I’ve been making money on Fiverr for the last year and there’s so much good about it, but there’s a whole lot of crazy shit you have to deal with. Understanding this going in will give you peace of mind once you finally start coming up against the BS. The great thing about Fiverr is that it’s easy to set up and get started. If you have any plans on freelancing or making money on the side, I’d get started right away.
The Upside
Like I said, getting started on fiverr is super easy. Just go and sign up and link up your paypal account to it. You can post a gig immediately and orders will eventually come in. The ease of use is really great and any random Tom, Dick, or Harry can start making money.
The great thing about fiverr is that you can make a gig for anything within reason. Good at graphic design? Head on over and start pumping out awesome flyers. Great writer? Prepare to be inundated with requests to write 500 word articles.
You don’t have to do any marketing besides the copy in your gig or a possible accompanying video. Once you put the gig up and associate the correct keywords with it, people will just come to you.
The Downside
One of the most hilarious things about fiverr is the fact that people will try and negotiate shit with you. I have received messages so many times from people saying something like, “Hey, I have x amount of books that I need read and would like you to do it, what’s the best price you can give me?” How about ordering my gig FOR 5 DOLLARS?
The site is called fiverr and people are negotiating with you over 5 dollars. Here’s something else, fiverr keeps a dollar for themselves, so for every gig I do I only really get 4 dollars. Yet people are trying to negotiate over that?
This is to be expected because with gigs that run 5 dollars it will attract a bunch of idiots. Think about it for a second, if someone is willing to spend money on fiverr it usually means they don’t have the money to hire a professional. With this cheapness they aren’t likely to want to spend the 5 dollars either.
Another shitty thing about fiverr is that it takes at least 14 days for your money to clear. What happens is after you complete a gig, the money doesn’t go into your account until the buyer “completes” the gig. More often then not, this doesn’t happen. After 3 days if they don’t do this, fiverr marks the gig complete automatically. This adds even more time to the countdown.
This is a real pain in the dick. I basically have to wait half a month to get paid for something that I just did. If you have a build up stream of gigs coming in this isn’t a problem but when you are just starting out it sucks.
The Importance of Ranking
You would think that with gigs being 5 dollars there’s only people on here making beer money. You would be wrong. Some people are making serious coin. There’s a couple of keys to doing this. You have to have a gig that you can do really fast, a gig that people want, and more importantly, you have to rank for that gig.
Fiverr isn’t like other freelancing sites where you bid on projects. The way it works is you put your gig up and the people who want the work go searching for what they want using keywords. If you show up near the top of the results for those keywords you will most likely get a ton of gigs. If you can bang out a ton of gigs in a day you could be looking at a lot of money.
The catch is that you need the gigs in the first place and an unending supply of them. Ranking for the right keywords for your gig is vital.
Fiverr’s Discretion
You’re essentially in the hands of fiverr with this business. If fiverr were to shut down you could potentially lose all of your funds. They can also cancel any of your gigs for any reason without any explanation whatsoever.
One time I had a pretty nice gig that was ranking well for writing Amazon Reviews. I was getting a lot of money through this gig. I woke up one day to find that the gig was cancelled by fiverr. I have never found out why this happened. They don’t care.
I didn’t lose all the money I built up through the gig, but I did lose future money that would undoubtedly come in day after day from that gig. Did Amazon file a complaint? Did a customer? Who knows? If you go on fiverr right now and search for Amazon reviews you’ll find gig after gig offering the same thing that I did, yet they are all still active. I have no way of explaining it and have since moved on to other lucrative gigs.
Conclusion
If you want to make some extra money get on fiverr and throw up some gigs to play around with. Get good enough and you may find yourself getting a ton of gigs and a lot of extra money.