How To Market Your Fiverr GIG (A Guide For Newbies)

[tomconti]

So many users asking for suggestions and so many pseudo-answers from seemingly “helpful” forum users, are the reason for me to go a step further and share a guide that I established when I started with Internet Marketing. It literally took me months and a lot of budget to figure out this approach and you may find it useful.

Initially, I created a gig to sell this and control who receives this or not but, then again, I guess it should be free so that everybody has the same chance of success. I do not use this method on my own gigs but instead, I use a variation of this to obtain passive income through my off-fiverr businesses. Feel free to try it out, give it your own “twist” and make this yours.

Let’s jump right into it.

This guide will explain how to market yourself and your product successfully on a low budget. In fact, there is no investment required at all but, you will need to brainstorm, invest time and effort. Instead of looking at how to improve your gig, it is always a good idea to understand your product and it’s place in the market.

The market within fiverr: Look at your competitors, how do they present their products, who do they target? You will find, especially here on fiverr; most of the time, sellers did not invest too much thought into their offer and they often just created a gig, put a cheap price on it and target a very broad audience. Within every category here on fiverr, there are only very few sellers truly being “successful”. These sellers tend to be rewarded by fiverr and for you, maybe being new or inexperienced, it will be very tough to outrank your biggest competitor directly. We have to find another approach. So here we come to the first point of this guide:

1. Finding your niche, determining your target group

For this example I chose to use the field of a graphic designer and you will probably agree, it is a very competitive and tough niche that is oversaturated here on fiverr. Looking at your target group (as a designer), you will think that every business can potentially be your client. Wouldn’t it be nice to create a gig and have literally billions of customers? Nope. Don’t jump on that boat, it is likely to sink before you even get your first order.

To apply my method successfully, you want to narrow down your niche as much as possible. So for the first step we brainstorm, try to narrow down our target group and maybe go from “all businesses” to “start-ups and new businesses” and you will find, we reduce our audience but, it is still too large of a market. We could use tools now to narrow it down more but, I promised no investment right?

So let’s jump right to Google and put in “new businesses” and also look at what Google suggests to you while typing. You will want to learn as much as you can about your market, in particular you want to focus upon problems and solutions. Again, if you are not a designer, just take this as an example but basically, narrow down the target group within your niche as much as you can. But back to our example. So what does a new business struggle with and what does it need to succeed? I just did some research and for our example, I found that the importance of branding a business is often underestimated. And guess what? As a graphic designer, we can offer part of the solution at least. If you do your research right, you will find a keyword that will narrow down your target group and for our example, I find “corporate identity” to be quite interesting.

Back to fiverr we go and we put in “corporate identity” and will find a few successful sellers and good for us, they do not work for $5.00. You want to be competitive but, not underpriced and honestly, my own research suggests that every time I did go up with my pricing on fiverr, I often later found an improved ranking. I don’t work on fiverr that much and am literally charging hundreds of dollars per composed minute and even though this is completely over-priced here, my ranking has still improved. (note, I removed my gigs altogether for now) But back to this guide and our sample case. Corporate Identity and branding yourself as a new business seems to be a good niche, still somewhat broad but will do for now. We can go ahead and jump to:

2. Down the rabbit hole we go / Advanced Research

If you did your research right, by now you will understand your target group within a narrowed down niche. Now is the time to put your knowledge into action but DON’T create your gig just yet. Since you are a designer (if you are not able to create designs at all, outsource this part) create a profile picture for fiverr, twitter, facebook & instagram (don’t forget to design the banners for facebook and twitter). By the way, you do not necessarily need a profile on every social media, I myself just mainly use facebook and instagram and it works just fine. But whatever platform you choose, you want your profiles to look as professional as possible and avoid adding spammy content such as “cheapest freelancer”, “fastest service” or whatever could possibly indicate a low-quality service. Don’t forget you need to establish trust and authority, you don’t want to be the cheap guy for quick jobs around the corner. Make it classy and be creative and then upload some content to each platform showcasing your skills. Only take your best examples and if you do not have enough, create more just to have them on your profiles. Trust me, it will be worth it and if you follow my step below, lots of people are going to see and interact with your social-media.

Once you have your social-media profiles up and running, try getting a few likes, followers, subs and tweets, basically get some love, this is actually very easy. Just interact with active profiles, like their posts, leave a comment - DON’T SPAM and in most cases you will find they will return their love if, your social-media looks professional. You do not need many interactions. Don’t waste your time hunting for likes and comments as, you just need a few to begin with.

Now it is time to search for your narrowed down audience within social-media platforms and only focus on small to medium sized groups/profiles that have an active following (in our sample case we look for groups about corporate identity, business start up’s and groups around “new business owners”. Look at their posts. Do they in average receive engagements that seem legitimate, or does it look like a fake profile or group?

In total you should contact 15-20 good group/profile owners and basically, think this through and let the owner know you are a professional, and your focus is to help and provide a solution to the group/following. DON’T ask them for any help directly and DON’T share any links or anything that indicates you just want to sell. Tell the owner what you do and ask him/her for his/her opinion as to what the group would mostly benefit from. Make him/her feel proud about being an owner of that group and give him/her the chance to feel good by stepping up and showcasing his/her knowledge about his/her group. You will be surprised what happens next.

Be prepared to read A LOT. But most importantly, take every response seriously, they often know best about “their” niche. Try to think about how to put your offer possibly as a “package” while considering their input. If you skip this step; chances are, you will just offer a service based upon a cliche and make the chance higher of failing to properly target the niche altogether. Take your time and do this. Once you have enough data, go ahead and:

3. Create your gig TAILORED to your niche

That was pretty exhausting hmm? I know there is much to take in while researching, going through the responses from the owners and by now, you’re probably already many hours into this but, hang on, we are almost there.

Now it is time to brainstorm. TAKE ALL OF THE INFORMATION you’ve acquired up to now and create your gig accordingly. You want to establish trust and authority and your gig should be precisely targeted to your niche. I myself am very terrible with videos but, if you can create a video (and also here demonstrate that you know your business) to help show that you understand your niche and provide a SOLUTION, it will help your gig. It goes without saying that your fiverr title, description and tags should match accordingly.

4. Marketing

So here we are, we did some extensive research, created our social media presence, reached out for owners to have valuable input and created our gig accordingly.

Marketing is crucial and it can make or break your business. Don’t go for paid ads just yet, you need to have a decent following and authority first. But get back to the owners, thank them for their help and kindly ask them to look over your gig and if you have a very targeted gig, possibly a video and did your job right, chances are they will post about you. Some will ask for promotional fees, it is up to you to decide how much you are willing to spend (if at all) but, in my experience you can always ask for a test run to see if the group or following will react properly to your service. Note, the size of the group does not always matter much because, it is more about engagement within the group. I had much more conversions with a very engaged 10k group when, compared to a 50k group that, was barely responding at all.

So basically you use them as influencers and it can easily happen that they convert much better than paid ads altogether. Especially if, you have narrowed down your audience enough and provided tailored solutions. Rinse and repeat, start from scratch with your market research, find a different aspect of your niche, contact more influencers, be part of their group and offer value - this is a manual process but well worth it.

5. Advanced Marketing

Well, up to now it has been all a manual process. If you are ready to invest a little bit of money into your business, I highly recommend to automate your social media profiles. There are many tools out there which work quite well. They are affordable and they will auto like, comment and follow targeted users within your niche, resulting in your social media presence gradually growing nicely. Never EVER include any link, spammy content or anything suspicious as an automated task. You want people to appreciate you and look up your profile where they will find your link.

Once you have a nice following, you may look into paid ads but, keep in mind, it is very unlikely to achieve a profitable ROI immediately as you are basically buying data to start with. You want to look at which audience responds best to your ads. I suggest not going that route altogether because to do this on a much more promising level, it would require you to have a domain, host and landing page with some ad tracking setup and at that time, I do not see so many reasons to forward any personal business traffic to fiverr to begin with. Just know, if you go that route of creating your own website, you will be much more flexible but, if you have no experience you may have to LEARN a lot about keyword research, ranking within search engines, along so many other things, so i don’t really recommend this unless you already have experience.

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There are many people in the forum asking for help but I wrote this guide for fiverr freelancers that are actually willing to work, invest time and build up their fiverr authority vs someone expecting to be simply handed orders… However the case be, good luck to you!

Any questions? Feel free to ask!

[lemuel_irabor]

Hi Tom,

Do these tips necessarily work the same way for Freelance Writers? I mean, considering the fact that most buyers believe writing is “easy” as they mostly believe we can get templates for (all nonfictional) writing online.

Again, I think getting a social media presence is important as it adds to your credibility as a seller. But, would it be considered “unprofessional” to use the same account that we use for, say posting family vacation pictures, to promote our businesses?

Your input would be greatly appreciated!
Nice writeup by the way.

[tomconti]

Hi Tom,

Do these tips necessarily work the same way for Freelance Writers? I mean, considering the fact that most buyers believe writing is “easy” as they mostly believe we can get templates for (all nonfictional) writing online.

Again, I think getting a social media presence is important as it adds to your credibility as a seller. But, would it be considered “unprofessional” to use the same account that we use for, say posting family vacation pictures, to promote our businesses?

Your input would be greatly appreciated!

Nice writeup by the way.

Hey Lemuel,

it is a method that can work for anybody but it may need adjustment to your profession. When it comes to writing, you can not only narrow down what you write about and make the topic itself part of your authority but, also you can look at different styles of writing and find matching groups that would find your service interesting. Maybe a thought would also be to write an article about writing, look into (guest) blogging within a specific niche (requires research) and if you provide some valuable content, you can maybe include a link to you fiverr gig within the guest post to get you some very targeted traffic.

Generally, to stay within this guide, it is always a good idea to have your private facebook account kept private. You can easily create a facebook page from your account or/and join relevant groups. When you create those pages, it is very important to make the page about something specific rather than having it broadly about writing. You can have as many pages as you want, there are no limits and since all of your pages will basically be about “writing” (just different aspects about writing), you can still merge all of your pages at some point to establish your brand within one hood and have a decent amount of following. By that time, you may want to look and experiment with paid ads. Important: when you merge your facebook pages, you will lose the content you posted within those pages, just your following will be merged so it may be best to backup your articles and repost them over time.

Hope this helps, there is really no shortcut and it takes time and a lot of effort.

[zaiba202]

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us:)

[lemuel_irabor]

Hey Lemuel,

it is a method that can work for anybody but it may need adjustment to your profession. When it comes to writing, you can not only narrow down what you write about and make the topic itself part of your authority but, also you can look at different styles of writing and find matching groups that would find your service interesting. Maybe a thought would also be to write an article about writing, look into (guest) blogging within a specific niche (requires research) and if you provide some valuable content, you can maybe include a link to you fiverr gig within the guest post to get you some very targeted traffic.

Generally, to stay within this guide, it is always a good idea to have your private facebook account kept private. You can easily create a facebook page from your account or/and join relevant groups. When you create those pages, it is very important to make the page about something specific rather than having it broadly about writing. You can have as many pages as you want, there are no limits and since all of your pages will basically be about “writing” (just different aspects about writing), you can still merge all of your pages at some point to establish your brand within one hood and have a decent amount of following. By that time, you may want to look and experiment with paid ads. Important: when you merge your facebook pages, you will lose the content you posted within those pages, just your following will be merged so it may be best to backup your articles and repost them over time.

Hope this helps, there is really no shortcut and it takes time and a lot of effort.

Thank you for the prompt reply.

I’ll surely take your advice(I’m surprised that it’s free though).

Can I send you a PM if I have any more questions?

[tomconti]

Thank you for the prompt reply.

I’ll surely take your advice(I’m surprised that it’s free though).

Can I send you a PM if I have any more questions?

Very welcome. Originally, I wanted to charge at least a few bucks for this but once I created the gig, some people thought it would be a good idea to flag it (Obviously I only had a little bit of info about this guide and did not post about key elements) .

Given, where we are and that there are many “sellers” out there trying to make a quick buck, I did not see a point in arguing and agreed. But since I invested so much time into writing this and I know there are quite a few users here that need help and would actually work, I decided to just post this.

The nice thing about this is that if enough people with quality services give this a shot, it will potentially push out many of those “low quality gigs” provided by lazy people and this may sort out the marketplace a bit. I know, I am very optimistic here but there is hope. Please let us know how this worked out for you.

[sharif54]

Thank you. It’s very important for us

[shabsmariam]

Showing the important and the power of social media promoting of our gigs. Thank you