I finally delivered my first Fiverr order, Mistakes new Fiverr Marketers Make (Fiverr Beginner's Guide)

Posted on Naijacrawl Blog

How long has it been? It was supposed to take only 5 days! I think it has taken 47 days, yes – 47 good days, and now, I have finally parted ways with my first Fiverr client.

Oh, did I say I finally delivered my first order? Pardon me, that was a slip of tongue, the order was actually canceled and wasn’t delivered. In this post am going to explain why an order I worked on for 47 days was canceled, the mistakes I made and what I learned from those mistakes, grab your popcorn people, let’s roll.

This post was written with beginners in mind, I will try to go into as much details as possible; experienced Fiverr marketers can also follow along although this post might sound a little too detailed, you may pickup
a few things on the way… who knows what might help in the future?

If you didn’t know already, Fiverr is an online skill marketplace, think of the local market or supermarket in your area, Fiverr is exactly the same thing – well not exactly same thing per say, Fiverr is an online marketplace which means the seller and the customer doesn’t get to meet face to face, secondly you can’t buy your regular wares like beverages or wines in the platform, for that you’d have to visit amazon or eBay, here we actually market (buy and sell) skills like web development, programming, audio editing, video editing, copy writing, graphic design etc – the different types of skilled marketed in the platform will surprise you, so if you already have skill but hasn’t registered on the platform, please do so already. If you need to learn more about Fiverr, please search on Google for more information about it, I will also post regularly about my experiences on the platform on this website.

Alright, now that you might have a fairly good understanding of the platform, any related terminology will be explained as we move forward, here you will understand some Beginner tips needed to start out on Fiverr.

It was on this fateful 14 September 2018, I had received a follow-up message on an offer I sent to a buyer about a week ago using the buyer’s request page – on this page customers who are probably too lazy to move round the whole market checking and comparing prices (assuming it’s your regular local market) writes a description of what they want to buy and sellers who can deliver this product make offers to the customer with their prices and how long it will take them to deliver this product (or orders), the customer then selects the “best person” for the job.

2 weeks before the message I had gotten a laptop, created my gig a day later – think of gigs as the wares you see on your regular market displayed inside showcases and hung on counters, so basically, by creating a gig I had actually set up my own ware and hung them on counters – oh and don’t forget the price tags. That same day I started making offers to clients using the buyer’s request page.

I made my first mistake by sending an offer to that particular request, the customer requested for someone with knowledge of PHP, I thought maybe I could convince him to work with python (which is what I work with), PHP and Python are programming languages which in my case are being used for web development, so they are like different tools that do the same thing. This was my first mistake. Always remember to apply for an offer that allows you to deliver with the tool you work with, don’t write an offer you aren’t sure you can deliver – do not play trial and error with a customer’s order. You will learn more about this as we move further.

It took a week, I have even forgotten I wrote an offer to that particular request because I had continued writing offers to so many other requests. so imagine my surprise when I was contacted with details of job I had forgotten I even applied for, someone talking like we had somehow discussed about the job before, thankfully I can view all the requests I sent offers to, sure we had discussed about the job before, he needed someone to redesign an existing site interface and add some functionalities to make the lives of the site visitors easier. This was a big task, I’d only gotten my laptop about two weeks before and hadn’t embarked on a large project, I had just finished writing a simple web scraper; and here I have someone who want’s me to build something with a technology (or tool) I don’t like or use, I had even forgotten my plan was to convince him to drop PHP and use python instead.
At first I wanted to reply with “Sorry am not a PHP programmer, find someone else”, but then I looked around the room, I was actually sitting with an experienced PHP programmer, the owner of this great blog and a good friend – Kizinho.

“Kizinho I just received a message from a potential client that requested for features you may already have scripts (already made) for, what do you think? Should I negotiate with the customer? I will handle the interface while you handle the back-end” I had asked, he gave me a go ahead, few hours later a $70 custom order was placed with 5 days time frame – Another mistake.

I had made two mistakes by accepting this very order – First,

Accepting A Project That Required A Tool I Don’t Work With:- I’m a python developer, I accepted a job that needed tools I don’t work with.
Do you know why I accepted the order in the first place? Na, I haven’t told you yet, well I accepted the order for the same reason many starting Fiverr freelance will accept this type of order – Rating! I had hoped to do a fantastic job and get a five star rating; I did not stop to think about certain variables that came with job, for example, communication, I as the front-end developer lives very far way from the back-end engineer, this presented communication issue because relaying to and fro such long distance with Facebook and Whatsapp is a huge mess I would have realized this if thought about it a longer, sometimes the message you’re trying to pass along might be completely misunderstood. Also I didn’t stop to thing “Oh maybe this project might be more complicated than I thought”, and it as hell was, we will look at this mistake in the next section, for now, please never accept a project that requires a tool you are not familiar with, you might be severally tempted but don’t give in, my huddles might be different from yours but it will ultimately boil down to one thing – bad customer experience.

Now is the major mistake from my long list of mistakes – Read More
https://naijacrawl.com/read/news/others-news/i-finally-delivered-my-first-fiverr-order-mistakes-new-fiverr-marketers-make-fiverr-beginner-39-s-guide

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Nice one bro... ride on

gracefoundmme:
Nice one bro... ride on

Ok...

Assuming I understood what the customer wanted without paying proper attention to details:- Care for a piece of advice? Never under any circumstance assume you understand what the customer wants without paying very proper attention, neither should you try to guess what a clients requested that you didnt understand properly Big mistake, you will waste a lot of time doing this.

Redesign an existing interface, implement a new such feature that will return relevant results on both single and multi-search query, dont touch the static files was all I read, at some points I think I had also read something about adding some few other pages My customer had sent a 9 page .docx document listing what he wanted some where vague I agree, but what did I do? Well, I believed he listed everything he needed on the chat message he sent so the document was just a way of well I dont know what to say, I just kinda believed everything he wanted was on our chat message, so I just skimmed through the pages of the document with the wrong impression that I had fully understood the project big mistake then came the complaint:

What is this? The whole features seems like it was rushed and I dont think you understand this project at all, please design an upgrade in progress landing page for the site and redo the whole stuff, its not ready at all! But Ill take it youre still working on the project my heart skipped a beat when I saw this message on the morning of day six. I had been feeling like the Killer Bean the previous night, I had expected a wow message that morning with a lot of smiling faces, and what nonsense was he talking about when he he wrote I dont think you understand the project at all? I replied the message with all the features he had asked me to implement, give me 24 hours to rewrite the whole document he replied, but now I couldnt wait for 24 hours, so I calmed down then and reread the whole breif (yep, that was what he named the .docx document) - Implement a live search filter for the search results that lets users filter the results by views, rating, relevance and many other variables What the hell? Implement a new rating system that lets user users rate the software source and a rating pop-up What?! Now this requirement was vague, it was not clear enough, by source he meant www.domain.com and not www.domain.com/name-of-software, I just guessed he meant he latter, that is rating a webpage against rating the whole website, so we went ahead to implement a system that lets users rate the latter Instead of asking for clarification I guessed he wanted something else, never do this! Ask questions when you dont understand anything.