What is Fiverr?
Fiverr is a platform where people can buy (and sell) micro-services for five dollars, a five-er. The most popular jobs being sold (gigs) are “1000s of .EDU backlinks” or “500 real twitter followers” and because of that Fiverr has a bad reputation in the online marketing community. Because, you know, that’s not how it works.
I would definitely not recommend many of the SEO/Marketing related gigs being sold there. However, Fiverr can be a really useful asset for inbound marketeers who may have a smaller budget, not have as many resources or connections that larger companies would.
Finding Quality Work
Finding quality work can be hard. I’ve learnt that reviews are not always reliable or accurate. The best rated jobs on the site are actually very spammy and very not recommended (“2500 twitter followers”, “2000 forum backlinks” etc). So how do you pick a good gig? The answer is common sense. If something sounds to good to be true, it probably is. After all, nobody is going to work for more than 1 hour on your order for only $5. To be honest — most gig services are either pre-made, automated or $^#!.
Don’t let this discourage you though. It really does depend on the seller. If you are interested in a gig you should message him/her and ask for more information. What would they create/do for you? Have they done something similar? This is a great way to judge the quality of a gig. Work samples are another good way to weed out the bad gigs. And if it doens’t work out, you only lost five dollars.
In this post I’d like to share some of the best types of gigs Fiverr has to offer, which everyone should take advantage of.
1) Graphic Work
There are a lot of good designers on Fiverr. You can find gigs great for banners, ebook covers, Christmas cards and even photo alterations. There are quite a few designers to choose from, so pick a style you’ll like! Make sure to _always_ check to see if the work is copyright free and not stolen from someone else (some people…). An easy quick way to do this is by using Google’s reverse image search.
2) Logo Design
Though technically graphic work, logo design is a category of its own, I would not suggest you outsource your company logo for $5. However, if it’s just for a beginning blog or a small website you can’t go wrong. Buy 5 different logos from five different designers, and I’m positive you will find something you’ll like. I’d advise to choose gigs that offer the source files for no additional cost.
A design I had made for an upcoming blogpost. Can you guess what it’s about?
3) Illustration for Blog Posts
Due to the many creative people on Fiverr, you can even outsource the visual side of your blog posts. All the illustrations in these posts were created through Fiverr gigs. Pretty sweet huh?
Another use could be to create a caricature of yourself. A colleague of mine is not a fan of having an online identity, or using photos of himself. But I do not like looking at the default avatar on the company blog. Solution? A caricature of him – for $5.
4) Voice Overs and Intros
You can score some great intros (or other things) for your videos on Fiverr featuring your logo. It will not be unique, but it will do for starters. You can also find highly skilled people to do voice-overs. You could order a voice-over for a radio commercial, video tutorial, podcast or perhaps even as a narrator for your blog posts?
5) Scraping Content
You will like this one! For as low as $5 you can get almost anything (legal) scraped/crawled. As marketeer you probably have plenty of uses for this! If you don’t, you should read Eppie Vojt’s post on scraping everything. I have personally bought a gig to gather product information from supplier that were not offered in product feeds.
6) Data Entry
Got a lot of repetitive tasks needed to get done? You can probably outsource it for $5+. Maybe let someone gather a list of URLs and add all Moz Metrics?
7) Slicing
If you have any single page designs (PSD) that you would like to get converted to HTML/CSS you can get it done on Fiverr. For a premium you can even get it converted to a Wordpress theme.
Bonus Fiverr: Proofreading
There are quite a few content creators on Fiverr. You can also find plenty of professionals who will proofread your content. Like this post for example! Checked for grammar and spelling for only $5. That’s quite a steal!
If all of this doesn’t work out you can always let someone dress up as Harry Potter to promote your brand. Have you ever bought any Fiverr gigs? Please share your experience in the comments below.
