an email to my direct clients outside of Fiverr and a message to my repeats here on Fiverr to give them a heads up about my absence and just disappear for a day or two at the beach, or mountains, or to play games with my kids. - Saying "No" to a project or two you don't really want to work on. Unlike being an employee, everything that comes across your desk as a freelancer is an opportunity, not an obligation. Being able to decline work for any reason imaginable has been very freeing. - Exiting my studio for a few hours to play with my kids. Or inviting my kids into my studio/office to goof around for a little while. - Easing into my day with a bit of a late start. My kids are out of school for Spring Break here in the US so I slept in until 8AM just because. - Not wearing pants while I work. Yep. - Strength training 3x per week, and walking every other day. Keeping my body moving is a must to combat time spent at a desk or in my recording booth. - Blasting music once in a while in my studio. It's just me in here - who's going to complain?
  12. I'm also a top rated seller, and Fiverr has also given me clearance to ask for reviews. But customer service can be quite fickle, and I've heard of people being told something is OK to do or say and suddenly being dinged for doing exactly that one day because one or two words were on the naughty list. I see where you're coming from though, and offering some vague guidance on at least understanding the system is a good thing. It is quite disappointing that Fiverr has rolled out their current system and doesn't seem to have given buyers much in the way of guidance on how to understand these changes. As usual, they change something and put the onus on us as sellers to make it work.
  13. Picked up a fun, large video-game project this week. The buyer came to me about 2 months ago asking for a quick audition which I gave to her. A week later she said she loved it but the casting director decided to go with someone else. Last week she came back and said the other voice actor fell through and she was able to pitch me to the CD again and this time he saw where she was coming from and decided to work with me. Always fun to take on a character role to punctuate the typical commercial and educational narration work I do. The price was right too - even after Fiverr fees the rate will exceed typical "indie" rates and fall somewhere between those and AAA game titles instead. Felt like a win all around.
  14. I played around with Neo for a while too and finally managed to get it to say this as well, but that's still not actually filtering by 5-star ratings, just by TRS status which I personally wasn't asking it for (I was very specific with the 5-star language). Instead it kept sharing people with me that had 4.9X ratings. Or it shared sellers hat showed as "5 stars" in the Fiverr Neo chat window, but when I clicked on them their profiles showed "4.98" or "4.95" stars and so forth. That's about the closest I could get it. Neo did give me pages and pages of very corporate explanations about why 4.99 is just as good though. I have some interesting screenshots.
  15. And just to check and see if Neo is able to filter other sellers by rating I then asked Neo to filter by sellers with 4.95 star ratings and it was able to immediately do so and provide me with a seller recommendation. So it looks like Neo has been programmed to not offer 5-star sellers. Self-fulfilling prophecy much? 🤔
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