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Tips on How to start as a Freelancer


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So I recently had a problem with something to resolve which I stumbled on to the forum. I saw that there’s alot of people who still aren’t clear on how they can start out as a seller on Fiverr.

So here are my two cents on the matter, thing’s I’ve learned throughout my 6 years of freelancing experience.

[update]: If you’re not completely new to this and just want to upgrade your gig styles, here are some best practices that I wrote about that have helped me and others over the years. Link

Lets break everything down evenly, if you think you’ve already gone through the process, skip through the steps.

A. Knowing how useful your services can be to other people.
So this is something simple, but I think many people get it wrong, people who start freelancing start one of the two ways, choosing a freelance gig from one of their skillsets, or choosing what skillset out there has the best margins.

i. Starting with a skillset:
if you’re starting out as someone who’s choosing from their skillsets, this is something I would recommend, chalk down everything you can do on a piece of paper, your hobbies, your abilities, your skills and interestes and once you do, now go and ask yourself if what you do is unique enough and most importantly either has a higher margin for funds or is easy enough to replicate.
Once you have these chalked down, you can easily choose between them and come up with a service, that’s unique to you and has the highest profit margins.

ii. Starting learning higher margin skills
so for someone who sees how much value a certain service can have on freelance websites, this is certainly the one they would choose, usually after starting out from their own skill sets and then porting to this. So I would recommend following this in the same order I wrote here, starting with your skills and then moving to better services. So once you see that a certain service or skill has high demand, you should start learning it and in the mean time having your profile built on the platform. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad for now, you’re learning and you’ll keep changing them as you see more people showcasing these services and also learning from online platforms.

So if you’re learning and giving a online service, chances are there are plenty of courses out there you can learn from, Fiverr’s learning page being one of them. I personally haven’t used them, but it can be a good way of increasing your metrics on your profile. A site called Coursera is definitely a place I’d highly recommend checking out, where you can get scholarships for all courses and can also audit the course for free without paying and getting any certificates.

Once you do this, you’re set to go, keep improving, keep building.

B. Creating your Profile
So this is the most important part, I think the only thing that really helped me was reading a course online where I read how online transactions weren’t really trustworthy and how brands branded themselves to give them a background that gave them legitimacy and trustworthiness. Brands create ambassadors, create stories and create programs.
You are your own Brand, your own ambassador, your own Story, try capitalizing on that, if you’ve ever filled out a college application, you’ll definitely know what I mean here.

Here are a few steps you can follow in creating your online gig/ profile.

i. Know who you are:

“So no one will really knows you better than you yourself.”
Actually not very true, in fact many people will know more things about you that you really don’t, so here’s my advice, ask a few close friends, to tell you three things they really admire about you and three things they wish you changed (keep in mind that this is feed forward not feedback, feedback has a negative connotation to it at times.)

ii. Creating your Story (Video to be exact):
Once you get these, use it in your story, create your plus points and make them into a VIDEO, can not stress this enough, make it into a video that has your eyes available in them, you can have a look at my profile, where I’ve only showed my face for a little while, and the other was info graphics, but trust me it worked so well. (PS. I haven’t linked my profile here, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m gaining any traffic from here, the post if for sharing my experience, if you want to look, you can go to fiverr and search iconsolutions)

iii. Know what not to advertise:
So, unfortunately not everyone can capitalize on their looks or charm in life, Its very important to know your audience, if for some reason you think you appearing on the video will do it more bad than good, then I would suggest asking a friend to review it, or if you think your english accent isn’t really that good, again I’d ask a friend to review it. Not everyone has the best of an accent, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to work, if this is the case, practice a sentence a hundred times while you record, and make sure it looks good, in the other parts you can have an infographic or something else to compliment your work.
Furthermore, make sure you highlight other skills that you’re not really selling but banking on, for example I do web development and Design, but I’m actually an Electronic Engineer, and I highlight that fact in my gig and my video, its a complimentary thing that gives you legitimacy.

I’ll make more posts about these in the future to help others in more detail, but this here is the jist of it all.

iii. Last but not the least, Writing your GIG:

So, once you’ve established your video and story, you now need the profile to highlight what you offer. I won’t go into much detail over this one, because its a topic all in it self, but you can do some research into what other sellers are doing that are successfull. Find out the highlighted keywords, but DONOT, I repeat DO NOT copy those same sentences and paragraphs, thats infringement and you can get blocked for that, I certainly had an account gig deleted for copypasting my profile.
So once you have that incorporate these keywords into your profile with your story, and trust me you’ll be golden.

Example:
If you want to have a look at how all this deploys to look, have a look here:

C. Summary
Next there are ways to increase your audience reach which I’ll write about more if this post ends up being helpful to people, LOL What if it turns out I wrote this this for an hour and no body read it 😛
Anyways, best of luck, hope this helps you and if you have anything that you think helped you or you want to ask any questions I’m always here. Just ping me 😊
Cheers 😃

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As long as people can understand what you are saying, I wouldn’t worry about your accent deterring prospects.

@humanissocial Well in a perfect world it shouldn’t matter, but from human psychology we know that human nature has alot of hidden biases and sometimes where you’re from can negatively affect your persuasion as well, especially when you’re trying to sell something.

While I am sure that accents can sometimes sound in your favor as well. According to a pew study people with a British accent are thought to be more persuasive and intelligent in general. While if you have a middle eastern accent, you’re thought to be more aggressive and untrustworthy.

So what I’m saying here is to build on your strong suits. 🙂

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@humanissocial Well in a perfect world it shouldn’t matter, but from human psychology we know that human nature has alot of hidden biases and sometimes where you’re from can negatively affect your persuasion as well, especially when you’re trying to sell something.

While I am sure that accents can sometimes sound in your favor as well. According to a pew study people with a British accent are thought to be more persuasive and intelligent in general. While if you have a middle eastern accent, you’re thought to be more aggressive and untrustworthy.

So what I’m saying here is to build on your strong suits. 🙂

I know this, thank you. My point is that most people are not going to be surprised you have an accent. It is pretty clear when a seller is not western and maybe not proficient in English. If a buyer has a problem with this, they aren’t going to pursue you in the first place.

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I know this, thank you. My point is that most people are not going to be surprised you have an accent. It is pretty clear when a seller is not western and maybe not proficient in English. If a buyer has a problem with this, they aren’t going to pursue you in the first place.

@humanissocial Makes sense, and I get the idea where you’re coming from, but if you do some research you’ll see that alot of professionals from Universities like Duke or Berkley or even almost all on Entrepreneurship suggest you to keep in mind the complementary customer, someone who’s not really a customer but can become one, you need to identify those and try to cater to what makes them go away.

So in summary, yes its really hard if you’re not a westerner, but what I’m saying is just compliment your services, by practicing it a few times and you’d be surprised how well you would do. 😃

I hope this describes the position on where I’m coming from 😊 , let me know what you think.

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