So what is REALLY wrong with Fiverr anyway?

It’ no secret that a whole lot of people are REALLY mad at Fiverr right now. Negative reviews and tales of woe involving Fiverr abound the internet, from across the globe.

Why is that? Well, we’re going to go over some of that here in just a moment. Let’s get back to what brought you this post in the first place.

So, you’ve got a small task that needs to get done, but you’d really rather not. Since you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade, you’ve certainly heard of Fiverr, and have been somewhat curious about what sort of results you would get from hiring someone off there. Well, depending on what you’re looking to accomplish – and more importantly, what your expectations are, that might not be a bad idea. Lets address goals and expectations, shall we?.

If you are simply laser focused on hiring a freelancer specifically for $5 and you’re not yet familiar with any of the sellers on the platform, hiring a freelancer off of Fiverr is bound to be a game of Russian Roulette for you. There is a plethora of unskilled workers from third world countries bidding on projects or offering services that they do not know how to do either AT ALL – or at the least, do have enough competency in the skill to have any business offering to do it professionally – flooding the marketplace with offers to complete these skilled tasks for next to nothing…

Conversely, there is also an abundance of very talented, high quality freelancers on the platform who do provide amazing services. Although their rates are usually set at what is genuinely a very fair (much lower than industry standard) rate, The high quality professionals, unfortunately, seem to get downed out in a sea of very low quality “imposter services” that managed to sell 300 of at $5 each, making them a “top selleOf course buyers are going to be attracted to the prospect of getting the work done at the lowest rate possible – and they end up bypassing qualified freelancers who ask a bit more, and then end up about as satisfied as you were.

“People who are professionally trained and certified, talented, with a ton of experience having to price themselves below minimum wage in order to compete”

Now what that’s evolved into is a wide variety of actually skilled trades being either

A) SEVERELY devalued – people who are professionally trained and certified, talented, with a ton of experience having to price themselves below minimum wage in order to compete in that perpetual race to the bottom.

OR

B) MUCH worse yet – their professions end up getting a QUITE undeserved bad reputation.

That’s my biggest issue with Fiverr. I work in SEO, provide Social Media Management and online Reputation Management services, Manage Advertising and Media Buying campaigns, and do ghostwriting .

Let me start off by saying that NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE SPAMMY – nor are they (if done by anyone who knows the least about what they’re doing) artificially generated, completed at a volume of “10,000 within 3 days”, done sloppily or in a way that looks anything other than organic (because real value is going to provide real results ultimately, and there’s no sense in driving traffic to the desired site if it’s not traffic that would convert to begin with!) – anyway….

These “$5 for 4hours of work” freelancers have created a TON of misconceptions about several freelance vocations… Just to set the record straight:

SEO does NOT mean posting a ton of spammy or irrelevant comments in random unrelated forums, blogs, or profiles that no one will ever see because they’ve got no friends and will never be touched again – That is NOT SEO.. SEO is a very complex, specialized methodology that requires a ton of case-specific analysis and research, and a borderline obsessive need to stay on top of the latest developments with it, because the algorithm changes ALL THE TIME…

Social Media Marketing Does NOT involve buying followers! Buying followers is completely pointless – adds no value to your profile, since they would 9 times out of 10 be mostly empty zombie profiles that don’t engage with any posts and don’t share anything – they would not help your profile gain any authority or influence anyway… it would defeat the purpose.. Also, SMM is also not limited to simply “posting something for you” every once in a while… It’s monitoring for engagements, following up on comments to posts, interacting with the followers (reciprocacy goes a long way) and coming up with great content for you to share based on your customer’s interests…and more, but I digress…

Reputation Management DOES NOT MEAN buying fake reviews! That’s Trashy, lazy and frankly stupid because almost anyone can spot that from a mile away.. That would be things like acting promptly and professionally when there is a mention of your brand, whether it be positive or negative, and either thanking them for their loyalty if it is positive or proactively helping them resolve the issue if it is negative (yes there are tools that will alert you anytime it detects that your brand name (or any specified word or phrase) is mentioned anywhere online). It’s about turning the unsatisfied customers into satisfied ones by going above and beyond, and creating a very positive first impression of your brand to people who hadn’t heard of you who came across that interaction (either in a forum or via blog comments and responses).

Well educated, experienced and talented writers ACTUALLY charge more than a penny or two per word when writing. Seriously. There is a FLOOD of “writers” from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Philippines, etc. that are making the industry for most (especially new) freelance writers financially impossible. They are cheaping it by offering “services” at $0.005 per word (half a cent) then they provide you with an incoherent mess full of inaccurate statements, and little to no concept of sentence structure or grammar, let alone spelling by saying and then leaving SUCH a bad taste in the client’s mouths that they end up convinced (and often quite freely tell anyone who will listen) that hiring writers off fiverr (or freelancer, or upwork, or guru or legiit, or whatever platform you’re on that week) is a waste of money and attempting attribute that level of skill to all writers on the platform across the board…That’s exactly how it happens too..

FINALLY – Setting up and managing an Ad Campaign or a media buy is NOT AT ALL the same thing as “sending unlimited (probably fake) website visitors to your site, or 10000 visitors (who will all be bots) for $5 – or anything even close…. It involves knowledge of the ad networks, to know which ones would be the best fit to find your target audience, negotiating the best rates and setting the correct parameters to achieve the best results, designing and styling ad copy that will convert, Doing small scale tests to optimize it and ensure the highest revenue margin before – and therefore sending TRULY targeted traffic to your site, people who actually INTENDED to go to your site and who WANT to purchase or subscribe (whichever the case may be) – not at all the same as “sending 5000 USA visitors (who will somehow all be( from Twitter within 6 hours” .

So, as you can see – In all of the aforementioned instances, what the flood of low quality workers has morphed the perception into, in the minds of an unfortunate percentage of potential clients of these (and many other professions) barely, if at all, resembles what the professional service actually is .

Moral of the story – Do not go for the cheapest services you can find on those types of platforms. It will never end well. Go for someone who can actually communicate what it is they will do to achieve the desired goal you are hiring them to achieve. Typically someone who prices themselves at least moderately- someone who prices themselves around $2/hr is not going to be as invested in producing high quality results for you as someone who is pricing themselves at $20/hr will. It’s just a fact.

Anyway, thank you for letting me rant lol… Hopefully, somewhere in my tirade, either you or one of your subscribers will be able to find some useful information that will make their next freelance/gig platform (buyer or seller) a bit smoother.