Today I’m excited to begin my investigation of Fiverr.com as a way to make money on the road. As I’ve mentioned before, Fiverr is a primarily service based freelance site where all gigs start at a base price of $5. You can, however, add on gig extras and charge more money.

Fiver takes 20%, so you get $4 per gig, which admittedly isn’t a whole lot. But it comes down to how many you can sell. And how long it takes you to complete each gig.

For example, I’d like to make $20 per hour. So I want to design base gigs that I can complete in 12 minutes or less.

One of the nice things about Fiverr is, you get a taste of the freelance world without quite as much pressure and expectations of experience as you would have on some of the high priced freelance sites.

Some people, therefore, like to cut their teeth on Fiverr and then move on to higher value sites once they have more experience.

I’ve sold on Fiverr before. My first successful gig was sending little plastic turtles to people along with poems. I’ve been inactive on Fiverr for about a year, now, though. So I feel like I’m starting from scratch.

I would also like to quickly point out that there is another site called Fourerr that does more or less the same thing but for a dollar less. In my experience, Fiverr is more user friendly and has a lot more people using it, so I haven’t really messed with Fourerr, but if anyone has tried it, we’d love to hear about it in the comments!

My First (New) Fiverr Gig

In order to make sure sellers are active and responsive on the site, Fiverr “pauses” (take off the market) gigs from sellers who haven’t logged on after a certain length of time.

Once I got busy with my FBA business about a year ago, I stopped regularly checking the site and they paused my gigs, which was just as well.

Now, I’d like to give selling on Fiverr another try. I could “un=pause” my old gigs, but I think I’d rather create some new gigs instead.

You can have up to 20 gigs ‘active’ at a time on Fiverr.

Once you have an account on Fiverr, one of the first things you’ll likely want to do is update your profile. Click on your username in the upper right hand corner and head to your dashboard. If you haven’t updated your profile yet, you’ll most likely have a notification asking you to do so.

You’ll be asked to upload a photo for you avatar and write a little mini bio about yourself.

Once you’re already under your dashboard, you can create a new Fiverr gig by clicking ‘selling’ at the top of the page, then ‘my gigs.’

Then click ‘add new gig,’ and go through the directions.

After a few days of having one listing on Fiverr, I don’t have any sales yet. I’m not discouraged yet, because it takes time to get something like this going. But it is a reminder that it’s unlikely you’re just going to throw a listing up and make instant bank. (In case that’s what anyone was expecting.) It’s something you’ve got to build.

I’m still figuring out the best way to market a Fiverr gig.

And I’d like to create more listings.

I remain optimistic about Fiverr as a way to make money on the road, but it is important to realize most customers on Fiverr are looking for a cheap deal, and there’s not a lot of room to sell a premium good or service (unless you’re offering it as a gig extra).

Once you have a listing live, another good way to make money on Fiverr is by browsing the gig requests. You can’t see these until you have a live gig, but basically they’re requests from customers regarding things they want to buy.

If you’re logged in, you can access these by hovering over your account name at the upper right hand corner of the screen, and then clicking ‘selling’ and then ‘buyer requests’.

You can then respond to any of the requests you feel qualified to complete and make them an offer. Many freelancers on Fiverr just throw out a $5 offer for more technical projects with the expectation that particulars will be discussed further before a final price is agreed upon.

I recommend writing a little note with your offer, because many sellers don’t and it’s a way to set yourself apart and show you’re serious and not just submitting to every gig on the buyers requests list (even if you actually are).

Also, don’t offer to do something you can’t actually do. You’ll put yourself in a bad situation and end up getting bad reviews for your account.

I’ll continue to post updates as I build my Fiverr empire! Thanks for reading!

Check out additional ways to make money on the road.