Step-By-Step Guide To Starting A $1000+ Per Month Fiverr Side Hustle
A little while ago I wrote an article titled “How I Built A $3000 Per Month Fiverr Side Hustle”. In that post I talked about my journey as a freelancer selling on the fiverr platform. Since publishing that post, a lot of people I shared it with have asked for tips on how to start their own fiverr side hustle…so I decided to write this, an attempt at a step by step beginners guide to starting as a freelancer on fiverr.
For some background, I’ve been selling copywriting services on fiverr for the past 1.5 years. It’s my side hustle, and I’ve gotten to the point where my hourly earnings rate consistently exceeds $150+ per hour, I have earned a total of just over $30,900 since starting out. It’s been an amazing way to supplement my income without spending hundreds of hours each month, and I think it’s something almost anyone else can do as well.
In this post my goal is to clearly outline every little step needed to grow a side hustle on fiverr to the point where you are able to generate over $1000 per month. I think that it’s reasonable for anyone to be able to get started with this guide, and selling on fiverr, in a weekend (if you commit to making it happen!)
A lot of these steps are supported by video tutorials I’ve published on my YouTube channel. I’ll do my best to link to the key videos that cover what you’ll want to do or work on for each step.
I’m hoping this can become something like a beginners handbook that people can follow to build a foundation, and eventually scale a profitable freelancing business on fiverr for themselves.
Enjoy!
Phase 1: Research, Skill Assessment, Pick a Niche
Step 1: The first step that anyone interested in making money on fiverr needs to take is to do some research. I can’t tell you how many people EXPECT to just create a fiverr account, publish a random gig, and have the money start rolling in. This rarely works.
The first thing you need to do is to spend some time getting a feel for the fiverr market by researching the various categories and types of services people are selling on the platform. There are hundreds of categories of services, and in each category there are many different niches that people specialize in; getting an understanding of what’s out there should be your first step.
Spend a few hours clicking through the different categories, and make note of gigs and sellers you see that you might be interested in for yourself.
Step 2: The second step that you need to take is to do a bit of a skill assessment. Most of us have full time jobs, and with full time work you’re often expected to do hundreds of different tasks on a daily basis. When offering services on fiverr it’s sometimes best to offer VERY specific services for sale, the reason being that it’s easier to sell things on the site that way.
For example, if you work as a customer service representative in your day job you probably take phone calls, write emails, resolve disputes for clients, draft up presentations, and many other things. When selling on fiverr, I’d recommend pinpointing a specific skill that you have experience in, and offering that as your gig. In the customer service representative example, maybe you could offer email writing, or PowerPoint presentation design, or cold calling/script writing services each as their own gig on fiverr.
If you’re having trouble figuring out which skills you possess that would be profitable to sell on fiverr, here’s a link to a video where I outline 7 skills that I think are currently in high demand. Check it out, and if any of these align with skills you think you already possess, that might be a great starting point for you.
Supporting YouTube Video: 7 Skills That You Can Sell On Fiverr
Step 3: Once you’ve done a bit of research and also spent some time thinking about the types of skills you possess that people might want to buy on fiverr it’s time to pick a niche. It’s very important to make sure you create some level of brand consistency across the different gigs that you offer. For example I specialize in copywriting, so all of the gigs I offer are related to copywriting in one way or another. This helps me to build authority and trust with buyers, as when they come across my profile they get the feeling that I am an expert in a specific niche.
Alternatively, if you don’t pick a niche and just offer a bunch of random gigs in different categories and niches, people might get the impression that you are not a specialist and might opt to work with a seller that is instead. This is my opinion, if you want to offer gigs in a bunch of different categories, you should do it. I just feel that in an ultra competitive market like fiverr, anything you can do to make yourself look better than the competition helps… and I think specializing in a niche is one of those things!
Supporting YouTube Video: How To Pick A Niche On Fiverr Based On Your Skills
Phase 2: Creating A Fiverr Profile And Publishing Your First Gig
Step 1: Once you know what you want to offer for sale on fiverr, you need to create your profile. It is SO important to spend time making sure your profile looks amazing. Your profile picture, description, the skills you list, these all need to be carefully thought out and written to give buyers the best first impression possible. I recommend using a headshot of yourself for your profile photo, fill out your description with information about you, your past experience, and the skills you can offer them, and also adding relevant skills and experience to the profile as well.
A lot of buyers rush through this, and because of that they don’t get as many orders as they would like. Your profile is sometimes the first place buyers go when deciding whether or not to hire you, it’s SUPER important. Below is a link to a playlist I’ve created on YouTube where I review, and provide tips and suggestions to help people improve their fiverr profiles (totally free), if you need help with this, check out that playlist and I’d be happy to help.
Supporting YouTube Video: Fiverr Profile Tips/Reviews
Step 2: After you’ve created a professional looking profile, you need to create and publish your first gig. Just like your fiverr profile, making sure that your gig looks professional and free of errors is crucial to having people actually purchase it. I recommend that you create a professional looking gig thumbnail that is both informative and looks nice. Include 2–3 samples of your absolute best work (if applicable) in the gallery section to help showcase your skills. And write a gig description that helps sell your services (include: what the gig includes, your experience, and why they should choose you).
Here are a couple of videos that walk you through the various steps of creating a solid fiverr gig yourself, if you struggle with design you can hire someone on fiverr to help you with that.
Supporting YouTube Video: How To Create A Fiverr Gig That Sells
Supporting YouTube Video: Tips From A Fiverr Graphic Designer Gig
Phase 3: Increasing Gig Impressions, And Getting Your First Order
Step 1: Increasing gig impressions
The most common thing I hear from new fiverr sellers is that it’s been a few weeks, or few months, and they still haven’t received any orders. This is a situation almost 100% of new fiverr sellers find themselves in, and it sucks, but you can fix this!
The misconception a lot of sellers have is that after you create your profile and gig, you just leave it alone and let the orders start rolling in.
WRONG! After you create your first gig, you need to monitor it to see if it’s actually generating any interest. If it is getting viewed, but people just aren’t buying, maybe your prices are too high, or you are just getting beat by the competition.
But if your gig is not getting interest, and impressions and views are low, you might want to consider modifying your gig to affect how visible it is in fiverr search. If you’re unfamiliar with SEO, this is what I’m talking about and it definitely applies to fiverr just like it does to sites trying to rank highly in google.
The first thing that I think you should do when trying to modify your gigs to improve their SEO is to search for keywords related to your gig, and review the gig titles and descriptions of other top sellers. Try to figure out what keywords they are including, and how they’ve formatted their gig descriptions, use this to create a unique gig description for yourself following a similar framework. Here’s a link that shows you exactly how to do this.
Supporting YouTube Video: Tweaking Your Fiverr Gigs To Get More Impressions
Supporting YouTube Video: Gig Tags That You Should Use On Fiverr
Step 2: Getting your first fiverr order
If your gig is getting impressions, and people are viewing it and messaging you but still no orders… we may be facing a “you” problem here. But not to worry, there are things you can do to help here. A lot of times people with little or no sales experience have trouble “closing the deal” so to speak on fiverr… and believe it or not, there is a need to “close” as a seller on fiverr, over 50% of my clients message me with questions and try to negotiate with me prior to actually placing an order.
Here’s a guide I created that talks about the 3 main types of buyers on fiverr, and strategies you can use to sell to them, a helpful starting point for anyone having trouble closing their first sale. Remember, you want to be helpful, patient, and provide as much value as possible… one thing buyers HATE is being rushed into making a purchase. (remember this)
Supporting YouTube Video: 3 Types Of Fiverr Buyers And How To Sell To Them
Phase 4: Increasing Your $ Earned Per Hour, Optimizing, And Growing Your Business
Assuming that you’ve gotten to this point, you’ve probably already have a bunch of fiverr orders coming in and your earnings are slowly starting to grow. That’s awesome, and congrats to you! But, everyone likes earning more money. Everyone likes making more per hour. And everyone certainly loves taking their business to new heights!
At this phase in your fiverr journey you’re going to want to start finding ways to save time completing projects, managing your fiverr workflow, and doing fiverr related things. It was at this phase in my fiverr experience that I was able to bump my earnings up from $40–70ish per hour to well over $100, $150, and even $200 per hour. I spent a bunch of time analyzing my workflow, tracking the amount of time it took to complete different order types, and streamlined how I communicated with my prospects.
Step 1: The first thing you’re going to want to do is start tracking your orders, by project type, gig, time to complete, and earnings per hour worked. Below is a video where I walk through the spreadsheet that I use to do this, check it out, I recommend that you create one for yourself and start tracking!
Supporting YouTube Video: Make $200+ Per Hour By Tracking Your Gigs
Step 2: The next thing you want to look at is how you can save time communicating with buyers, delivering orders, and doing repetitive tasks. I focused on automating (as much as possible) any communication with early phase prospects, who might have a lot of questions but are still a ways away from actually making a purchase. I used the fiverr quick response functionality to do this, I built templates that answered the most common buyer questions I was getting and almost instantly was able to save a lot of time every day answering repetitive buyer questions. Link below to a video showing the types of templates I use for my clients, take a look, and tweak or modify them to fit with your own buyer type.
Supporting YouTube Video: Use Fiverr Quick Responses To Your Advantage (Save Time)
Step 3: At this point, you should have a pretty well oiled machine going with fiverr. After you’ve found success and figured out a workflow that works for you and helps you optimize your earnings, you’re going to want to start thinking about expanding. One of the most obvious ways to do this is to offer new gigs for sale, adding up-sell opportunities through gig extras, and upping your prices (if possible).
When looking at new gigs that you can offer, I always recommend figuring out a new gig that is relevant (on brand) with the types of services you sell in your other gigs. For example, I started with email writing, and my second gig was linkedin message writing. Similar, but different enough that a buyer might be interested in buying both gigs from me.
New gigs are great, they allow you to build more SEO juice back to your profile, and also serve as another landing point for buyers to find you and make their way back to your profile and your other gigs.
I created a tutorial video that walks through the process I took to grow my copywriting business on fiverr, one of the steps in that tutorial outlines how to go about thinking about and launching a second, third, fourth gig and beyond. Link below, might be helpful for when you are ready to start launching additional gigs.
Step 4: Creating new gigs is great, but also upping your prices is something you should look into as you start to build authority, gain ratings, and progress through the fiverr levels. As you gain experience, your skills improve, better quality work costs money… and you should take advantage of that. My main gig started at $5 and is now priced at $35. Test the waters with small price increases to see how buyers react, keep creeping your pricing up until you get to a point where you think going any higher might cause you to lose business.
Conclusion: I know that this was a lot of text, but I hope it is super helpful for anyone looking at growing a business on fiverr. If I missed anything, or if you think there are steps that should be included here just let me know in the comments. Happy selling!
