Here's How This Copywriter Went From Earning $5 to $50 an Hour on Fiverr A few simple moves can set you apart from other service providers and help your bottom line.
By Natasha Zo Edited by Amanda Breen
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Putting her hopes and dreams into the gig economy, Jordyn Roe packed her bags and left her home in North Carolina to see if the independent lifestyle would work for her. The plan was to complete her yoga-teacher training in Koh Yao Noi, Thailand and complete meaningful work exchanges while finding a way to do something that offered value to people.
Now, let's zoom into some details. Jordyn did not have an established client base. She also left in November 2019 — unaware, like the rest of the world, that a pandemic was about to disrupt her travel and business plans. Travelling was going well; copywriting, however, wasn't. Most of Jordyn's time went towards writing pitches to clients on freelance platforms, but without credibility and ratings, it was hard to beat the competition. So her only option was to negotiate the price. She picked up writing projects about meditation and personal development — a yoga practitioner and reiki master herself, Jordyn had a wealth of knowledge to share on the topic. However, the competitive market wasn't working in her favor. An article that would take her six hours to write, including the pitching time and all the revisions, would pay $30 at the very best.
Running out of patience and cash, Jordyn needed a quick solution. Coincidentally, countries started shutting borders, so now she truly had no way back to her past life.
Related: Launch a Lucrative Career in Copywriting for Less Than $20
Finding a new niche
Her then-partner noticed that Jordyn had a beautiful soothing voice — perfect for meditations. Before leaving the U.S., Jordyn never considered her clean American accent to be an asset, but she had a very strong inner drive to try new work that would make an impact on the world.
She discovered that Fiverr had a whole section dedicated to lifestyle gigs. You can order things such as spell castings or tarot readings. Guided meditations were a rising sub-niche in voiceover gigs. The math was easy: "Articles and blog posts" niche on Fiverr offered over 53,000 gigs. However, under "guided meditation" there were fewer than 250.
Building the rating
After failing to compete with thousands of copywriters, she recognized that in the gig economy, profile ratings are everything. Her new career started with careful research of the niche and Fiverr rating algorithms.
Jordyn discovered a few articles and Reddit threads suggesting quick ways to build up her Fiverr rating profile, such as exchanging social likes for profile likes, asking people to save her gig into their lists and other "manual" tactics to get her new gig to appear in relevant searches. This took about three days of meticulously gathering "likes."
Second, the profile rating was heavily influenced by the time it took to respond to potential customers. However, because she was living in Southeast Asia and her customers were ordering from Europe and North America, she needed to win in a different way.
Fiverr is known for being a place where many users hide their true identities, and overall trust levels on the platform are low. Jordyn decided to address that from day one. She chose to create her gig under her real name with her real photo in her profile, and she even included a video of herself in a professional studio that she rented. Her total investment in this new career added up to about $250: $200 for a professional microphone to use for voice-overs and $50 to hire a music recording studio to help her video introduction stand out.
Investing in building profile "likes" and showing her real self proved to be the right strategy. After launching the gig, it took off instantly. All she had to do was deliver great work and get those positive customer reviews.
As a voiceover artist, she could finally cover her travel expenses in Thailand, where the pandemic kept her. While six hours spent winning a copywriting contract and writing an article with revisions could earn Jordyn as little as $30, she can now make double that in under an hour, which is how long it takes her to complete her average order.
Her gig now comes on top of the searches in the "guided meditation" section on Fiverr, which guarantees a steady flow of orders.
Related: Should Fiverr Investors Be Worried About LinkedIn?
Here are Jordyn's top tips for making it in the gig economy.
Look for a unique niche and get specific
Competing against a few hundred voice-over artists was a completely different ballgame than competing against tens of thousands of copywriters. Even there, she specialized in a guided meditation and built her reputation in that specific niche before listing a few more gigs on her profile.
You can game the rating first, then focus on the quality of the service
It seems as if you need to have some social proof even before you score your first order. Jordyn gamed it by collecting "likes" on her profile, which helped the algorithm favor her gig and allowed her to get first orders where she could demonstrate the quality and earn the ratings.
Make the initial offer look cheap and take advantage of upsells
Her own gig is priced at under $5, yet the average order is anywhere between $50 and $80. But here's the trick: The initial order is for 100 words of recording. Scriptwriting, longer recordings and special requests are how she hits her higher average.
Transparency is a good idea
Jordyn uses her real name and a video to help her stand out from the crowd of others who hide their identities behind avatars. Jordyn says that many clients really respect that and even credit her work on their websites. This helps her build authority outside of the platform so that one day she can launch her own website and receive orders directly.
Related: 3 Ways to Increase Client Retention Through Transparency
By zeroing in on a niche service, accumulating ratings and offering low prices with upsells in mind, you too can take advantage of this growing and lucrative gig-economy sector.
