Bonvi
Power Member
- Jul 15, 2019
- 760
- 419
Inspired by the other freelancing thread, I decided to keep track of my income on Fiverr, my interactions with clients and profile metrics. My hopes are, that this journal will help me understand what I am doing a little better and maybe find ways to improve it.
I am on Fiverr since a few years, but only seriously earning on there since maybe 2-3 years. I started doing VA work, web research and the likes, now I still do that, but my best gigs currently are web scraping, data cleaning and B2B Leads.
Background:
When I first started with Fiverr, I landed a fantastic gig, that generated 5k impressions per day, and I had so many orders and big projects that I had more work than I had time in the day. Things went well for 9-10 months or so until I got a horrible client, who blackmailed and tricked me into doing more work than I signed up for (A LOT more work!), and paid very little for it all. He even haggled me on the already low prices for my services.
What happend was this: hepaid me 200 usd for a scraping job that should have been at least 700 (but I didn't feel comfortable enough to ask for that much... Imposter syndrome lol), and after I delivered the files to him, he said "oops, this is not what I wanted. I actually meant this and that." But that scraping was a whole lot more difficult due to the nature of a dynamic real estate website where everything moved around and changed container names etc, and for the further pages, there were captcha tests and all that.
I didn't have a lot of work around that time as I just finished two big jobs and waited for something new to come along, so I wanted the money. And this is where he blackmailed me;
I said to him "Look, that big job is so much extra work and nothing as we discussed beforehand, I will have to charge you more for that." Thinking about it, it would be around 2400usd for that job with my set rates, and that is a justified price for the hundred thousand or so entries I had to scrape. "I will need 1200 for this".
His reply was, that he will not pay that much and he will leave me a really terrible review if I don't do "what we discussed beforehand", which is absolutely not what we discussed and agreed on but okay. I used screenshots and marked the fields with red borders that I will access and scrape to avoid any miscommunications like that, but he just pretended that I just didn't get it right.
Now bad reviews are obviously not good and I didn't want to cancel, as cancellations are also not good, but less bad, although it means you did all the work for free as he already has the files and if you cancel, you forfeit your claim to the money.
I was in bad and didn't know what to do, so I thought "Well, it's better in the long run to protect my reputation than to make money. So if I deliver what he wants and work my ass off for free, at least I won't a cancellation and at least a little money...".
He graciously offered 50 dollars extra for that work... What a dick.
Anyway, it took me 7 days to figure out how to do it, it was very complicated work. Once delivered he was VERY pleased and left me a "good" 4 star review, which on Fiverr is bad. Either 5 stars or no good. Anyway, he was very happy with it, he told me in the message, left taht review and then it was my turn to review him.
Green around the nose as I was, I left him a 3 star review saying "We had difficulties agreeing on a fair price and he massively underpaid me". He took that very ill. In a private message he told me he will leave me the worst private review possible (which is where buyers can leave you a review in private, without it being shown to anyone).
He did, and all my impressions went from thousands a day to under 50 a day and didn't rise again for 10 months. I only survived due to recurring clients with long lasting projects.
I then was shadow banned, didn't get any new orders, and just when the last order was done from the recurring clients (the projects just concluded), it lifted like 2-3 weeks later and I finally started getting traffic again, but never as much as I used to have back in the day.
So, ever since that, I am struggling on the platform and try to have a steady, good time again.
Focus:
The thread will monitor my impressions, as I personally think they are the most important thing on Fiverr. The more people see you, the more potential clicks you get, the more clicks you get, the more potential new clients you get. If you have very few impressions, then the chain reaction will result in very little work.
I will try to improve them to get more exposure and land better jobs.
I'd also like to journal about client interactions, as some clients are a breeze to work with and others are just godawful people who will drain your soul and just make it all horrible and terrible.
And I will try to learn new "tricks" to sell and make an income.
What do I do? What is my current skill set?
I started with doing VA work and manual research, Data Entry and everything people wanted me to do manually.
After a while, I got tired of doing it all by hand and started to learn coding, Python in particular. Just did various youtube and udemy courses until I had the basics down, but wasn't sure (and still not very sure!) what to do with it.
As of now it's mostly webautomations (log in scripts, interacting with websites etc), and data scraping on various platforms. Depending on how easy or difficult the website is, I am either using Selenium or Beautiful Soup.
Another big thing I do, is data cleaning with pandas and openpyxl, mostly in excel. Really messy lists with a lot of typos or misaligned data in columns that needs to be sorted into the right columns etc. I have a client coming back every month or so for a data matcher, I built once, which brings in a huge chunk of money for me. Usually around 800-1000 dollars a pop. I wish I had more clients like that, but I am not sure how to find them.
Current process is to use chatgpt, outline what I want to do, get a script, and then I end up going back and forth a little until it has the right general direction down, and then I end up tossing chatgpt to do the rest by hand. It makes it a little quicker this way, so I don't have to figure out where to start. It's basically like picking up a halfway done project and just finish the rest. Maybe one day chatgpt will be able to complete projects on its own, but so far it's rubbish. It only saves you time in the beginning of setting things up, which libraries and the general approach, but applying actual logic, that works, is not a thing as of yet.
The next big thing I do is that I scrape B2B data. Depending on how much I can find, I still do this only half manually and I don't think my sources (apollo, sales navigator) are the best for the job, as sometimes I get a request, look it up, find very few entries (only a few hundred when you'd expect thousands), and they end up hiring someone else, who then finds thousands of entries for them. Or the client has a specific list that he wants to reasearch, and when I look, I only find 20 % or less of those companies on Apollo at all, but then someone else seems to do the job right (I end up stalking a little and go back to their profiles a few weeks later to see reviews of the freelancers they hire).
So I am really not sure where they are looking!
A lot of orders end up not being taken up, because I can't find enough.
What do I do to improve my situation?
On the site, I am learning flask and plan to maybe learn Django, I am also currently doing a course at the uni for Frontend Web Dev.
GOAL:
My goal is to have a steady income over 2000 dollars a month there and get back to at least 3k impressions a day for any of my gigs or 10k in total (1k a day per gig each).
Either by improving current gigs, make new gigs that reach it with my current skill set, or learn new skills to sell.
Impressions today:
So as of this very moment, I am getting maybe 3k impressions in total per day for 10 gigs according to Fiverr, but that may not be too accurate.
VA: 237
Scraping: 11
Data Cleaning: 119
B2B Leads: 2
I won't bother with other gigs as I make most sales through these.
Earnings:
Earnings on Fiverr are in three categories:
1. Earned so far (which is after Fiverr's cut (which is 20%) and after the order was completed and paid out.
2. Payments being cleared (which are completed orders, but are still in the pay out period of 7 days. If you are elligible, you can pay out early for a 1% fee, I used to have that but not any more)
3. Open orders (Fiverr orders take 3 days to auto complete after delivery. So either the order has not done that yet, or it's not delivered at all yet. The sum is before Fiverr's cut, so 20% of it still go to Fiverr)
As you can see, it's a slow month, but it's not as bad as it could be, the big client hasn't ordered yet, and I am still waiting for a few follow up orders from other clients, that I worked with in the past and indicated that there is more to do (like 5-6 or so), and I am also discussing tasks with like 3 clients as well, where I expect a couple of orders each in a few days, too.
Sorry for the long post, I hope this will evolve into something useful for others (I know there aren't any techniques here) but for now, I mostly created it for myself and kind of sort my thoughts about this and keep track of it.
I am on Fiverr since a few years, but only seriously earning on there since maybe 2-3 years. I started doing VA work, web research and the likes, now I still do that, but my best gigs currently are web scraping, data cleaning and B2B Leads.
Background:
When I first started with Fiverr, I landed a fantastic gig, that generated 5k impressions per day, and I had so many orders and big projects that I had more work than I had time in the day. Things went well for 9-10 months or so until I got a horrible client, who blackmailed and tricked me into doing more work than I signed up for (A LOT more work!), and paid very little for it all. He even haggled me on the already low prices for my services.
What happend was this: hepaid me 200 usd for a scraping job that should have been at least 700 (but I didn't feel comfortable enough to ask for that much... Imposter syndrome lol), and after I delivered the files to him, he said "oops, this is not what I wanted. I actually meant this and that." But that scraping was a whole lot more difficult due to the nature of a dynamic real estate website where everything moved around and changed container names etc, and for the further pages, there were captcha tests and all that.
I didn't have a lot of work around that time as I just finished two big jobs and waited for something new to come along, so I wanted the money. And this is where he blackmailed me;
I said to him "Look, that big job is so much extra work and nothing as we discussed beforehand, I will have to charge you more for that." Thinking about it, it would be around 2400usd for that job with my set rates, and that is a justified price for the hundred thousand or so entries I had to scrape. "I will need 1200 for this".
His reply was, that he will not pay that much and he will leave me a really terrible review if I don't do "what we discussed beforehand", which is absolutely not what we discussed and agreed on but okay. I used screenshots and marked the fields with red borders that I will access and scrape to avoid any miscommunications like that, but he just pretended that I just didn't get it right.
Now bad reviews are obviously not good and I didn't want to cancel, as cancellations are also not good, but less bad, although it means you did all the work for free as he already has the files and if you cancel, you forfeit your claim to the money.
I was in bad and didn't know what to do, so I thought "Well, it's better in the long run to protect my reputation than to make money. So if I deliver what he wants and work my ass off for free, at least I won't a cancellation and at least a little money...".
He graciously offered 50 dollars extra for that work... What a dick.
Anyway, it took me 7 days to figure out how to do it, it was very complicated work. Once delivered he was VERY pleased and left me a "good" 4 star review, which on Fiverr is bad. Either 5 stars or no good. Anyway, he was very happy with it, he told me in the message, left taht review and then it was my turn to review him.
Green around the nose as I was, I left him a 3 star review saying "We had difficulties agreeing on a fair price and he massively underpaid me". He took that very ill. In a private message he told me he will leave me the worst private review possible (which is where buyers can leave you a review in private, without it being shown to anyone).
He did, and all my impressions went from thousands a day to under 50 a day and didn't rise again for 10 months. I only survived due to recurring clients with long lasting projects.
I then was shadow banned, didn't get any new orders, and just when the last order was done from the recurring clients (the projects just concluded), it lifted like 2-3 weeks later and I finally started getting traffic again, but never as much as I used to have back in the day.
So, ever since that, I am struggling on the platform and try to have a steady, good time again.
Focus:
The thread will monitor my impressions, as I personally think they are the most important thing on Fiverr. The more people see you, the more potential clicks you get, the more clicks you get, the more potential new clients you get. If you have very few impressions, then the chain reaction will result in very little work.
I will try to improve them to get more exposure and land better jobs.
I'd also like to journal about client interactions, as some clients are a breeze to work with and others are just godawful people who will drain your soul and just make it all horrible and terrible.
And I will try to learn new "tricks" to sell and make an income.
What do I do? What is my current skill set?
I started with doing VA work and manual research, Data Entry and everything people wanted me to do manually.
After a while, I got tired of doing it all by hand and started to learn coding, Python in particular. Just did various youtube and udemy courses until I had the basics down, but wasn't sure (and still not very sure!) what to do with it.
As of now it's mostly webautomations (log in scripts, interacting with websites etc), and data scraping on various platforms. Depending on how easy or difficult the website is, I am either using Selenium or Beautiful Soup.
Another big thing I do, is data cleaning with pandas and openpyxl, mostly in excel. Really messy lists with a lot of typos or misaligned data in columns that needs to be sorted into the right columns etc. I have a client coming back every month or so for a data matcher, I built once, which brings in a huge chunk of money for me. Usually around 800-1000 dollars a pop. I wish I had more clients like that, but I am not sure how to find them.
Current process is to use chatgpt, outline what I want to do, get a script, and then I end up going back and forth a little until it has the right general direction down, and then I end up tossing chatgpt to do the rest by hand. It makes it a little quicker this way, so I don't have to figure out where to start. It's basically like picking up a halfway done project and just finish the rest. Maybe one day chatgpt will be able to complete projects on its own, but so far it's rubbish. It only saves you time in the beginning of setting things up, which libraries and the general approach, but applying actual logic, that works, is not a thing as of yet.
The next big thing I do is that I scrape B2B data. Depending on how much I can find, I still do this only half manually and I don't think my sources (apollo, sales navigator) are the best for the job, as sometimes I get a request, look it up, find very few entries (only a few hundred when you'd expect thousands), and they end up hiring someone else, who then finds thousands of entries for them. Or the client has a specific list that he wants to reasearch, and when I look, I only find 20 % or less of those companies on Apollo at all, but then someone else seems to do the job right (I end up stalking a little and go back to their profiles a few weeks later to see reviews of the freelancers they hire).
So I am really not sure where they are looking!
A lot of orders end up not being taken up, because I can't find enough.
What do I do to improve my situation?
On the site, I am learning flask and plan to maybe learn Django, I am also currently doing a course at the uni for Frontend Web Dev.
GOAL:
My goal is to have a steady income over 2000 dollars a month there and get back to at least 3k impressions a day for any of my gigs or 10k in total (1k a day per gig each).
Either by improving current gigs, make new gigs that reach it with my current skill set, or learn new skills to sell.
Impressions today:
So as of this very moment, I am getting maybe 3k impressions in total per day for 10 gigs according to Fiverr, but that may not be too accurate.
VA: 237
Scraping: 11
Data Cleaning: 119
B2B Leads: 2
I won't bother with other gigs as I make most sales through these.
Earnings:
Earnings on Fiverr are in three categories:
1. Earned so far (which is after Fiverr's cut (which is 20%) and after the order was completed and paid out.
2. Payments being cleared (which are completed orders, but are still in the pay out period of 7 days. If you are elligible, you can pay out early for a 1% fee, I used to have that but not any more)
3. Open orders (Fiverr orders take 3 days to auto complete after delivery. So either the order has not done that yet, or it's not delivered at all yet. The sum is before Fiverr's cut, so 20% of it still go to Fiverr)
As you can see, it's a slow month, but it's not as bad as it could be, the big client hasn't ordered yet, and I am still waiting for a few follow up orders from other clients, that I worked with in the past and indicated that there is more to do (like 5-6 or so), and I am also discussing tasks with like 3 clients as well, where I expect a couple of orders each in a few days, too.
Sorry for the long post, I hope this will evolve into something useful for others (I know there aren't any techniques here) but for now, I mostly created it for myself and kind of sort my thoughts about this and keep track of it.
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