The gig economy is booming, and eCommerce is on the rise, even before we had ever heard of COVID-19. The 2020 pandemic has served to fuel the gig economy’s growth and will continue to do so for some time to come. More people are turning to online solutions to purchase goods and services, which has created new eCommerce opportunities in a wide range of industries.
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Thousands of businesses worldwide have learned to thrive in the new normal, and part of their success stems from their willingness to use freelancers to shoulder some of the workloads.
What is Freelancing?
Freelancing is a term used to describe an individual who works for many different employers.
Instead of showing up to work every day at the same office and collecting a paycheck from the same company every week, freelancers operate their own business by making their services available to whoever needs them.
A freelancer could be working for a mom-and-pop store one day to a multinational corporation the next.
Where Do You Find Freelancers?
Freelancers can set up shop on their own and advertise their services through the usual channels. However, the most popular strategy for a freelancer to get work is to create a profile on one of the many freelance platforms available online. Some of the most popular freelance sites include:
- Upwork
- Freelancer
- Flexjobs
- ProBlogger Job Board
- Fiverr
All of the platforms have their various pros and cons, but the platform that wins hands down as the easiest site to locate a professional freelancer is Fiverr.
Most freelance sites require the buyer to post a job, wait for a response from hopeful services, troll through said responses (which can number in the 100s) and then get into a back-and-forth, and hopefully productive, conversation with a freelancer of their choice.
It’s a complex and laborious process. Fortunately, Fiverr’s setup has streamlined the process tremendously.
Fivver freelancers set up a gig page, which is basically a sales or landing page. On this page, they get to describe their services and convince you about the benefits of working with them.
Reviews from previous customers are also on display, making it easy to determine the quality of work you are likely to receive.
All pricing is laid out, so you are in no doubt about how much the service is expected to cost. If your job doesn’t quite fit the Fiverr seller’s pricing structure, you always have the option to negotiate a different price with them and receive a custom quote.
You can browse through hundreds of categories covering everything from video and music production to SEO audits and web design. There’s not a lot that’s not on offer at Fiverr. The way the freelancers are listed makes it easy to compare services against each other so you can quickly find the best of the bunch and put them to work.
Ease of use that is unique to almost every other freelancing site out there is why Fiverr has become the go-to site for finding professionals in all types of industries. It’s a straightforward system to quickly bring new skillsets on board with your company, or quickly get more hands on deck to take over time-consuming tasks.
The Freelance Advantage
Entrepreneurs and business owners are always the get their hands dirty types who like to get things done themselves. However, once a business grows past a certain point, doing everything in the company outgrows a single person’s capacity to tick off all the boxes on a jam-packed to-do list.
It’s not just one-person shows that need help on occasion. Even small teams can get overwhelmed with a maxed-out schedule. Adding freelancers to the payroll can help a business leap over the humps or allow other staff to do more of what they do best, which improves productivity.
Why Fiverr Has You Covered for All Your Freelance Needs
Fiverr has a setup that helps businesses quickly find professionals in any field, but here are a few more reasons why Fiverr’s freelancing platform will work in your favour.
Quickly compare freelancers: Fiverr freelancers [affiliate link] create gigs, or landing pages, for their services. Here they can outline their skills, making it easy and fast to compare different skill sets and find the one you need.
Improve productivity: Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Focusing on what you know and letting someone else handle the rest will improve your productivity and the quality of work you can deliver. If your skills lay in web design but not so much in content production, you could team up with a Fiverr seller with the necessary writing skills.
Hire new talent only when you need it: A significant challenge for small businesses is bringing full-time or part-time staff onto the payroll. There are the hassles and expenses of vacations, benefits, and infrastructure like IT and furniture. Plus, you have to worry about slow periods where full-time staff may not be productive enough to earn their keep. A freelancer can be brought on board only when you need them, and you only pay them for their work.
Get more done in the same amount of time: During a business’s first few months, there’s plenty of time to work on the company and take care of clients.
However, tasks like marketing, accounting, and maintaining your website are in danger of falling by the wayside once your client list fills out. Hiring freelancers means you don’t have to bring on a full-time accountant, marketing expert, or content creator, but you can still check off all the items on your daily to-do list.
Here are just a few of the many tasks you can outsource to a Fiverr freelancer to help you grow your business.
Business Names, Slogans, and Logo Design
Coming up with a catchy business name and professional logo design ideas can be challenging if you’re not a creative type. Fortunately, Fiverr provides access to a wide range of talents perfectly suited to business logo creation.
Choose a branding expert who can coordinate your branding, or go with a few different sellers. The site is loaded with talented designers [affiliate link] with portfolios loaded with stunning professional logos. There are also business experts and slogan writers who do branding work every day, and many are fantastically skilled.
Content Creators
Google has made it clear that your website needs to move beyond a glorified online brochure with just a few static pages. A regularly updated blog with value-adding content is mandatory if you want your site to gain a foothold in the search engines.
But, what business owner has time for digital content creation every week? Fiverr comes to the rescue for business website owners who desperately need fresh new blog content to increase traffic and enhance the customer experience.
Pick from a wide range of best content creators with content creations skills ranging from social media content and SEO blog articles to full-blown e-books. Browse the writing category, and you will soon find a rockstar content creator perfect for your needs.
SEO Experts and Web Design
Digital commerce has been expanding for the last decade, but the pandemic has pumped the gas, and more people are shopping online than ever before.
It’s more important than ever to get your website up to scratch and ensure your on-page and off-page SEO is on point. You also need a website that looks great and loads fast. You can do all of these things quickly and affordably through Fiverr’s SEO and Web Design categories.
Keyword Research
Your website needs regularly updated content, but every article or blog post will work best when you structure it around keywords to help your site get found in the search engines.
Keywords are simply the phrases people use to find a business in search engines, but it can be a time-consuming task to unearth the terms worth targeting.
Plus, most keyword research tools require an expensive monthly subscription. Instead of learning an entirely new skillset and paying hundreds for a service you might only use occasionally, why not hop onto Fiverr to find a keyword research service with the skills, experience, and toolset to do the job right?
Product Description Writers
When you start up your Etsy store and load it with products, you need engaging descriptions to get your visitors in the buying mood. If you are the crafty type, but not much of a wordsmith, a quick search on Fiverr for production description writers will help solve your creative challenges.
Legal Expertise
Yes, there are legal experts available on Fiverr. It’s a good thing because every business website must comply with regulations when operating online. This requirement will extend to every country wherever you expect to engage with customers, not just your own.
Easy Steps to Hiring a Freelancer on Fiverr
Fiverr often features hundreds of freelancers in any given search. For instance, the search phrase ‘writer’ will return more than 110,000 hits. You can’t possibly check out everyone. Fortunately, Fiverr provides a few tools to help streamline your vetting process.
Categories – You have a couple of options for searching the Fiverr marketplace. One is to do a keyword search using the Find Services keyword search bar. The other is to use the categories section to find the worker with the skills you need.
Keyword Search – A phrase of 3 or more keywords will be more efficient than a single word search. For instance, ‘writer’ brings up more than 100,000 searches, while ‘product description writer’ shows a little more than 20,000. The more detailed you can get in your search phrase, the less work you will have to find a freelancer.
Reviews and Ratings – On every gig displayed in the Fiverr search results, you will notice an average star rating and a number in brackets next to it indicating how many people have reviewed the seller. Not every buyer will leave a review, and buyers can only leave a negative comment if they accept the order, even if they don’t like the results.
This review system eliminates review bombing, but sacrificing a payment just to leave a negative comment could hide a lot of dissatisfied customers.
Still, lots of positive reviews are a good indication of the experience you can expect when working with this Fiverr seller. When you see a profile that appeals to you, clicking the gig description page will provide even more information.
Response Time – Response time tells you how fast you can expect a Fiverr seller’s response and is an average figure. A single-digit response time is pretty good, but if communication is critical, one to four hours is more reasonable. Remember, Fiverr operates worldwide, so be mindful of the seller’s location when judging their response time. For example, I live in Australia, but many of my enquiries come from the U.S. A figure of fewer than 7 hours is pretty good, given that I’m likely asleep when messages arrive in my inbox.
Gig Description – It pays to read a Fiverr seller’s gig description carefully. Here, they will let you know what they can and can’t do and their conditions. If you order a project that does not align with the gig description without contacting the seller, they may need to cancel. Cancellations affect a seller’s performance in the search results, and you will also lose your processing fee.
Save to Gig – The ‘Save to my gigs’ feature is often overlooked for determining if a gig is right for you. You will see the little heart on the search page towards the bottom of each profile. When you click through to the gig details, you will also see the heart icon towards the page’s top right and a number next to it.
This figure records the number of customers who have saved this gig to a list for future reference. Naturally, it’s not a perfect quality indicator, but it’s another useful metric to note in your search for the best person for the job.
How Fiverr Can Help Build Your E-Commerce Empire
Fiverr is the perfect marketplace for finding freelancers to help run your e-commerce idea and get it off the ground. You don’t need to know how to build a website, create branding, add a trading platform, or implement an ordering system. These skillsets are available on Fiverr at a range of budgets.
Fiverr has gone to great lengths to make it straightforward to get over the first two hurdles: websites and logos. Here’s how you can achieve both quickly and easily.
Create a Website in a Few Simple Steps
Every e-commerce venture starts with an idea, but it doesn’t get far without a website. Fortunately, you don’t need to scour through hundreds of results on Google, which will most likely present you with some costly options. Instead, head to Fiverr and use Fiverr’s outstanding Guided Website Design Service [Affiliate Link]. All it takes is five simple steps, and you are on your way.
Your first decision is to choose the type of website you want to create. You have five choices, but you are starting an online business, so select ‘Online Store’ and click next.
On the next screen, you get your pick of several designs and an opportunity to check it out as a live preview. Once you select a website preview you like, you can then make selections based on your needs, including:
- Homepage
- Product Listings
- Payments
- About Us Page
- Contact Form
- Product Reviews
- Shipping
- Many More
Now that you have all the necessary pages selected, it’s time to move on to the next phase, deciding how quickly you want your website and budget preference. The next screen gives you the option to review your choices before clicking “Done.”
Get a Logo Fast
Every business needs a logo that sums up its brand at a glance, but not everyone has the design skills to create one that will catch the eye.
You can create a beautiful logo on Fiverr fast. There’s no waiting and no back forth with a designer required.
As soon as you are done with the process, you have a sweet new logo to download and start using.
Fiverr’s logo tool first guides you through the steps, starting with entering your brand name, slogan, and your industry.
You can also select any elements you prefer to appear in your logo and set the tone, such as fun/serious, casual/innovative, etc.
Once you go through all the steps, the Fiverr logo designer will show you a select number of designs. Choose the one you like most and purchase it right away, or change it up using the Customize This Design option.
From here, you can modify different features of your logo, such as font types and sizes, colours, and alignment of the elements. Drag and drop until you are satisfied and ready to click the buy and download button.
Conclusion
Growing your team is a careful balancing act between putting on new employees and managing your budget. Adding more workers to the payroll is often not the most economical solution, but you sometimes need a little extra help during a busy period or need someone with skills you don’t have.
Outsourcing your work via freelancers remains one of the best strategies to get work done when you can’t justify being a full-time employee. Freelancers are also able to fill in the gaps and perform roles you don’t have time to do yourself during the early stages of your business.
Are you ready to start getting more done in your business through freelancers? Check out Fiverr [Affiliate Link], the most competitive freelance platform making hiring a freelancer almost as easy as ordering a pizza.