Fiverr has been around for a while now and I’ve used it since it was launched, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit my experiences with Fiverr.
Firstly, my experiences on Fiverr are only as a buyer. I have never listed a gig, but have occasionally thought about it but the actually commission you receive has put me off (although there are quite a few tricks you can you to increase your profits from Fiverr, which I might cover in another article).
The other things I should point out is all the Fiverr gigs I’ve tried are related to SEO and graphics, so I can’t comment on the quality of gigs in the other categories.
It’s a Jungle In There
With so many people offerings gigs on Fiverr, it really is like a jungle in there. You never know if you are going to come across a beautiful butterfly or get bitten by a snake.
The Fiverr rating system can give you a general idea as to the quality of the gig, but it’s not a completely reliable or foolproof system. I’ve ordered some gigs that had rave reviews, but found the results were were mediocre.
As with a lot products or services, the best recommendations come from your friends as they are the people you trust the most.
Bad Fiverr Experiences
Luckily I’ve never had a completely negative experience with Fiverr. Perhaps if I had ordered a greater variety of gigs, the odds of getting a really bad one would increase.
Of all the gigs I order, I’ve only had to get one refund due to the gig not being completed. I have to say that I don’t find the refund process on Fiverr to be entirely obvious, but once you’ve worked out where to flag the information, it generally doesn’t take very long for a Fiverr staff member to review the details and issue a refund (if appropriate).
For me, the type of gigs I was most disappointed with the results (with the exception of one person) were the ones related to creating graphics, ie: banners, headers, logos etc. I’m no graphic designer, but honestly, some of the work I received was very basic or just looked plain amateurish. I know you can’t generally expect a highly professionally designed graphic for only $5, but I was expecting a little more.
In most cases, I ended up doing the graphics myself and personally thought I did a much better job.
The other types of gigs I usually avoid are anything to do with SEO. You can do some real damage to your rankings with some of the backlinking gigs on offer. Most of these use automated software to blast out spam comments or pretty much useless profile links. I can understand why some of these gigs do well, as there are a lot of people who don’t know much about SEO that read the gig descriptions and get sucked in.
Good Fiverr Experiences
Like I already mentioned, Fiverr really is a jungle, but there are some great services on offer that are high quality and an absolute bargain.
In regards to graphics and logos, I’ve ordered three gigs from a user called creative1desing
The particular gig I ordered was:
Create 3 Different Logos For Your Website or Blog
You’ll probably see some negative comments as graphic design is a very subjective and personal opinion. Obviously for $5 you can’t expect the world, but I was happy with each of the results.
The seller states that if you aren’t happy with any of the designs, they will redo them. I got them to make some minor modifications to one set of graphics I ordered, which was done very promptly.
Now, I know I said there are a lot of SEO gigs on Fiverr that you should not touch. I did try some recently and while I was initially impressed, I later worked out they were using greyhat methods.
In particular, there are a lot of Fiverr gigs that offer services that provide you with unique articles that are guaranteed to pass Copyscape, but in actual fact just steal unauthorized content from many sources and run it through some software to make it appear “unique”.
My next post will be covering this in more detail.
If you know of any other great Fiverr gigs you’ve come across or ones to definitely avoid, please leave a comment below.
Cheers
Peter –
I completely agree with you on Fiverr, there are some diamonds in the rough for sure. We’ve had some clients who went the SEO route and they’re paying for it since the Penguin / Panda updates.
There are some great deals on there though, we had a couple of videos made for $5 which in our opinion were every bit worth the money.
Thanks for putting up the article…looking forward to reading more.
Thanks for your comments Scott.
Yes, I’ve seen a few good gigs on Fiverr for creating video intros.
Cheers
Peter