This Is Exactly How I Made $500 in My First Month on Fiverr

It’s a lot easier than you think

After the global pandemic, a lot of people began realising that their 9–5s weren’t as stable as they initially thought — it opened up a wave of digital nomads and work from home freelancers that wanted to make money on their own terms.

And I think it’s great! But freelancing is definitely not for everybody.

There are so many different ways to make money online though, so if it’s what you really want, you’re bound to find something that suits you.

I thought Fiverr was it. I made $500 from early March to mid April from working on Fiverr — but it didn’t work out quite how I’d planned.

Nevertheless, I’ll tell you how I did it.

1. Choose A Niche Service To Sell

I noticed that my quick success was due to the fact that nobody else was offering what I was offering. Later on, I found out why nobody was offering that service, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Selling something both in demand and different will attract a lot of people to your gigs. On Fiverr, you can sell in a variety of categories, from writing to marketing, to music. Having a very specific niche that nobody else offers will help you to stand out from the crowd.

For example, I was writing personal statements or statements of purpose for high school students and people who wanted to apply to university. The reason I found success was because nobody else on the platform was offering this service “from scratch”.

My “competitors” were plainly editing or offering feedback on essays or personal statements for their clients. They were not writing them an entire statement from scratch. I, however, would get to know the client and write their personal statement as if I was them, incorporating passionate language with all of the things admission officers want to hear.

Fiverr considers this practice “academic work”. In my opinion, nobody is being graded on anything so I strongly disagree, but this is the reason why my account was suspended. Editing is the safe route that people take to avoid their accounts being suspended for doing others’ academic work.

Find something out of the box and unique that nobody else is offering (and that is also within Fiverr’s guidelines) and you’ll be rolling in it!

2. Staying Online

This is a huge one and extremely important.

When buyers go onto Fiverr to find sellers, they want somebody that is going to reply fast. Therefore, they’ll often select the filter on the search results to only show sellers who are online.

After my first job, I realised this when I was scrolling through the buyer site and analysing my competitors. I triggered this filter and my gig showed up in the writing category on the second row.

Everybody listed above me had much higher prices and lower ratings. I only had five star ratings at the time and I was charging around $7 per piece which is immensely cheap compared to the professionals charging anywhere from $30 — $100.

Even after raising my prices to $20, I was making decent money and started obtaining around 2–3 jobs per day.

Keeping your Fiverr tab open throughout the day all day is exactly how you can get more orders and make more money on the platform. It eliminates so many of your competitors and raises the chance that somebody will find you.

3. Keep Prices Low

Now obviously nobody is working on Fiverr for free.

If you’re trying to make money, it might sound counter-productive to give away your service for free. But the secret to success is to be patient.

Now, don’t keep your services so low that it looks like you have imposter syndrome, or so you seem incompetent. But make them low enough so that you provide excellent value for money — which is what people want.

If a buyer buys something cheap and it exceeds their expectation, it’s going to be more valuable and surprising to them than if they spend more money but get the same quality. This is how you can get 5 star reviews which will lead to more orders, and subsequently more money.

When you’re starting out, reviews should be the most important thing. On Fiverr, climbing up the ranks is basically the likelihood scale of whether or not you can make a living as a freelancer. New sellers are at the lower end and of the 800,000 people that search Fiverr every month in the US, the majority of those will go for experienced sellers that know exactly what they’re doing.

Offering lower prices has a lower risk factor — buyers may lose time, but at least they won’t lose money. That’s why it is crucial to keep your prices low until you have at least 3-4 5-star reviews.

4. Work Efficiently

I delivered my first client’s work in just 40 minutes.

I wrote her an entire personal statement that was strong and charismatic and I wrote it so fast it set the standard for all of my future gigs.

She gave me a 5-star review stating how fast I was. So did the next person. And the next. In fact, I had 12 different reviews stating how fast I delivered their work — and to an impeccable quality too.

Now, the first client was definitely my ideal client. I didn’t need to chase her up for information because she provided it all for me first time. She was also around my age and was going through the exact same process I went through to apply for university. On top of that, she was even applying to study the subject I applied to study.

Because of this (and the adrenaline from excitement of getting my first client), I was able to provide the service super efficiently. This wasn’t as easy as other clients. Particularly due to time zone differences, I often delivered at the very last minute.

However, for the most part, I maintained a high standard of work for all clients. While some jobs were tougher than others, I got through them. And you will too.

5. One Day Delivery

The final thing that is sure to guarantee you fast success on Fiverr is delivering as soon as possible.

At the beginning, all of my gigs had one-day delivery. I increased these for custom orders as I began to receive around 5 orders a day around a week before my account got banned. This was simply because I was overloaded with work and didn’t even have time to think.

Apart from building apps or writing an ebook, there aren’t many services that can’t be done in a day. At first, you won’t get more than an order per day either, so ensuring you get jobs completed as quickly as possible will drive potential customers your way.

If you have any other tips, pop them in the comments. Let’s have a friendly discussion. 🌎

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