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Trolling Buyers Request For Fun AND Profit (Maybe)


emmaki

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I’ve found a solution to one of Fiverr’s ongoing problematic issues! Kind of…

Now, all but the most green of Fiverr sellers will be aware of the issue of sellers thinking that BR is an appropriate place to beg for a job. This is annoying, yes, but since I am now visiting on a semi-regular basis, I decided to turn it into an opportunity.

The Legitimate Way to Troll BR Spammers and Probably Get Away With It (Unverified)

One approach I’ve seen mentioned is to write to these condemned souls. Whether you take the kind route or the mean route, I bet it’s ineffective. There’s also the remove feature, but that’s toothless and boring.

My route is a better way, and it also uses BR exactly as it’s meant to be used. So I’ve written a consultation gig and I will be sending it to them. Somewhat irritatingly, that category doesn’t have the much-maligned packages, so it is a basic $5 offering. But with extras, it could work as a relatively easy money spinner. After all, finding fault in these poor sellers’ gigs is not going to be hard work.

Throw in bragging rights (my description and FAQ) and social proof (TRS, ~1500 reviews averaging at 4.95) and this gig will either flop or fly.

Anyway, this is what I mean when I tell people to stop whining about not being able to get a job or stuff they can’t change. There’s always a solution.

Another Tip, This Time For Tip-Loving Newbies With Awful Tips Trying To Promote Themselves

This is actually how you promote yourself on a forum. I think. Well, I’ll let the mods decide on that, but regardless of what their judgement is, this post is a better class of spam.

  1. It’s unique, compared to the usual moan about how BR is useless
  2. It deals with an issue that annoys just about every seller out there
  3. It isn’t a copy-paste of anything out there that is either copied or spun…
    3a) …or a work of glorious mundanity (“first, you must make profile, then u mek sell”)
  4. and so on and so forth, I’m bored of this list now.

The point being is that while quite a few people will go to take a look at my profile and spot the new gig, I haven’t really promoted it. I haven’t even really gone into why I am the best most experienced yadda yadda yadda followed by a boring old link. Instead, I’m letting my fingers do the writing as my brain cranks out solutions to problems.

It’s the old rule: you need to engage people first. In any case, the forum’s not a great place for spamming so whatevs. But if anyone wants to join me on my trolling journey of fun and profit, feel free to steal my idea (but not my writing, dudes, that would be lame).

So, don’t be lame. Be cool.

now I must go and lie down: this has been a most distasteful episode of blowing my own trumpet which simply won’t do

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And yes, maybe we should be helping people for free. But one look at so many people begging–literally–for advice here shows that they don’t listen. Put a price on it, and it suddenly has value, which means they may listen. If you want free advice, you need to work for it. That’s just the way it works. Searching for something adds value as well. Without some form of work to get something, it does somehow become meaningless. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for it but IDK what it would be.

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Good point. I’m using the FAQ (which I’m fiddling about with at the moment) to answer a few issues that might stop people buying. I just added a “why did you contact me” FAQ question and threw in some vaguely terrifying issue that I can help them fix (e.g. not getting banned for being uninformed/dumb)

That’s most likely going to be my pitch. Freebie people get a custom quote along with a reminder of terrifying consequences that could be avoided if only they would just invest in their precious, underperforming business for once. You get the general gist.

Which category were you in, btw? I put mine in business consulting which looks like a bit of a backwater tbh, but since I’ll be actively trolling BR it’s not such an issue.

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You’re right: it’s annoying.

This one time, I had responded to a seller in BR with an offer of my own. I have also done the same with someone who inboxed me (and apparently a lot more people) saying he was sorry he had to resort to writing to individuals with offers. Neither one took me up on it!

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Very good theory, except, there is a small chink in it. The sellers who beg for orders are not the kind who have a credit card attached, and are unlikely to spend money to improve themselves (that’s the reason they are using spamming as a tool). They are newbie college kids who are not serious Fiverr members.

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“…people begging–literally–for advice here shows that they don’t listen. Put a price on it, and it suddenly has value, which means they may listen.”

Sound logic, hopefully this approach works. I may have thought of this Gig idea as well, but I didn’t want all the sales that would come along with it, if you know what I mean?.. 😃

-Annie

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24 hour update:

2 orders (one from the forum, one from ??? Possibly BR, but not sure)

Uh, that’s it. Not bad for 24hrs in a deadish category, though.

You may be wondering why I haven’t targeted My Fiverr Gigs, AKA the Spam Gulag of the Forum (and for good reason). If you look on the right hand side menu, you’ll see that it has over 40k posts. Check in and virtually all of them are sad and unloved. I could target them with a C&P spam, but that would be a C&P spam. As my gig is set up with a consultation for $5, going down the “free help now buy my shit” route won’t work here. Unless the mods ignore my spamming for a week or so (just 1 per post) so I can harvest data on this. Yay or nay, mods?

I have put my spamming on BR to a halt for now as I’ve also been working messages way harder than usual and that got some nice bacon in for the rest of the week and the beginning of next week. So in between filling orders and forum chat I’m updating my gig thumbnails to be a bit more salesy and not the crappy pics I put up when I started the gig and didn’t feel like the additional farting around with Photoshop. I had a look at Canva which has some neat free templates (which appear to be OK for commercial use), so I may edit stuff in canva, import to PS then superimpose my order now pretendy offical template over it for extra legitimacy. Combined with the TRS ranking and generally good reviews, this should work well (social proof). I will consider videos next. As I am a masochist who likes to do everything myself, it would be my first attempt at videos. So…yeah.

I am doing all of this extra work because work has dried up a bit lately. TIP FOR EVERYONE: this is what you do when work dries up a bit. Not moaning on the forum about no sells or posting a plaintive whine in the Spam Gulag or someone else’s post. Got it? If you haven’t, well, I don’t know what to do apart from call you a lazy bum who’s not really that interested in running your own business.

I’ll update in a week or so, that should be enough time to get some more meaningful results and data.

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Thanks! I was actually thinking of adding a little poop hat (@jonbaas and regulars may remember the particular graphic I’m thinking of!) to my website sucks gig on the frowny-face man. Because it would be funny. Or a poop emoji.

Of course, this is another thing–the more “fun” gigs (or provocative at least) will have more lighthearted thumbnails, while the more business oriented ones would be more professional. Will figure out a template for those later. The upshot of this is that I could then offer yet another service for the hapless newbie…and my portfolio speaks for itself.

I have to say, I don’t spend a lot of time in the marketplace, but there’s an incredible amount of crappy thumbs out there. Stretched out pictures, too-tiny writing… I’ve also noticed that Fiverr has serious issues (well, not that serious but irritating to life-threatening depending on your OCD levels about this kind of stuff): so you make your thumb, upload it. Looks great on the gig page. Quite a lot gets shaved off around the edges on the thumb (desktop) and even more on the (Android, I imagine Apple’s the same) app! It’s bloody annoying, but that’s why my template is where it is. I know the rough boundary now, but it doesn’t work with the mobile version. I can’t be assed with that level of perfectionism though.

more taps: this is how you spam, guys. This is how you spam. Do you spammers who spam the forum badly at least see just how magnificently you fail?

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It takes 5 minutes to spam all the spammers in BR with a quick finger (oo-er missus) and copy-paste message. It’s too early to say whether the conversion on this makes it worth it at all, but I’d say you’re thinking about this the wrong way entirely.

After all, on the majority of other boards this is what the vast majority of us do. Anyone serious about their business would listen to good advice and implement it. Those that don’t/won’t and continue their behavior are more likely than not to fail, or at least fall far short of their goals. Anyone who spams my inbox with “plooz halp me, i articals right bat no odor” gets the full all the extras deal custom quote. Sure, 99% will balk, but if it’s a quick response and 1 person out of 100 converts, I’m doing fine.

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I’ve never bought a gig before, but I think I’ll buy your consultation Gig at some point, after I’m done with my current lot of orders (booked for next 30 days). I want to discuss things such as pricing and packages with you. I know you won’t mind advising me on this for free, but this way it would be more professional and I’d take your advice more seriously.

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UPDATE

Trolling BR gets about the same results as spamming it. No surprise there, except I’m not getting banned or punished unlike the people I am bothering. No matter: I now have a 5-star gig to trole them with whenever I feel like it.

In other news, seriously spending time in your inbox–yes, even with the timewasters–has proved fruitful, as is redesigning my gig covers–today I focused on my top 2 gigs as they are above the fold. I went for eyecatching and boastfully true (hey, my placement is 1st sometimes for one of them). Best day of orders in quite a while yet. A mixture of both? IDK, but I feel sure my extra work is related. Funny, that.

In the meantime, I am creating a brief sheet. I really should have got to this a long time ago, but it will serve two, no, three, purposes.

  • “I have a writing project, how much is your quote?” – quick response about filling out this brief sheet and sheet attached. That’ll sort the men from the boys!

  • making it a mandatory part of getting a gig to go through. Can’t be arsed to fill out the brief/spec and get mad because it’s not what you wanted? Oh dear. I’ve done exactly what you asked.

  • a more professional approach: all of this put together should warn Mr $5 God that I’m not to be trifled with. Or at least, if they want to trifle with me, they’re being very silly indeed. For a buyer with a larger budget in mind, it displays something a cut above the competition (I imagine)

Bonus fourth purpose:: because all of this is incredibly useful advice that anyone can use, I get to spam the forum once again with no slaps on the wrist. DO YOU HEAR THAT SPAMMERS! DO YOU HEAR THAT?

Look, I’ve only put my orders up $5 to $10, but if I want to push them up further, I need to display that professionalism upfront. As soon as I can, my prices go up again.

So instead of whining on the forum about how Fiverr is over for you or some other plaintive song of your failed type do, do some f***king work. If you don’t have the skill to pull of any of the things I’ve mentioned above, be clever and invest in your business. There’s no rocket science here at all. Absolutely none.

My old covers are holding me back. They are boring and generic. My new ones stand out. Before October, they will all look like that, and I’ll have all the FAQs filled out, PDF samples, the works. I want to continue my lazy Fiverr getting jobs without working to get them life, so I’m prepared to do some “free work” to get there.

And also spam troles. I need a hobby. Also, I’m wondering if I could become a writing superseller. Now that really would drive my prices up…

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