Freelancer Tips

Fiverrcast Episode 8: Working Through Language Barriers

By
Fiverr Team
|
October 13, 2015

Transcript

Redd: Hello and welcome to Fiverrcast, the official Fiverr podcast for sellers, by sellers. My name is Redd aka reddhorrocks.Adam: And I’m Adam AKA twistedweb123. Today we’re joined with special guest host Marco. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself Marco?Marco: Hi everybody. I’m Marco AKA mark74 on Fiverr. I’m a friendly Italian father, IT Gig developer. I’m on Fiverr for more than three years. Some users can know me because I’m also a Fiverr forum moderator and being a super seller and currently a top-rated seller and a Fiverr ambassador. Yeah, a lot of badges and pins I’m proud of.Redd: So today, we’re going to be talking about the barriers that people on Fiverr face when English is not their first language and Marco, your first language is Italian. Correct?Marco: Yes, correct.Redd: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about different challenges that you faced being someone who has had to learn English more recently and get better more recently partly because of Fiverr?Marco: Well, Redd, when you enter Fiverr, you know that you’re not going to speak or write your language because Fiverr is international. So you have to speak the most common language, so English. Naturally, we have different knowledge of English. Someone knows a little more, someone a little less.The first thing you have to face is to present yourself to the community. So maybe you can set up a Gig. What about the script? Not everyone is able to write correctly in English and maybe you can find it scary. You can find plenty of errors in it. So the first problem is trying to write something that people can understand and something people can like so they can notice you and buy your Gig.So the first problem is, “Should I write my own script or should I hire someone else to do it for me?” Second big problem, Fiverr tells us that having a video can boost up your sales about 200 percent. So maybe you want to record a video but if you’re having some trouble writing in English where you can go back, correct and type it again, that’s not true for the video while you’re in front of the camera and you have to talk English.So for a non-native English speaker, that could be really scary because you have two problems, your English and the camera. Not everyone is comfortable in front of the camera. So you can find a lot of sellers having problems and maybe they come to the forum being a moderator. I read a lot of threads about new sellers introducing themselves and asking for some tips about their Gigs, asking, “What do you think about my Gig? How can I improve my script?” And that’s the first problem you have. I don’t know. You’re on the forum, Redd, you too. Did you notice this?Redd: Yeah, I think there are a lot of people on the forum that like to come there for advice on their Gig descriptions and I think it is extremely important to have a fluid and fluent Gig description even if English is not your first language because that really is the first opportunity people have to experience you or to understand who you are.Yeah, I think if it’s not your first language, it’s a good idea sometimes to see if you can find someone else to check it for you. So either finding someone on the forum or hiring a professional scriptwriter. I think both are very good resources for polishing your Gig description if you’re worried about your language skills.Adam: I think there’s an actual flipside to that as well and I think sometimes you got to keep in mind from the buyer’s perspective and how they’re going through the order process and I think it’s important that even if you do hire a professional scriptwriter or someone to write your description for you, that it still has your kind of personality and your mannerisms in it because often you may hear or find that buyers may order a Gig that’s written in complete perfect English, very, very high quality. But then when they place the order and the seller is obviously maybe not as strong in English, they can still communicate, but they may struggle. That could be kind of quite confusing to the user, in the buyer’s point of view.So I think it’s quite important to kind of have that middle ground of still presenting yourself as a proud Italian, in your case Marco, but helping out with some of the vocabulary or some of the words that may be difficult.Marco: Let me tell you my story because yeah, you’re completely right and because it’s not necessary to present too with perfect English if you then cannot write or talk a perfect English. Almost three years ago, I decided to record my video just because – you know, to boost my sales. So what to do? I’m scared. I know my English is little. I can write better than I can talk and I’m really scared of being in front of a camera.So my first idea is no, I cannot shoot my video. I had to hire someone. I searched for some sellers and I found one and we talked a little bit and so he recorded the video not pretending to be me. I asked him. You’re not me. You’re talking about me, what I do.He did a good job. I really liked it and when I uploaded my video on Fiverr, I received an email telling me that the video was not good because it wasn’t me in front of the camera. Now you can understand how I felt. I felt lost because I realized I had to shoot my video but really I couldn’t.So I run my story on the forum and that was my real first contact with the Fiverr community because I felt the power of a community. When I run my story, really there were a lot of users coming back to me, supporting me and telling me, “Marco, never mind if your English is not good. Don’t be scared. Try recording the video. Be yourself. Never mind what happens.”If you’re you on the video, people understand who you are, what you do, and so go on. I really felt the power and this support let me to think maybe I could try to shoot my video. So I went back to the seller who recorded the video for me and asked him to write down the script. I read the script and decided it wasn’t good for me because it was good if someone else is talking about me but then I wanted to say something more personal.I wanted to tell my story. I wanted to be me. So I turned my camera on and I started recording. I had to redo it maybe 30 or 40 times. I was so scared and I was mixing sentences because, you know, I had a general script. But then I decided to tell what I was thinking and finally I recorded my video. The one, the only one I do for my main Gig and maybe you can laugh watching it. But that’s really me.I uploaded it and it went online. You know what happened? After a few weeks, my sales really boosted and I was – I received the super seller badge. In these days on Fiverr, I read about – I read the thread telling that you don’t need a video to be successful on Fiverr, to have a high rating.I was thinking about this thread because in part, I agree with this. You don’t need a video to be successful. I think several TRS don’t have a video and they really – they sell a lot of Gigs and they are successful. But, you know, an image is not a video. I think naturally this is just my opinion and maybe it’s different from yours. But with the video, you can be yourself and you can establish a connection with your buyers.You can be yourself. You can show your passion. You can show your attitude. It’s not only that you present your Gig but you present yourself. Just to close my story, when I receive some Gig, there have been buyers writing part of my video script as a feedback.That means a couple of things, that they watched the video and say – and they liked what they were saying because they did realize I was saying something true, something personal.Adam: I think a very big kind of misconceptional – a very big thing that people often forget is they think that when you create a video, it has to be the best possible video that it could ever be and it has to be really, really, really professional. But on somewhere like Fiverr where it all starts at the same price points, so it’s quite difficult to undercut someone and where a lot of people offer the same sort of services, people kind of forget that it’s not just about as you say the service you’re buying. It’s about who you’re buying it from.So if you’re more likely to present yourself as yourself, you’re much more likely I should say to have that engagement with your audience. So it kind of – a simple way to think about it is to think about it as if you were going shopping. One shop sold let’s say a tomato and the other shop sold a tomato. Both are at the exact same price. What makes you choose one of the shops? That comes down to the brand recognition and kind of liking that place.So by appearing on video yourself or just presenting yourself, even with a photo of yourself, is a great way to engage with your potential buyers a lot more than kind of maybe shying away from the fact that English isn’t your first language.Redd: I think it’s important to remember that every seller on Fiverr is unique and every buyer on Fiverr is unique. So you are – you’re creating more of a connection between two people rather than necessarily buying from a large corporation and putting a face on that. It’s extremely important. I know for me there’s a lot of places that I choose to shop either online or offline and I shop there because I like the people.A good example of that, I’m currently shopping for my wedding dress and I went to one big, huge store with a whole bunch of people and I found a dress and I loved it. I thought I was going to buy it and then I went to this tiny little store run by this one woman and she was so nice and so amazing and so wonderful that I found a completely different dress, loved that dress more because she was the one selling it to me and that’s the dress I’m going to buy.So it’s the same on Fiverr. It’s important to take the time to have a personal connection with your buyer regardless of whether your first language is English. It’s a good tip for everyone. Marco, what do you think about people who aren’t English or American or aren’t from a primary English country trying to represent themselves as though they are?Marco: Well, this is a general mistake. This is a common mistake because as Adam said, if you present yourself being from USA or UK, but you are from maybe an Eastern country, after a couple of messages, you realize you’re not saying the truth.If I tried to establish a connection with you and I realize you’re lying, I don’t buy from you anymore. So I prefer someone writing me in a really bad English but trying to do his best or her best, trying to explain maybe – if you write perfect English, maybe you can agree for a Gig with two or three messages. OK?If your English is not that good, maybe you have to go on. Maybe it takes a little longer to agree to fully understand what you need or what you offer. But it’s OK.Redd: All right. Well, let’s move on over to our question and answer portion and we’ve got one really, really great question that I think I would love for us all to weigh in on today. It’s from Roselinefergie and she says, “Hi friends. If you can assist me, how can I get my account back up to 90 percent so I can take part in buyer requests or is there any platform where I can advertise my Gig to boost my sales? Does anyone have suggestions on what I need to do?”What I think has happened with this particular seller is that they have had a couple of instances of bad feedback and their feedback has dropped down below the 90 percent threshold, which is pretty scary when that happens. I mean everyone at some point will have to deal with a negative review.So I think the big question here is, “How do you go about recovering from negative feedback?” What do you think about that Adam?Adam: I think in this case, it’s a case of if I got for example one negative feedback today, it wouldn’t have a massive impact on my Gigs because I’ve had so many sales. But I think when you start off and maybe you get a few negatives or it doesn’t go quite right, it can really be detrimental to your account because you can drop below 90 percent easily if you have say one negative in your first 10 orders because you’re still getting used to the platform.So in my mind there, the biggest recommendation that I would have is to reach out to your previous buyers, the ones who weren’t happy and see if you could potentially come to an arrangement where you could perhaps provide additional work or if you could provide a refund to try and get your account back up because let’s say for example you may lose $4 or $8 or a $16 order as a low-rated seller early on. The fact that you’re at 90 percent, that could see you miss out on sales for quite a long time until you get back up to that amount and could start off buyer requests and everything else.So if it’s going to take you say two, three weeks to get back to 90 percent to do buyer requests, but you could refund two buyers today to get back to that percentage, I think it’s very important to reach out in the early stages to try and get enough feedback under your belt. So a negative here and there isn’t going to be detrimental to you.Redd: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s important to provide opportunities to the – it’s about providing an opportunity to your buyer to rectify the situation. So, yeah, it’s really easy to get angry or upset if you have negative feedback especially if you don’t feel that you deserve it. But it’s really important to reach out and find out if you’re not sure what went wrong. Find out what went wrong. I’ve got thousands of orders under my belt and I still do this.If I get any kind of lower-rated, basically lower-rated than five stars, for me I will reach out to my client and find out what happened because it’s really important to me to have perfect customer satisfaction. It’s not even necessarily about my rating. I want to make sure that every single client I have leaves with a happy experience.So yeah, and sometimes it has been something like a miscommunication where they thought I provide a service that I don’t, things like that. So I think yeah, the first – step number one is definitely reach out and see if you can rectify the situation rather than – and do that quickly because at some point, feedback – I think it’s only a couple of days after feedback is left that you can no longer edit it.So I think it’s very important to get right on top of it, talk to your buyer and see if there’s something that can be done to make sure that both of you end up being happy with the situation. What about you Marco? How do you handle that?Marco: Well, talking with your buyer, try to understand if it’s your fault or if it’s just something that you didn’t agree, something that went wrong. I think 99 percent of the problems can be solved just by being honest and talking, writing, trying to explain. If you feel there’s no way out of this, OK, accept it and leave it on your back and go on, straight on, trying to offer a good service in the future so your percentage can rise again.Redd: All right. Well, that’s all that we have time for today. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks so much to Marco for joining us. You can find him on Fiverr as “mark74”. If you have a question for us and would like us to answer it on the air, you can find our community questions option at forum.Fiverr.com. Our jingle today is by Ryan AKA customdrumloops and we were edited today by Dansha. Thanks so much and we will see you next week.Transcription by: Transexpert

Fiverr Team
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