[Why lying about your skills will never work]

On 6/5/2022 at 7:48 PM, smashradio said:

Here's the thing: Most of these liars and pretenders will market themselves as "experts" or "specialists". That's the first lie. They will also promise to do something they can't. 

I wonder: when you came back to Fiverr after a couple of years – with a plan this time around –did you know, at least to yourself, that you had the skills required to perform the services you would sell? 

You don't have to be an expert to sell on Fiverr. But you have to be an expert to market yourself as one. That's the difference.

I have no formal training as a voice over actor (I never went to school for it!). In fact, I'm self taught. I had work lots of prior work experience, so I knew I could do it well. 

I'm also a self taught translator, and I've worked as a journalist for years without ever going to school for it. 

So you don't really need any formal education or prior experience to be good at something. 

I think the core of the issue is self-deceit. The pretenders fool themselves, just as much as they try to fool the buyers. 

You went overboard with your efforts. You refuse to deliver subpar work. Maybe you shouldn't have accepted those orders until you've learned the trade, but then again, I've accepted voice over jobs as Santa Claus, even though I usually don't offer character voices, because I'm not very good at them, to be honest. All though I do a killer Goofy laugh!

I informed the buyer that character voices isn't something I excel at, pointed out that it's in my gig FAQ, and offered a cancellation. But I also said that I'd be happy to try, and if they liked it, they could keep it. If not, we could cancel the order. The client ended up loving it, and I'm now their yearly Santa Claus. I'm still no good at it, but they liked it, so I guess I'm in the clear. My point: I was honest about my limitations and didn't promise something I couldn't keep. 

I'll add to this, that as a translator, my clients are often from other countries. They don't know if the translation is any good. Far too often, they will come to me with a document they bought from some cheap translator on Fiverr, and ask me to just "confirm" if it's good. 

They usually end up ordering from me when I highlight all the mistakes/clearly Google translated content. 

When I do, they will go "Oh, but he said he was native!" or "She promised me a manual translation!". 

So yes - you might be able to get away with certain things/niches, but frankly, I don't care if you can "get away with it". It's just like those people with fake university degrees. Even if you can get away with it, it's unethical. 

The other day, I checked out a couple of web designer gigs on Fiverr (helping out forum members). One of them had the typical "I'm expart web developer with much long experience". He offered to "customize wix templates". That has nothing to do with "web development". Also, the guy was probably 16 years of age.

Now that's a pretender. A liar. 

The other one had something akin to "I'm a web design intern at a large agency here in *Country*. As a side project, I create websites for my clients using WordPress.".

He was honest. An intern. Cool! Still learning, but he wouldn't get that spot at his agency if he was completely useless. 

 

That`s a great comment, but now`s the question. What should newbies on fiverr do? Because I am the one and I see that it`s really hard to get your few first gigs, of course because of the reasons mentioned above, but anyways I`m trying not to lie and even ready to do first orders for free but nobody`s even messaging me to offer smth. I was hoping you may have some piece of advice for me. Thanks in advance!

[What some of the best search tags for translation Gigs?]

 

On 9/18/2020 at 5:34 PM, ibrahim_chawqi said:

My impressions are dropping and I was wondering if my search tags have anything to do with it… help?

Sometimes it`ll be better just to type the language you`d like for translation