How to Make Money on Fiverr [$5 Per Gig]

Today I’m sharing my interview with Vaughn Fry, a movie critic, and Fiverr expert. When he’s not working on his passion, he spends some time making money with Fiverr to help pay off his student loans.

Fiverr is an online clearinghouse for $5 service jobs. It’s also on the list of our most-trusted money-making websites. Vaughn offers several services, but he’s had the most success with Twitter and Youtube backgrounds. If you’re a freelancer and a piece of your service could be performed for $5, consider Fiverr to market your services.

As you’ll learn in the interview with Vaughn, there are ways to do your work with Fiverr more efficiently and, thus, more lucrative. Vaughn also lays out some tips and tricks for making the most of your time with Fiverr.com.

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Show Summary: How to Make Money with Fiverr

Vaughn had student loans that needed to be paid. So when a friend told him about this new site called Fiverr, where people offer their services for $5. He discovered he could do creative projects and be paid $5. The only problem was: He wasn’t sure what he could sell for $5.

Since he had a degree in film production, he decided he could do some stuff with his movie review video series on YouTube, Vaughn on Movies. He offered ad space before his reviews or 30 days of advertising on his website for $5 each. Eventually, he added custom Twitter or YouTube backgrounds, and that’s when he was successful.

Finding His Niche

Vaughn’s custom Twitter and YouTube backgrounds were hot ticket items and became featured services on Fiverr. The only problem was the time it took to complete the full customization requests. Essentially, his service was too detailed for the amount of money paid. It took a lot of Vaughn’s time—an hour or more per job—and it wasn’t efficient.

Vaughn streamlined his process for creating the backgrounds. What once took him an hour now takes him about 15 minutes to create. He also optimized the time he spent communicating with customers and answering questions.

He filmed a video with all the essential details his clients needed to know, and he required them to view it before proceeding with a purchase.

Also, as a top seller and featured gig on Fiverr, Vaughn was allowed to offer gig extras. So he would charge $5 for the background plus another $5 for its installation. He sometimes charged clients $60 for a project because they added so many extras to their orders.

Building Authority on Fiverr

Over time, and as he continued to be listed as a top seller on Fiverr, Vaughn received a lot of celebrity clients—television and movie stars, athletes, beauty queens, etc. He was seen as an authority, and people trusted him.

All these things contributed to building Vaughn’s online reputation for his movie reviews and networking. He often negotiated with celebrities to follow him on Twitter and retweet one of his movie reviews in exchange for his services.

Being a featured seller on Fiverr has been more valuable to him than advertising his site elsewhere.

Fiverr does make a 20% commission off every sale. So if Vaughn created a YouTube background for $5 and then charged an extra $5 to install it, he would see $8 on that project.

He is currently getting close to $100, with some weeks being slower than others. In his first year, he made nearly $4,000.

Between being labeled as a “featured gig” and jumping on Fiverr when it was becoming hot, Vaughn has found part-time money success.

However, people working full-time probably would not be able to make $100 a day like Vaughn because of the amount of time needed to complete that number of projects.

Vaughn’s Tips for Getting Started

For someone wanting to make extra money using Fiverr, Vaughn offered these tips:

1. Try to have an attractive set-up for general instructions. Include something clever or funny.
2. Include an attractive thumbnail and bright colors to attract attention.
3. If you have something unique—even if it takes a little time to do—if you stick with it, you can probably make your processes more efficient and make good money using Fiverr.