Fiverr has been a highly competitive marketplace for gig based services ever since it went live in 2010. Now that the platform has given its freelancers the ability to charge more than the traditional $5, the competition has only gone up.
To make real money with Fiverr, you need your gig to stand out from the pack.This article explains how to do that so you can start racking up more sales.
Who is this article for?
- Experienced Fiverr sellers
- People creating their first ever gig
- Opportunists looking to find gig opportunities they can arbitrage
Let's go!
The Elements of a Fiverr Gig
While the actual offer is the heart of a gig, there are 6 different aspects that can attract or repulse buyers.
This article won't cover pricing or choosing what is included in your offer or any potential up sells.
To learn more about pricing, read my complete guide to pricing anything here.
Let's go through each element one by one.
The Fiverr Gig Title
I debated with myself over which was more important: the gig title or the thumbnail and I had to go with the title.
Fiverr is its own search engine and without a good title, Fiverr won't know where to display your offer.
First, we need to clearly describe your offer. Don't be vague, clearly define what is being offered
Next, you will want to make a list of all search terms you want to appear for. If your task is "I will make a cartoon drawing in 48 hours," you're going to hopefully appear for a lot of different search terms.
Things like,
- "Cartoonist"
- "Sketch artist"
- "Custom cartoon drawing"
- "Draw cartoon"
- Etc.
The key now is to decide which terms are most likely to attract your ideal customer. They won't all be created equal.
We need to consider 3 things.
- Search volume (High)
- Competition (Low)
- Relevance (High)
Let's start with search competition.
First, type in the terms 1 by 1 into Fiverr's search bar.
On a spreadsheet, note the phrase in a column and then the search results in another.
Do this for all terms you've collected.
Finally, analyze the top page competitors. Fiverr doesn't have any sort of individual split testing functionality sellers can utilize (which would be amazing) so our best takeaways will come from seeing what Fiverr is already showing for top results.
Your Fiverr Gig Featured Image
This is the most important aspect of your Fiverr gig.
With the average human attention span now coming in lower than a goldfish at 8 seconds, you need an image that will capture your audiences attention right away.
If your featured image is unappealing, it is not likely people will even click through your gig to dee the details of what you offer.
With that being said, quality is key. You must make sure your image is high resolution to be sure it is not pixelated and hard to see.
If what you offer is visual, you should give the best example of your work as the featured image.
Text isn't always necessary, especially if you create work that can be showcased entirely in a picture such as the cartoon drawings below.
In other cases, text might be the best way to stand out. This is particularly true in highly competitive gigs like SEO (see image below).
The best way to see what is working best is to check what the best selling gigs are doing and emulate those as best as you can. In the SEO example, 7 out of the top 8 are using text while in the cartoonist example, only 1 out of the 8 is using text.
Another great way to grab attention for your featured image is to create a video. According to Fiverr, adding an intro video to a gig increased user engagement by 40 percent!
Your Fiverr Gig Secondary Images and Videos
The more details you give about your gig the better. There are some buyers who base their buying decisions solely on pictures.
Because of this, It is very important that your pictures tell a story about what it is that you sell or offer. With nothing being left to the imagination.
Three pictures is the least you want to have for any gig. If this is the case, be sure to have only your best work as the three images. However, the more supporting images you have, the better.
Your Fiverr Gig Description
As with anything you purchase online, your copy (in this case the description) is what will most likely convince your reader to become a buyer.
You want to make sure to include as many details as possible. Leave no question as to what it is you offer.
This is also where you will be sure to include:
- Exactly what the buyer will receive
- Timeframe
- Number of modifications (if any)
- Your experience
- Call to action
Spend some time analyzing your top page competitors for details as to what words they are using to describe their gig.
The description should be keyword heavy. Anything that a buyer would think to search for should be included in your gig description. The keywords you used for the title, should also be included in the description.
Lastly, your description should be easy to read. Any long paragraphs without breaks will likely be skipped over by your reader.
Tip: Spelling and grammar do matter. I've passed on many gigs myself because the seller showed they lacked attention to detail in their work. If english isn't your first language or you aren't great at spelling and grammar, hire someone to help you with your gig.
Be sure to give adequate spacing, but also highlighting, bold text, italics etc are very helpful with making important points in your text stand out.
Adding an FAQ section to your post can also be extremely helpful, especially if your gig is complex.
Answering questions your potential buyer might have will make them feel much more comfortable and likely to purchase. It will also help you avoid any confusions that could lead to bad reviews.
The Reviews
Good reviews can make or break your gig. It doesn't matter if you've done everything we've mentioned so far extremely well if you have pitiful reviews.
The problem for most people trying to rank, is that they are starting off with NO reviews.
It presents a bit of a problem because many other gigs can be priced the same as yours with more reviews. And with 90% of buyers being influenced by positive reviews its only logical that your gig will be the one left behind every time.
Fiverr themselves, will also promote gigs with higher reviews before others.
There are many black hat ways of getting sales and reviews like spamming Facebook groups but that's not what we teach here at EntreResource.
You need to put in some elbow grease to get your first sales and reviews and you need to go above and beyond to ensure that you start the gig with 5 star reviews.
I highly recommend that you start your gig at a lower price to drive more initial sales. It may feel like a gut punch to significantly reduce your price in the beginning. However, you want to position your gig to be as enticing as possible.
After you receive a hand full of great reviews, you can always raise your price.
The Gig URL
This tip is last but certainly not least. It’s a great hack that many people don’t think of, or think has any bearing on ranking in Fiverr. However, that couldn’t be any further from the truth!
Everything about your gig you want to be in unison, using the same keywords as many times as naturally possible. This includes the gigs URL.
One thing to keep in mind is that your URL will not change. So you must be sure of your keywords and what you want to rank for.
Also, if you ever changed the details of the gig, it would no longer match with the URL keyword. So take time to think about the keyword for the URL as you will not be able to change it later.
So you might be asking, how do I do this? Let’s dive in!
Your URL will always be a subdomain of fiverr.com and will look like this “fiver.com/YourGigNameHere.”
The “YourGigNameHere” is what we want to customize to highlight the keywords that our potential clients will be searching for.
Normally when you set up your title you will enter in something like “ I will create a SEO friendly blog post”
In order to set up your URL specifically to rank for these keywords, you want to leave out everything except the keyword you want to rank for.
So instead the first time you set it up you would only type in “ SEO friendly blog post.” This would create a Fiverr URL that looks like this “ fiverr.com/SEOfriendlyBlogPost
This is exactly what you want in order for Fiverr to be able to quickly rank your gig.
After you save this, your URL will be created and you will go back and edit your title to include the secondary words.
Conclusion
Creating a Fiverr gig that converts has many facets to it. Most people feel they can just list a gig without doing any research.
You have to remember that Fiverr is a search engine just like Google and the buyers are real humans comparing your gig with hundreds of others. In order for the algorithm to know where to place your gigs, you have to make it more than clear what you’re offering. In order for your gigs to sell, they need to draw the attention of the viewer and show (quickly) that you have the solution they're looking for.
Now, go follow the optimization steps in this article and you'll dramatically increase your Fiverr sales!