The Five Dollar Bible by Richard Allen - HTML preview

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Choosing Something To Sell

Now if you’ve done as I suggested in relation to choosing a username then you

will have opted to choose a username that reflects your service.

Many people like the idea of selling on fiverr, and I can remember when I first

came across it that I spent around 2 hours of my then employers time surfing the

site looking at the crazy gigs on offer, but then when it comes to deciding what to

sell they draw a blank.

Well if you can’t think of anything to sell then I’ll spin the positive and say that’s

a good thing as it means you can think up an original idea rather than copying

the masses.

Firstly one big myth is that you can only sell services on fiverr that you can

deliver online, well I’ll dispel that myth as you can sell any physical product that

complies with fiverr’s sales guidelines (Permitted articles etc.) and you can opt

to sell it Worldwide and charge people for delivery on top of the standard $5

price. Indeed I did this and one of my first ever sales was shipping a laminated

QR code from the UK to the USA. This went the extra mile and the customer was

overjoyed to get it.

Indeed if you can find something low weight and low cost to sell on fiverr, then

you could make a good living by carving out your own niche in selling a physical

product.

You will find some fiverr guides that give you ready made examples of what to

sell, but this guide is designed to be thought provoking, I don’t want you to be

following sheep, I want to inspire you to design sheep!

The best way to do this is via brainstorming. Firstly: -‐

Make a list of what you are good at doing be it at home or at work.

Make a list of what you like doing at home or work – the best ideas will most

likely be the things that you like doing at home.

Note the difference between the two – some things you maybe good at doing but

not actually like doing, some things you will like doing and be good at. It’s the

crossover of the one’s that you are good at doing and the one’s that you like

doing that you want to shortlist.

Now I would advise writing as long a list as possible of each of the above two

lists, and be creative, and crazy even – note that some of the best selling gigs on

fiverr are the mad ones. Check them out at http://fiverr.com/categories/fun-‐

bizarre/ but don’t do it at work, as you will easily spend two hours in

wonderment at just what people will do for $5. This section alone shows you that

just about anything does and will sell on fiverr.

Got a crazy new idea that no one else is selling? Great then you could be a top

seller in know time at all.

Then once you have your shortlist think carefully at anything that’s going to take

you longer than 15 mins to do. As fiver pays you $4 from each gig, then if you can

do 4 gigs in an hour then that pro-‐ratas out at $16 an hour, which working from

home with no overheads is not bad. No fuel needed to drive to work, no

expensive deli lunches to buy, all those overheads are gone when you work on

fiverr.

Personally after six months I looked at how much time I was spending on my

fiverr gigs, and guess what I did? I deleted my top two selling gigs!

That’s right I didn’t pause them I just down right deleted them. This actually

caused me problems as they were so popular to start with my regular customers

simply placed an order for the work via any one of my other (Totally unrelated)

gigs. So I honoured those orders but let them know I was stopping that service.

The problem was I was taking up to 20-‐30 mins for these two gigs, so whilst I

was selling a lot I was only making $8 and hour and working a LOT of hours! Not

my idea of a good home based business. So I was brutal and took it a step further

and cut out any gig that took more than ten minutes. This meant initially I took a

dip in income, BUT my hourly rate pro-‐rata went up to 6 x $4=$24 an hour, and

now all but one of my gigs actually takes 5 mins or less, and some of those come

with extras at $10 (or $8 paid to me by fiverr) each.

This de-‐stressed my fiverr gigs entirely, I stopped worrying about was I going to

get everything done on time, to focussing on gigs that I could get a good payback

per hour on.

Think of why you need to do this – if you get 10 orders a day that take 30 mins to

process a day each that means it will take you 5 hours a day to earn $40, now

$40 a day extra sounds good but do you want to spend 5 hours a day after work

to earn it? I think not….