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My fiverr review
A day has exactly 24 hours, 86400 seconds. That’s it, it does not matter if you are rich, poor, in love, bored or from out-of-this-world. On this planet Earth, that is what you get for one rotation of the planet. Out of those 24 hours approximately 7 hours is what you need to rest. That leaves a meager 17 hours or 61200 seconds to do all that has to be done. Life is short and so is each day.
If you have a blog, or any other business really, you can only achieve so much before you require help. For bloggers the amount of time you have to spend on creating content plus the amount of time you need to spend on social media marketing easily eclipses your available time. Finding help is hard but for a fairly small amounts of money you can get some help using Fiverr. Here is my fiverr review.
Too much on your todo-list
fiverr is a web site where you can search for help in any area of your blog, or in life. Looking for a PVA ( Personal Virtual Assistant ), fiverr has one for you. If you are looking for some help with graphics, fiverr has one for you. Or maybe you are looking for a ghost writer, fiverr has one for you.
It is a great site to get some basic things done for you on the cheap. I would not recommend in building long term relations with E.g. a web developer on fiverr. There are other sites which are more expensive but which offer more certainty and better quality in general. fiverr can be a great help for certain tasks after you got started and things get heavy. However if you are an established brand, blogger, YouTuber or entrepreneur you may find better value using different services such as Upwork or Freelancer.
Also if you look at the 1 star BBB ratings of fiverr you will quickly realize that not all is well with the services they offer. So make certain that you use it for what it is good for and use other more reliable services when you need more.
The underlying idea behind using fiverr is to offload some mundane tasks or pay for gigs whenever you are stretched thin. I would not recommend using fiverr to run your social marketing campaign or to add most of your blog posts to your blog. Certain actions taken online to promote your blog could badly backfire. A seller could sell for example SEO for your blog and then use blackhat techniques which will get you in trouble with googles search algorithm.
Finding freelance helping hands
For this fiverr review, I hired two ‘ghost writers‘ and asked them to provide a blog-post on their experience earning money through fiverr. I contacted six different writers and received immediately feedback from three. The English grammar of the first respondent was not up to my standard. I hired the second one outright and the third applicant after reviewing their sample content.
After one week I have received the article from Wembleyspace from Nigeria. The gig has cost me $22,- with fiverr taking a $2,- cut from my side as well as taking a $4,- cut from Wembley’s side. You can read her article here. ( coming soon ) …
The second writer never responded with any result and I had to cancel the order after one week. I contacted another writer never heard back and went on to the third attempt. As it turns out, finding writers on fiverr which do charge in the $20 range is not an easy feat. I have spent about 2 hours on fiverr researching and sifting through all possible offers. There are a set of five filters on the top of the search results to narrow down the results but you will still have thousands of results you can look through.
Update: The fourth writer create a custom offer below the advertised word count.
Most results start with a $5,- offer. Once you click you will find that the basic offer is mostly just a bait to get you to the profile. Some sellers go from $5 for 300 words to $120 for 1500 words to $180 for 2000 words. A seller is either of the following levels “Top Rated Seller“, “Level One“, “Level Two“, or “New Seller“. Depending on the level the rule of thumb is that the price per words increases. There are likely some diamonds in the rough on the “New Seller” profiles but you end up looking at over 8000 profiles. Good luck.
The gig is up
What people may not know is that you can also “Post a Request“. After the previously mentioned rejections for the second blog post I went ahead and send the following Request to fiverr’s freelancer community.
Looking to find a “Top Rated Seller”, “Level one”, or “Level Two” Blog post writer from the US willing to write a 1500 word blog post about his own experience earning money through Fiverr.
This is for my blog http://mmofl.com and I would fully credit the author.
Please contact me for further details.
Regards
This approach can save time as you will get only a response from people actually interested in accepting this gig. It has to go through an acceptance review by fiverr first before the Request becomes live. This process took about 2 hours. Once published on the fiverr platform I received 25 responses within a few minutes. I removed offers which exceeded the proposed $15. One seller was asking for $400 for the gig, which is quite excessive in my opinion.
Most offers I received cam from Nigeria or from Pakistan. I received 10 offers from Pakistan, and 6 offers from Nigeria which matched my request. One offer from Tunesia, and two offers came from Bangladesh. All other offers were either asking for more than the amount specified or had no seller ranking. The reason why I needed to get some one with a Level one or Level two is simply to allow him to tell a better story about his or her success rising up to that point.
Since I had eleven Level one sellers and seven Level two, I focused on the later ones. Eventually I picked one and will post his story as soon as it is completed.
Where did all my time go
You have to invest additional time when you hire a freelancer. It is not just that finding a writer costs time. You have to first define what it is that you are looking for. Next you have to wait for the result and then you also need to proof-read the article ( if you care ). Lastly you have to add images and format the text for your blog and publish it, including SEO, and social marketing.
It is possible to take parts of these tasks and also outsource them but in that case you would end up with less control and less money. While finding the first writer went rather smooth, I invested more time into finding the second writer. I could have easily written a 2000+ word blog post myself in the time I spent looking for someone to write the second article.
The good thing is though that once you found a person you trust on fiverr you could build a long term relationship which can save you the time to look for alternatives. The only thing remaining would be to set topic, word-count, and price.
Credit where credit is due
I think it is only fair to not take credit for my hired writers posts. Instead credit them in the two articles. I found that if you look for ghost writer, their de-facto norm seems to be a 500 word blog post. 500 words are barely enough to describe your trip to the bathroom in the morning and are not really anything I would consider blog-worthy. A good blog post has to get into some detail and tell a story. I think of 1500 words as the bare minimum for any good blog post.
Below are the links to the blog posts I ordered for the fiverr review.
fiverr Post 1 :: Can you earn a fulltime income freelancing on fiverr
fiverr Post 2 :: Are full time fiverr jobs real ?
Update: I published the post and updated the link. Please feel free to check it out.
I enjoyed the articles I received for this fiverr review and they are well worth reading. If you consider using fiverr for this type of work you certainly have a lot to chose from. If you look at fiverr as a way to earn a little on the side you have to do the up-front work as with most online gigs. Once you have established yourself on the platform and you can consistently deliver on your gigs you can earn good money on the platform.
The amount of money fiverr is scooping off of other peoples work is huge. For a $5 gig, fiverr keeps $3 because you end up paying $7 for the gig and the seller also pays 20% and receives only $4. fiverr even goes so far and keeps 20% of the tip a buyer can chose to give to a seller. fiverr is a publicly traded company now and has to earn money. It remains to be seen if competitors can out-compete fiverr in the low budget gig economy in the future. With these margins there is certainly a good opportunity available.
