Staying SANE on Fiverr - Introduction
Avoiding the Straightjacket
Hey, welcome to the first of a series of blogs and live feeds that talk about ways to succeed on Fiverr, while preserving your sanity and peace of mind. It's intended to be a fun series, but at the same time, it addresses (and offers solutions to) some of the real anxieties, frustrations, and apprehensions people can feel doing freelance work in general, and on Fiverr in particular.
I'm convinced God knew what he's doing when he created humans with personalities that match their gifts. The banker's dogged stolidity helps him or her to analyze, calculate, and plan. An artist's fanciful nature helps them to imagine and create and design. For each, crossing over and attempting to do the other's work is a painful task: Just as bankers might have difficulty unshackling themselves enough to create art, creatives tend to find it nettlesome to try and conduct business. For the artistic, business details are a drudge and tax their patience. They'd rather spend their time creating rather than crunching numbers, doing sales, promoting, auditioning, advertising, order handling, invoicing, and the like.
Why I Like Fiverr
That's actually one of the better arguments for Fiverr is they take a lot of that drudgery out of the way. For their 20% commission, they lift a lot of the business burden off the shoulders of creatives. Once your actual gig has been created and well-designed, Fiverr handles promotion/showcasing your service, processing new orders, collecting from the customer, record-keeping, and paying you. They also help you to stay disciplined by rewarding you for handling customers well, delivering on time, and sharing your gig links through social media and elsewhere.
Fiverr is a natural place for right-brained people to offer their gifts. Many of its sellers are writers, artists, designers, video producers, and voiceover people. If you are one, you know that, along with being sensitive, creative, and smart, they can also be a little temperamental, eccentric, and idiosyncratic. Before people take offense, understand that I count myself in that lot. My moods tend to be driven by experiences, and experiences driven by my mood. If you're like that, I get it. And if you're like me, you're more right-brained, and not by nature inclined to the business side of things. I consider Fiverr a boon to people like us for the reasons I've mentioned.
That Said...
Despite that, there are plenty of little things about Fiverr that can drive creatives to distraction if we don't approach them with the right mindset, and follow good techniques and practices. There are ways we can take the pressure off ourselves and our buyers. We can tweak what we offer, and especially, HOW we offer it, and lower the anxiety level considerably. There are pressure valves we can open that bring real relief to stressful communications. Those are the sorts of things I'll be addressing in our new series, "Staying SANE on Fiverr." Hope you'll follow along!
There's so much you and I can do together to improve your gig's performance. Schedule your Gig Doctor appointment by hitting the Gig Checkup link at the top of this page for an inexpensive personalized checkup and consultation!
For those of you who do voiceovers, or who are interested in entering that fun profession, I can help there too. Check out my voiceover coaching services.