Offer premium value-added services on fiverr
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.
