How To Make It As A Freelancer On Fiverr

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5 min readApr 17, 2020

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A Short Guide Of Everything I Have Learnt Over The Past Few Years

Firstly, it’s not as hard as you think it is because

  1. Fiverr takes care of your marketing
  2. Most of your competitors are mediocre

In this resource I will break it down to the simplest elements possible. So you can apply it immediately.

Step 1: Creating Value

Unfair Advantage

Ask yourself, what can I do better than most people?

If you can’t answer this question skip to competitive analysis section for ideas on how to break into the market.

Before you even get started you need a basic understanding of the value you’re going to create.

This includes:
1) Your core service
2) Your unfair advantage

Everyone is unique. Your experiences, things that are drilled into your head during childhood or small skills you’ve mastered by passionate repetition can’t be stolen by a competitor.

Capitalize on this.

Action: Reflect and write down things that make your service above average.

How I did it: Since I was young I’ve watched my mother run her salon business. That made me obsessed with everything to do with business. This early exposure to everything business gave me an innate business sense that I could impart to my clients on fiverr to make their ecommerce stores a success.

Niche

You are not amazon. Your service will not be for everybody.

Why? Because choosing a small subset of people to serve with excellence is what is going to set you apart from other services grinding out mediocre work at low prices.

Action: Decide who your ideal customer and create your service around them

How I did it: Early on I knew I would love to work with and help entrepreneurs succeed. Just like my mom I know all too well the struggles and trials of entrepreneurship. Having found success with my own stores, I’m really happy to be able to share my experience.

Discipline Of Market Leaders

This idea is taken straight from the book of the same name.

Image credit: StockViz

What this diagram describes is a choice for businesses to select which attributes to focus on. The key here is that there is a constraint.

No business can be the absolute number one in product, operations and customer intimacy at the same time. Time and energy is finite so it’s best to focus on one and be above average for other attributes.

How I apply this to Fiverr is as follows:

  1. Operational excellence — A well run team that churns out client after client with overall satisfaction on work quality
  2. Product leadership — A high quality service that’s the best on fiverr for your category
  3. Customer intimacy — Excellent communication and after sales support

Step 2: Positioning

Do the opposite

The general rule in a hyper competitive environment is to do the opposite.

This way you stand out from the crowd and sends a signal to potential customers saying, ‘Look At Me!’.

There are 3 ways you can stand out:

  1. Value — The quality of your gig
  2. Design — How your gig is presented
  3. Price — How your gig is priced

These are ranked by effectiveness.

Angling Market Entrance

What is an angle? It’s a way we can enter the market that avoids most of the competition.

Market angle is also the way we introduce ourselves to the market.

While all gigs have to start with the price point of $5 or $10, some gigs should maintain that number for longer, while others should raise their prices as fast as possible.

Example Openings:

Market full of extremely high quality, highly priced gigs
Ripe for a price undercut
Price your gig low, reduce value offered, increase speed of gig completion

Market full of extremely popular & cheap gigs
Ripe for premium differentiation
Price your gig higher, increase 10x value offered, invest in exceptional customer service

Market full of popular, average priced, mediocre gigs
Ripe for dominance
Keep price low, increase value, focus on market share & order completion

Once you’ve decided on these values, you can plan your entrance into the Fiverr market.

Step 3: Overdeliver

Going Above and Beyond

Ideally you have to go above and beyond for every single customer. But for your first 50 customers, this is absolutely crucial.

The reason why it is only an ideal, it is because it is draining to go above and beyond for a customer as a solo freelancer, eventually if you don’t scale or outline processes you will burn out.

Here are the three ways I’ve found to go above & beyond:

Communication
The two main components in communication is response speed and tone. Customers want to spend their money on someone who responds to them quickly, within 15 mins, and who also has a positive and empathetic tone.

Value
Your gig job scope requires you to design 1 logo? Why not design 3 different versions of the logos to be applied in different contexts, all without the customer asking. Surprise them with bonus value.

Service
Empathy is king in service. You have to anticipate the reason why they are purchasing your gig and craft everything towards your clients goal.

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

How I did it: When building stores for my clients, I always ask them what their goal is for their store. I want to know this because I know they don’t care how many lines of code or how design optimized it is. Sure it helps, but their goal is to make money! Anything else is a second-hand consideration.

Closing

The ideas have written are very basic. It is easy to ignore them in the face of fancy over optimizing. Distilling every service based business to it’s essence, it’s all about genuine human connection.

I hope this short guide reinforces the absolute fundamentals of making money on Fiverr.

I plan to delve into each sections more and expand into greater detail the more advance techniques I used.

If you have any questions about this guide or about making money on Fiverr, feel free to send me an email and I’ll be happy to answer them personally.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

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