How to succeed in Fiverr: The Ultimate guide

The system I used to make 5-figures in my 1st year in Fiverr as a side-hustle

Hello stranger,

This is my no-bullshit guide for making money on Fiverr. This is the exact process that I used when I started 14 months ago, and still using right now. Those steps allowed me to make an average of $1,000-$2,000 per month without really breaking a sweat, as a side-hustle.

If that sounded bullshitty already, Ok, I have to admit at times I did break a sweat. But when that happened, I just paused my gigs for a week or two, so no one could find me.

That’s a good problem to have. Right? I could have chosen not to do that and make $2–3k/month consistently in Fiverr. But I like to not have all my eggs in one basket. I want to keep Fiverr as a side-hustle and a lead generation machine for my freelancing business.

Anyway. This is what we’ll cover:

Contents

• The philosophy I have as a Fiverr Seller
• How I built my Fiverr strategy
• My Fiverr gig research process
• Creating your Fiverr gig: A step by step guide
• Managing Fiverr clients
• Promoting your gigs
• Now What?

The philosophy I have as a Fiverr Seller

I AM Fiverr

As you already know, Fiverr is a service marketplace. “Buyers” can browse through “gigs” offered by the “sellers”. They can order and expect the service to be delivered within a given timeframe.

Notice how I put “expect” in bold?

The Buyer as well as Fiverr, expect you to deliver on whatever service has been ordered. Once somebody orders, it is NOT optional for you to deliver. You cannot say. “Oh I am sorry, I’d rather not”. Once you put your gig out there, you represent Fiverr and Fiverr doesn’t like sellers who give it a bad name. Your gig and profile reputation will plummet and you’ll have kicked yourself out of the platform

Be nice to Fiverr and it will be nice to you.

Fiverr loves its Buyers

No surprise here, huh? They’re the ones who pay, so it will do anything to keep them happy. That’s good news if you’re a buyer, but not so good if you are a Seller. Because as a Seller, you’ll come across weirdos and irresponsible Buyers who have irrational demands, who don’t want to pay etc.

There are ways to avoid all that (as you will read below). But have in mind that most times starting a conflict with a Buyer, will leave you empty handed, as Fiverr Support usually takes the Buyer’s side. At the end of the day Fiverr knows that you are expendable. There are hundreds of other Sellers ready to take on the job in your place. That’s why playing by their rules is the only way forward.

At the end of the day Fiverr knows that you are expendable. There are hundreds of other Sellers ready to take on the job in your place. That’s why playing by their rules is the only way forward.

That 20% is not their fee

Fiverr holds 20% from every transaction. So, if a Buyer pays $100, then $20 go to Fiverr and $80 to your pocket.

I know, it sucks.

But, I see it differently. That 20% is my CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). Nothing in life is free, so just suck it up and be grateful that Fiverr even gave you such visibility on the web. I currently do not have another way that gets me in front of 22.000 people’s eyes every month.

How I built my Fiverr strategy

When starting in Fiverr, the no1 question everyone has in their mind is “How can I compete with the hundreds of thousands freelancers already in Fiverr?”. “With no referrals, no gig authority, no profile authority, how will I get in the 1st page of search results, and if that happens, who will trust me?”.

While I had these questions, I decided to give it a try anyway in late 2017, and created my first 3 gigs. This is what I was offering as a marketer (at a ridiculously low price):

1. My marketing strategy templates
2. Facebook ads management
3. Google ads management.

Guess how much I got from sales in 1 year (2018)!!!

$25

Yup. 5 people bought my templates. The other 2 gigs barely got any impressions.

But then something happened.

I had a job to do and somehowI ended up paying for a tool that could scrape Yellow Pages in seconds and create spreadsheets of leads fast. When I finished that job, I still had the tool and wanted to make the most out of it. So I created a quick Fiverr gig, offering lead lists from Yellow Pages, and before I knew it, I started getting weekly requests and sales.

That laser-targeted niche approach, actually worked:

There were:

• 21,000 services available when you searched “facebook ads management”
• 668 services available when you searched “yellow pages”

I had eliminated competition, by avoiding it.

So, I decided to test this with another laser-targeted gig: I offered “investors’ profile scraping in Angellist”. You can’t get any more niche than that. I was basically the only one who offered this in the whole platform. Literally, I had ZERO competition.

Whoever happened to search for this thing, I was the only option for them.

So I did that for a few months, but I was bored. I didn’t like these projects and wanted to do more interesting things (Marketing Automation is my thing).

Also, in case you imagine that I made money with those 2 gigs, I didn’t. I made around $150, which was still a 600% increase from the previous year. Could I possibly top that?

I decided to get more serious and devour every good article out there about Fiverr success, took good notes and went to work:

My Fiverr gig research process

Researching what gig to offer

Creating the right gig is the most important decision to make when starting in Fiverr. If you don’t get this right you won’t succeed.

This is my train of thought and that’s what I did when I made my first successful gig…

My gig should be something that:

• I am good at
• can be delivered easily
• has lots of demand
• has little competition

For the first condition I had a lot of skills to choose from, but Ideally I wanted something related to Marketing Automation. I also took into consideration how people search for services. I made the assumption that they search for experts in specific tools.

For the other two conditions, I needed to find the sweet spot between supply (number of gigs for a given search query) and demand (number of searches).

I experimented with various searches and found that sweet spot to be about 200–600 gig results for my search query of interest.

More results would indicate that I’d have too much competition to fight against.

Less results would mean that there isn’t much interest for such a gig anyway.

In the end I chose to offer to “Build marketing automations with ActiveCampaign”.

• I was good at it
• I could deliver easily
• ActiveCamapign has lots of demand as a Marketing Automation software (highly acclaimed and super-cheap)
• The amount of competitive gigs offered were ridiculously and surprisingly low (plus, most of them were generic)

A hack for finding profitable gig ideas

There are tasks that require certain paid tools. Usually business owners are reluctant to pay for these tools themselves because they don’t have the time and knowledge to use them. Also, because they usually need them for ad-hoc projects — using them only once.

The Yellow Pages software I mentioned above is the perfect example for that. Without any special skills, I delivered a service quickly, literally with a push of a button, just because I had paid $60 for a piece of software.

Can you think of any paid software like that that does a valuable very specific job quickly? If yes, pay for it and create a gig for that. You’ll get your money back in no time.

Researching competition

You think research is over? Nah, it’s not.

Well, you could start creating your gig with no research, but before you know it, you’ll run into more questions:

• What EXACTLY should I offer?
• How many gig options should I have?
• What kind of “extras” should I include?
• How do I price my offering?
• What sort of things do I write as a description?

The answers are right in front of your eyes: Just open the 5 most popular Fiverr gigs in that category. See what they are doing. It will take you 5’-10’ minutes to get a rough sense of it.

Now, copy everything, and add your personal touch to differentiate yourself.*

*“Copy”, not in a sense of actual “copy and paste”. Just use their ideas as an inspiration to answer the above questions.

Creating your Fiverr gig: A step by step guide

When creating your Fiverr gig, always have the competitors’ gigs open in other tabs, to quickly go back & forth. Alternatively, you can take a look at your notes from the best practices you found in your research. I advise the former.

Gig title

You’ll want your title to be both descriptive and fully visible in the search results. The limit is 80 characters, but to be safe, I advise you to make it 45–65 characters long. Find the balance.

Also, when creating your title you should know that based on that, a unique URL will be created. For example My gig titled “I will audit your landing page for more conversions”, got this URL: https://www.fiverr.com/nontaskar/audit-your-landing-page-for-more-conversions.

You can change the gig of your title whenever you want but you CANNOT change the url ever again. Taking that into consideration, you’ll want to create a title that is:

• short and clear in terms of what it offers
• includes your basic keyword(s),
• memorable
• Easy for the eye
• shareable

Gig category, tags and meta-data

That should be easy to find. Pick the category that makes the most sense to your service. In case you cannot find something that fits, again, check what categories the most successful competitive gigs have put. You can find that information just above the title of each gig, as breadcrumbs.

Fill out everything: All meta-data and all 5 tags (not many tag options unfortunately but they’ll still increase your visibility)

Pricing

When you’re starting out, you are not going to make lots of money. You want to get noticed. You want to get your first reviews, because this is what will bring in all the sales and the bigger money in the long run.

That said, what is the sure-fire way to get that attention?

To offer a lot of value with a price that feels like a steal.

So, do your research, see what pricing models competitors use, choose the one that fits you, and go with a price similar or slightly lower than the competition*.

Your low price is the one that will get quick traffic to your gig, but that doesn’t mean that your average order value will equal your gig price. Leverage as many “gig extras” as possible to maximize the potential revenue from each order. For example, you can offer ridiculously low prices (as your base price) for slower deliveries, but double the price for fast ones.

Fiverr allows you to either have ONE or THREE offering options. It’s a wasted opportunity if you don’t use all 3. And if you’re struggling to find the correct price levels, check my favourite pricing technique: Decoy pricing!

Lovely stuff…

* TIP 1: A great way to avoid getting compared to competition — and thus avoiding pricing down — is having either a qualitatively unique offering or a unique pricing model.

For example: If you’re doing “landing pages” and everybody gets paid “per landing page”, why not consider having a pricing model that pays per “landing page section”. It will also attract more attention because of the naturally lower nominal price.

Just an idea ;)

* TIP 2: You can change the gig price at any point. However this might get you off the search results for a few days (as Fiverr reviews major price changes). A trick to avoid this is to frame your offering in a way that it allows you to lower the service level in the future.

For example: I originally created a gig where I offered 2 hours of my time for a specific service. Then, I basically “doubled” the price by offering only 1 hour of my time for the same money.

Description & FAQ

You have 1200 characters to describe your service and to make it shine.

These are my tips, for making the most out of them:

• Feel free to get inspired by the competitive gigs, but… do NOT copy their actual words. That’s not a strategy by the way. It’s just not right, if you do that. It’s lazy. Stop being lazy.
• Mention what the gig includes as well as what it does NOT include. Be clear. Be bold. Make it sound like you are qualifying them, not that you’re begging them.
• For goodness sake, don’t be generic. Insert personality and don’t be afraid to use humor. Be AT LEAST memorable. Write something unexpected to catch their attention.
• Most people don’t buy the first time they see your gig. Urge them to put your gig on their favourites by clicking the ❤️ at the top right corner of your gig. The amount of “likes” your gig has gotten is certainly one of the biggest gig ranking factors. I almost always put a highlighted message at the top of my gig description.
• Use a variety and combination of keywords throughout the description. Take a look at this article, for more ideas on that.
• Don’t just write a 1200-character wall of text. Make it visual. Use paragraphs, bold, italics, highlights and bullets to mix it up and make it more easy to read.
• Use the FAQs section as an opportunity to clarify your services at the beginning. As you progress, you should optimize by adding actual FAQs that your clients ask. Also, this section is yet another opportunity to insert your keywords in your gig page.

Gig requirements

This is the section where clients tell you what they want you to do. One option would be to just add only 1 “requirement” question (“What do you want me to do?” or something).

My experience is that if you do that you’d have walls of text that you’d have to scroll through to find out the info that you need, and people writing bad briefs that don’t help you deliver.

Everyone writes their requirements in their own unique way, and you’d have to adapt to that. But if you want to scale and get serious about your business, then THEY have to adapt to YOU.

So, I suggest that you structure your requirements section as a questionnaire, where everything goes to predictable places. So that when you’re going through the requirements again and again, you’ll know where to find what.

You can also use this section to ask other relevant questions like “Why did you choose me”. I’ve just started doing that and I already gained significant insights from that.

I suggest you include at least 4–5 questions in that section at the beginning. Later on, you will understand how to optimize that, by observing the patterns in your buyers’ questions. Optimize as you go.

You also get bonus points doing all that, because buyers assume that you know your shit when you are able to make really good and to-the-point questions.

Images

The ideal Fiverr image resolution is officially 690 x 426px. However your image will look stretched in the search results. That’s because…I dunno, I cannot believe how Fiverr hasn’t figured that out yet.

Anyway.

Here are my suggestions when creating a Fiverr gig image:

• Check the search results for your main keyword. How do most of the images look in general? How can you stand out? I’ve found that most competitors’ images are pretty “busy” and “loud”. So I choose a more minimalistic approach, with a bold title, a subtitle, an image, bright-colored background and lots of empty space.
• Use your main keywords inside the image
• Include an image of yourself. The first step for building trust is that simple: Show your goddamn smiling face!
• Again, be different. Do something out of the box to attract attention. Be bold. I became a Level 2 seller using one of my stupidest photos ever for my gig.
• Fiverr stretches and cuts the edges of your pics on the sides, in a weird way. Sadly you cannot avoid this but you can avoid having your text or images cut by not putting content near the edges of the Fiverr image.

Fiverr also recommends including a short video in your profile. You can try it, I’m sure it can work wonders, especially if it is high quality and you are comfortable on camera. I haven’t tried it yet, so I won’t say anything more.

Following the advice of this section, will get your gig close to 80% optimized (I just made that number up, but you get the point). To perfect your gig description and settings, you’ll have to do it over time. It has to become your philosophy to optimize every aspect of the gig whenever you get feedback. Usually it’s indirect feedback when you see patterns emerge during client interactions, but you can also actively ask clients and non-clients for explicit feedback.

Managing Fiverr clients

Effectively managing your Fiverr Clients is important down the long run. That’s because Fiverr is the boss here, and having good “stats” is a critical success factor.

It’s what will

• get you good visibility in the search results,
• result to good reviews from buyers,
• upgrade you to higher Fiverr levels.

Your client has all the control

That’s generally bad advice for a freelancer. You should be in control. However, you have to face reality and see that if you are a serious seller, you need Fiverr more than it needs you.

You WILL encounter bad/unreasonable buyers. You WILL have to work sometimes more to get that good review. You WILL have to sometimes swallow your pride and comply with whatever irrational demand the client makes. You WILL have to be always professional and polite, even with rude and unprofessional clients.

99% of the time, when client relationship turns bad, it’s because of one thing:

They feel that they will end up in a dispute and might lose control of the situation (and their money).

Spoiler alert: they won’t

So whenever you see the first signs of your relationship going south, or they somehow get agitated, STEP. THE FUCK. BACK.

Reassure them, don’t become confrontational, don’t be judgemental, ask them clarifying questions, take responsibility for your mistakes, offer a refund…

Do whatever is in your power to make them think that THEY are in control.

Doing this right, will put YOU in the driver’s seat.

Be available

Buyers when they want something done, they contact a bunch of sellers. The first one to answer has the advantage. Also, if you are already in contact with the buyer, quick responses are reassuring that “you are there when they need you” and an indication of professionalism.

A good advice is to check Fiverr a few times a day and to have the mobile app installed to get live notifications.

If you cannot be available all the time however, I have a couple of tips:

• Have some “Quick Responses” available in your chat settings, so that you can show how fast you are, but without wasting time. I always use a canned response for my first greeting which reassures them that I’ll get back to them in a few minutes/hours.
• You can use another trick to “be available” for your non-buyers in the future: Always urge them to press the “❤️” button at the top right corner of your gig, to save your gig in their list. Not only do you get potential buyers like that, but it seems like this is a ranking factor for the search results.

Always overdeliver

Always surprise them with the effort you put. You don’t have to do something really fancy to “overdeliver”. Maybe it only means to “underpromise”. Make sure you always give something of extra value, that you don’t mention in your gig description. Some of my examples:

• I complete each delivery with a short explanatory video of what I did and how I recommend they use my deliverable.
• As a copywriter, I write more words than they paid for (if that adds more value)
• If they pay me to build a Marketing Automation, I may do some tool integration for free, or some cleaning up in their account.
• Provide free support related to that project after the job has finished.

These are the kind of things that will get you actual referrals and new clients.

Get on video

What I notice is sometimes clients misunderstand my words and get defensive. Or sometimes they flat out treat me like I am a machine that delivers services, not a human being. That is psychologically understandable but not nice and not good for my Fiverr career. I got quite a few cancellations out of such misunderstandings.

The solution I found is ridiculously simple. Instead of chatting, I started sending Loom videos asking questions and clarifying things. Also, I started jumping in short (free) calls with them.

That not only speeds up things, but — most importantly — helps build a human connection and empathy. That in turn, makes Fiverr sales go up.

Always leave testimonials back

To tell you the truth I am not sure how effective this trick is but try this: When they write you a testimonial, you can respond directly underneath it. These testimonials as well as your responses are visible in the gig page.

That means that strategically inserting keywords in your response, will probably increase keyword relevance and rank your gig higher up.

Avoid cancellations and disputes

A good trick to avoid cancelations and disputes is to always ask their permission before “delivering”.

Again, remember: make them think that they are in control.

Don’t make them think that you’re trying to “get this f***ing thing over with” and send a plain “order delivery”. Because you will most likely get a plain “Review request” back.

Say something like: “Hey, I think that I finished with the project and I’m good to deliver the order. Can you please check if there is anything left to do? Let me know, and when you’re happy with my work, I will submit the delivery.”

Extending the delivery time

Fiverr’s gig countdown timer might cause you stress. Especially if buyers are unresponsive after the order. Well, don’t stress. You can extend the gig time as many times as you want through the Resolution Center. I’ve done it countless times and it doesn’t seem to affect my rankings or annoy the buyer.

Promoting your gigs

I haven’t heavily promoted my gigs, so this will not be a complete guide. I will tell you though what I have tried and what has worked this last year.

Get traffic from friends

A gig that gets high traffic will send a signal to Fiverr that people are interested in this. It may not be the most important aspect, but especially when you are starting that’s an easy win: Occasionally post your gigs in your social profiles. A bunch of people will just click out of curiosity. Your mother, your girlfriend, your uncle, your ex-client, it doesn’t matter… You are not looking to get sales anyway.

Join Facebook groups

There are Facebook groups for Fiverr that serve this purpose: Its members post their gigs there, and exchange “gig visits” and “gig likes ❤”. That’s theoretically against the ToS of fiverr but I have experimented with it a few times to see what happens.

I felt that it worked at that time. I definitely got my numbers inflated and I think I started getting more orders. I stopped doing it though because it’s a risky practice. I prefer to keep my account.

Get repeat customers

This is HUGE. I believe this is how my Marketing Automation gig started gaining popularity. Early on, I got a repeat client that made an $150 order, every month (for a gig with starting price from $15).

• Fiverr likes high-value orders.
• Fiverr likes sellers who make customers happy and keep them coming back.
• Fiverr likes gigs with lots of good reviews

Add these together, you get a gig that gets easily on the 1st page of search results in no time.

But OK I’ll admit I got lucky finding this buyer early on. However, you can still do it, with the hack below…

Make your clients order

If you have clients outside of Fiverr, move them in and make them order your new gigs, as part of their payment. OK, you’ll lose 20% of it but if that makes your gigs impressions skyrocket, why not?

Build a Fiverr gig ecosystem

When I started, I had a gig that offered “Marketing Automations setup with ActiveCampaign”. However, I saw that my clients needed way more than that. They needed:

• Email copywriting
• Landing page design
• Landing page copywriting
• Landing page optimization
• Integrations with 3rd party software
• Marketing strategy

Well, guess what:

I created gigs for all that and I let my customers know. Once I started a conversation and I saw what they needed, I sent them over to relevant gigs.

Whose sales went up?

So, yes, Don’t just create one gig. Build multiple gigs related to each other and cross-promote the hell out of them to anyone who contacts you.

Alright, now what?

Now you know what I did to succeed in Fiverr and hopefully you followed me along to start getting more serious with it.

I want to close by saying that the advice that you read here was ideal to implement for your 1st year in Fiverr. Or maybe your first $10–20k.

Then, things become much easier.

Because you start to get out of the Fiverr “rat race”.

You already have authority within the platform.

Buyers trust you by default, because they see “5.0 stars” average by “245 previous buyers”.

You can now charge more, for the same work.

Fewer clients will show up, but those who do are serious, professional and willing to pay more.

That “slavery” feeling you had against Fiverr, disappears.

You have more free time.

You can focus on other ventures.

Everybody loves and admires you.

You reconnect with your soul.

You retire rich and happy.

There is love and unity in the world.

You transcend your body and become a part of the cosmos.