Fiverr is one of those services that increases the lure of blogging. Looking at Fiverr’s front page it seems like writing is all you need in order to start and maintain successful blog. You can hire $5 providers for everything else. Whether you need advertising, social media management, guest blog posts, traffic, likes, shares, comments – it’s all there. Just give the service providers $5 and that’s it – you’ll be taken care off.

Now, everyone heard that saying: some things are too good to be true. If guys behind Fiverr didn’t mind joke at their expense they could try adopting “Too good to be true” as motto. It would be both funny & great move. And that motto would definitely describe what they offer more accurately then current (“Freelance services for the lean entrepreneur”).

What complicates situation is that you there are definitely some gems on Fiverr. But it’s like 10% / 90% – out of 10 services you buy 2 will truly help you. Other 8 will fall somewhere between “this service produced negative net result” and “seller didn’t bother to deliver anything, cancel and ask for refund”.

The biggest surprise for me was that ratings system doesn’t matter much. You have 5 star, Top Rated sellers that will do things which fall under Black Hat SEO. Things like spamming links to your website with automatically registered accounts on major domains. Now, don’t get me wrong – this technique when properly executed can do wonders for your SEO ranking. Just when you are ordering you aren’t told that this is what you will get.

But, let’s start with more positive experiences I had – I’ll review several services: 2 good, 2 bad and then 1 ugly. If there is interest in this post I can even link directly to providers I review here. Let’s go.

Guest blog posting

I loved this gig because seller threw in bunch of tips as free extra. So on top publishing my post and linking back to the site, I got some advice. Blogging is one of the latest in series of crafts humans have been perfecting. The best way to learn craft is to work with someone who is already great at it.

So, this type of service is definitely something very valuable on Fiverr. You can explore who offers this service, look at the Alexa stats of their blogs and decide who you want to work with. Then for $5 you get to interact with someone who you can emulate.

The downsides of this approach are obvious – writing 1000 words is not easy and there is no instant result. Words per minute is one of those metrics that you need to focus on as a blogger. I would say that on average you are looking at typing 500 words per hour if you want to keep quality at decent level. Sure, you can type 80 WPM but good luck producing original content at that speed. So, it’s up to you to see whether investing 2 hours + paying $5 on top of that is good use of your time.

Facebook page followers building

This definitely doesn’t fall in White Hat SEO… but building following on Facebook Fan page in era of $0.8 per US Like is hard. So, if you can hire someone who builds following by manually linking to your fan page – it’s all good right? You save time by having someone else join various interest groups and post your link in relevant discussions. You then use that time to produce content. Win-win, right?

The obvious problem here is – how to hunt down provider who genuinely works? I.e. someone who doesn’t have 10000 bots that he is reusing over and over on different gigs? Well, unfortunately there is no silver bullet here. You need to hire over and over until you find someone reliable. Or go with recommendation of someone you trust.

Let’s buy traffic on Fiverr

To start of “bad” gigs – let’s go with the most attractive offering on Fiverr – traffic. Basically all traffic gigs on Fiverr are not what you expect. Most $5 gigs that you are buying are software generated – you get bunch HTTP requests through VPNs from different IPs. These show up in Google Analytics as hits. This can be part of SEO strategy, but as all Black Hat SEO practices it is frowned upon and not sustainable long term.

Then you have premium gigs which are either popunders or traffic from traffic exchanges. Both can be genuine human traffic, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll get much traction. Maybe if you are having truly “attractive” blog (wink ;)… but again you won’t have much luck with these traffic types either.

Now, you may say – for $5 I don’t expect much and if I can get 1000 people on my blog for that money it’s worth it. Well it would be worth it – if it didn’t impact your bounce rates.

First of all, *most* of traffic sellers on Fiverr simply lie. They tell you it’s human traffic exchange – you pay and then get 1000s of visits that last 10 seconds each. So, you got synthetic traffic. Not only you got synthetic traffic – but you now have terrible activity and bounce rate on your site measured by Google Analytics. Your content is now likely marked as terrible (considering activity time and bounce rates).

SEO authority links

Oh, how happy I was when I found this gig. Top rated guy, Fiverr ambassador, 1000s of 5 stars – and he is willing to provide 10 links from his “high authority domains” to my site for only $5! Joy!

After paying and waiting several days you get professional looking report saying that you got 20 links instead. Disappointment creeps in when you see that like 18 links are nofollow… while provider claims in report that he “aims for 70% follow / 30% nofollow mix because thats _optimal_”. Even bigger disappointment is seeing that links are created by spam accounts on domains like ted.com. Not only you got low value links, but now you’ll forever be marked as spammer = will never have opportunity to do a TED talk. T_T

Again, I understand that there can be value in this if you are doing Black Hat SEO. Like, create conversion page for some product, aim to improve your ranking on Google for certain keywords, end up making boatload of $$$. So, sure you can do tons of stuff with these spam links. But if you are trying to establish online presence, build long term value and share knowledge – gigs like this are pretty much pointless for you. In the end you’ll have bunch of links to your site marking you as spammer.

Buy promoted Reddit post through Fiverr

I love Reddit. Look at my post history and it’s pretty much obvious – I spend tons of time here interacting on various topics. I talk on /r/bitcoin, read books and discuss on /r/BettermentBookClub, moderate /r/BloggersHelp – you name it. So, when I saw a gig that advertises Reddit promotion for $5 I simply had to try it. They describe the process as finding great, relevant subreddit, crafting post and then adding bunch of upvotes and relevant comments so that your content gets promoted.

Sounds terrific, right? All they want for you is URL, keywords and optionally script or text to post on Reddit. I went with it and provided:

1. https://howtoaddict.com/review-summary-subtle-art-not-giving-fck-mark-manson/
2. book review, book summary, mark manson
3. You go with whatever script you deem best – and be sure NOT TO POST IN SUBREDDIT I mention in my review… go with some that is popular enough and with lots of people who are looking for book reviews / summaries.

Here comes the funny part – the result:

You go with whatever script you deem best – and be sure NOT TO POST IN SUBREDDIT I mention in my review… go with some that is popular enough and with lots of people who are looking for book reviews / summaries.
by inReviews

Yeah, you don’t expect much for $5 but come on – you need to try in order to mess up that badly. Obviously I couldn’t be upset after witnessing result that was this funny. So I sent back something in line of “Come on guys, seriously?”. After a while response came back: “We sincerely regret for this situation, our associate made a mistake and he will be punished for this situation. We will redo the post and will get back to you in nearest time.” T_T for “punished associate”. “Redo” wasn’t as funny as original, but still funny:

Summary of “The subtle art of not giving a f***” by Mark Manson – How To Addict.Reading this book got me to finally produce detailed overview that I am using now as review of the book.
byu/john_lee12 inbookquotes

Kill it with downvotes. I mean what else would you expect when you post what they posted in /r/bookquotes. Sorry to mods over there – but please do keep it up for lolz.

Conclusion

The biggest problem of Fiverr is that you practically need to pay for 10 gigs to find 1 that is good. Descriptions of gigs and star ratings mean almost nothing. So if you are trying to establish quality blog, you pretty much have two choices:

1. Completely avoid Fiverr
2. Pay for premium services that someone you personally trust recommended

This way $40 out $50 you spend will go toward marking your site as spammy. $5 will go toward gig that is OK but doesn’t truly improve your blog traffic. And finally $5 will truly benefit you.

At that rate you are better off hiring someone to post links to your site on social media for $50. Or buy Fiverr gig for $50 that truly improves your blog.

Whatever you do – keep blogging, keep rocking and if you ever need a blogger friend – reach out. I’m not sending nudes or anything, but I’ll gladly send comment, like, share or hug. :*

Comments