I want to introduce you today to one of my favorite websites of all time called Fiverr.com.
It is the world’s largest marketplace of things you can get done for a $5 note and,
at first glance, it seems like what could you possibly get done that you’d actually
want done.
So let’s have a little look at some of the sorts of things you can get done on Fiverr®.
Before we actually go into how to do that, what to look out for and how to really kind
of work the system.
So let’s start with the front page.
One of the most misleading aspects of Fiverr® is that they put on the front page a random
selection, to my knowledge, of $5 jobs or, as they call them, gigs.
And so sometimes it’s easy to write off the website because you’re seeing things
that you consider to be ridiculous.
But let’s have a look at what we can see today.
Number 1 with ridiculous: “I will as the nature guy, [which I presume is modelled on
the Crocodile Hunter from Australia] deliver a message for you.”
That’s not very useful to me.
“I will create a video testimonial as a plastic bag covered man.”
Not wildly helpful.
So you can see there’s lots of things that aren’t helpful.
But when you dig a little deeper, you find things that are amazingly helpful.
For example, “I will record your voice over in my Australian accent.”
Well, of course I already have that one down, nevertheless, if you need a voice over, that’s
a great place to start.
Let’s have a look here when you click in the search box and type “voice over.”
And what find is everyone who’s doing a voice over gig, and there are 617 results
right now, as you can see 617 people are willing to do voice overs for you.
Everything from George Bush through this person’s American accent to this young male voice over
to accents from all over the world.
So, voice over would be one thing, but not everybody needs a voice over.
What are some other very handy things?
Well, if you’re in the business of writing, and most people are, whether they’re writing
a book or simply reports or business plans, it’s quite often good to get your writing
transcribed.
What I mean by that is if you record some audio and you want to get it transcribed into
words.
There are 654 people who would love to help you with that.
You can see here, “I will transcribe 7 minutes of audio”, “10 minutes of audio”, “5
minutes”, “13 minutes”, and on and on it goes.
What are some other things?
Well, how about doing some kind of editing?
Whether that’s editing of written words or editing photos or editing videos, you can
find gigs here on Fiverr®.
Here’s a video editor out of Australia, here is a photo editor out of Sri Lanka, here
is an audio editor out of the United Kingdom and on and on it goes.
As you can see, when you roll your mouse over any one of these gigs or $5 jobs, it tells
you a little bit more information about what that gig is.
And we’re gonna go further down this path in one moment.
By the way, when you do a search, and let’s do another one here, for example for logo
design.
Let’s say we want a logo design, well there are 23,000 people who would love to do that
for you.
What happens is these are shown, you get the first 5 or 10 in what they call recommended
order.
That’s a random thing that they come up with.
I’m not sure of their metrix, but presumably the people who are getting the best results.
But you can change the order by pressing these green listing or sorting techniques.
High rating, and you can see something different comes up first, express gigs for gigs that
happen more quickly, you can see here within 24 hours.
Gigs with video, I presume that that means they have a video example or do video for
you, a video logo I should say, and then these are just the people who have listed only recently.
So, you can see that you can change the way that this thing is listed quite easily.
Let’s look at another one, although logo design is very good.
How about a cover design for a book or maybe a CD or DVD or for your ebook that’s gonna
go on Kindle?
Lots of cover designs here.
There really are a wide variety of things that you can get done here, even creative
things.
Like, maybe you want a brainstorming partner.
Type in “brainstorm”, “I will brainstorm 9 brand new names and matching domains.”
That’s something that’s for online.
How about a virtual assistant?
They’ll help you with kind of anything.
There are 735 of them.
Let’s do it another way.
You can see it’s actually logged in for me here so I’m sort of inside the system,
but you can also just browse by looking at categories, graphic design, video and animation,
online marketing.
Online marketing is very helpful and you can see here you can do, for example, web analytics
or SEO.
You can have someone do keyword research for you.
So, not only can you just type in random words of the sort of things you might like to get
done, but also you can browse using the categories.
And I’ll just finish off with fun and bizarre, which are the ones that they used to feature
on the front page and thankfully they’ve taken them off.
But you can see some very bizarre things here such as recording a voice over in the vice
of Sean Connery.
I’m not sure that’s helpful to many people, but it certainly comes under the fun and bizarre,
or this guy who will pop his eyes out and read a message.
All right, back to something actually helpful.
So let’s say we want to hire, for example, a transcriber.
So I type in transcribe and up come 654 people who’d love to help me with that.
And I could just sort of start going through the 654, and on and on and on they go as you
can see here, and I can load ever more, or I can try to narrow it down.
So how do you do that?
Well, firstly what you’ll notice here is a lot of these transcribers tell you how many
minutes they’re gonna do for you.
And I think 5 minutes is not very much, 10 minutes is not very much.
What if we type in transcribe 30 into the system?
It’ll pop up people, that’s still too much.
Oh there we go.
Here, it’ll pop us this guy who will do 30 minutes of your audio or video file.
Here are all the 30s here.
Terrific.
And what I can do at a glance is I can this person, which country they’re in, Argentina
here.
What rating they have.
If someone has a rating of nothing, that means that they haven’t been in the system very
long, a rating of 1 means they’ve been there for a while, the rating of 2 obviously quite
a lot longer.
And in fact I think we can even select high ratings so that we get all high rated people
up top.
There we go.
That’s better.
The second thing is we can see over here how long they’ve been in the system and obviously
someone who’s been there for one day is very different from someone who’s been there
for several years, and the delivery time in case that’s important.
For example, here you can do 30 minutes of audio but it takes 29 days, which is not very
helpful.
But look at this person here.
This person will do 15 minutes of audio.
That’s still a fair amount.
In fact I’ve used this person plenty of times before, Debbie, she’s lovely, from
the Philippines.
Been there for 2 years.
I’ve probably used her a dozen times myself.
Delivers in 5 days and often less, but look at this.
She has 906 votes.
Let’s look at her profile by clicking on this and it will roll down into this particular
gig.
All right, “I will do 15 minutes of audio or video.”
A little less than I was hoping for, but on the positive side, look at her ratings.
She’s had 906 gigs before.
In other words, she’s done this 906 times for other people.
That’s outstanding.
She has a 98% positive rating.
That means most people, whatever that is 800 and something people, think she’s terrific.
She has 6 orders in queue and 5 days on average and her average response time is 14 hours,
so she’s pretty on the money.
Now if I want to talk straight to her, and you can see her picture here, I can just click
on “Contact Me” and have a bit of a chat with her before we actually do a gig.
But down here you can see “I can transcribe a 15 minute audio within 3 days or a 4 day
turn around for 30 minutes of audio or a 5 day turn around for 60 minutes of audio, and
for those longer audio files please send me a message first.”
So you have to say, “Hey, I want to do this,” and check in.
Also, she has some extras for those gigs.
You see, if you want to do it quicker, “I will do a 15 minute audio in 1 day instead
of 3.”
You add $10, and she’ll do an express gig for you.
So she’s got some add ons you can choose here.
Now I’ve used her many, many times and if I want to order something right now, and I
don’t happen to have anything ready to go, I would simply click on the “Order Now”
button and jump into an order.
But since I’ve worked with her so many times before, I’m gonna sneakily, using movie
magic, cut to a gig that I’ve done with her in the past.
Okay, here we are in an active gig with Debbie.
Once you press on the order now button, it basically takes your money, which you can
do through credit cards or PayPal, and brings you here.
We start this conversation, which you can see is rolling down the screen here.
Let’s look at the top.
So, automatically an email comes from Debbie to you saying, “Hi, I’m Debbie.
Could you please send me the number of speakers, if there’s more than one on the audio, their
names, you know Tim and Steve and Bob, the kind of audio and if there’s any accent.”
So you can see here straight away we’ve got our response.
“Hi, Debbie.
We’ve already got you working on an order for us.
We’d love to line up another.
I’ve got 6 audio files totaling 85 minutes.”
Which is why we gave her, as you can see up here, $30 instead of $5.
And this happens to be from my PA Amber who runs these gigs for me.
And what you can see is Amber’s then uploaded these files to the system so that Debbie can
get them, and hey, presto the order begins.
We’ve added some more files and some more files and here is Debbie coming back to us,
“Thanks very much for purchasing the gigs.
I will work on them and send you any questions.”
And then she’s telling us she’s still underway.
My PA is responding, and 3 days later, hey, presto here are all of the files.
We just say, “Thank you very much.”
We gave her a thumbs up rating, which is one of those 906 votes, and she thanks us for
our review and we’re done.
So using Fiverr® is very much as simple as that.
It’s basically about finding a gig, buying a gig, sending the files you need worked on,
whether that’s graphic, whether it’s audio, whatever it is that you’re working with
and, hey, presto it comes back to you.
So let’s have a little look at the navigation at the top here.
We’ve got a “Home” button that brings me back to the very beginning where I can
search for gigs or browse using categories.
We’ve got a “To Do” button, which at this moment has nothing outstanding, but that’s
where the system lists things that they’re waiting for you to do.
So you can see down here, and I’ve got lots of these, you can see down here that they
asked us to basically give feedback, positive or negative feedback, to the seller, which
is what these ones are all about.
Down here, “Your seller needs some information to get started” which must have been waiting
for us to send some files or something like that.
So this is kind of a dashboard of the things that we have to do.
Up here is our inbox.
This is any conversations we’re having with people and little tags here of different people
who are doing stuff for me.
The interesting one here I use a lot is shopping.
This shows you past gigs.
For example, I’ve got 298 that have been completed already.
So let’s have a look at a few of those.
Most recently I’ve been doing a lot of audio transcribing because I’m working on a lot
of interviews for a book.
Down here is something kind of interesting.
This is YouTube views.
We’ll look at that in a moment.
This is a radio strategy.
We’ll look at that in a moment.
This is getting some media contacts.
That’s interesting.
Let’s keep moving.
I’d like to see one that’s got design involved, so I’m actually gonna search my
past gigs for anything that involves design so I can bring one of those up for you as
well.
Just show you those two or three gigs so you can get a sense of what Fiverr® can actually
do.
You can see someone’s done a logo for me and I wonder if there’s one that talks about
designing a book cover because I know I’ve got a lot of those that I’ve done using
Fiverr® as well.
Let’s see what it’s gonna say.
No it hasn’t found those.
Okay, let’s move on.
So here’s the first gig that I’m looking at.
Look at this.
For $5 I can buy 2,000 people looking at my YouTube video of whom at least 100 are gonna
like it and there’ll be some other various bits of social media proof added to that video.
And you can see, when I sent them a link to this particular YouTube video, I’ll pop
it open here in front of us for the entrepreneurial tool kit, and down here you can see 119 likes
with 1500 views, a bunch of subscribers, and that’s obviously what that Fiverr® gig
bought me.
What’s another Fiverr® gig?
Here’s one.
“I will work with you on a strategy for your radio station or show.”
Fantastic.
This is a guy called radiojim.
I gave him a lot of information about what I was doing and he then sent me back, as you
can see here, a PDF and we’ll have a quick look at it.
He gave me a strategy for doing a radio program.
You can see all of his strategic stuff starting to come up there for me.
Okay.
Let’s look at one more, designing an outstanding logo.
In this case I wanted something for an idea called “Ozzie Business Connections” and
gave him some information and here are the logos that he or she designed for me.
Let’s have a little look.
Now the thing about doing things like designing logos is they don’t always turn out perfectly,
so it’s good to have, I think, more than one Fiverr® gig going on at a time with a
designer when you’re just starting to work with them.
Okay.
Let’s go back to the home screen.
So, you can see how to get into Fiverr®, how to find gigs and what sorts of gigs you
might want to get done.
So what if we want to, for example, get a logo designed, how do you choose between the
16,334 people who are available to actually do this for me?
Well, one little trick is to click on this button here, these lines, which changes the
results into this more grid format.
And this actually gives you a lot of information.
As you can see, over here I can have a logo designed by a level 2 person, level 2 obviously
better than level 1 and better than nothing.
You can see which country they’re in, if you happen to have preferences.
If I want to, for example, hire within the United States, you can see how long they’ve
been there, in this case 5 months ago versus 11.
And you can see the delivery time, in this case this is sort of quite slow.
Let’s roll down a little bit and see if I can find someone better.
Over here is one of the things I like to use.
It’s the votes and this tells you how many times this person has done this work before.
So you can see here 86 votes.
That’s quite a lot.
So what I’m going to do is I’m gonna right click and open link a new tab so I can keep
that gig kind of next to me.
This one’s done 123, a designer from Australia.
That one looks interesting.
And 118.
That’s good.
Oh look here, 530, 490.
I’m looking for lots of votes.
Now, if you look at the top of my screen, I’ve got quite a few of these options lined
up.
I’ve got this one here and look at this.
He’s got a 99% positive rating after doing this 86 times.
That’s pretty impressive.
I can go down here and I can read a little bit about this person.
They’re from Austria and they give you a bit of a sense of who they are here and they
allow you to chat with them, which is good.
They’ve got a level 2 rating.
That’s good too.
You can see here they have quite a high cancellation ratio which means they cancelled 19% of their
gigs and, if you cancel them, they don’t count towards your ratings.
This person might have cancelled 1 in 5 gigs to keep their rating high.
That’s a little tricky.
Let’s go to this other person, 1076 times they’ve done this gig and I can have a look
at their portfolio here and see some of their designs, which look pretty good to me.
In Indonesia, this person here, Reand, 96% rate, this is very impressive, and you can
get 2 or 4 logos as well.
I would probably pick this person because they look pretty good.
What about this person here with 479 votes?
Also fantastic.
Out of the United States.
Top rated seller.
100% rating.
That’s unbelieveable.
Takes 2 weeks.
And let’s have a look at some examples.
Very nice.
I’d probably hire this person too.
I mean, I don’t spend too much time thinking about it because it’s only $5 after all.
So I’d probably hire those two people with lots of votes, positive ratings a shorter
delivery time in a country I’m sort of interested in.
Well, that really doesn’t matter in many cases.
And that’s how you can choose between lots of different options on Fiverr®.
Now, what if this last circumstance happens where you want something and you want it for
$5, but you can’t find it?
For example, if I go to the home page and I write in here, something I’ve done several
times, which is I want a back cover copy for a book.
I want all the marketing information on that, and there might not be a gig that does exactly
that.
This one here, “I will supply sure fire solutions to improve your copy.”
Well, it’s not quite what I want.
“Designs with back covers.”
That’s not quite what I want.
“Write the back cover blurb.”
Actually one person’s actually got it.
But let’s pretend for a second that we couldn’t find anybody.
There’s actually something you can do.
Click on “Shopping.”
Right there under actions you’ll see “Request a Gig.”
If you click on that you can basically type in here, and you hit this green button “Request
a Gig”, what you’re looking for, for example, “I’m looking for someone who will write
a back cover blurb for my non-fiction book,” and you post it in a certain category which
might be writing or advertising and subcategory . . . . Looks like we found the wrong category.
Let’s go back.
Maybe writing and under creative writing, yeah, I’d say probably creative writing
and scripting, copywriting.
There we are.
So then I hit submit and it pops up here.
And basically the system them allows anyone who is interested to send me an offer and
say, “Yeah, I’d love to do that for you.”
So even if your gig doesn’t exist, you can still find it on Fiverr® .
So there you have it, Fiverr.com.
One of my absolute favorites.
Lots of things you can do here.
I’ve shown you how to sort through different gigs and find the best ones to actually hire
and how to deal with gigs if they don’t exist at all, how to get one sort of made
up for you.
Okay.
That’s everything for Fiverr®.