The road to your first 100 dollars

[thibaultmar]

Hey Fiverr, and most importantly, the new sellers because this one is for you guys.

Having trouble getting your first sale ? Same thing happened to me about 18 days ago. This is what I did to earn my first 100 dollars.

1. Buyer requests

In my opinion this is one of the best ways to get that first order. Try to be one of the first guys to offer something. What I do with buyer requests is try to show that I’m the best seller available. How do I do this? By not selling. I never give a price or what I will do on a buyer request. What I will do is tell them what I normally do / what I’m capable of. then I ask him as much information as possible so I can give him an honest opinion of what I can do for him.

What’s happening here is I’m asking a question he wants to respond to, thus starting a conversation. What I’m also doing is putting the focus on his problem and not my price.

2. Overachieve

You need to spend 4 times as much time to find a new customer as to resell your service to an existing customer. Give your customer the best gig he could ever wish for, even if it’s for only 5 dollars. A happy customer is a returning customer, and also one who will give you a good review. Don’t fall for the quick cash if you have a chance to build a relationship with a customer.

3. be professional

Yes this is the internet, and yes 5 dollars isn’t much. But I act the same towards my customers as I would act during my day job (which is actually quite the same.) People love to be respected, and that’s how you should treat them. I don’t care if they buy or not, it doesn’t hurt to be friendly.

Also, being professional means not to bend over backwards for every customer. I had one case of a guy giving me very limited information to work with. I delivered the order with a note that I would do a revision based on his feedback. he started threatening me with a bad review. This is the point where most people would just give a refund, but I’m not used to bending over that quickly. I told him he might get a refund after he gave me his feedback and had a rightful complaint on my revision. In the end instead of a refund that I had to give, I got a happy customer.

Be firm, if you know you’re good at what you do then act like it. Ofcourse you need to be fair, but if you’ve done what’s asked then don’t be afraid to say so.

4. Tweak tweak tweak

Reaching people with your gig is important. Since I write sales copy I tend to not buy from gigs that have no attracting description. If you see that something is not working, don’t be afraid to change the description or change the gig. Make small changes, see if there is a difference and keep changing it. It can always be more attractive.

What I haven’t tried yet but what I should try is adding video to my gig descriptions. Some people say it is very important, so do it if you’re having trouble getting sales.

Feel free to experiment with your prices too. I know I’m good at what I do ( Not to brag or anything, I just have to otherwise I would get fired.) So set your prices accordingly. I set mine at 5 dollars untill I got some reviews. Then I raised them to position myself as an expert.

5. Look at the competition

In my first days I had trouble getting my first gig. I was posting to every buyer request available and was getting close to no response. I set my gig description and title but wasn’t getting any views.

That’s when I decided to change up my stuff. I posted on this forum for reviews on my gigs, I checked the competition selling the same gigs. Important to note here, I didn’t do this to copy them, I did it to find opportunities they didn’t exploit. Don’t be just like them, be different, be better.

6. Good communication

Once you land a gig, communicate with your buyer. I tend to send them regular updates or questions to let them know I’m busy with his/her gig and interested in the case. Communication is key, always.

Since communication is key, I would love to start a conversation here about how you guys got your first sales, how you got through your first months. Feel free to ask me as many followup questions as you want!

[imranzafar7]

Nice tips.
I just had a question. I joined Fiverr a week ago and completed my first order two days back. The buyer was really happy with my writing and wanted to give me more work. The problem is, I also have a day jobwhich takes up 12 hours of my day. So I will never be able to accurately pinpoint the number of contents I can do per week as it will vary with the workload at my day job. You seem to be working fine well alongside a day job. Any advice for me?

[emmaki]

You’re over-complicating it. How many hours are you prepared to put in outside of your regular job? How many articles/content/whatever can you push out per hour?

That’s what I did when I wasn’t arguing with French people about salads (I was a bad waitress lol)

[thibaultmar]

i tend to take longer deadlines. most of the time 3 days. on wednesdays for example i need to get up at 6.30 and i’m home at 22. just plan ahead and communicate with your buyers.

good luck!