Introduction
Fiverr has taken the internet by storm. There is really no other way to say it. This little freelancing platform that could has totally transformed people’s expectations of getting and providing freelance services through an online exchange format.
It seems that Fiverr has solved the two most common problems freelance platforms have historically struggled with. Fiverr not only offers a ton of services from a wide range of eager providers from all over the world, but it also is able to pull in lots of buyers.
When you put these two factors together, it is no surprise that Fiverr has become the “go to” freelance service destination on the internet. Also, given its low-cost profile compared to other freeform or custom order freelance resources, Fiverr stands to continue to attract a lot of buyer attention.
Let’s get one thing clear, you can have a platform filled to the brim with sellers. Unfortunately, your platform is probably not going to succeed unless you also get a lot of buyers. Buyers make the platform successful. Fiverr has managed to do this.
Fiverr’s Secret
The secret to Fiverr’s success is to enable people to post whatever services they may have, ranging from graphics design, to writing, to virtual assistant services, to video spokesperson services and others, for a flat fee.
Originally, this was set at $5. This explains the name Fiverr. But as customer needs have changed and the market evolved, Fiverr now allows service providers to charge the price they’re most comfortable with.
Compared to traditional freelancing, Fiverr removes a lot of doubt and guesswork from the freelance process. When you go to places like Freelancer or Upwork, you basically see a listing of somebody who needs work done. As a potential freelance contractor, you send in your bid. It’s anybody’s guess whether your bid will get accepted or not.
Fiverr flips that model on its head. Instead of customers posting their requirements as well as their budget range, service providers provide a description of the service that they would do as well as samples of their work.
Most importantly, providers are required to put a fixed price on their service. Whether they are charging $5 or $500, it doesn’t really matter. They have to provide a fixed price.
This has taken much of the uncertainty and guesswork out of the process. It is no surprise that Fiverr continues to grow.
The Good News?
You can make money off Fiverr too. In fact, Fiverr has many testimonials of people claiming that their income on this platform has replaced their regular job’s income, and then some.
In fact, a lot of people happily announce that they’ve quit their day jobs and are doing voice- overs full time. There’s even one person who travels all over the world and is sustained 100% by his income from Fiverr. That’s how lucrative this micro-freelancing platform can be.
But there’s a big warning sign. You have to be careful about using Fiverr the right way. While it’s very easy to get excited about these success stories, and believe me, they resonate on so many levels (Who wouldn’t want to own their time? Who wouldn’t want to work on their own terms?
Who wouldn’t want to cherry pick the projects that they get?), the big problem is, if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you don’t have a strategy, you end up wasting time and, yes, money, in the form of opportunity costs.
Think about it, if you are spending your time doing work for people for $10 when it turns out that you could have been working for $50, you are actually losing money.
Now, this is different from a situation where you have spare time and you’re simply trying to turn your spare time into spare cash. In that case, this would be okay. This is especially true if you’re training yourself by taking on these jobs so you can level up in the future. But if you are looking to earn a full-time income, you have to learn how to use Fiverr the right way.
This book teaches you 6 better ways to make money off Fiverr. Make no mistake, offering high value and time-intensive services for $5 is not one of them.
The Biggest Hassle with Fiverr
By this point, you’re probably excited about Fiverr. In fact, you may be raring to go and put up an ad and see what you can make. Well, you might want to cool your heels for a little bit.
How come? Well, here’s the sad reality about Fiverr. Most money on Fiverr is made one way. What way is that? You sell your time for money.
You may be thinking, “what’s so bad about this?” Well, if that’s what you wanted to do, you should have just gotten a job. Seriously. You should have just gone to monster.com or some other online jobs platform and hunted yourself down a job.
The great thing about a regular job is that you are guaranteed a paycheck every 14 days. You don’t have that assurance with freelancing. Also, most jobs in the United States have a medical and dental insurance plan as well as 401K retirement plan. You don’t have that with freelancing. Keep this in mind.
Because if you’re just going to be selling your time for money, maximize your return on effort by getting an actual regular job. Unless your hourly rate is $1,000 or more, it’s just not going to cut it. There’s no comparison if your focus is selling your time for money.
What’s the Big Problem with Selling Your Time for Money?
There are several problems with this way of making money. First, you only have so much time to sell. Last time I checked, there are only 24 hours in a day. Well, if you’re like most people, you at least need six of those hours to sleep, and probably more.
Also, there’s only one of you. It would be great if you have an army of you out there so you can basically farm yourself out to work on all sorts of different freelance projects. You then get paid many times over. But unfortunately, there’s only one of you, with only 24 hours in a day.
Traditional freelancing is also not very scalable. Once all your available time slots and production slots are taken up, you have to wait until you clear out some work for you to take on more clients.
What do you think will happen if you told them to wait? Based on my experience, at least half of them will look elsewhere. And given how robust the Fiverr platform is, they don’t have to look far, and they don’t have to search long.
It’s Too Easy to Get Pigeonholed
Another problem with Fiverr freelancing is that it’s too easy to feel that you’re stuck offering one type of service in one particular type of context. It gets old quickly. It seems that all the amazing benefits of Fiverr are simply off limits to you. You quickly discover that it’s basically hard work.
Now, you may enjoy what you’re doing, but if you get pigeonholed and you just offer one type of service, let’s say you’re a graphics artist and you design banners for people, your skill set is not growing if that’s all you’re doing. If you’re doing banners all day, every day, the improvements you can make as far as taking your skills to the next level is actually fairly restricted.
On top of this, there is always the chance that someone will undercut your pricing. You have to understand that the vast majority of people on Fiverr either do not make any money at all or they make very little money.
There are a lot of reasons why this is the case. Some people simply do a bad job and they get bad reviews. Other people charge too much money.
You have to remember that the market has expectations based on the services you provide. If the going rate for banner design, for example, is $5 and I come along and put up my service for $25, chances are, I won’t get too many orders. I may get orders every once in a blue moon, but you can bet that they’re not going to be repeat orders.
For customers to come back, they must feel that they’re getting a solid value. You can deliver on that value based on quality or price, but the problem is, Fiverr tends to attract people who are drawn primarily by price.
I know, it’s rough. We can cry about it, we can definitely whine, but I doubt any of that is going to change the situation. That’s just the way it is.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Making Money Off Fiverr
I don’t mean to depress you. I definitely don’t want to discourage you from using this amazing platform. It is amazing. It can make you money. But you have to use it the right way.
If you use it the wrong way, it can easily become a race to the bottom. That’s right, when you look at the pricing that you offer, make sure it’s cut to the bone because you can bet that if there is any allowance for a decent profit, somebody will come in and offer a lower price.
This is especially true when it comes to virtual assistants, data entry, and similar services. It is brutal. We’re talking about people working for less and less money.
It used to be that the low-cost service providers would come from Southeast Asia as well as South Asia – in places like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Indonesia. Now, the action has shifted to Africa. If you think people from India were charging low rates, think again.
That’s why there really is a cutthroat competition, and it’s a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. It’s not pretty. If you’re going to be trading your time for money, you’re going to have to accept the very real possibility that you’re going to have to charge less and less money to stay competitive.
Now, one way to compensate for this sad reality is to play up volume. You can cut your pricing to the bone so as to drive up volume.
This sounds great, but the problem is, there’s only one of you. If you’re like most people, you probably would want to spend some time with your family. You probably would want to read and spend time on yourself and become a better person that way. Unfortunately, you can kiss goodbye to all that time because volume requires burning up tons of time.
The Bottom Line
Now that you have a big picture view of what Fiverr’s promises are and what the perils of its reality are, I’ve got some great news for you. You don’t have to play the Fiverr freelancing game to lose. There are 6 better ways to make money off Fiverr.
Starting with the next chapter, you’re going to learn everything there is to know about playing the Fiverr game the right way. I’m going to teach you how to play the Fiverr freelancing game to win.
6 Better Ways to Make Money Off Fiverr
This chapter is an overview of the six different methods anybody can use to make real money off Fiverr.
Let’s get one thing clear, if you want to make chump change or beer money, Fiverr is the place to be. There are lots of graphics designers designing banners from time to time or eBook covers once a week who make enough money to buy beer on the weekends.
However, if you have a family to support or if you want to make real money, you need to think big. You need to think outside of the traditional freelancing box.
In other words, you have to decide on and commit to making money without trading in your time for money. At the very least, you’re going to have to commit to and dedicate yourself to charging a lot more for your time.
These are the two key elements that inform all the six methods that I’m going to share with you in this book. Always keep your eyes fixed on the problem you’re trying to solve: selling time for money.
Method #1: Offer premium value-added services
Method #2: Bundle others’ services and sell turnkey assets
Method #3: Bundle others’ services and sell operational assets
Method #4: Buy services that help you buy resell-able high value assets
Method #5: Resell cheap Fiverr services at other higher value locations
Method #6: Use Fiverr services to build your own assets
These 6 methods have varying requirements of time, focus and capital. Regardless, if you use one, a few, or all of them, you can make quite a bit of money. A lot of this income can happen on autopilot.
I know it sounds exciting. So, let’s jump in.
Offer premium value-added services
This way of making money off Fiverr actually involves you trading your time for money. Now, don’t get upset. Don’t close this book just yet. Give me a chance to explain. The big difference is you pick higher premium services. This is the key.
There are many services you can offer on Fiverr. Unfortunately, given the geographic distribution of service providers, you’re going to get caught in a race to the bottom. That’s right. There are people who are ready, willing and eager to work 10 hours for 5 bucks. Are you willing to do that?
If you’re like most people who live in America or Western Europe, the answer should be a resounding no. After all, you value your time. If you just wanted to earn 5 bucks for 10 hours of work, you probably would be doing something else. There are a million other things that you could be doing at your neck of the woods to earn far more money than 5 bucks. Let’s not kid ourselves.
However, that is always a possibility if you are careless regarding the service you offer. The first thing that you need to do is to pick higher premium services you can offer. If you type in a skill set or a service and it turns out that the average fee charged by the provider of that service on Fiverr is $100 or $200, then you may be on to something.
Additionally, you can bundle many different tasks that you do yourself and you charge a premium. Here are some examples.
If you want to just offer premium services and get paid more for every hour of actual work you do, then you should switch from SEO writing or regular website copywriting to higher value
writing markets like technical writing, handbook writing for products, sales copywriting or medical writing.
Similarly, certain types of academic writing usually involving PhD dissertations pay a lot more money. You can also bundle services along with your main service. You’re still offering writing services, but you would include a lot of add-on value. For example, you’re offering SEO writing. Their client gives you a keyword and you write a 1000-word article.
Well, that kind of service is currently getting $5 on Fiverr, but you may get away with charging
$10 or $15 for that same service if you add pictures to the text that you produce, format it so that it’s more readable and upload it to your client’s WordPress installation.
Generally speaking, when people see add-on services put together in a bundle, they are more likely to pay extra.
Advantages
There is really one advantage worth talking about here. You get a higher dollar value per unit of time and work you put in. You end up working less and earning more than the normal way of making money on Fiverr.
Disadvantages
To offer premium services, you must first know how to perform such work. This requires mastery expertise, credibility and authority. In other words, you have to pay your dues. This is not something that you achieve overnight. I can’t call myself an SEO expert after reading an online book or a couple of blog posts on SEO and then start offering that service on Fiverr.
If I were to do that, people will see me for the fraud that I am and I can only imagine what kind of reviews I’ll get. It all boils down to results and it takes quite a bit of time, effort and focus to become an expert that delivers the kind of results the market demands. Are you willing to put in that time?
Also, the higher the value of the service, the more specialized it becomes. This increases the dollar value for that service. So far so good, right? Well, here’s the problem. This is basic economics. When the price of anything goes up, the demand usually goes down. That is the bottom line.
People are always looking for cheaper alternatives. People are looking to break up expensive items into cheaper parts. There are all sorts of coping mechanisms to high prices. Your service is not immune to these. This might translate to limited demand. Now, this doesn’t mean that this is the end of the world.
If you are charging $200 per project, instead of getting a project every other day, you might get a project once a week. But if you were to add up all the orders that you get for that high value service, you may actually still be making more money than if you were to offer a lower value service that is in higher demand.
This is good news if you think about it. You work less, yet earn more money. What’s not to love? Unfortunately, you have to be very careful regarding the niches of services you offer because some niches may have such low demand that it’s just not worth it regardless of how much money you charge.
Another disadvantage to this Fiverr alternative is the need to build a brand or reputation. If you want to justify why you are charging $25 for something that other people charge $5 for, you’d better have a solid brand or reputation to back it up. As you can well imagine, it takes some time to develop such reputation.
You create a brand based on consistent quality. This takes time. Finally, there is always a chance that people will not buy from you if they see that you’re offering a “premium” service on Fiverr. To these people, Fiverr is the kiss of death. These people have essentially written off Fiverr as far as quality goes. According to these individuals, when a service is listed on that platform, that service is no good. It’s going to be almost impossible to persuade these people to buy from you regardless of the fact that you have a lot of testimonials and you are able to produce solid results.
You’re just going to have to live with this disadvantage. Unfortunately, depending on the niche of your service, the majority of people who might demand your service might think like this.
Step by step directions
To offer value-added services, you need to take three steps. First, you need to figure out what your areas of expertise are. You have to write down all the things that you are good at. Please understand that these are things that you’re actually good at. This means people compliment you or may have even paid you for this type of work.
Of course, you did it as a favor, so the payment is basically a token. Regardless, there has to be some sort of objective indicator that people view you as an expert in a certain type of activity. This must be objective.
This is not just your girlfriend telling you that you’re a great writer. Of course, she says that even though she could barely read the stuff that you crank out because she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. That’s not the kind of external validation I’m talking about. This has to be from people who objectively would say that you are a credible expert or an authority when it comes to this type of service.
Look for those skills. Write them all down.
Find high-value sub-niches or bundle small services you can do in your niche
Now that you have a list of things that you do reasonably well and that a lot of people praise you for, these services must already be listed of Fiverr. The next step is to look for sub-niches or
specialized versions of those services. Research on the Fiverr and see how much people are paying per service.
You should have a clear understanding by this point of just how much your services are worth. Now you have to make a decision. Are you going to go ahead with this low-value service or am I going to enhance its perceived value by doing other things that I would do myself?
Again, going back to the writing example, if the only thing you can do reasonably well is to write SEO keyword articles, that’s going to have to be service you offer. However, this doesn’t mean that you’re going to offer that service for $5 just like everybody else. You can make things better for yourself by including additional services.
You can say that you’ll add pictures, you will format, you will add citations, you will interlink the stuff that you are producing with previous items on previous articles on your client’s website and you are also going to upload this material. All of a sudden, the service that you could have only charged $5 for per 1000 words, you might be able to charge $15 or $20 for.
The great thing about this is if you factor in all the additional services, they really don’t add much time to the service. Most of the time is eaten up by the writing itself. This way, you actually increase the value of your time by including these add-on services. Create a package and get testimonials so as to convince people to buy your package.
Bundle others’ services and sell turnkey assets
What are turnkey assets? Turnkey assets are non-operational online assets like shells of websites, blogs with a small amount of content. The idea behind these sites is that the buyers of these sites have absolutely no clue how to put up a website. They don’t know how to do it or they don’t want to know how.
This is where you come in. You put in the time, effort and energy to find specialists on Fiverr to put up a website. You pay them and then you turn around and sell the starter website or low content blog that they built for you. What are you really selling? Well, you’re selling time, convenience, and most importantly, niche selection.
You have to pick out the niche. You have to buy the domain name and you have to customize the asset based on the niche. Those are the services that you are selling. Again, people would pay for this bundled service because either they don’t have the expertise, or they don’t have the time to achieve that expertise.
Advantages
This is probably one of the better ways to make more money selling other people’s services. You’re not selling your own labor. You are selling other people’s labor. You also bundle different services together, so you leverage whatever is special in the services of others.
This means that you get to play the owner of a sports team. Successful NBA professional basketball teams win championship after championship because the management knows how to cherry pick the right talent. You can do the same on Fiverr. There are many highly talented and skilled people from many countries who do excellent work.
You cherry pick these people, so they work together to produce a website for you. Since your finished product is so vastly superior from digital assets created just by one person, you can charge a larger premium.
Another great advantage to selling turnkey assets is the fact the likely buyers of this type of bundled service tend to be professional buyers. Don’t be surprised if the person who buys your website from you turns around and sells it to another person after your buyer pumps up the traffic, creates more content and actually starts making money from the website you sold that person.
They then take the website to the next level and then they flip it for many times the price you charged them. That’s how the game is played. What do you think will happen if that person is able to sell your prebuilt turnkey asset for a lot of money? That’s right. He or she will come back to you again and again and again.
The bottom line here is simple. You are not selling your time directly. Sure, it takes time to play project manager and coordinate all these different Fiverr freelancers, but you’re not doing the actual work. Your main work is basically finding a buyer.
Disadvantages
The big disadvantage to this Fiverr monetization model is that you have to come up with the cash up front. You’re going to have to pay your specialist upfront. You’re going to have to pay the person finding the domain name. You have to shell out some cash for the WordPress theme designer, as well as the person customizing it.
You probably would also have to get somebody to produce content, as well as graphics. This can add up. The good news is Fiverr is so cheap. Don’t be surprised if it takes you all of $50 or a maximum of $75 to come up with an asset that you can turn around and possibly sell for $200 or if you really do your homework and are good at closing, $400.
Another drawback to this model is that you need to pick the right niche, or your asset might not sell. This is a big one. If you pick a niche that has a fairly low demand or has very high standards, you’re probably not going to sell the asset that you have built.
While it’s true that you can mark up the amount of money you paid the service providers to produce the asset, you still have to sell many of these assets to make real money. The average American needs to make around $5,000 just to achieve average income.
This means that if you are turning around and flipping assets using Fiverr labor and your average is $200 a website, you need to move 25 of these sites. Now, that might seem like a low number, but you’re basically going to have to give yourself a quota of selling one website pretty much every single day. That’s quite a tall order.
Another weakness of this business model is its focus on customization. You have to customize the asset each and every time. You cannot resell the same asset over and over again. You’re not selling private label rights (PLR) material here. The reason why you are able to charge a premium is because this is custom work.
This brings up another disadvantage. Since you are dealing with custom work, there is no assurance that the people you hire to get work done on Fiverr will produce the same quality the next time around.
This can ruin your reputation. You might have a repeat customer who is expecting the same high quality as the site that you just sold him or her and it turns out that your service providers simply got lazy or just barely put in any effort and they produced crap. Not only would you fail to make a sale with your repeat customer, but that person will probably not come back.
Finally, one of the most common ways you can sell turnkey assets is to list it on Flippa. Depending on your niche, your listed asset may not sell the first time you list it. This means that you have to relist again and again.
Unfortunately, you have to pay for each listing on Flippa and these listing costs can cut into your profits. It’s not unusual for people to get so desperate about unloading an asset, that they price it so low, and when you factor in their Flippa listing fees, they actually lost money.
Step by step directions
Step 1: Find turnkey assets that sell quickly at decent pricing on Flippa
Essentially, you’re going to reverse engineer what already works on Flippa. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Go to Flippa.com and look for websites for sale. These are websites that are not operational and are totally brand new.
Look at the different niches that are selling. This is very important. Do not look at stuff that hasn’t sold yet. Look at auctions that have successfully closed. Pay attention to the niche and the price. A pattern should emerge. Focus on niches that command really high prices.
Now, don’t get excited. Just because you found an action where a totally brand-new site sold for $2,000, doesn’t mean that you should rush out there and start building a similar site. Pay close attention to similar websites on Flippa. Does that type of website sell quite a bit every month or is this a once in a blue moon kind of thing?
Your job is to look for a niche that sells frequently on Flippa at a high enough price.
Step 2: Find service providers on Fiverr that can be used to build your asset
Now that you have a clear idea of the turnkey sites that sell well on Flippa, break down the kinds of services needed to build such an asset. If you are selling websites, you obviously need a WordPress theme designer, a WordPress developer which includes installation, content, graphics and you also need a person to find the domain.
Put all these together so you can have a list of services for which you would look for contractors. Next, you go to Fiverr and but strategically.
Step 3: Buy several gigs to build the asset
This seems pretty straightforward, but it’s actually more complicated than that. Remember, you’re building a custom asset. This means that you are building something of quality. This is not stuff that you’re just blowing through. This is not just stuff that you’re trying to zip through and build as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
Believe me, if you do things that way, it’s going to show and people looking to buy your asset probably won’t because they have seen better quality. Do not compromise quality. The good news with Fiverr is that there are so many service providers there that you can pay very little to get very high quality. Do that.
Step 4: Sell your turnkey asset in Flippa
This is pretty straightforward. List the turnkey asset that you have built and sell it on Flippa. Ideally, you should have the website ready for transfer on your server. It should have its own dedicated domain name. Make it easy for you to transfer digital assets on your server. Coordinate with the technical support people at your host to ensure that the assets that you plan on selling are very easy to move.
List your asset on Flippa. Now, don’t get excited. I know you’ve done your research and I know that the chances of this thing selling the first time you list it are quite high. However, be ready for the possibility that you may have to relist this item several times before you can move it.
Factor those costs, as well as the value of the time you spend relisting into the final price of the asset.
Bundle others’ services and sell operational assets
This way of making money off Fiverr is really not much different from the method I have described in Chapter 4. The big difference, and in most cases the only difference, is that this website is operational. What does that mean?
It means that this website is getting traffic and is turning that traffic into dollars. In other words, it’s actually generating an income.
Advantages
The big advantage of this of this type of Fiverr service flipping is the money. That’s right. With everything else being equal, people would rather pay more money for an online asset that already generates money. You may have designed a very good-looking online asset. Your turnkey website may look really good.
The problem is it’s anybody’s guess whether it can actually translate visitors into cash. You don’t have any of that kind of uncertainty with an operational asset. You know that this thing works. You know that if you buy this asset, you will make money.
Given enough time, this asset will produce enough money to cover the cash you spent to buy it in the first place. Given even more time, you make pure profit. That’s how this type of asset works. It’s no surprise that a lot of online investors in online properties would rather buy operational assets.
Advantages
You stand to get more money building this type of asset than a turnkey asset. After all, people are willing to pay a big premium for an asset that is already generating traffic and cash. This is a big deal because if you establish a track record of building and selling money-making websites, your reputation becomes golden.
People will seek you out as the person they can buy assets from that guarantee income. Very few people can do that. If you are able to do that, then you are going to be able to charge a lot more money than turnkey site creators.
If your properties consistently make money, you can even charge a bigger premium that other people who build similar types of websites.
The big advantage here for buyers is the fact that you save your customers from the headaches of picking out a profitable niche, positioning an online entity, building a brand, building traffic, crafting the right content and converting traffic into cash. Those are big problems. You will know this firsthand if you ever try building any kind of website or platform. It’s not easy.
The big value that you bring to the table is that you solve these problems for your clients. They get an actual working business.
Disadvantages
The big disadvantage to this business model is that you have to spend cash up front. Again, just like the business model I’ve described in Chapter 4, this is a cash upfront model because you’re hiring people to build the asset.
Unfortunately, your spending doesn’t stop there. You probably have to buy traffic if you’re not generating it organically. You’re also going to spending a lot of time to fine-tune and tweak the website, so it performs optimally as far as making money is concerned. You’re going to have to charge money for that time.
Unfortunately, this is uncertain because it’s anybody’s guess when if ever this website actually starts converting traffic into cash. Another big disadvantage is that you are very vulnerable to niche selection. You have to pick the right niche, otherwise the ROI simply isn’t going to be there.
This means time because you’re going to have to research the right niche. Market demands do fluctuate over time. A potentially fatal problem with this model is that you can’t just assume that since this type of website asset has historically sold on Flippa, that you only need to show up at Flippa, list the asset and then collect your money. It may not work out that way.
It may turn out that for whatever reason people are not buying this type of website on Flippa anymore. If that’s the case, then you might have to sell on your own. By that point, all bets are off as to whether you can unload this asset or if you’re going to have to discount it heavily just to move it.
Finally, even if you are able to find a buyer, you can still suffer headaches. How come? Well, you turn over the website to somebody and it turns out that their traffic drops like a rock. It turns out that they’re no longer able to convert the traffic into cash. This happens quite a bit.
If this happens, then your reputation goes down the toilet. You may be thinking, “Well, that’s just my online reputation.” Think again. If word gets around that you are selling assets that stop working after a while, people are going to stop buying assets from you. That’s the bottom line. Bad news.
Step by step directions
Step 1: Pick successful niche sites with decent competition levels
Just go to Flippa. Figure out what sells. Make sure that you have decent competition. What do I mean by decent competition? I’m talking about competition that is not so crushing and so numerous that you really don’t have a chance. There has to be enough of this type of site selling, but the potential sources or competitors on Flippa should not be so numerous that getting into this is just not worth your time.
Step 2: Reverse engineer these niche sites using Fiverr gig service providers
This is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory. See Chapter 4 on what is involved.
Step 3: Use Fiverr to get content and traffic
This is what’s different between this business model and the one that I described in Chapter 4. In Chapter 4, you just use all sorts of service providers to build the asset and content. That’s it.
You’re not pumping it with content, nor are you getting traffic.
In this business model, you’re going to use Fiverr to get traffic. Here is a little bit of a caveat. There are a lot of scammers on Fiverr. There are a lot of people who would not hesitate to take you money in exchange for imaginary traffic.
Do yourself a big favor. Look at the ratings of these people and be willing to pay a little bit extra for real traffic. If you play your cards right, you will be able to find service providers that would pump a real American or Western European traffic to your website, which can covert well and translate into a decent monthly income for the asset.
Keep it up for a few months and then flip the site.
Step 4: Fine-tune your website
If you really want to make money with your website, sell it when it’s time. What do I mean by that? Fine-tune conversions and traffic generation and keep scaling up the income of your site until you can fetch a handsome price for your asset.
Sure, you can turn around and sell the moment your website made $100 a month, but let me tell you, people would probably not pay more than $500 to possible $1,000 for your asset. There is a multiplier effect going on here.
If your asset is making $100 a month and the multiplier for the bidders for your site ranges from 5 to 10, then expect anywhere from $500 to $1,000. Do you see how this works?
Accordingly, fine-tune your conversions and traffic generation and keep scaling them up until your monthly income from this specific asset is high enough for you to get a very decent price. It all depends on what is comfortable for you. It also depends on how quickly you need the money.
Buy Services That Help You Buy Resell-able High-Value Assets
This business model involves you looking for services on Fiverr that involves researching or finding digital assets. These assets take many different forms.
There are people on Fiverr that use all sorts of sophisticated software to quickly find domain names. You can then buy these services to get a list of those domain name that you could possibly buy. Buy some and then, try to flip them.
Similarly, there are service providers on Fiverr that can help you find leads. For example, if you’re looking for yoga instructors in Los Angeles, there are virtual assistants who can look up those people.
They can get a name, an address, a specialization, and contact details. They can even find social media accounts. You bundle all that information, then you sell it to people who are looking to reach those prospects. Do you see how this works?
This is one of the least known ways to make money on Fiverr. If you know what you’re doing, you actually stand to make a lot more money using this technique than most of the other techniques I shared in this book.
Advantages
A lot of the services that go into finding and analyzing potential, digital assets are actually cheap on Fiverr. We’re talking about five bucks. How come? A lot if these service providers don’t do it by hand. They don’t have the time to do it by hand, plus they’re too smart for that.
They use software. Some of them have special coded software that they built themselves or they hired somebody to do it for them. Others use off-the-shelf software. Regardless of the tool that they use, you benefit because you buy their services at a low price.
Next, you can buy these services to compile an asset. For example, you hire somebody to find a certain type of doctor in a certain city in the United Sates. You can then take that information and sell it many times over. You pay for the asset once, but you can sell it again and again.
Another advantage you get with this business model is that depending on the asset, you can actually charge quite a bit of money. Let’s get one thing clear.
If somebody just wants you to find all the doctors who offer their services in the greater Los Angeles, California area, you probably won’t be able to charge too much money. There’s probably a lot of lists out there. In fact, a lot of them are free. What makes your list so special?
Now, if you came up with a list of specialist doctors who are looking to buy and MRI machine because they have bought a related machine in a not-so-distant past. That list that you have can be gold. You can sell it to an MRI sales company or companies related to MRI. Do you see the big picture here? Good. It’s quite lucrative.
Finally, you sell assets with this service. For example, you hire people to find specialized domain names. Those are assets. This is very different from leads. Leads are those who can resell many times over but are not assets.
Disadvantages
The big drawback to this is the fact that it costs money upfront. People finding assets for you or digging up information for you will not do it for free. No chance. You have to pay upfront.
Next, you have to pick the right assets to sell. Otherwise, you’ll have many assets that won’t sell enough to cover your costs. Again, going back to the doctor example. You might think that people will pay good money for a pure list of doctors from a specific geographic area. Think again. Those lead lists are probably all over the place. Why should they pay you money?
You have to find specialized information. The same applies to domain names. You have to pick the right type of domain name that has existing demand. Otherwise, people are not going to pay that much money for it assuming they buy it at all.
The next disadvantage is that reselling domains means buying the service to find it, analyze it, and then, pending more money to buy the domain. In other words, you’re paying many times over.
Wait, it doesn’t stop there. Just because you bought the domain doesn’t necessarily mean that you can automatically flip it. A lot of times, people who buy digital assets like domains have to hang on for it for several months or even several years for it to be worth quite a bit of money. There’s a lot of opportunity costs involved. This is not a slam-dunk.
Finally, if you are using Fiverr services to find data that you can turn around and sell. Please understand that you can’t just advertise online, and people would line up to buy that data.
Chances are high that you have to do direct outreach.
This may mean that you would have to hire a virtual assistant to research businesses that may be interested in the data that you’re selling and reach out to them. If you are extra proactive, you might want to hire call centers in places like the Philippines and India, who do outbound sales. Basically, you’ll just give them a pitch and phone numbers to call, and they’ll take care of everything else.
Usually when an actual human being makes the outreach and gets a voice-to-voice connection, your chances of unloading your digital assets go up quite a bit. You’re also able to charge a lot more money, but again, this is not a slam-dunk. You’d have to have data assets that people would actually want to buy. It’s anybody’s guess if you have that kind of assets, so you need to do your research first.
Step-by-step directions
Step 1: Decide on what resell-able asset you want to specialize in
Step 2: Formulate tightly defined research and production steps
This is extremely important. You cannot let your Fiverr freelancer do creative thinking for you. They work best when you have a pre-set list of decisions and analytical points for them to follow. They just need to go step-by-step to get to the desired result. The less surprises, uncertainties, and discretion involved in the process, the better.
Step 3: Contact top-notch researchers on Fiverr
Basically, you look for the type of services that is required to find this type of information or asset. The next thing is to look at the different researchers available. Look at their ranking, testimonials, and what people say about them.
At this point, it’s not a good idea to go cheap. Don’t look for the lowest price service provider. Instead, look for somebody who is worth the money. Sure, you may pay a little bit more.
However, if your results are solid and you have a high chance of reselling that data or finding the right asset, then you have struck gold.
Step 4: Get the asset compiled
I’m talking primarily about data assets here.
Step 5: Reach out and sell
This is the most important part. Seriously. The previous four steps are nothing compared to this step. If you get this right, you will make quite a bit of money. If you get this wrong, you’re going to be sitting on an asset that is practically worthless. It only has potential value, but that’s the best you can hope for— potential.
To turn that potential into cold, hard cash in your bank account, you have to reach out and sell. Again, Fiverr comes in handy. If you are too shy, or you don’t have the time, or you simply can’t be bothered to do this, there are virtual assistants on Fiverr. If you’re looking for specialized services at their cheap prices, go to Cognoplus.com.
Regardless of how you do it, you need to have other people find your prospective buyers, get in touch with them, open the sale, and then you come in and try to close the sale. If the assets that you have gotten using this business model involve domain names, then you can place those domain names on auction websites like Flippa.
Resell Cheap Fiverr Services at Other Higher Value Locations
The name of the game here is information differential or information imbalance. It’s easy to get the impression that if you see news on one website, then people that visit another website will automatically know the news. After all, the internet is just a giant spider web, if you will, of links.
The data that you can find on one place can also be found or accessed from another place sooner or later. Well, this is too much of an assumption to make. It turns out that in certain situations and regarding certain types of data, data actually travels slowly.
This is a money-making opportunity for you. While a lot of people know about Fiverr and they know that they can buy services starting at $5, not everybody knows this. Even if people have heard of Fiverr, not everybody has actually used Fiverr.
Again, this is an opportunity. You only need to find other websites on the internet like Facebook pages, Facebook groups, message boards, forums, and other places people post information.
Some of these places have a marketplace. This is where community members offer to either buy services, offer services for sale, or do a little bit of both.
Once you find these places, sell Fiverr services on them. Of course, when they click on the link, they’d go to your website, but you’re actually just reselling Fiverr services. You’re not offering the services yourself.
Again, the operative principle here is to buy low and sell high. You buy low on Fiverr and you sell high on these other places.
Advantages
The big advantage here is that you get to mark-up Fiverr services. It’s not unusual for people who buy something for $20 on Fiverr to turn around and sell it for $200 to $500 on their own website. Not too shabby.
Another big advantage is that you get to offer the best service provider. You have to remember that there are a lot of service providers on Fiverr. There are a lot of people from all over the world offering a wide range of services. Not all of them are good. Some of them however are experts. They are at the top of their field.
What you can do is you can offer the best service providers from Fiverr. Sure, they sell at a higher price, but you can always mark it up. This way, you can resell only the very best and leave the garbage around.
Finally, the biggest advantage of this business model is you name your mark-up. If you think you can get away with 100% mark-up, go for it. If you think that 500% profit is possible and probably, take advantage of it.
You have full freedom because you’re advertising on third-party sites, but when people click a link, they don’t go to Fiverr. They go to your site. This is where you advertise services that you turn around and buy from the “best of breed” service providers on Fiverr.
Disadvantages
The big disadvantage with offering best of breed service providers is that those people can disappear. I know this first-hand because I used to get really awesome Kindle book covers from this person who cranks out one best-selling cover after another.
I thought that I would always come back to this person until I learned my lesson the hard way. For four straight months, he was unresponsive. It’s as if he fell of the face of the Earth. These suppliers are all over the place on Fiverr.
In fact, there is a rule of thumb. The more competent the service provider and the more of an expert he/she is, the flakier that person is. We don’t like flakes. Nobody should, but unfortunately they’re part of the mix.
This is the risk that you run. Do yourself a big favor. Find an alternative. This means that you have a back-up or two. For example, you’re offering graphic services and you normally turn around and buy Michelangelo’s services. If for whatever reason he flakes out, you can always tap Raphael or Leonardo so you can cover your assets.
Another key disadvantage is that the quality might be spotty from time to time. If this happens, your reputation may suffer. Remember you’re charging a fat premium for this service. You are riding on somebody else’s expertise.
What if that person gets sloppy or lazy? Let’s face it. This happens to the very best of us. Again, this is where having a back-up comes in. If your main “go to” person delivers garbage all of a sudden, you can at least quickly pivot and order from the next expert and come up with something decent.
Another drawback to this business model is that many markets are increasingly sophisticated. Don’t think that the person you’re selling to are idiots. Don’t think that they are completely wet behind the ears and they haven’t heard of Fiverr. If they haven’t heard of it, they will hear about it soon enough.
Now, some people simply don’t care. Some people may realize that you’re just flipping services and guess what? They don’t care. Why? Their time is very valuable to them. They have other bigger fish to fry.
Other people can take this very personally. They don’t like to feel that they’ve been taken advantage of. They can see right through your system. It’s obvious to them that you’re just flipping services by buying low and selling high.
These people are probably not your intended buyers anyway. Chances are if they’re that paranoid, cynical, and skeptical, they probably wouldn’t have bought from you. If they did, they probably would’ve turned around and asked for a refund.
It’s a good idea to be discreet. Don’t be obvious about it. However, at the end of the day, haters are going to hate. That’s just part of the game.
Another drawback is people often will only pay you a very fat premium. I’m talking about over 200% or 300% if you have a solid brand. This means that you have a long list of people who are happy with your reselling activities. These are people who really get a lot of value from what you’re doing.
That is hard enough because you’re going to have to perform really well for an extended period of time. You also have to have a solid reseller site. You can’t just go to Blogspot, Weebly, or Wix and scrap together a very basic site. People are going to equate the low quality of your site with the quality of the services you are reselling.
This means that you’re going to have to step up the amount of money you pay upfront for this business. You have to pay solid money to a developer and designer on Fiverr to create and authoritative and expert-looking reseller website.
Finally, you have to get traffic to your reseller website. This means that you have to go to forums, message boards, Facebook groups and pages that already actively resell the Fiverr services you are reselling. Go there. Get people excited. Post your offer and when they click, they’d go to your reseller website.
Step-by-step directions
Step 1: Find places to resell on
This is very important. Make sure to create a list of all sorts of places where people are selling services. Again, this may be Facebook groups, pages, message boards, or forums. Once you have found these places and looked at the services, play close attention to the prices being charged.
If you notice that a certain type of service tends to fetch a fairly high price across many different sellers and across many different times, chances are good that people who visit this place pay a premium for those who offer that type of service.
Step 2: Find providers of your target service on Fiverr and hold an audition
By “hold an audition”, I’m not talking about getting people to try out for free. I’m talking about paying for these wide range of people’s services. Again, this is going to drive up your cost, but you need to pay this money so you can see who actually walks their talk. You’re going to have to pay to figure out who’s the real deal.
Again, you’re trying to offer “best of breed” service providers. You’re not just reselling some random rookie’s output.
Step 3: Build your reseller website
As I’ve mentioned above, you’re going to have to spend real money to put together a high-quality reseller site. From the outside looking in, it shouldn’t be apparent that you’re just turning around and reselling Fiverr services.
From the perspective of outsiders who know nothing about you and your service, you should like an established, credible, authoritative, and trust-worthy business.
Step 4: Present case studies
People are not going to buy from you if you just tell them that you’re the best thing since sliced bread. Things don’t work that way. People are going to say, “Show me.” The best way to do this is through case studies.
This means that you’re going to hire many different service providers on Fiverr and then, give them the same project. You then take the results of the project and pick out the very best provider. You can use those results as your case studies.
This way, you showcase to people that you can actually get the job done. Also, you may want to offer your resold services for absolutely free in exchange for a testimonial. Personally, I prefer video testimonials.
Run the service for free for clients so you end up paying for this service to the provider on Fiverr and then, showcase the positive results. Obviously, leave out any failed results.
Step 5: Do outreach
I wish I could tell you that you just need to post an ad on forums, message boards, Facebook groups and pages. It doesn’t work that way. You definitely need to do these, but you also have to do outreach. This means that you’re going to have to contact digital marketing agencies and other organizations that normally order the type of service that you are offering.
Use Fiverr Services to Build Your Own Assets
Instead of reselling service providers’ work on Fiverr, use them on yourself to create assets like Kindle books or your very own blog network. You then buy other Fiverr services like traffic services to enable you to make money from the assets other providers have built for you.
Advantages
The first advantage that you get using this system is that you buy cheap, but proven services to create assets. The assets that you get are things that you can build once but make money from many times over.
For example, take the case of a book. You can find a wide range of Kindle book cover designers, authors, and editors on Fiverr. After you’ve gotten their work and you’ve published the book on the Kindle self-publishing platform, you can make quite a bit of money over the life of a book.
You only paid for the work to get published once, but the potential for earning is phenomenal because you can earn many times over from that same asset.
The second advantage that you get is that you get to tap a wide selection of service providers. You have to remember that the quality of the asset that you build through Fiverr is completely dependent on the competence and quality of the service provider.
Since you have a lot of selection on Fiverr, it’s possible to pay very little while getting very high quality. I’m not saying that you should get your hopes up, but this is a possibility with Fiverr because they also have a lot of sophisticated filtration tools. You can quickly identify providers that charge very little but have a track record of delivering solid results. Do business with those people.
Cost control is a key advantage to all of this. If you don’t take anything from this section, please understand that when you’re using Fiverr services to create assets that you control and own, you control your costs. By insisting on finding the very best service providers for the lowest prices, you can crank out a tremendous amount of assets.
Now, this doesn’t mean that all of them will be runaway hits. In fact, the vast majority of them might fail, but if you have enough assets out there, enough of them might generate cash and these trickles or tiny streams of income can combine soon enough into a nice river of monthly income. Not too shabby.
Finally, given the huge selection of service providers on Fiverr, you can easily scale up your operations. You can actually get many books written at the same time. It’s not unusual for Kindle publishers to become overnight big-time publishers by having hundreds of books published within a year. That’s all doable if you connect with the right service providers on Fiverr.
Disadvantages
I know you’re excited. After all, with Fiverr’s sophisticated filtration technology, you can find people who charge very little money, but produce world-quality work. Sounds awesome right? Unfortunately, you’re not the only person looking for that type of provider. In fact, there’s a long line of people looking for that type of contractor.
What happens then is that it becomes very hard to find these people. You can still get them at very affordable rates, but you may have to wait in line assuming that they are available at all.
Another drawback is that the best providers usually are doing it out of love. I remember when I first started out at writing. I advertised on Fiverr. I was getting a lot of work producing 1000 words for five bucks. Well, as you know, after you take out Fiverr’s fees, that $5 shrinks to $4. If you take out PayPal’s fees, that $4 gets even smaller.
However, I was willing to work that rate because first of all, I love to write. Second, I know that I am learning so I’m willing to pay my dues. Third, I want to get a nice flow of work so I can see if I can get used to that volume. I got all three.
Now that I found out what I needed to learn I have “graduated” from Fiverr. I no longer offer live gigs there. The vast majority of service providers on Fiverr now who offer writing services are from places like Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. It’s not unusual to find somebody to write 1000 words for five bucks. In fact, some offer more than that. We’re taking 2000 words for five bucks.
Depending on what your objectives are, this is too little money. Seriously. Don’t be surprised if you’re working 12 hours only for four bucks. Not exactly a fun time. I share this with you because the best providers sooner or later realize this.
This doesn’t mean that they’ll all quit the platform. Some may still be available, but only for very little engagements. They can only take so much work because they have a day job. Others simply take a long break and they come back if they desperately need the money.
Understand that this happens. This is why it’s really a good idea to have a huge back-up list. Never ever assume that that amazing writer that you keep going back to again and again will eagerly take your projects over and over. They might have grabbed the clue. They might have better things to do so have a back-up list.
Finally, even if you have identified the very best service provider for your type of asset on Fiverr, don’t expect consistent quality. People do have a bad time. People may be in a hurry. People may be going through a bad breakup or divorce. All sorts of things can be happening in the background. Be aware of this. Be at peace with this and make provisions for this happening.
Step-by-step directions
Step 1: Pick your niche
I don’t care whether you’re publishing Kindle books, or offering online courses, or blogging. You need to be in the right niche. Otherwise, you’re not going to make much money. Seriously. It really all boils down to demand.
If you think you’ve come up with a content that’s the best thing since sliced bread, but nobody wants to read it or bother with it, then you’re not going to make much money so zero in on the right niche.
Step 2: Get best of breed services
You may have to spend quite a bit of cash trying to figure out which people actually know what they’re doing. Go through that process.
Step 3: Fine-tune the assets
Now that you’ve a good idea of which person produces the best asset, fine-tune the process. Try to come up with the optimal way for them to produce high quality work each and every time.
Step 4: Scale up results
Now, figure out what is working for you, fix any problems, and then scale it up. If the service provider writing books for you can accommodate 10 books a week, then go for it. Assuming that there’s no slippage in quality, go for it. Scale up your results because the more assets you have out there, the more streams of revenue they generate. These streams of revenue do add up.
