How to Sell More on Fiverr Through Blogging

Recently, I’ve been reading some discussion online about people who are trying to make money on Fiverr. There were many complaints and dissatisfaction about their progress so I feel the need to address the issue by providing a solution using my existing knowledge. If you are facing a similar situation as the others, then this article about how to sell more on Fiverr outside of the marketplace is something that will probably benefit you. 

Fiverr (for Seller) at a Glance

In case you don’t know, Fiverr is one of the largest freelance services marketplace that attracts close to 40 million viewers every month. These people are all looking to outsource a certain task, such as business logo creation, proofreading and even some strange things like psychic telepathy 🙂

If you possess any of these talented skills, sign up for an account and create a gig following a few simple steps as shown in the video below.

Depending on the level of skills, you can sell a gig between the price range of $5 to $995. Now, here comes the problem that most sellers are whining about.

1) When it comes to revenue, you don’t earn every dollar that you charge the customers. From the equation, Fiverr takes a 20% commission cut and PayPal takes 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. So the calculation for a gig that cost $5 is going to look something like this;

$5 – $1 (Fiverr’s 20%) = $4

$4 – 0.42 cents (PayPal fee) = $3.58 (Your actual profit)

Clearly, if you are thinking of making a living on Fiverr, you need to undertake a lot of $5 gigs OR increase your service price.

2) Now here comes the second problem. Even if you are willing to work hard, many buyers go to Fiverr with the mentality of searching for cheap deals. It’s like shopping on eBay – getting things at the lowest price possible. Hence, higher-priced gigs might not be as appealing as cheaper ones that are offered by your competitors.

No matter how much injustice that makes you feel, the buyers couldn’t care less whether your skills are worth is or not. If you think that you deserve more, then you need to reconsider the value of your skills versus the time spent fulfilling ‘cheap tasks’.

3) Just like the visitors, the number of sellers in the marketplace is equally as enormous. Given the chance, everyone would want to be featured on the front page listing of Fiverr, but it’s not going to be that easy. Basically, there is no way to request or pay to be featured.

It’s entirely up to the discretion of the editorial team to perform the selection based on one’s selling performance, such as providing high-quality services and timely manner in handling orders. Even if you do earn the ‘featured badge’, the status is not permanent as gigs are randomly displayed throughout the marketplace in order to refresh the listings.

Therefore, if you’re just starting out, you need to be very patient and work your way up to achieve the levels that Fiverr has nicely laid out. With every level that you earn, you can add more services at a higher price and be eligible for the promotional listing.

To state the obvious, if you want to be a successful Fiverr seller, you need to follow the system that’s in place whether you like it or not. But like any online endeavor, there’s always a way around things in order to attract more audience, sell more, and earn more.

That’s where blogging comes into play.

What Can a Blog Do

Now, you need to shift your mentality here from a seller to a business owner. Think about building a brand for yourself, a hub of information where people can learn more about your skills and a personal webspace to feature your talents without having to compete with others.

A blog can do all that and because it is a separate entity from Fiverr, you can control how you market your work. You can even use it to cross-promote with the Fiverr badge that comes along with your sellers’ account.

So, instead of just waiting for customers, you can use your blog to reach out to them using various marketing channels and one that’s especially important is the search engines, which I will elaborate momentarily.

How to Create a Blog

The first step to creating a blog is to understand what type of niche you are in. From there, draw some phrases to reflect your expertise and put it in a domain name which is basically the name of a blog. A decent domain with a .com extension should cost you around $15 or less.

After you check the availability of the domain, purchase and link it to a hosting company that supports WordPress. By default, WordPress is a blogging platform so the moment you enter the back office, all the system is ready for article creation.

While you are at that, head over to your favorite social media and register for a new account (preferably one that is separated from your personal profile – just to keep things professional). There’s a reason for doing this and your blog will thank you for it later.

What Topics to Blog About

Before we jump into topic ideas, let’s take a moment to think what are the pain points your niche could be facing. If you’re a graphic designer, your audience may be searching for new logos for their business. If you’re a video producer, people might need help with professional video editing for a particular project.

These pain points – also known as keywords – are the reasons why they go online and search for freelancers like you because you are the solution to their problems. Hence, these keywords are knowledgeable information to have on hand because they attract your targeted audience.

If you include them on every single article and optimize them, your blog will be indexed and ranked much faster on the search engines which is famous for driving the biggest percentage of free traffic when you get to the first page of Google.

Google is always my favorite tool for brainstorming keywords ideas and here’s how it works. Say you are a designer that provides graphics for businesses – your keyword search can start off like that. Type in a few related phrases and watch what Google Suggest in the roll down list.

Within an instant, Google is already showing you what people may be searching for in this niche. These are all potential keywords that you can leverage from, but there is one more step to it which is to analyze whether a particular keyword is worth using or not.

As a new blogger, you should aim for long and non-competitive keywords because that will help to push your blog into higher rankings. I personally use Jaaxy Keyword Tool because it’s a simple tool that doesn’t have all the cluttering interfaces.

Basically, what you are looking for is a low QSR (equals to low competition, <100) and some fair amount of AVG (search traffic per month).

In the example above, we could see that ‘whiteboard animation for business’ has the lowest QSR (40) and quite a bit of traffic (164) which makes it a good keyword choice over the others that have more than 100 QSR.

How to Optimize Your Blog

Now that you have found an ideal keyword to use, proceed to write an informative and helpful article for your audience – the longer, the better – and be sure to include the keyword in your meta title, meta description, image tag and finish off with a strong call of action to get readers to check out your gigs on Fiverr.

After publishing the article, get some engagement going for the log posts by inviting your peers to leave some comments and share the post on social media (remember those profiles that we created earlier?). Repeat these steps for every blog that you write and make the effort to publish as frequently as you can because the more content you put out there, the more people will discover your service through the search engines.  

When traffic and revenue start to get some traction, consider putting up an advertisement (that is linked to your blog) on Google because they usually get the highest position on the result page where it will attract more viewers.

Think Outside of The Box

Fiverr is just another marketing tool and if you feel that it’s not meeting your expectation, take a moment to think outside of the marketplace and see where you can find your customers elsewhere. Learning how to sell more on Fiverr through a blog is just one example to show that there are many opportunities online to grow a successful freelance business.

It’s not impossible to market your own service and if you master the skills, someday you may not even have to rely on marketplace traffic any more. Who knows, right?

I hope this article has triggered new ideas in your creative mind and if you want to get started immediately, hop over to my recommended training platform to create your first blog and learn to make friends with Google.

Question – Are you a Fiverr seller? What challenges are you facing when promoting your freelance services online? Please share your thoughts/experiences in the comment area below.