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 by guest host Katie AKA “kymmypops”. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself today Katie?Katie: Hi guys. Yeah, I’m a top-rated and super seller on Fiverr and I sell videos and voiceovers and I’ve been a seller for a few years now. I joined back in January 2012.Redd: Well, thanks so much for being here today. Today we are talking about how do you get your business ready for the holidays. There’s a plethora of holidays coming up and we know that there are a lot of ways that you can make your Gigs more holiday-specific. So we thought that we would talk about that today and Katie, this is really one of those things that you’re great at. Can you tell us a little bit about how you handle holiday Gigs and how you create them?Katie: Sure. I absolutely love doing Gigs for the holidays. I think it’s a great way just to earn that extra bit of money. Of course you attract new customers. You get more tips. Everyone is more generous. So yeah, I really do enjoy working over the holidays as weird as that sounds. So I basically just listen to my customers. They say, “Oh, I love you doing your Christmas Gig when you dress up in a Santa outfit. Can you do one with the Easter?” or whatever.So a lot of the time it is just feedback from customers. So I will just listen to them and then I will create a new Gig and if it’s popular, I will be lucky to get featured or something like that, so yeah, just listening to what customers say really.Adam: So when you go ahead and create your Gig for the holiday, so let’s say we’ve got Halloween coming up, when you go ahead and create your Halloween Gig, what do you do with it after the holiday period? Do you deactivate it? Do you delete it for room for others or how do you handle that?Katie: I normally leave it up for probably about a week because you actually get a surprising number of orders coming through late if it has been someone’s birthday or you can say, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t make it.” So I do kind of leave up the Christmas one and stuff like that. But yeah, I normally do just then suspend it and then probably about a month before that holiday, I just reactivate it again.Redd: What other ways do you feel like you can customize your Gigs or other sellers can customize their Gigs towards a holiday focus?Katie: I think that everyone on Fiverr can edit their Gigs for the holidays or create new seasonal Gigs really. Even if you offer logos, you can make it seasonal by doing a Christmas hat or something like that or if you do voiceovers, you can do some spooky stuff for Halloween or pretty much anything. If you write poetry, anything, you can make it for the holidays.Redd: Have you guys found – I know that I found this a little bit last year. Do you guys find that you get a sales bump or a sales decrease in December?Katie: Bump.Redd: You do?Katie: Huge, like four times what I earn any other month will be in December. Busiest month, yeah.Adam: Yeah, I definitely see a bump in December. I’m not quite sure why because I don’t always offer that many holiday Gigs. So it’s always quite interesting but I think there’s a lot of increased traffic during the kind of later months where people have – coming on to the platform to see holiday Gigs, maybe stumble across other Gigs as well or specifically looking for those holiday Gigs.So I think it’s very important around the seasonal times even if you aren’t 100 percent sure about what you could potentially do is maybe just have a kind of standard holiday Gig. So you create a standard holiday Gig so the Gig URL just says a holiday or anything along those lines.Then each time a holiday comes up, try and tailor that specific Gig to each holiday. So you can tailor it to Halloween. You can tailor it to Christmas. You can tailor it to New Year’s and so on and so forth. So each time that you fancy doing maybe a holiday promotion, you can just activate this one Gig and have reoccurring or constant feedback on that.Redd: Yeah, that’s definitely a good idea because then you’re not – also you’re not scattering your feedback across multiple Gigs, so it will help you with the ranking of that one particular Gig. That’s a really good point.Adam: Well, I think the biggest drawback that I can see in holiday Gigs is that they’re absolutely fantastic when the holiday is on. But as Katie said, you keep up for a little bit while after the holidays finish for those latecomers. But after that point, you usually suspend the Gig and you’re unlikely to reactivate it until the same sort of time next year.So as a new buyer coming on to your profile and see in – let’s say you have a Christmas Gig. Come on to your profile and seeing your Christmas Gig, potentially it’s going to say the last feedback you received was a year ago and as a new buyer who may not have been on Fiverr before or who doesn’t realize that it was suspended, they may kind of wonder, “Is this Gig actually active? Is it that busy?” whereas if you had the one kind of holiday Gig that you tailored for each holiday, you would be receiving that constant feedback.So for Christmas, you maybe have feedback from thanksgiving. So we could see it’s maybe a month or two previous and before that, you would have Halloween again and the feedback would always kind of keep up-to-date.Redd: Yeah, definitely. I think there are so many avenues that you can structure it where you have ways to bring new people in, ways to increase your ranking in that one particular Gig and it really is. There are so many ways. I mean there’s a – even if you don’t want to get into like the big holidays, like Christmas or Easter or Hanukah, things like that. You can also look towards even the little ones like Memorial Day in the US. It’s actually like a pretty, pretty big holiday. So there’s little nuance things that you can possibly do that you might be able to make that Gig be a little more prevalent for those particular holidays.Adam: I think a standard Gig as well that you tailor would be very helpful for that because you have a limit at the moment obviously of how many Gigs you can add to your profile and if you were to try and cover as many holidays as possible, you would like to use up all of your Gig space whereas if you had one Gig that you tailored for each upcoming holiday, you would only use that one Gig space and you wouldn’t limit yourself. So that kind of leads me on to the question for Katie really which is, “When you go ahead and create your seasonal Gig, do you take the Gig you already have and just edit that to be holiday-specific or do you normally create a new Gig entirely?”Katie: Well, I have my seasonal Gigs which I kind of suspended as I said. So – but I do sort of revamp them. I do new video. I edit the description. I update it. So it looks new but then at the same time it will still have all of the hundreds of feedback and positive ratings from the years before. But I think it’s important to make it look new as Adam said so it doesn’t look like it has been sitting there for a while and no one has bought anything from it.Adam: Because I can imagine that when you – the holidays come up and you want to tailor your Gig. I can imagine that if the feedback might be quite old, there might be a part of you that is tempted to edit your – let’s say for example you have a logo design Gig and you have a Christmas logo Gig.Let’s say the Christmas logo Gig had feedback from a year ago and your logo design Gig is getting feedback every single day. I can imagine if you’re getting a lot of orders on that, there will be the temptation to convert that into the holiday Gig.But for me, I would be reluctant to do that because you could miss out on those buyers who don’t want the holiday. So I think it’s important to have the holiday version and the non-holiday version running simultaneously. To think if you convert your Gig to be specific for a holiday, you may miss out on those who don’t celebrate it.Redd: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think it’s really important to maintain your standard Gig for your regular clients because a lot of the times, clients don’t particularly like it when we change too much on our Gigs because they’re like, “What’s going on?” So yeah, I think two is good. Having two is good but I would say the same thing. I wouldn’t necessarily change my main Gig to suddenly be all about the holidays.Adam: You could put like a note in your main Gig though and say, “Want the holiday or the Christmas or the Halloween version of this Gig?” and then put a link through to your holiday version of it. So users are still coming on. You can maybe appeal to both markets then and on the same way on your holiday one, you could say, “Do you want the standard version of this Gig?” and then link through to the standard version.Katie: That’s what I normally do. But it’s like the same I do with voiceovers and I think by having kind of a – going against what you said – I do agree with it. It’s a great idea but then on the other hand, I have – I will do a voiceover for $5 which is just a standard one and it can be pretty much anything.But then I also have voicemails, video games, podcasts, radios, commercials. So I have lots of Gigs and I think these – it’s good to kind of spread it out because there are so many new buyers on the website. It’s good to kind of spread out as much as you can so you don’t get very down if you do just have that one voiceover Gig. You know what I mean?Adam: Yeah, I think the issue that you have there is when you have a lot of different Gigs normally and it comes to the holidays. You have to kind of be quite ruthless in which services you want to offer for the holidays because you’re limited by how many you can create.Redd: I had a quick peek around the site today and I found some really, really interesting Christmas Gigs that I had never thought about existing. So I thought it would be kind of cool if we shared some of those. I found this really – this one that I really, really love. It’s from a user called “ceeworks” and they will put your logo or message inside a snow globe, which I think is absolutely adorable.Adam: I think looking at that, the snow globe Gig, it’s a really great Gig and it really attracts the attention. But it falls under one of those problems where when you create such a unique Gig, where can you list it? And currently it’s inside the Other category on Fiverr. Now the Other category on Fiverr gets less traffic than other categories simply because usually if the user knows what they’re looking for, they will go to that category for it.So in the other category, you rely on kind of passing trades because it’s quite unlikely that the user is going to go into the search bar and type in “I want a Christmas message inside a snow globe.” That’s not really something that they’re going to think of. But when they see it, they’re going to want to order it. So I think this Gig here, it’s absolutely fantastic. I think it highlights the importance of tagging your Gig and being up-to-date on what holidays or what holiday tags Fiverr are currently featuring on the forum or maybe inside the blog to make sure that you do show up in those relevant searches.Talking about holiday Gigs that I love, I’ve come across one from the user “puppychao,” where they will create an ornamental, like a plush toy maybe for your pet or just to have it as a plush specifically for the Christmas season. Now the thing I love about this Gig is that it really captures the imagination. It’s not as standard as maybe other holiday Gigs you may come across but it also could stand alone as its own Gig outside of the holiday period. So they have the ability there to swap in between and maybe choose how they want to offer that service.Redd: What about you Katie? Do you have any that you really like?Katie: I was just having a look at them. There’s a cute one I like. It’s from a user called “uncandiedvalley,” American seller level two and it’s “I will record a Santa Claus voiceover for $5,” and I just think that’s really cute, you know. If you have a kid or something, that would be amazing. I would have loved to have gotten that.Adam: I think I still like one now to be honest.Redd: Yeah, definitely.Adam: So I think these are great examples of how you can have very specific holiday Gigs like the Santa Claus voiceover but then you can also have Gigs that can maybe stand on their own inside or outside of the holiday like the plush cushion option as well.So I think there are some really great different options available and whenever you’re trying to look to create a holiday Gig yourself or you maybe think at yourself, “Well, I’m not really sure what I can do,” I highly recommend having a look, searching the tags, looking through things like holiday, Christmas, Halloween, Hanukah, et cetera, and could get a feel for what other sellers are able to do with their Gigs.Redd: Yeah, definitely. There’s so much inspiration that can be taken from the site and from what you guys are already doing, so I’m totally copying you. So have you guys ever bought holiday Gigs on Fiverr?Adam: I actually did a few years ago. I was a member of a Facebook group who are all kind of Fiverr sellers and we all decided it would be really fun to do a secret Santa and Katie was actually a part of that group as well. We all decided that it would be a great idea to – yeah, do a secret Santa and buy each other Gigs from the Fiverr platform for the holidays.Katie: It was so much fun. I can’t remember the name of mine but I got something for Angie which is seller “madmoo”. I think I got this guy wearing a Christmas hat and putting like chocolate on his belly. Like he was shirtless and oh my gosh, I know she loved it.Adam: I feel mine was quite subdued now because I remember I got one for “guitario” and he was a guitar player and he just made his first logo like a week beforehand. So I went onto the platform and I ordered him a video animation of the holidays. So his logo came up on the screen with like snow and Christmas music as an animation and I think he really liked that.Redd: That’s a really, really great idea for anyone, like any group of people. Like I mean talk about a great way to set yourself up a limit on how much you’re going to spend on people. That’s a fantastic idea to do secret Santa that way. That’s amazing. I’m so sad I missed it.Adam: It’s a fun challenge as well because there’s obviously so much on Fiverr. You just don’t know what you can get. So I mean none of us ended up buying each other the same present at all and it was so much fun to go through all the different options available.Katie: It was so good especially the build-up and then sort of on Christmas when everyone sort of opened …Adam: Oh, yeah, we had a release day on Christmas. Yeah.Katie: So it was so good. But it doesn’t just have to be – well, I got like a kind of creepy one but it was amazing. But I even got kind of more sensitive Gigs through there. It was my brother’s birthday around Christmas when I got him and his girlfriend a portrait done and I have given gifts loads on Fiverr. I love the artwork on there but it doesn’t just have to be weird stuff which we normally did.Adam: Yeah. I remember I bought my dad a wine holder as well. I remember there was a seller who took a piece of wood and crafted it so it wasn’t – into a self-standing wine holder. She put the wine inside it and it balances by itself and he really liked that.Katie: Oh wow. That sounds cool.Adam: I didn’t tell him it costs $5 though.Redd: Let’s hope he doesn’t listen to the podcast else you have been outed.Katie: Hi Adam’s dad!Redd: All right. Well, that’s about all we have time for today. I want to say a big thank you to Katie for joining us. You can find her on Fiverr as “kymmypops”. Our jingle was made by “customdrumloops” AKA Ryan. We were edited today by Dansha and don’t forget if you have any community questions or you just want to share some awesome holiday Gigs, you can find threads for that on the forum at forum.Fiverr.com. Thanks so much and we will see you next week.
