Freelancer Tips

Fiverrcast Episode 1: Fiverr in Hours

By
Fiverr Team
|
August 28, 2015
fiverrcast episode 1

Transcript

Below is the transcription for Fiverrcast Episode 1: Fiverr in Hours.Redd: Hello and welcome to Fiverrcast, the official Fiverr podcast for sellers by sellers. My name is Redd AKA reddhorrocks and I’m a voiceover artist, a Fiverr® super seller and an ambassador. I’ve been a seller on Fiverr since January of 2013. I started out as a part-timer. I’m now a Fiverr seller fulltime and I’m delighted to be hosting Fiverrcast.Adam: And I’m Adam AKA twistedweb123, also a Fiverr seller and ambassador on Fiverr. I specialize in web programming and design, having initially registered all the way back in 2010. With almost five years under my belt, I’m happy to be sharing my knowledge and experience with like-minded sellers and the capacity as host.Redd: This is the inaugural episode of Fiverrcast, a new podcast where we delve into the ins and outs of being a seller on Fiverr. We will be bringing you a new episode every week covering a range of topics as well as answering questions from the community and speaking with guests about their own experiences.Adam: In today’s podcast, we’re going to be covering the topic of Fiverr in hours, how we go about managing our time, along with our balance of work-life we may have outside of Fiverr, our family and any other commitments we may have going.Redd: So Adam, tell me what your work day looks like.Adam: My work day can vary from day to day but that’s the great thing about Fiverr where you could wake up to one order. You could wake up to 10 orders. There are so many tools available with that. I think the true way to get to balance is to make sure you’re always ahead of your queue. So if you’re waking up with nothing on that day, you can really prioritize how you’re going to work.Redd: And I think I do a similar thing. I generally start my day with answering all of my admin work. So I will get up in the morning. I will grab my coffee. I will spend 45 minutes or so just getting my stuff together, answering client questions, looking on any modifications that have come through from the night before and then it depends on what I’m doing. If I’ve got an event that I have to go to or I’m having lunch with a friend, I can get all of my work done ahead of time and I can build myself what I like to call a buffer. So I can get work done ahead of time to give me space in my queue in order to live my life.Adam: Yeah, I think that’s definitely a better way to go ahead and do that. However, I will say you’re a lot more organized than me spending 45 minutes in the morning answering questions.Redd: Well, that’s how long it takes me to drink enough coffee to wake up. So there’s that.Adam: Oh, OK.Redd: So what do you do when you’ve got more work than you expect? How do you work that into your day?Adam: I will be honest. I approach Fiverr in a very analytical sense. I record every single thing I do to make sure that I’m working at maximum capacity. So if I’ve got 10 orders or if I’ve got 100 orders, I mark the time it takes me to do one order at that time and if I’m busy, I just look to increase that. So if I know I’m very busy and I’ve got say 50 orders to do in one day, I will make sure that I am doing an average of each order per – let’s say five to ten minutes maximum, where if I’m quieter, I will give myself a bit more leeway to do that. So I often only associate so much time per day to do the work. It’s just about how quick I will work in that time period.Redd: So do you ever find that you will have family interrupting you? How do you handle it when your plan gets thrown out the window?Adam: I’ve gone through two births with Fiverr still active with no vacation mode at that point in time and I will say it was very interesting. It’s just something I powered through because the only thing I thought was whilst you have busy days, it’s how you handle those busy days and manage to have a couple of late nights or a couple of early mornings. That’s how you define yourself as a great Fiverr seller because it shows that you’re in it for the long run and you’re taking it as serious as you should be to make sure you succeed.Redd: That’s really, really impressive that you went through two births. I mean wow.Adam: You could say that to my partner, not me to be honest. I think it was harder on her than it was on me. I think there was a time where – I think the second birth had the Fiverr app available and there were a few stares and hand squeezing going on. So I think today as well to help with the discussion, we’re going to bring in a guest speaker or another Fiverr seller available who is Tom and we shall bring him into the call and he can go ahead and introduce himself. Hi there Tom. How are you doing today?Tom: I’m good. Thank you. My name is Tom. I’m the graphic designer behind newbold3d and I work on Fiverr. I’m a top-rated seller, super seller and I’m also a Fiverr ambassador and so yeah, fire your questions.Redd: So we talked a little bit about what my day looks like and what Adam’s day looks like. What does your day look like as far as your Fiverr schedule? How do you fit everything in?Tom: Well, I really enjoy my bed. So I spend a lot of the morning in bed reading through my messages, going through modifications, and then I will get up and get ready and put some clothes on and then I will sit down on my desk and I work a good six hours on designing.Adam: Being a graphic designer, you must receive quite a lot of modification requests. So how do your handle those requests in regard – in comparison to new orders? I imagine if for example you have 10 orders one day, and you had 10 orders the previous day. If four of those came back and asked for modifications, you would almost – you have 14 orders more than normal. So how do you juggle them in your queue?Tom: Well, I tend to go through my modification requests early on in the morning just to make sure they are out of the way and then if I have a bit of spare time in the evening, I will go through just to check if there’s any more modifications needed doing or if not, they will just have to wait until the morning.Adam: So you allocate specific time for modifications.Tom: Yes, you could say that. Yes.Adam: OK, that’s quite a good idea.Redd: Does that mean that if you don’t have any modifications, you just sit and watch TV?Tom: Party, yeah. Yeah. So I kind of split – I mean we have the orders that are active and need doing. We have modifications and we have messages. So I kind of split those into groups and go through each category at once.Adam: That sounds like a good idea because I – at the moment, I do modification requests as soon as possible when they come in and it can really throw me off my work process where I may be really in the zone of completing new Gigs and then I have three come back with modification requests and you just get thrown off and a bit disheartened I find.Tom: Yes. It’s all about focus. I mean I think doing it the way you’ve just said can break your focus up a lot.Adam: Definitely. I think I’m going to take …Tom: So yeah, you want to get into the zone of designing. Then you want to get into the zone of being top customer service person and then you want to be in the zone of making modifications and yeah.Redd: I think I do a similar thing to you Tom because generally what I will do is I will do answering all my client emails and then I will do my pick-ups which is my modifications as a voiceover person. But then I will usually – I won’t start my main recording for the day until maybe three or four hours later. So I have a nice big chunk where I can get on my errands run and all of my other stuff done and then I tend to work into the evening rather than during the day.But I see what you’re saying. It really does – if you’re in the middle of doing what you’ve been doing and then all of a sudden, you’ve got to backtrack to something you’ve already filed away as completed in your brain, it can take a minute to switch them back again.Tom: Yes, certainly. All right. It’s interesting here that you do your work later in the evenings. So you spend your day doing events and activities and well, that’s the great thing about Fiverr. It can really fit around your life.Redd: Yeah, I work – I mostly work in the evenings because my other half works an evening job. So instead of him working the 9:00 to 5:00, he works 3:30 to midnight. So I try and keep the same work schedule as him which I normally if I wasn’t doing something like Fiverr, I wouldn’t be able to do. But it means schedules can match up. So when we have stuff to do during the day, we can do it together.Adam: I work in the evenings mainly as well because I have a young family. So I spend a lot of the time with my two young children and my partner and then I usually crack down to work properly maybe about 6:00, 7:00 PM. The rest of the day I might target and I will look at messages, respond to anything but I’m not properly working until evening time.Tom: Yes, there are also those late-nighters as well when you get a few too many orders in or …Redd: So what’s the latest you guys have ever stayed up working?Tom: Oh, wow. I think in the early days, when it was $5 per Gig, there’s no extras. I think then I had a massive influx of orders and I must have been up at least 24 hours getting those orders done. My time management wasn’t great back then either but yeah, so probably – I probably stayed until 12:00 midday.Adam: Mine was when I first got made a super seller, I was the first super seller. So I had no idea what it would entail or what would happen and I got a message from Natalie the community manager at the time just giving me a heads up that I was going to be the super seller and I think that message came in about 10:00 AM.The blog was up by midday and within an hour, I had over a hundred orders with no idea it was going to happen. I didn’t change my delivery time of two days. I didn’t change anything at all and I was absolutely swamped. I believe I worked for something like 39 hours straight to catch up and the irony was I made a lot of good revenue over that time. It was really great but I also broke my laptop. So it kind of evened out in the end to where I broke my laptop and I had to buy a new one for that.Tom: Oh, dear.Redd: Wow.Tom: That kind of cancels that out then.Adam: It was interesting because it was also only a couple of days after my son was born as well. So it was a very interesting, busy time.Redd: Well you’re the definition of when it rains it pours, aren’t you?Adam: I think so.Tom: And yourself Redd?Redd: I think that the latest I have stayed up working is probably like – I’ve had a few days where it has been like 3:00 AM and it’s hard for me because there’s a limit to how much talking I can do before I start to lose my voice.So those are always fun times when I’m up until 3:00 and I’ve been recording for maybe 10 hours and you start to get a little rough around the edges and you have to do a couple more retakes. But that generally for me happens if I will suddenly get an enormous order that I don’t know that I’m going to get.So I don’t check my orders in advance. I just go through whatever the next one is in my queue and occasionally I will open up my queue and it will be 10,000 words and I will be like, oh, well, I didn’t see that coming. So I guess I will get that done.Adam: So being one of the biggest voiceover sellers on Fiverr and also managing your time, I’m sure a lot of people are wondering what do you do on those occasions where you may have a sore throat or a bad voice or even have a cold. How would you manage your orders in that sort of scenario?Redd: Well, that’s one of the things about Fiverr is we don’t really get sick days here and I really tend to avoid stopping working because my customers have come to rely on me. I have a lot of repeat business. It’s generally all about being very, very careful in my recordings. If I have lost my voice or I’ve got a cold, it just takes me a lot longer to work. I also firmly believe in cough syrup, cough drops and hot toddies are awesome. I make mine with fireball whiskey. I highly recommend it.Yeah, you don’t really get sick days. So you just have to kind of push through. There have been a couple of times where I’ve had to come to a client and been like, hey, I’m really, really sorry. I’ve just lost my voice. I’m going to need a minute and they tend to be extremely understanding because they too are human and recognize that you are as well, so yeah.Adam: And I imagine as well if you have that buffer that we talked about previously, that can help with that because if for example you came down with a migraine and a really sore throat rather randomly and you just couldn’t fix it that day, you have always kind of got that buffer where you can take away – take the day off, come back to it the day after and hope everything is fine.Redd: Well, sometimes for me I do have an extra fast delivery option which is a one-day option. So a lot of the time, I have to deliver work anyway.Adam: I used to have the one-day option but I changed it specifically for two days because I realized that I couldn’t always guarantee one day whilst I could 90 percent of the time. If something did come up or a friend invited me to go to a pub or a restaurant or something, I realized that I couldn’t actually do that because some of the work I was doing such as video recording could only be done at certain hours of the day when I had good background noise.So I was finding that if a client say ordered at 7:00 PM and I was out for the evening, I couldn’t get it done before 7:00 PM the next day. So I had to change that for two days just to make that easier for me.Redd: Yeah, that makes sense for you. See, that’s the benefit of recording is I can do it at any time of the day but yeah, I mean there’s a pressure though for sellers I’m sure to have that one-day delivery especially for me. My particular category is extremely competitive. It’s necessary for my clients and a lot of the time, my clients will have work that they need immediately and that’s – it’s not exactly my fault but it’s one of those things that I do have to try and accommodate and again, in a competitive category, it’s hard not to. So if you two are going to give your biggest piece of advice for how to handle time management on Fiverr, if there was one thing you guys could tell our listeners, what would you tell them?Tom: Don’t drain your energy because it’s often very tempting to – I would say burning a candle at both ends. When you’ve got a list of Gigs in queue and you see the revenue there, it’s very tempting to just work 24/7. But then your work quality is going to suffer and your clients will start to notice. So I will just make sure that you’re taking that time off and time away from the computer and time off from work.Adam: I think that’s some great advice because like you say, the fact you could see orders upcoming. You could earn that money if you stayed up later and carried it forward. I think that’s some great advice because I am probably quite guilty of doing that myself and there have been a few late mornings where either I’ve woken up late or I’ve worked to – I was a little bit too tired and maybe quality has gone down. So I think that’s a great piece of advice.Tom: Yeah. It’s very tempting.Adam: Mine would probably be as you’ve probably – as you’ve already discussed with me to have the buffer. So there has been a few times where I’ve been on Fiverr and I had things at my –children being born at both unexpected days. Neither of them were when they’re meant to turn up.So having the buffer allowed me to have that kind of emergency because as Redd points out, with Fiverr, you have nothing such as sick days or leave on the day if you needed to. So whilst you can message your buyers and most will understand and be thankful for that, creating that buffer for yourself does make time management a lot easier because you’ve always got that buffer to help you no matter what. How about yourself Redd?Redd: I think that my biggest piece of advice for people is to stay on top of your communication. It’s very, very important of course to build your buffers and to get your orders done on time. But at the end of the day, for my clients, one of the most important things is for them to know that I’m communicating with them. So having that time set aside especially in the beginning of the day to make sure that I’m communicating with my clients, that helps because then if for some reason it’s going to take me a minute to get to something, my clients understand because I’ve already told them, hey, I will have this retake for you. I’m back in the studio at 4:00. I will take care of it then. Then you don’t find you’ve got all these times during the day where you’re responding to clients saying, “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?”Adam: No, that sounds fantastic as well. I think most clients are quite – they give a lot more leeway than people were to imagine that they do. So I think as long as you say – as long as you’re communicating with them and you’re being honest about what’s going on, when it’s happening, and all this kind of other areas of that, I think clients can be great in understanding how you handle your own schedule as long as you communicate that to them.Redd: Yeah, definitely. I mean again everyone is human and it’s good to remind everyone of that.Adam: OK. So we’ve covered the topic and we’ve now got a few questions from the community which hopefully we’re going to be able to answer today. I will throw the first one open I think to Redd which is from Angela. I just joined Fiverr and put up my Gig. How do I get new sales?Redd: I think this is one of the most commonly asked questions in the community on Fiverr. It’s always scary when you start something new and any new business is going to take time to build. You have to gain a reputation. You have to gain reviews and you have to keep working at it and be patient.As far as getting your first sales when you start on Fiverr, one of the best things I think you can do is your own social media. If you’re offering something new and exciting, tell your friends. You never know who you’re going to have that know someone who just told them they need that. Start there. Start with your community and then start to expand it. But it’s all about patience.When I started, I got my first order maybe three or four days after I signed up. But it took me two and a half years of work to get to where I am today and I am certainly not your typical seller. So patience, dedication, customer service, social media. That’s my best advice for that.Adam: OK. Do you have any comments on that Tom?Tom: No, that sounds very good. It’s very important to get very good feedback early on so over-delivering is very – it’s essential. Sometimes it can feel like you’re not being paid your worth in the beginning, but you really got to impress your clients.Adam: So you put in the – the over-effort in early on to reap the benefits in the long run.Tom: Yes, correct.Adam: OK. So the next question we have is from Ana who says, “If you could change one thing on Fiverr, what would it be?” I’m going to throw that one to Tom.Tom: I’d love to see a way to charge more than the base $5 which is going to really – it’s going to allow you to accept more orders because sometimes you will get – clients ask for a little bit too much for $5 because the $5 isn’t a lot, let’s face it. So being able to set your Gigs at say $25 is going to be a great help. I mean that’s five times the base. So yes, that would be what I would change and hopefully can see.Adam: OK. So do you have any of the community questions, Redd?Redd: Sure. I have a really good one from Joe. How important are Gig videos? What do you think Adam?Adam: There have been studies previously that have said Gig videos can earn up to 200 percent more sales. Now, what I found with this is the key to that statistic is the fact that it’s up to 200 percent.So I’ve often had people say to me, “Should I have a video? Will it increase my sales?” And the fact is that usually putting a video on, just by having a video would increase your sales. However, it does very much depend upon what the quality of that video is. There are some Gigs that don’t really warrant having a video and by having a video there, they can actually distract away from the message.An example of that are certain services we’ve seen that could be along the lines of social media, marketing, and certain other elements like this where the people don’t necessarily need to see the service represented to them.They already understand it. But in other areas where we’re talking about things like actual video marketing or we’re talking about voiceovers or graphic design or a whole host of – the majority of other services, having a video is very important to increasing your sales and we have as I say seen examples where it will affect your orders up to 200 percent.So I personally have the video enabled on I think maybe about 70 percent of my actual services and I have seen a difference there compared to when it’s disabled.Redd: I can definitely see what you’re saying about some services don’t necessarily require Gig videos. But do you think there’s something to be said for having them anyway just as an attention grabber?Adam: I think if you’re going to appear on video yourself, I think then yes, definitely have a video because representing yourself to the buyer is a great way to create that personal connection and build a subconscious level of trust and kind of set the tone of your service. But I think what a lot of sellers will fall into is that they feel they really need a video no matter what and they often maybe end up putting the video that is the same as a lot of other videos on the platform. So it doesn’t really add anything to their service and rather than make them stand out and look different, they actually kind of blend in more to the crowd.Redd: Ah, that’s a good point.Adam: But certainly I think if you’re going to appear on video which I would highly recommend, you should do and I would put that up.Tom: Yeah, because I think it’s very easy to forget that you’re dealing with another person on the other side of the screen. So if you’ve got a video though of yourself, you’re kind of reminding the buyer that they’re actually dealing with a real person, a human being, and they’re likely to treat you better as well I think.I mean when I first – before I got there, had a video up, I did get a lot of nasty clients. But now they’ve seen me and know I’m a person. They speak to me and treat me more like a person as well.Adam: Well, that’s a great point to mention because we’ve come to the end of time now and we’ve asked all the questions available. But that’s a great point to mention because we will actually be covering that in more detail on next week’s show when we look at the topic of customer service and how we approach that.We at Fiverrcast are running a competition looking for our own version of the Fiverr logo. The competition is open to submissions with some fantastic prizes up for grabs. For more information and submission guidelines, head over to forum.Fiverr.com.Redd: Thank you so much for joining us today on Fiverrcast. Thanks to Tom for being our guest. A special thank you to Ryan AKA customdrumloops for composing our jingle. We were edited today by Landon Grace. Be sure to join us next week when we discuss the importance of customer service. If you would like to send us in a community question, you can do so by going to our thread on forum.Fiverr.com.Transcription by Transexpert.

Fiverr Team
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