How We Got Started with Our Business on Fiverr

If there’s one thing I learned over the past years, it’s that being a student isn’t easy. Besides going to class every day and finding time to study and finish assignments, we also have another major task. Making money. Going to school isn’t cheap and neither is paying for rent, utilities, and food. A job isn’t the most convenient thing to do since it takes a specific number of hours out of your week for minimal financial gain. Oddly enough, it was at my regular job that one of my coworkers informed me of a freelancing website called Fiverr (If you’re going to give it a check, try using my link so we both get a free gig (Fiverr Registration).

The same day that I found out about Fiverr, I created an account and a basic gig for analyzing social media accounts to make sure all the information was entered in without errors or typos. This was in May of 2015 and I obviously got 0 orders on my gig since I had no reviews and no one knew me or my work. I gave up on Fiverr at this point until about a week later when I found a section of Fiverr that I had not noticed before (Buyer Requests – more about this below). Hopefully, with the rest of this post, I can help you get started with making some money on Fiverr.

Here’s my success so far with Fiver:

This is roughly 18-20 months worth of income.

Now keep in mind that although I started in May of 2015, I didn’t start making good money until about 5 months ago, when about 90% of the profit was made. Also, Fiverr revenue is in USD so for those of you in Canada or another country, this usually means your income helps a lot more when the revenue is converted!

Alright so now you may be wondering, what’s my secret, how did I accomplish this? This may sound cliche but there really is no secret. I’ll explain how I did it and you can see for yourself.

1. Create an account on Fiverr (Duhh)

2. Fill out ALL of the information you can and use a picture of yourself (don’t use pictures of others or pictures of random objects like puppies or cats).

3. Create some gigs, this is extremely important since this is how people will make orders from you. Brainstorm 3-5 things that you think you can do in about 10-30 minutes time (eg. I will proofread 1000 words, I will write a 250-word article, I will draw you as a cartoon, etc.). Once you have compiled a list, search Fiverr for the things on your list to see if someone else is already doing it. Click on some of the related gigs and take a look at what they are doing, how much they are charging, and what their gig description looks like. Now use what you’ve learned to create as many gigs as you can on your account. Make sure you upload relevant images for your gig and classify it in the right section.

4. Now that you have gigs set up, we can ignore them and move on to the important part. Fiverr has a section called BUYER REQUESTS, this is a section with a list of thousands of jobs that people need to be completed, and usually, they put their budget for people to bid on. I know we’re trying to make money but before that can happen, we need to get you some reviews. Go and bid on jobs that you can do (if you can’t but it looks like an easy job, search Google for how you can do it, and teach yourself if you have time). You may find that some of the jobs will require an hour or two of work but the person wants it done for $5, if you can do it, still do it. The reason for this is that we’re going to try to get 10 orders and reviews ASAP so that we can get promoted to a Level 1 seller. When you submit your order, make sure you ask in a polite way for 5-star feedback or a way to make the order better so the buyer will leave 5-star feedback. Our goal here is to give the buyer more than they paid for so instead of thinking “Is this all the person is going to do?” they think “Oh my god! Did I just get all this done for $5???!?”. When you send out requests, it’ll ask you to pick one of your gigs to offer to the buyer, make sure you pick the same one each time so that any review the buyer leaves will fall under this gig.

5. Keep sending out bids every day until you hit your cap. Almost 100% of your money will come from this section for now since people still don’t know you. If you keep doing this, you should hit Level 2 in about 2-3 months and hopefully made between $500-1000 which isn’t really a lot of money for the time you invested but bear with me.

6. Once you hit level 2, you’ll have between 20-100 reviews since not everyone who purchased from you will have left a review. Now at this point, you should have had one or two gigs that have been making sales (from buyer requests). Now take a look at level 2 sellers who are selling the same thing and look at their prices. Since you are now level 2 as well, you can start pricing your gigs to match theirs. Once I hit level 2, I raised the price of my $5 gig to $250 and I still have about 2-5 orders per week! Yes, you may lose a lot of sales but think about it like this, would you rather have 10 orders a day which will get you $50 ($5 per order) a day but requires 10 times the work, or 1 order a day which gets you $50 with minimal work?

Since you’ll have lots more available time now, head into the Fiverr forums and start helping others since you should be an expert at this point. Why visit the forums? Well in order to be promoted to a TOP seller on Fiverr, you need to be present in the forums.

Feel free to check out my Fiverr profile if you’d like to see how to set up each section!