So I recently had a problem with my account on Fiverr, to resolve which I stumbled on to the Fiverr forum, and I saw that there are a lot of people who still aren’t clear on how they can start as a seller on Fiverr.
So here are my two cents on the matter, things that I’ve learned throughout my freelancing journey that started back in 2012.
[Update]: If you’re not completely new to this and just want to upgrade your gig styles, here are some best practices to Optimize your Fiverr Gig where I wrote about the practices that have helped me and others over the years.
Let’s break everything down evenly, if you think you’ve already gone through the process, skip through the steps.
A. Knowing how useful your services can be to other people.
So this is something simple, but I think many people get it wrong, people who start freelancing start off with one of these two ways; they either choose a freelance gig from one of their skill-sets or choose a skill-set out there that has the best margins.
i. Starting with a skill-set:
If you’re starting as someone who’s choosing from their skillsets, this is something I would recommend, chalk down everything you can do on a piece of paper, your hobbies, your abilities, your skills, and interests and once you do, now go and ask yourself if what you do is unique enough and most importantly either has a higher margin for funds or is easy enough to replicate.
Once you have these chalked down, you can easily choose between them and come up with a service, that’s unique to you and has the highest profit margins.
ii. Starting learning higher margin skills
So for someone who sees how much value a certain service can have on freelance websites, this is certainly the one they would choose, usually after starting from their own skill sets and then porting to this.
So I would recommend following this in the same order I wrote here, starting with your skills and then moving to better services. So once you see that a certain service or skill has high demand, you should start learning it and in the meantime have your profile built on the platform. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad for now, you’re learning and you’ll keep changing them as you see more people showcasing these services and also learning from online platforms.
So if you’re learning and giving an online service, chances are there are plenty of courses out there you can learn from, Fiverr’s learning page being one of them. A site called Coursera is a place I’d highly recommend checking out, where you can get scholarships for all courses and can also audit the course for free without paying and getting any certificates.
Once you do this, you’re set to go, keep improving, keep building.
B. Creating your Profile
So this is the most important part, I think the only thing that helped me was reading a course online where I read how online transactions weren’t trustworthy and how brands branded themselves to give them a background that gave them legitimacy and trustworthiness. Brands create ambassadors, create stories, and create programs.
You are your own brand, your own Ambassador, your own Story, try capitalizing on that, if you’ve ever filled out a college application, you’ll know what I mean here.
Here are a few steps you can follow in creating your online gig/ profile.
i. Know who you are:
“No one knows you better than yourself.”
Not very true many people will know more things about you that you don’t, so here’s my advice, ask a few close friends, to tell you three things they really admire about you and three things they wish you changed (keep in mind that this is feed-forward not feedback, feedback has a negative connotation to it at times.)
ii. Creating your Story (Video to be exact):
Once you get these, use them in your story, create your plus points and make them into a VIDEO, can not stress this enough, make it into a video that has your eyes available in them, you can have a look at my profile, where I’ve only shown my face for a little while, and the other was infographics, but trust me it worked so well. (PS. I haven’t linked my profile here, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m gaining any traffic from here, the post is for sharing my experience, if you want to look, you can go to Fiverr and search iconsolutions)
iii. Know what not to advertise:
Unfortunately, not everyone can capitalize on their looks or charm in life. It’s very important to know your audience if for some reason you think your appearance on the video will do more bad than good, then I would suggest asking a friend to review it, or if you think your English accent isn’t that good, again I’d ask a friend to review it. Not everyone has the best accent, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to work, if this is the case, practice a sentence a hundred times while you record, and make sure it looks good, in the other parts you can have an infographic or something else to compliment your work.
Furthermore, make sure you highlight other skills that you’re not really selling but banking on, for example, I do web development and design, but I’m an Electronic Engineer, and I highlight that fact in my gig and my video, its a complimentary thing that gives you legitimacy.
I’ll make more posts about these in the future to help others in more detail, but this here is the gist of it all.
iii. Last but not the least, Writing your GIG:
So, once you’ve established your video and story, you now need the profile to highlight what you offer. I won’t go into much detail over this one, because it’s a topic all in itself, but you can do some research into what other sellers are doing that are successful.
Find out the highlighted keywords, but DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT copy those same sentences and paragraphs, that’s an infringement and you can get blocked for that.
So once you have incorporated these keywords into your profile with your story, then trust me you’ll be golden.
Example:
If you want to have a look at how all this deploys to look, have a look here:
C. Summary
Next, there are ways to increase your audience reach which I’ll write about more if this post ends up being helpful to people, LOL What if it turns out I wrote this for an hour and nobody read it ????
Also as a reference point for starting your freelance journey, you can also have a look at some freelance listings on Jooble.
Anyways, best of luck, hope this helps you, and if you have anything that you think helped you or you want to ask any questions I’m always here. Just ping me!
Cheers ????
