I have followed the rise of fiverr and its job offers over the last couple of months and remained in some sort of waiting position due to my skepticism. I had never ordered gigs as I wasn’t sure if $5 (or $50 / 10 gigs in this case) would buy me anything great good, and don’t misunderstand me, you cannot get super-high quality for five bucks but there are surely tasks you can outsource with fiverr. So how did I use the platform and what did I get for $$$? Here are the results of 10 fiverr gigs I ordered over a period of one month.
If you had never used fiverr I strongly recommend reading this simple tutorial first.
Table: fiverr gigs
| Gig | Type | Rating | Cost | Delivery | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| do Long Tail Keyword Research | normal | 100% | $5 | < 1 day | Pretty good, from one initial seed keyword I got a list of 15 keywords where at least 8 of them help me for future development |
| write an Article of 300 to 450 Words for Your Blog or Website Prof | express | – | $5 | 15h29m | The seller didn’t have any ratings before my gig (beware) of those but I was positively surprised. After the briefing with a couple of bullet points and inspiration links I got an excellent article back I could immediately use on my blog |
| write an Article of 300 to 450 Words for Your Blog or Website Prof | express | – | $5 | 16h01m | Same seller, same briefing. Compared to the related gig I ordered from this seller this article wasn’t that great and I had to rewrite some parts. She/He could have done it as well but I needed it quickly so I did it myself |
| write a 200 words article for you and post it on my own EDU domain | normal | 99% | $5 | 7 days | Can’t say much except that the article (with do follow backlink) was written and published. The only downside is that it wasn’t a real .edu domain but a subdomain with .edu in it. Half-fail. |
| tweet your product or link to over 1500 loyal followers | normal | 100% | $5 | 1 day | The URL was tweeted to all her followers and the seller proposed to reply to it so she can retweet it once again. Very motivated but her follower group wasn’t that receptive, i.e. targeted for my type of business. Would use this service for other sites. |
| help you fix css problems of your website | normal | 96% | $5 | 1 day | I didn’t have time or was too lazy to dig into my HTML / CSS problems (I had a breaking sidebar) so I ordered this gig. The seller quickly came back with 2 possible reasons and he was right. I could quickly fix it and didn’t spend hours on it. |
| give Page Rank 4 Blogroll Link for 3 months | express | 100% | $5 | 7m(!) | Great value for $5! The seller told me he would leave it there for 1 year. Amazing but let’s see if the link is still there after a couple of months, let alone one year. |
| share your link to Facebook 572 friends, Twitter 4000+ followers stumbleupon,google+,Digg | express | 100% | $5 | 3h30m | Pretty similar to the twitter gig I ordered but this time for another site. Outcome is unfortunately similar: responses, visits or retweets is very close to zero. |
| post 15 insightful comments to your blog | normal | 100% | $5 | 3 days | I told the seller to comment on posts he actually finds interesting so he is more motivated. Comments were indeed insightful except maybe 3 which I deleted. Others were replied to. I would definitely order this gig again. |
| post 10 Blog Comments In Your Blog Posts | normal | 100% | $5 | 6 days | I briefed the seller with exact links to posts as this was the requirement. The blog comments were ok but didn’t spur any conversation. The seller also features an option to do 60 comments for $20 which somebody could consider as well |
Spend your dollars wisely, even if it’s cheap
What you can see from the 10 fiverr gigs is that I didn’t have a single total-failure and in total I was pretty happy about the results (hey, it was only $50). What I learned is that you shouldn’t order gigs only because it is possible, it doesn’t make sense to let somebody tweet your url to over 1,000 followers when they’re potentially not interested in or related to your product or business. You have to ask the sellers what their twitter account is so you can have a look at their environment of people.
Stick to proven people and methods
Also interesting to note is that those “express”-gigs sometimes aren’t extremely faster than the normal gigs when the seller’s queue is long. You don’t pay more for them but the added bonus (saving time) is less than expected. In my case they sticked to the deadline so that’s ok. In the future I will rely on sellers that have proven to be successful, so I would recommend reordering gigs instead of constantly trying out new people. Generally speaking I will continue using fiverr and can tell you it’s excellent for outsourcing simple tasks.
Photo by AaronPatterson