- A common horror story I hear
is from makers who hire someone
on platforms like Fiverr to promote their store
for a really low price,
and that ended up tanking their store traffic
or their SEO ranking.
And look, I'm all for spending as little as possible,
but it's also true that you often get what you pay for,
and in some cases, what you pay for simply isn't enough,
and that's not gonna help
your handmade shop in the long run.
I totally get why you might want to hire someone
to help you with your marketing.
In fact, I'm all for it.
I think being able to delegate work is important
as you grow your shop so that you can work smarter,
not always, always harder, harder, harder.
It's understandable if you feel like, you know,
I've got so much to do, Deb, and I've got no time to do it,
and so it's not crazy to think that someone else
may know how to do it better than you
and save you a bunch of time
by doing some of the marketing work for you.
But not all money turns out to be money well spent,
so today I want to help you really make sure
that even where you are hiring out
marketing work for your shop,
you are delegating something
that's actually likely to help you get results
and that you are delegating it to the right person.
Ready?
Let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Bonjour, my name is Deb and I'm the founder of tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers
and handmade shop owners just like your fabulous self.
You can learn more about Tizzit HQ,
our community, just below,
in the link below this video.
But for now let's jump straight into today's conversation,
should you hire a marketing expert off Fiverr?
First, I want to make it very clear
that I'm not saying that Fiverr is bad.
That is not what this video is about.
And I'm sure there's some really good freelancers out there.
I've hired people on Fiverr myself
for some tasks here and there,
and I'll probably do it again in the future.
It's a really convenient platform to delegate some work.
So why do I think it's important to talk about this?
Because I think that delegating some tasks
to help you grow your handmade shop is very smart.
It's a great way to make sure
that you are staying in your zone of genius
and reclaiming some time for yourself.
But I also know
that if you don't find the right person for the job,
you will end up spending more time fixing things
than you would have spent doing them yourself
in the first place.
So again, this is not a stab at Fiverr itself.
There are some great gigs and great freelancers on Fiverr,
but they're not the ones I'm talking about today.
Today, I want to make sure
that you don't sign up for the bad ones,
because quite regularly I'll get messages from makers
saying, "I've just hired someone to do this or that
"for my shop and it didn't work at all.
"If anything, things are worse now.
"What do I do?"
Or someone will say that and someone will reply
in the comment with some less than great experiences,
you know, sharing what's happened to them, as well.
So the two most common things handmade shop owners tell me
or I see they are using or considering using Fiverr for
are Etsy SEO help and getting traffic to their shop.
So let's talk about each one of these.
First is purchasing Etsy SEO help.
And here's an example that happened to one of our members
inside Tizzit HQ before she started working with us.
She had hired someone for a very cheap price on Fiverr
to optimise her Etsy listing, titles, and tags for SEO.
She had the right idea to optimise for Etsy search.
She just didn't hire someone who either knew
enough about how to do it, or took actual time
to do proper research and do this properly.
This person not only deleted the tags and titles
that were bringing people to her shop,
but she also used titles and tags
that were way too broad to be anywhere close to effective,
coupled with a few keywords that brought the wrong type
of customers altogether to her shop.
So think, for example, DIY kit versus digital patterns.
She actually sells digital products, digital patterns.
DIY kit feels like it's maybe close enough,
'cause this is, like, what someone would search
when they want to make something,
and similar to digital patterns,
but they're looking for very different things.
Someone that is searching for a kit wants a kit.
They want to receive products in their house to help them.
Often it's more of a beginner kit,
whereas patterns, it's a digital file.
You have all of the, you know,
supplies in your house already,
so even if those people were making a similar project,
they want to make it differently
and they're not looking for the same product.
So that's, they're two very different intent
in those keywords.
Because of that, her conversion rate tanked,
which then sends a negative feedback loop
to the Etsy search algorithm.
She lost a lot of traffic, her sales went way down,
and she spent a month fixing her titles and tags
and trying to build her sales back up
to where they were before she hired the SEO person.
Look, I'm sure you've heard it before,
you get what you pay for.
SEO takes time to do.
It's a process.
There's a lot of time spent on understanding your shop,
understanding your market, your customers,
researching keywords alone, and I'm not even mentioning
actually implementing those changes in your shop.
So if you're paying a very small amount for that,
there's no chance to getting it done properly.
Okay, the second thing I hear about a lot
is from shop owners who hired someone
to promote their store and generate traffic in views.
That's usually what the service sounds like.
Essentially purchasing traffic to their shop,
and I want to warn you, don't do it.
Here's why.
I stopped counting how many times a shop reported to me,
a shop owner reported to me,
that they saw something that said,
"I will bring thousands of visitors to your shop
"for that little amount," and they thought, you know,
that is crazy cheap for a lot of visitors.
It's a great deal, let's go.
So they pay them a small amount, and here's the kicker,
many times the person actually does deliver
and does send traffic to your shop.
So what's the problem, you may wonder?
Well, they might send thousands of visitors to your shop,
but often what they do is they go and post the link
for your listings or for your shop in, for example,
big Facebook groups, promo groups,
or just in places where essentially
it's not at all your ideal customer that is on there.
It's just a big promo fest where businesses
kind of drop links, and it's share for share,
clicks for clicks, or like for like.
And what happens is you do get thousands of people
coming to your shop, (crowd cheers)
but no one is buying,
because no one is actually your ideal customer.
So what that does is it tanks your conversion rate,
which is, as you know, a signal to a platform like Etsy
that something is wrong with that shop or that listing.
So now they aren't going to push it in search results
because, you know, they've seen thousands of visits
coming to it and no one has converted into a customer,
no one purchased.
So the goal of a platform like Etsy is to make sales,
and the conversion rate is an element of the algorithm.
When your conversion rate tanks,
it's the signal that you're not maybe a listing or a shop
that they should feature highly in search results.
And so it can take time to rebuild from that
because you have to start bringing
really qualified traffic and getting sales again
to bring that rating kind of back up.
So what you really purchased then
is just a bunch of bad views or bad traffic
that not only didn't help your handmade shop,
but actually hurt it.
So remember, if it looks too good to be true,
it is probably too good to be true. (laughs)
You are much better off just learning to do the thing
or spending good money on someone
that is really good at it,
because this in-between is a waste of money.
And here's how a time versus money decision really goes.
On one end you spend nothing and invest time,
learn to do it yourself.
You know, do the thing yourself.
On the other end, you hire an expert.
Experts are expensive because they are in demand.
They are in demand because they are good
and they get results.
In the middle is the hire out for cheap option,
and there's really two things that you can expect
with that option.
One is not getting the work done properly,
because cheapest services often means
a lack of experience or expertise,
and so you might have to spend some time fixing things
and you can't be sure
that you'll get a return from that investment.
Or two, having to train that person yourself
on how to do things, which is actually a great
and economical way to hire a task out,
but you still need to learn in the first place
this thing that you then train this person to do for you.
So honestly, being a part of a community like Tizzit HQ,
having worked with thousands of handmade shop owners
and hearing many stories from people just like you
has helped me recognise that there are not any shortcuts
that actually help you in the long run.
If someone could come in for 10 dollars
and suddenly bring thousands
of qualified buyers to your shop,
they would charge a 1,000 dollars, not 10,
and they will be in high demand
'cause it'd still be a bargain.
Now here's actually what, I've got it on my phone here.
This is what a member of Tizzit HQ community
who has had several failed attempts at hiring cheap help
has reflected on and shared with us inside of the community,
and I want to read it with you
'cause I think there's some really valuable insights
and wisdom in there.
So she says, "All the time I have learned
"that trying to get things done really fast
"instead of figuring out how to do them yourself
"really never works.
"The best thing to do is bite the bullet,
"relax and know that if you do the right things
"by following the roadmap,"
she's referring to the Maker's Roadmap when she says that,
which is something that we have
inside of the membership community,
"So if you do the right things by following the roadmap
"and rely on yourself to get it done,
"it will be better for you in the long run.
"This goes for ads, for buying shop reviews,
"all of that stuff.
"I've done it all, and all of it
"was a big, fat waste of money.
"I hired Fiverr to write product descriptions.
"Waste of money.
"Get ads, get this, get that, jack things up.
"The problem was if my shop was not set up to perform well,
"if I didn't have the big picture marketing strategy
"or I wasn't sending the right people to it,
"I was just hurting myself.
"For me, it was always about this feeling
"of I've got to get this done,
"and I haven't got time to learn how to do it myself,
"and they probably can do it better than me,
"and so on and so on.
"This community really helped me recognise
"that there are not any shortcuts
"that actually help you in the long run.
"It may seem like it, but it's essential
"to be able to make the connection
"between the changes you make
"and the impact of those changes.
"When you do it yourself, it puts you in control
"of growing your business instead of giving your money away
"to a whole bunch of other people
"and either not getting anywhere
"or actually having it hurt you."
I could not have said it any better myself.
If I had to add anything,
it would be unless you're willing to pay good money,
don't hire out something
that you don't understand well enough yourself yet.
If you'd like to learn how to start
and grow a successful handmade shop,
or have a community of wise, handmade sellers by your side
as you decide if it's time for you
to outsource some of your tasks,
check out the community of handmade shop owners
and all the step-by-step courses we've created for you
over at tizzit.co.
We make starting and running a handmade shop
easier for you by walking you through
each step in the process
and providing support for any roadblocks that come up,
because they will, along the way.
So just check out the links below this video.
Thank you for watching.
Don't forget to subscribe.
And until next time, au revoir.