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Freelancing with Fiverr

¡ Miguel Parramón ¡ blogger

I’ve recently been using Fiverr to explore making money as a Freelancer using my web development skills. Here’s a little guide I wrote as I went along, explaining the process.

Get aquainted with Fiverr

Create your account on Fiverr and explore what other people are offering in your space. For me, a search for “Ruby”, “Rails” and “Web Development” yielded lots of active gigs offering the kind of services I would offer. Note things you like about their gigs, check their reviews, and use their pictures as inspiration for your gig.

Create your gigs

Create one gig showcasing your skills, for every skillset you have, you can use this one as template. Important things to point out:

  • Technologies you know: 

  • Web technologies HTML, CSS, JS

  • Backend skills: Ruby, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL…

  • Server administration: Linux, AWS…

  • Services you can provide: 

  • Create a web page from scratch

  • Pair programming to solve bugs or teach

  • Deploy a website on a server, AWS, Heroku…

Focus on showcasing quality in front of your competitors. Like other freelancing marketplaces, Fiverr has plenty of people chasing the quick buck and delivering low quality work. Stand over them by having a gig that

  • Instills confidence to the customer, 
  • with plenty of images, 
  • is structured: presentation, skills, availability details
  • has a call to action, and of course, 
  • is orthographically and grammatically correct.

Get some orders for cheap

Accept all the orders you get at the start, and pour your heart into them. Don’t worry about making money yet, focus on customer satisfaction and delivery times. Learn what people ask for, and tweak your gig description to better suit future clients. Initially I worked for several people for $5/hour to establish a reputation, get some good reviews, and build up my first contacts.

Hone your tools

Grow your tool repertoire to quickly build and deliver your orders. Mine looks like this:

Practice your estimation skills

People will often ask you for entire websites offering only some broad details. Being able to write a proper project estimation will save you lots of time in discussing project scopes and development times. Here’s an example to get you started:

Client request:

I want a simple application that will help me list Event centres and their features and allow user to book and pay for their event venues. Venue admin can access their accounts and see bookings and users can see all the venues they’ve booked over time and rate it.

Project definition, after a couple back-and-forth messages:

Ruby on Rails Events application: * Lists Event centres and their features, uploaded by the venue admins with the following attributes: ** Description ** Photographs ** Features ** Type(s) of event it’s suitable for. * Venue search by keywords * Allows user to book and pay for their event venues. Payment can be done on the moment, of after the reservation * Venue admin can access their accounts and see bookings * Venue admin gets notified in their Dashboard and email * Venue can’t be double booked - once booked and paid for, no one else can book for the same date * Users can see all the venues they’ve booked over time * Users can rate and write reviews for booked venues. * Integration of 2 payment providers

Deliverables * Code * Production deploy in Heroku

Estimated time booked for app development: 16 hours

Weed out unreliable customers

As you work with more and more customers, you’ll start getting the hang of identifying who’s good to work with and who’s not. Look for red flags when talking with potential clients like:

  • “I have worked with several freelancers before but they haven’t been able to deliver this task”: the history will most likely repeat with you
  • “I have this problem with my site and need it solved ASAP”: What made the customer get to this point? That’s the real problem. Only take it if you’re comfortable working under pressure
  • “Do this for cheap, and if your work is of good quality, I’ll bring you lots of more work”: The customer can see you deliver high quality code through your reviews. Also, most likely that further work will not come.

Don’t be afraid to cut ties with unreliable customers, even after you have started work, if things go out of scope. Some hours of lost work are a low price for future problems.

Adjust your price to your work load

As your reputation grows, unless you’re doing this full-time, you’ll likely get more orders than you can handle. Aggressively increase your price per hour until your demand matches your work quotas. This is the secret of making money with Fiverr: concentrate on high paying, quality work over cheap fixes, and big projects over debugging tweaks.

Profit!

Here’s an example of how much you can make with Fiverr.

I ended up my experiment after a couple months of work, earning a total of $2000, working for around 8h/week. Since that includes the first couple of weeks where my rates were much lower than at the end, I would expect my net earnings to be around $50/hour if I continue working on Fiverr.

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