How my Latest Gig Made it to the FRONT PAGE in Three Days!
Once you really get how Fiverr works, some amazing things are possible. Today, I’ll tell you how I created a brand new gig, and had it on the first page of Fiverr search results in just three days.
I launched a new gig on a Tuesday, and by Friday (yesterday), I had it ranked on the first page in more than one of the search criteria I was hoping for. I’m going to tell you exactly what I did today.
Back story: I’ve been doing my Gig Doctor service for a number of years. The core of the service is a one hour live Zoom session I do, where I meet with people, look at their Fiverr gigs, and make recommendations to help them to get found more easily, get noticed, and be ordered from. I created a website called thegigdoctor.com to go along with it. And I set up on Facebook with several groups designed to help people succeed on Fiverr.
Well a lot of the people in the groups were voiceover people, because that’s the area I pursue on Fiverr, so naturally most of the people meeting with me were also voiceover people. A couple years ago, it finally dawned on me that I was pretty much limiting myself to one genre of Fiverr sellers. There are thousands of voiceover people on the platform, but there are hundreds of thousands of sellers in other categories. It was one of those DOH! moments. So I decided to do something about it.
I created a Gig Doctor gig on Fiverr, offering the same service, same price, on Fiverr. It did well, and by the end of that year, I had done, if I remember right, close to 100 meetings, and had lots of positive reviews. So it had been a successful launch, and was providing me with a nice additional monthly income, having the service offered there on Fiverr. Fiverr’s computer noticed me, bolstered my gig up to the front page, and eventually to the first position, and also made me their “Fiverr’s Choice.”
Then one day, the gig just disappeared. Poof, and it was gone. Fiverr had decided there was no official category for what I was offering, and they zapped it. The gig and everything there, including my built-up set of reviews, was gone in an instant. I appealed to them, but they basically said, “sorry, it’s gone” and that was the end of it. So I just redoubled my efforts in promoting The Gig Doctor service elsewhere, and let it go at that.
Fast-Forward to This Past Week
Time went by, and recently, I noticed there were services much like my "The Gig Doctor" on Fiverr, so I contacted my Fiverr Success Coach, and she confirmed to me that there was now an accepted category for it. I told her exactly what I wanted to do, and she suggested a category where I set it up, which I did. I then asked that Fiverr look it over thoroughly, and tell me if there was anything I needed to do differently, and that I’d make whatever adjustments were necessary. I wanted to make sure that there was nothing there they could object to. They gave everything the seal of approval, so I published the new The Gig Doctor gig on Tuesday of this past week.
As I worked on the gig, and went through the process of designing and promoting it, it occurred to me that this was an excellent litmus test for some of the things I teach people in the Gig Doctor meetings. It was an opportunity to prove my advice, or disprove it. So I decided I’d post a series of daily updates on how it was going, to my Facebook group. I’d tell them honestly whether I was making progress, or if it had been a flop so far. So the pressure was on. I’d gone public about the effort!
Let me step back just a little and tell you the steps that led up to publishing the gig. First, I did some homework. I did a log of incognito mode browser searching on Fiverr, to see what the most popular searches were, related to what I offered, which was basically, “Fiverr gig optimization.” I learned that the most popular related searches had to do with search ranking, seo, gig profile, description, and a few other things. So as I worked on the wording of my gig, I made sure those words figured prominently in my title, tags, and description. I spent a lot of time refining my description, which needed to not only make the case about the value of what I offered, but also contain important keywords I wanted to be found by.
So I had everything in place, and I hit Publish. Alright, now this is where I could have stopped, and played the girl waiting by the phone to be asked to the prom. You know the drill. You put the gig up there and just hope Fiverr will give it a chance in search and maybe you’ll eventually get some orders. But I know Fiverr, and what makes gigs move up in the search rankings, and waiting by the phone is the long waiting game wasn’t what I had in mind. So next I’m going to show you exactly what made my gig rise to the front page in just three days.
What I Did
OK, so how in the world did I manage to make this brand new gig jump to the front page as fast as I did? Let me tell you the theory first, and then I’ll tell you what I did in practice.
Fiverr is a business that is successful because they have developed a way to help others succeed. But it’s not philanthropy. It’s business. Everything they do is designed to earn them more money. That’s what businesses do. Once you realize that, it helps you understand the best way to succeed with them. If you want to make money, find ways for your participation on Fiverr to help them make money. Let me give you a few examples.
Offer something of real value, that Fiverr customers will want
Offer it at the best price you can get. Which means, make sure the value is high enough that you can charge more than average, either through the starting price, or that plus whatever extras you offer. That way, Fiverr sees you as a good source of income.
Make an effort to promote what you’re doing. Again, there, we’re signaling Fiverr that we’re more likely to bring in money than someone else.
Demonstrate that we are going to make buyers happy. Fiverr will see evidence of that through the ratings we get.
Demonstrate that we’re responsible, meaning, we answer inquiries and messages in a reasonable time, and deliver our orders on time.
So coming in, I already had some juice with Fiverr, because I’ve already proven myself to be an effective seller. But that alone isn’t going to do it. I have to also demonstrate that I can do a good job with the new service I’m offering.
That brings us to the old chicken and the egg thing, doesn’t it. To prove I can deliver the goods in this new category, I need to complete orders successfully, and get five star reviews. But in order to complete orders successfully and get five-star reviews, I need orders! And when you first launch a new gig, you’re kind of nowhere. Right at first, you’re lucky if you can find your gig, no matter how far you go down through the pages of search results.
So somehow, the chicken needs to lay eggs, in order to get more chickens, and so on. And that’s what I set out to do next.
I came up with a promotion, to help get things going. While I priced my Gig Doctor service at $95 in the gig, I went online to social media and offered it for half price…$50…for the first month that I had it up on Fiverr. And then, to that, I added a free $50 HeadSlapper video, my two-hour “Climbing the Ladder on Fiverr” course, and a special spreadsheet called “GigTracker” that people can use to track the progress of their gigs from month to month. So suddenly we’re talking about an awful lot of value added to what was already a valuable service, and the whole thing was being offered at half the price of what the gig itself cost. I knew it was a heck of a deal and I was kind of giving away the store, but you have to take the long-view of things.
The way this worked, by the way, was that participants could get the special deal by going to my gig and clicking the Contact Me button, and that would then allow them to ask for the price break. I then sent them a special custom offer, they accepted, and then we’d schedule and meet, and I’d also give them the other goodies at the same time. Now, there’s one more important element to this, and that’s that I used a special link for the promotion. You get a sharable link like that by going to the gig, clicking the “Share Gig” button, and then clicking on “Copy Link.” That’s a specially coded link that signals to Fiverr that you’re sharing your gig, promoting, and driving traffic to Fiverr from the outside. They love that. It’s another way we can tell Fiverr we’re one of the people who are going to make them money. So don’t just copy the URL from the top of your gig and share that. If you do that, you’re missing the boat. The shared social link is an important element in this process.
What happened? People responded. The same day I launched the gig, I began seeing messages in Fiverr from people who had seen the promotion and wanted in. I think there were like seven of them that first day. So I sent them offers and they accepted, and suddenly I had seven orders in the queue.
As I expected, when I checked the next morning, the gig still wasn’t showing up in search. It doesn’t usually happen quite THAT fast. But by later that day, my gig had crept up through the 12,000-some results to about the fifth page in front the front.
I suspected that it would be after I delivered on some of these, and they left reviews, that things would start to take off. And that was exactly what happened. The day after I launched the gig, I think I did three or four meetings with new Gig Doctor friends, and after each was done, I hit deliver and asked them to leave a review, explaining how important that was to my own success. They were all happy with what I’d done for them, and every single one left a nice review. So I had high expectations for what I’d see the next day.
The next day (so this would be Day 2 after launch), The Gig Doctor gig was up to the first page for Gig Optimization. It was down from the top by about five or six rows, but it had made it to the front page. There were a load of additional Gig Doctor sessions that day, which I delivered immediately after they were done, and again it was all five-star ratings, and most also left nice reviews.
The next morning was pretty exciting. I did a bunch of different searches, and the Gig Doctor popped up on the first page in pretty much all of them.
Fiverr optimization (first position, first row) "Fiverr's Choice"
Optimize gig (first position, first row)
Fiver gig (first row)
Optimize Fiverr gig (second row)
Fiverr SEO (second row)
Fiverr gig optimization (third row)
Fiverr search optimization (third row)
Will the new gig continue to do well after the promotion is over this month of May, 2023? That’s yet to be seen. Its normal $95 price is higher than pretty much any of the others on Fiverr, because it’s really worth it for what people are getting. I’m inclined to say yes. I won’t be showered with orders like it is this month, but…well let me use voiceover coaching as a kind of a parallel example.
I have a voiceover coaching gig on Fiverr that’s also $95 for a concentrated one-hour session. Fiverr loves the higher price, of course, so they promote it heavily in search, and I do get regular orders on it, despite the fact it’s higher than the others. There’s a natural (and I think correct) assumption that if a lot of other people have already ordered it, and it gets five-star reviews, that it must be offering something of higher value and is worthwhile. That’s the message I hope people will get by looking at this new Fiverr Gig Doctor gig.
By the way, if you want to grab a Gig Doctor session for fifty bucks and get the extras including that “Climbing the Ladder” course on Fiverr (which I really poured myself into, and has kind of gold mine of info), the HeadSlapper video, “Knowing the Unknowable on Fiverr” and the rest, you can hit the special link I talked about, which I’ve shared in the show notes.
Next time on The Gig Doctor, a fun one. I’m going to compare working on Fiverr to being married. There are a lot of parallels, and I think you’ll not only enjoy it, but it’ll give you a new way of looking at your Fiverr experience that may help you succeed better there. In the close here, watch for another Gig Doctor I think you’ll like. Catch you next time!