Building a Strong Personal Brand

I’m grateful for all of you guys that are here because you want to grow your freelancing and your agency, you want to make more money, and Fiverr is a great place, Fiverr is a great partner. We’ve used Fiverr for a long time. For you to be able to grow, you’ve got to be able to build relationships even though it is online. You want to learn from people who have done this before. So you’re in for a treat.

You have someone like Gavin Lira, who started just a few years ago, and has gone from nothing to over a million dollars a year. And that’s not a lottery kind of thing. That is something that is possible for you if you follow the same steps. Just like if you’re a cook, you have the recipe and you have the ingredients, you will be able to produce that particular meal.

We’re going to teach you this framework in just a minute on how to make more money online, which is why you’re here. Just build these connections because the best way you’re going to learn is not just from some of the things we’re going to share today, but when you are around other people who are very successful, you will start to think their way, you will start to build relationships – It’ll start to infuse into your brain.

You can’t rely upon your Fiverr profile only. We love Fiverr. Fiverr is a great marketplace, but clients want to know who you are, and you’ve got to start building these relationships. 

Here’s the framework of what we’re going to cover. We’re talking about secrets of successful freelancers and how they get clients easily. So you’re a freelancer or you’re an agency and you want to learn from people who have done it. I want Gavin to be able to tell what he’s learned. So Gavin, maybe tell people about yourself and then let’s start going through the framework we have for you guys.

Gavin Lira: So guys, I mean, clearly the bullet points are there. Those can be read. But to give you a quick summary of things off the dome, about four-ish years ago, no one really knew about me in the online space. I also didn’t really know much of anything in that space. And I started doing drop shipping. I was trying to sell products using Shopify and Facebook ads, things of the sort. And after a lot of trial and error, mainly I lost money. I decided to move on to doing that for other small businesses and then I started to actually gain traction. Since then we’ve been able to transition into PR and scale that to over seven figures in a year.

So with that being said, what I wanna help you guys with today is along that journey, I’ve connected with people like Dennis who have helped me significantly. There are so many little pitfalls and different things when you’re trying to get high paying freelancing gigs that today I wanna help you guys avoid some of those, and Dennis is an amazing person for that as well.

That’s a little bit about me, and I’m happy to provide more context and a little insight as we go into everything as well.

Step one, you have to choose a micro niche. So instead of trying to do everything for everybody, you’ve gotta do one thing really well, so that not only are you good at that because you have a lot of practice, but you create the perception that this is the thing that you do. So it’s easy for people to hire you because you say, “what I do is PR” and everyone knows that you’re really good at PR.

And we have a world-class PR person here.

Gavin Lira: The name of my firm is The Empathy Firm. And the reason why it was named that is because as I got into digital marketing, in general PR, it’s all very similar. I realized that so many people were forgetting there’s another person on the other side of this screen.

I feel like a lot of times when it comes to freelancing, that same thing is forgotten by freelancers. Think about how many options there are on Fiverr, if I’m looking for, or Dennis is looking for somebody to hire. And the funny thing is, there are all these different options, but most of them are very general. There are not a lot that are tailored towards PR specifically.

For example, when it comes to data scraping, that’s something that I’ve hired someone from Fiverr for before and worked with them consistently on for getting media contacts and podcast host contacts, and there’s not a whole lot of them that scrape specifically for podcasts. So when you niche down like that, and even if you can vertically niche, because that’s for PR firms, there’s other ways to do this too if you’re doing something just for real estate agents or just for lawyers.

But it’s pretty interesting that will significantly set you apart from your competition just by speaking in your written words to a more narrow audience.

Guys, it may sound like you’re narrowing yourself, like you’re going to get less business by saying, going from data scraping to data scraping for podcasts. But the riches are in the niches. And anyone I can tell, like the seven-figure agencies, I met hundreds of them yesterday. All of them focus on one area.

So look at this Data Scraping podcast. I did a search here on Fiverr. There are 43 of them. And what do you think happens when an agency or a business wants data scraping, particularly for podcasts? They’re going to hire you one time on that gig, you know, $10, a hundred dollars, and then they’re going to continue to hire you. So the way you make more money on Fiverr or any system is that you take such good care of that client, they’ll continue to hire you.

Like Gavin, when you hire people on Fiverr, how often do you hire them for a second or a third time? What is the balance there?

Gavin Lira: Most of the time, it’s very rare that I’m looking for somebody who we’re just going to hire one time because if you think about it, that’s not a good business model if I’m doing all this work for a client, just for something done once. So we’re typically looking for people that we can work with multiple times a month.

We’ve hired hundreds of people, I want to say 400 people, we’ve hired on Fiverr. The thing I can tell you from the buyer’s standpoint is that you guys are sellers and you have gigs. I want you to understand, from the buyer’s standpoint, the number one pain I hear in frustration is that there are so many people who offer these different services. And then I go and hire this one guy for a website, this one guy for Canva, this one guy for some video editing.

So, as business owners, we want to hire one person and then continue to use that person over and over again. Let’s say this guy is doing this one thing, he’s a level two seller. He’s got 21, 5-star reviews. Agencies have repeatable processes. If I hire this guy one time, just to test whether he’s good or not. I’m going to hire him over and over again like another 10 times every month. That’s all he has to do.

But now if you look at his profile, he’s kind of hurt himself because now he’s saying, “I’ll develop an auto blog WordPress thing on any niche.” You’ve got to show one, like news, sports, health, like these are all completely different. And then the other thing too is that, look at the other pieces of his profile. It’s all this robotic kind of stuff where there are some screenshots and I understand like he’s trying to show, like this is what he’s doing.

But what would be a more powerful way, let’s just say he said, “I do auto blog WordPress sites for dentists” or something. Okay, let’s just say he chose that niche, like we say in step one. But then Gavin, what does he have to do to make this a more powerful profile?

Gavin Lira: If he’s choosing this for dentists, a few different things. One of them, clearly all the wording in that should be towards dentists. If you look at any niche, there’s certain terms where when you say something, someone inside that niche who lives that niche day in and day out knows that you also know that space well, right? So like if you’re in PR and you’re talking about something like a media kit or a press kit, most people don’t know what that is, but that’s a very niche specific term.

If I were scraping, I might say something like, “we’ll help you get the media contacts so you can fill out your client’s press kits with new features once you do outreach to them”, right? Like that’s very niche specific talk. And on top of that too, it would be really beneficial to show examples. And have case studies throughout that, of that specific niche. And even a one minute video of who you are, what your experience has been. This makes a big difference, especially if you guys don’t have a lot of reviews and you’re trying to build those up. You have to really be more specific. You have to show the case studies that you’ve done before, off the platform. And if you can make that video, that’s gonna help build a lot of trust.

I’ve hired a bunch of people on Fiverr and on other platforms because they have a video, right? And it’s not just for video editors, it’s for anything. For example, for writing articles, I’ll look at their profile and see it. They’ll say something like, “Hi, I’m Gwen Moore, and I’ve been doing this for five years. Let me tell you a little bit more about what I’m doing on Fiverr.” In this gig, I have a $10 option, a $100 option, and a $500 option. Let me explain the differences so you can choose the one that suits your needs. If you’re just considering it, you can choose this option, but if you’re really serious about it, then I recommend the other one.

Even though technically this information can be in the written description, since you can upload a document and choose a good, better, best option (which is available for $500), it’s already there when you show your face and introduce yourself. 

For instance, you can say, 

“Hey, I’m Gavin Lira, and I specialize in PR for personal injury attorneys. You can find all the details right here. But I just wanted to say hi and let you know what I do. Now, let me tell you about our process.

Before you hire me for the gig, I’d like you to message me so we can communicate effectively. I want to ensure that I understand your goals and have all the necessary details to meet your expectations. Once we’ve clarified everything, it’ll take about a week for me to deliver the first draft. It will be in a specific format, and you’ll have the opportunity for two revisions. I typically turn revisions around in two days, sometimes three if it’s over a weekend. Unlike some freelancers who can be flaky or located on the other side of the planet, I’m highly responsive, which is why I have so many five-star reviews.

Anyway, I’m Gavin Lira. Feel free to check out the other gigs I offer here, and I’m excited to work with you on Fiverr.”

So, what would you think if you saw that video and compared it to others offering similar services?

Gavin Lira: I would think even if Dennis only had like two reviews or whatever, as long as those reviews were good, if somebody had like 25 or 50 and I look at everything, I’m like, dang, now I’m actually considering working with Dennis. If I were just looking at the reviews and there’s no video, I would’ve likely gone with the person with the more reviews if it was the same service.

So do you think it’s more important not to say that you don’t wanna be competent, but do you think it’s more important to get better at your craft? Like being better at video editing or better at scraping or better at presenting what you do?

Gavin Lira: The funny thing is, of course, it depends on your skill level and where people are at. But I will say, I think most people make the mistake of thinking they need to get better at what they do when they really need to get better at communicating and presenting, as you’re referencing. And a lot of times, guys, that’s what’s gonna kill you is the inability to communicate effectively. 

Because if you can communicate effectively through your profile, then you have a really good chance at being able to level up your skills over time as you do more and more of these jobs as well, especially if you take care of your first few clients.

All of us as sellers, in order to get more buyers to agree to click the button, to pay money to buy our gig, it’s not about trying to convince other people that we’re really good – and our skill is, obviously you’re gonna do that, but there’s one thing you guys are probably missing, and that’s this: the buyers, by definition, are starting from a position of no trust. 

So they’re thinking, “This guy’s from Kenya, they’re from Pakistan, I don’t know who they are, they’re 8,000 miles away, or whatever. How do I trust them? How do I know that they understand what I’m trying to do?” So overcoming the trust piece, that’s the barrier that all buyers have, because they’re looking, they do a search and they see like 89 other people do this one thing when they do a search. 

So all of you guys, when your gigs are showing up, it’s starting from a position of distrust. So yes, show your skill, show your process, but the number one thing is you gotta overcome that distrust. So how do we do that?

Gavin Lira: One thing about that, guys, when it comes to overcoming distrust like Dennis had with communication, the way in which you format your profile as well, you need to make sure that you’re bulleting and making it super clear and simple. You don’t want huge blocks.

One of the best ways to do this guys too, is look at some of the top performing freelancers on Fiverr, but make sure that you don’t make this mistake. Look at their profiles. Look at how they’re set up. A lot of times they will have a video. A lot of times they will very clearly explain what to do in order to start a project, to contact them before starting all these different things.

But one thing not to get messed up is some of these people have thousands of reviews. They might have been really early on Fiverr, so they were able to go really general with their offering. Now that there’s way more freelancers, you need to communicate this again, just to reiterate for a niche specific, because they might have already claimed a lot of the real estate just for the general, you know, kind of terms and things. And the way that you can stick out and be different at this point is by actually doing less, by being more narrow.

So I would say though, what Dennis is saying, you really want to make sure you format your profile in a way that is super simple. And if somebody ever hits you up with a question that’s already on your profile, don’t tell them to go look at your profile. Because a lot of times what’s happening is people are hitting up multiple people for the job and trying to figure out who’s gonna be able to best help them.

If you do that, what’s gonna happen is, I’ve had that happen to me so many times and I’m like, Okay, I already kind of don’t wanna work with this person because they’re making me do more work and technically should I have looked at it? Yes. But when you’re super busy as a buyer, you’re going and you’re trying to take the path of least resistance and look for people who are really helpful and willing to go that extra mile and copy and paste their own profile to give me the answer instead of telling me to go click three more times to look at it.

It’s little things like that, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s like these client kinds of EQ skills. Here’s someone that I’ve hired many times, his name is Nikita and he does YouTube audits. So he doesn’t edit YouTube channels, he doesn’t edit the video, he literally just does an audit and he has a process that he does over and over again. His communication is so good, I feel like I’m cheating when I’m able to use him and it has nothing to do with his reviews, it’s about the quality of that communication because he niched all the way down.

So let’s go back and look at this in a little bit more detail. When you are broader, like video editing, article writing, scraping, data entry, Canva, “oh, I’ll do Canva for whatever it is. I’ll remove the logo”. That’s worth five bucks. But if you say, “I’ll do it for personal injury attorneys”, you can charge a hundred dollars for that. What do you do? What do you wanna be known for, whether you’ve sold it or not. Someone said community management UI design. But I want you to say, for what category? I’m telling you this one thing. Even if there’s like no difference between someone who’s a mortgage broker versus a chiropractor versus fixing brakes on Toyota Camrys. Even if what you’re doing is exactly the same thing from a graphics design standpoint. It’s the mere act of specifying that difference.

Here’s the main point. Don’t make the classic mistake of thinking, well, if I say I do everything for everyone, I’m gonna get more business. Right Gavin?

Gavin Lira: That’s a common pitfall, guys, the way to think about it too, because it actually took me a really long time to realize the significance of this. So here’s the thing, you might get hit up sometimes more, even if you go more general in specific points, but that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna make more money. And that’s the difference. And because you can market to more people if you’re doing your own outreach outside of Fiverr or whatever it is.

But that means now you have to learn all these different niches, you need to learn different things. It’s so much easier to get really good in one area, and when you can become an expert in that area, you can charge for your expertise and make more money per project for the same amount of time that you’re working too.

And this is not just for Fiverr, whether you’re on Fiverr or whether you have clients direct or whatever, this niching principle is absolutely true.

Gavin Lira: And one thing too, I see visual storytelling for everyone who has something to say, that’s still super broad. Again, appreciate the effort, but I would try to niche that down even more. Visual storytelling for personal injury attorneys, for real estate agents who help people buy and sell homes, whatever it is, right?

Look, Margaret just said website content for nonprofits. So that’s good. That’s providing a particular service to a particular industry, but there’s a third piece that’s missing, and that’s what the impact is. What happens with the website content? We get more donations, we get more traffic, we grow our email list, we get more advocacy. We have better SEO.

Here’s a fun exercise. It’s called the XYZ model. And it goes like this: I help X achieve Y via Z. So I help personal injury attorneys get more truck cases through our six-phase social amplification engine. You’ve gotta be able to niche down. I want you guys to start thinking about X, Y, and Z.

X. Who do you help? 

Y.  What’s the result that you achieve, why would they pay money for this? 

Z.  How do you do it? 

So if what you’ve done is you just do graphic design and you never really thought about what’s that worth to the client, I want you to take a step further and think, okay, so you’re making a better logo, you have a better website, you’re doing creative writing.

Usman says, “Helped a health and fitness brand increase conversions by 6% during Q4.” I like that. Now, when you can show that client that you drive a business result, like you could be good at Photoshop, you could be good at Canva, you could be good at WordPress. I know Fiverr organizes these different categories, good at writing, good at voiceover. You could be super good at the thing that you do. But here’s the thing that, as a buyer, I’m looking at, I want to know, you’re good at that thing, but can you drive that business result?

I know, okay, you make a better design. But certainly if you follow up with that client, you ask them, “Hey, do you like the design?” And they say, “Yeah, it was really good. And it also helped my conversion rates increase. I’m a painting company, and you made a new website for me. Well, I’m getting five new painting customers every month because of what I’m doing.” So think about what the business result is.

It’s kind of hard because you’re probably thinking, “I’m just doing one job at a time, a bunch of these little jobs on Fiverr.” Start thinking about where I am adding value? And I could probably charge a lot more for that. Business customers care about that. So I’d love for you guys to put your X, Y, and Z.

“I help X achieve Y via Z.” This is especially true for agencies because agencies, when you have a team, you can organize together to deliver that result, which is usually more clients and more revenue, and they’ll pay you a lot more.

Gavin Lira: And guys, if you don’t know what your niche should be or you haven’t figured that out yet, I want you to think of two different things while you’re typing these in.

One, what do you have a competitive advantage in? Meaning, is there a niche that you just know really well for whatever reason? Maybe you’ve worked in it for years already, or you’ve had a lot of clients in this niche already, or whatever it is. Maybe you personally had a job in this niche.

And then the second part, who makes the most money out of the different people that I serve in their businesses? On average. And the reason for that is because if you help somebody, let’s say get 1% better in their business, let’s say they’re making a hundred thousand dollars, you help them get a thousand more dollars. But if you help them get 1% better and they’re making a hundred million dollars, that means that you just helped them make an extra million dollars.

So I would first start with the competitive advantage because that’s going to be most important for what you know. But then after that, I would then really be thinking about who you can essentially help. If you’re helping someone increase 1%, who would be most benefited by that 1% increase?

And start getting testimonials from the other people. Once they give you the five stars, that’s great, but think about how you can even build into the process. Like before they hire you, you say, “Hey, we’re going to go through this process and the reason why I’m doing it this way is because you’re going to get this document at the end, I’m going to give you a summary.” This is what you have to even say, it’s really smart psychology. “I not only want to do a really good job to get a five-star review from you, but I want to do such an amazing job that you’re going to write a glowing testimonial that will help me grow my business.” So that’s why I have an incentive.

And it doesn’t matter what you do, you can literally say this. We’ve taught so many agencies how to do this, like using this one technique when you’re negotiating, going back and forth because maybe the objection I hear is, “Well, I can get someone else on Fiverr to do that for $50. Why would I pay you $200?” “Because I care more. And I really want your five-star review. And I’m going to work extra hard because I want you to say really good things about me.” And this also works if you don’t have any reviews at all. Right? Well, how am I going to compete against that guy who has 300 five-star reviews and I have like no reviews? You say, “I’m new here, I work extra hard.” Use that to your advantage. “I will work extra, extra hard because I’m trying to earn your five-star review. And I want your comments. I want to be able to feature your comment in my profile.”

And so business owners, they see that. When they see that you care like that, I hire a bunch of people just because they say that even if they’re not necessarily qualified. Even companies that are making a million dollars a year still have to be able to niche down and get these things right. This is not something where you work out one time and you never have to work out again in the rest of your life. Like Gavin and I, we do this every day. We’re still focusing on this. We’re still collecting feedback from other people.

So a lot of you guys do something like a voiceover or you write a copy or whatever. You’re really good at doing that. You can have that gig that’s already there and you have a lot of reviews stacked against that gig. But imagine that you copy that and you say, “Voiceovers for makeup artists” or “for garage door companies” or whatnot, and then charge 10 times more for the same task, the same gig. Watch what happens. If no one buys it, that’s fine. But watch what happens. I guarantee you’ll see this.

Gavin Lira: You guys can A/B test this too, with your different gigs that you’ve put up.

I want you guys to also really emphasize the point that I made earlier about the 1% difference and driving it home. Think about how much more you could charge if you’re helping somebody make an extra million dollars versus an extra thousand, right?

So that’s their, so like makeup artists, they might have a good amount of people that are interested, but they might not be making too much money themselves. But you might actually have less work with garage door repair, but you might be getting paid more for that specific stuff because those people typically make more for the time that they spend working.

We have clients that pay us more than $20,000 a month, and I can tell you that’s no more effort. It’s actually less effort than clients who pay a thousand dollars a month. So think about that for a minute.

Generally, you’d think like a client that’s paying 20,000 a month, they’re going to be way more work, and you’re going to have to do 20 times as much work as a $1000 a month client. It’s not the case. It’s less. And the same is true for a $100 gig versus a $10 gig because you’re not competing on price. It’s about having the right customers.

All the stuff that Gavin and I are talking about is positioning for the right customers because there are some people whose time is worth so much that they’ll pay a premium to have you do the work, even if someone else could do it for $5. You guys see the difference?

Everything that Gavin and I are teaching you right now is about positioning. Because if it’s for a real estate agent and this guy’s a real estate agent and he’s a super successful real estate agent and he makes $6 million a year, he will not hesitate to pay $100 for you even though someone else does something similar for $5. You see the difference?

Gavin Lira: They’re actually going to be looking for the people who are more expensive, typically, because they just care about getting the job done really well and not having to do it again rather than trying to save an extra 50 bucks and find someone for 50.

So clearly, you need to build up your reviews. It’s going to be hard to charge a really high amount right out the gate if you don’t have that. But if you do what Dennis was talking about earlier, make that video, make all the different things in your profile tailored toward that niche communication player, and you build up some reviews that way, then you can bump that price and really start playing to that specific niche, the top percentage of that niche – someone who is looking for that solution.

And plus, you could have a basic task, the basic gig where people come in on something that’s cheaper, but then you start the conversation. I saw some of you guys put it to the chat. But then once we have the conversation, we can sell them on something custom or a little bit more.

Absolutely. The point is you want to start that conversation.

I want to show you guys a little hack that I’ve seen almost nobody do before, but it works super well. So you can see that this is Gavin at Blue Shark Digital. They’re a personal injury attorney company. We do a lot of stuff with lawyers and doctors because these guys are friends with each other. And we also met this guy in Washington, DC.

And when we build these relationships, we are putting these relationships in our profile, on our Twitter, on our LinkedIn, on our Facebook because we want potential customers to see that we know how to build relationships. So watch this. I’m going to go to my phone or go to the photos that are on my phone. I bet you’ve never seen anyone do this. This is Google Photos.

Gavin, name any city in the world.

Gavin Lira: We’ll say, Washington DC.

Washington, DC. So this was just a couple of weeks ago, and Gavin is making videos with Price-Benowitz, which is an eight-figure law firm, and with the agency Blue Shark Digital. So Gavin, tell everyone what’s going on here.

Gavin Lira: Pretty much we were filming some videos, so Dennis and I were invited to speak in front of the marketing company. And afterwards, me and Dennis were getting shot for some essentially TikTok, YouTube shorts and short-form content. And we were talking about how dogs make the content perform better. And it’s like a hack.

And so we can take these moments and feature them. Now, this has nothing to do with whether we’re any good at Photoshop or Canva or voiceovers, but what does this do when we show snippets of this in our intro video?.

So I can do a video like, “Hey, this is Dennis and I do PR for personal injury attorneys, and we drive more leads in truck cases.” We can do all the stuff we just said, but then if I add in my intro reel, and here’s some of the clients that I’ve met, or even if you haven’t met them, let’s say you’re in Pakistan, you’ve never met them, you can still show, maybe you’re together on a Zoom and you take a little picture of that where you’re on the Zoom together with them and you can just show them like, “Hey, I care about relationships”, so let’s go, let me show you Fiverr’s headquarters.

So I was in Wix too, they’re friends of mine.

So we’re here at Fiverr and Yoav, hopefully we’ll get to see you soon. And we are having meetings and we’re talking about training that you wanna do like these ones. And just for fun, I’m showing that there’s coffee. I made a little video while at Fiverr. I thought, why not? I’m wearing my Fiverr shirt. We’re upstairs, top floor at Fiverr’s headquarters and we’re drinking a little bit of coffee, and you can see like, here’s some of our friends over at Fiverr.

Now I’m not saying, in order to get more gigs on Fiverr, you need to go to Fiverr’s headquarters and take pictures of yourself in front of it. I’m just saying, find moments that show that you’re a trustworthy human being. Maybe it’s the way you take care of your daughter and you’re a single mom. Maybe you volunteer in your church or your mosque. Maybe you’re part of a nonprofit and this is something that you care deeply about that has nothing to do with the skill that you have and doing WordPress or Wix or Canva. It’s just showing that you know how to make connections. If you can show this personal connection and show how you care, that will be night and day, the difference in the income that you can make.

Gavin Lira: So, the main thing here is, if you take a step back and you ask yourself the question, how do I get people to trust me more? And you ask yourself, well, what do I do when I’m looking for something? If I have a broken leg, do I wanna go to the doctor that does everything, or the doctor that specializes in broken legs – if I had a choice? And then what if there’s two of them? One of them has worked with 50 people before that I can see, and the other one has worked with two. And then maybe the one that’s worked with two is really good at communicating, though the one that’s worked with 50. I hit them up and they just say, like, “check the website for the information. It’s already on there”.

How can you build trust and help people feel like you can solve the problem? If you can even show some of those things that make you more of a human, like that video, and even in that one minute video, that could be a good time to pop up one or two or three of these photos, right? I love Fiverr, but to tell you a little bit about me personally too, I also volunteer at [Blank]. I care a lot about [Blank] and I’m excited to work with you and form a long-term relationship. Cuz the more partners that I have for the long-term, the better it’s gonna be for, you know, these other hobbies I have too, and for my family.

So it’s not about you. People always care about what’s in it for them, but when they see that you’re a human, they’re like, oh, that, that’s pretty cool. And they relate to you differently.

So we talked about how you wanna have a robust profile that has one main thing that you do. You can have multiple gigs if you want, but you wanna have one main one. You’re humanizing by having videos and showing a bit about who you are as a person, even though technically it’s on Fiverr and like they’re trying to hire you to do this one thing, but people do business with people. That’s what I think. I think people forget about that on the internet.

For example, last week, Gavin and I, we were in Louisville, Kentucky. What’s going on here, Gavin?

Gavin Lira: So that was essentially, you guys just met Darryl. We were visiting Darryl and his team in person to essentially give them training and start the discussions for how we’re going to be implementing certain parts of our project with him. There’s a picture that we took in his courtroom where his different attorneys will practice trials and things of this sort like that, and they film some ads and stuff in like too.

And we’re wearing a shirt. In fact, I have one here. Call the hammer. Look at this. And this is how he’s building his brand. This has nothing to do with car accidents or whatever. He makes a lot of money when people get in a car accident, a truck accident. But think about when you show yourself smiling, like literally, I see a bunch of you guys in your profile. Well, first off, you don’t even show your face, which is a mistake. You’re not trying to be a model. You’re not a fashion model. I don’t even have any hair, and you can see me here.

But when you show yourself and you smile like Gavin smiles, that makes a world of difference. When you can just post pictures of you, it could be your family, and you’re smiling with other people. What kind of difference does that make, Gavin? When you can show a picture of yourself smiling, or a video where you’re smiling and you’re describing your services?

Gavin Lira: Would you guys rather work with somebody who makes you feel good and get the same result as someone who is just like, I guess it was okay, makes you get the same result. If you had the choice you want, feel good.

And even if you don’t think your smile’s good or whatever, if you’re smiling, especially if you’re showing teeth, even if like essentially the bigger your smile can be, I think you guys are gonna judge yourself a lot and be like, oh, well maybe my teeth aren’t the best, or maybe my smile isn’t the best, or whatever.

If you can put it out there, you’re just putting out good vibes. And when I’m looking through everyone else, it just is. It’s those little things that subconsciously communicate and make the digital experience a lot more human.

Seriously, in this training, if all you did was enhance your profile by having a picture of you smiling, I bet you that would make a difference. So in this picture here with Daryl, me, and Gavin, who do you think has the best smile? Who’s got the biggest smile? Gavin, I think Gavin’s got the best smile here. It makes a big difference. So when you’re smiling, that’s telling people it’s safe. It’s telling them that you’re friendly and easy to work with, and you’re a pleasure to work with. So put up pictures and videos of you smiling.

Literally, like I’ve driven, so I’m not smiling here because I’m out. I’m, like, the last lap on a 3000-meter steeplechase. I’m trying to smile. I think I’m grimacing. Is that a smile? Literally do this, and people will get a sense of who you are. Some people here have said, “Yes, but what if I don’t have any business? And what if I don’t have any gigs, I don’t have any reviews? Then put something out there in the profile that you’ll rank on.

So if you’re in a niche and you micro-niche all the way down, it’s a lot easier for people to contact you if there are only five people to do that thing versus 500 people. So when you niche down, there’s less competition. If I see someone that does SEO for personal injury attorneys, especially for truck accidents, and I do a search there on Fiverr for that, and there are only three, and they don’t really have any reviews, I’m more likely to talk to one of them than other people that say, “I do SEO, and I’m an SEO expert for everything for small business.” Like, I wouldn’t want to talk to them.

And then you just get the communication going. So if you get the communication going, then you can start to show that you know what you’re doing, that you’re reliable, that you have good grammar, that you’re personable, and then you can negotiate a gig that’s way more than whatever your $10, $50, whatever price is.

Gavin Lira: I think, guys, you want to think, “How can I make this easiest for the people I’m working with?” So even before they get started, you can say, “Hey, let me know how it’d be easiest to work with you.” Typically how we work together is after someone agrees, tell them what happens next. After somebody agrees, they go to this page where we’re only going to ask for these questions. I’m going to need this. And then we do the rest.

And just from that certainty, if I feel like, “Oh wow, this person isn’t going to, like, this is all they need,” they’re not going to tell me they need this and then come back two days later and say, “I forgot to ask you for this.” Because I don’t want to be on Fiverr or replying every single day, right? And a lot of people don’t. We want to work with people who we trust and like and then have them do their thing and check when it’s supposed to be done and have it there. And so if you can make them feel more certain about that and tell them what happens after they get ready, that’s going to make them more likely to work with you because they are already aware of what’s going to happen afterward.

Think about any big decision that you’re making. Let’s say you’re wanting to build a house. If you’re wanting to build a house and you’re talking to these different companies that could help you build a house or whatever it is, you’re going to want to know, “Okay, if I were to pay you the money, what’s the plan here? What happens next?” And if you can provide that to somebody in a written format, where they ask a question, you answer the question they’re asking you, say, “Also, just to let you know, if we were to work together, here’s how my process typically goes.” I would just need this from you, and then you list what you would need, and then it’s going to take me this many days or whatever. And then you pretty much just lay out your process from start to finish, what you expect it to be.

And if you’re working and something changes, just communicate what’s going to be changing. But ideally, you’d even want to communicate that it’s going to take a little bit longer than what you think it’s actually going to take, because then you’re setting a better expectation. And if my expectation is it’s going to take 10 days and you get it done in seven, I’m going to be really happy. But if my expectation is that it’s going to be seven days and you get it done in 10, now I’m going to be like, “Oh dang, they’re three late.” But if you would’ve set the expectation at 10, and it ends up being 10, it’s the same. I’m like, “Okay, they did what they said they were going to.”

Under-promise, over-deliver. The other thing too is that to be able to deliver bigger value, you often have to partner with other people that do things that maybe you suck at. So maybe you’re good at more technical things, and maybe someone else is better at account management. Maybe someone else is better at creative things, and you’re better at more, like, programming sorts of things.

So it’s totally okay to be able to partner with other people to start agencies and be able to offer higher-value packages against a particular niche because let’s say you do just graphic design. Well, maybe you partner with someone who does ads because they can run ads against your creative, and now you can measure the ROI on that. And that person who does ads, they’re good at ads, but they suck at doing creative or video editing. There’s so many different ways that you can combine these different things.

So Fiverr Learn has a bunch of courses on how to do that. In fact, we even have a Fiverr Personal Branding course that shows you how you can do this. It shows you how to generate leads, how to partner with other people, how to communicate, and how to do a lot of the things that Gavin and I are showing you. Gavin and I are living, breathing examples of doing this. So we hope you learn from other people that are like Gavin and I. We literally are partnering together on a bunch of these clients, working closely together so that the client sees one team. The client doesn’t have to work with different vendors that have different processes. It’s a headache for the client to try to figure out what’s going on.

When you reduce friction for the client, when you make it easy for the client and you have one process saying, “This is what we do, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. This is the same six-phase process we use every single time,” that creates comfort. It makes it easier to close the deal, and clients will pay more for that to not have to deal with all these other things. Now you’ve got a cycle that builds up these incredible reviews.

If you don’t have a bunch of reviews, it’s even more important for you to put in place the process that we just talked about. I like to have when you say, “Here’s what’s going to happen when you buy my gig. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” have anywhere between three and six steps. If you have more than six steps, you’re going to lose people. It sounds too complicated. I love having between three and six steps.

I want to summarize, and then I want to hear Gavin give his piece. When you build a personal brand so that people see that you are personable and you share in your profile on Fiverr, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, that you care, you serve a particular niche, you drive a particular result, then people are more likely to hire you and give you the benefit of the doubt.

You always want to start from the business standpoint, not the technical standpoint of the task, and that’s the XYZ model. “I help X achieve Y via Z.” These are the people specifically I help, not small businesses. Do not say you help small businesses. That’s a non-category. I help this particular category achieve this particular result, a business result, not just better graphics, but more sales, more leads, better conversions. Some business results via editing blog posts or doing whatever the thing is that you do.

So you probably already have this thing that you do, but you haven’t been clear on the niche, and you haven’t really thought about measuring the results. Care a little bit more. Find out what happens when the clients use the creative that you give them, the graphic or whatever that you give them. Find out not just what they think or if they think it looks nice, find out if it drove them a business result. And if you can show that and put that into your profile and into the different gigs, you’ll win.

Gavin Lira: What Dennis said earlier about partnering too, same thing with what he’s saying about communicating. Make sure you’re partnering to help drive a business result. So don’t just partner with someone because you think it sounds good or because it combines two services. Think about what your niche wants.

For example, if I’m helping lawyers get on podcasts in my PR work, what they also want is to share that on social media. Dennis, for example, is helping chop that up and distribute it with paid ads on social media. Now it’s more valuable, and instead of charging $200 separately for each service, we could charge at least $300 when we put them together. We’re saving time, and that’s valuable to clients. They will pay a premium for that if you can help them more. But you want to make sure you partner with other reputable people.

If you focus on three simple things, it becomes a lot simpler. My biggest takeaways from today are:

1. Niche down and do less. Find something that people find valuable and in demand from the market, and that people will pay a good price for.

2. Communicate clearly on your profile to your niche. Use a one-minute video to build trust and showcase your skills.

3. Put yourself in the other person’s viewpoint. Reverse engineer the process and think about what you would look for if you were hiring someone on Fiverr. Test it out by creating a buyer account and experiencing the process yourself.

Remember, these insights are derived from hiring tons of freelancers. Because Dennis has hired more than hundreds of people on Fiverr, but he’s hired thousands of freelancers over time.

Questions

Yoav: Does body language matter in building connections?

Gavin Lira: Of course, it matters. Now, clearly, what’s body language on a Fiverr profile? It’s in the video and in the photo that you take. So, again, body language is what we’re talking about with a smile, right?

So definitely, it matters because, to make things simple, our brains are already making judgments in the first second of meeting somebody. Now, people say, “Oh, I don’t judge.” We all judge. We’re designed to judge, even if we don’t try.

So what I will say is the cool part about Fiverr is, if you’re kind of concerned about your body language not being the best or whatever, just take a good photo. Once you have that photo, it’s done. You don’t have to do it again, and then make that video. Once you have the video, you know, you’re smiling, talking in your video, it’s done. You don’t have to do it again.

Yoav: What are your thoughts on selling a service for $5 to 1000 people or selling a service for $5,000 to one person? Is Fiverr the platform for both?

Dennis Yu: Yes, there’s Fiverr Pro and there’s Fiverr for Business. And Fiverr allows for teams.

The beauty of Fiverr is that it started with people selling things for $5. In the first week, I probably bought a hundred different gigs for $5, just because why not? People doing voiceovers and cartoons and animations and logos.

But the beauty is that wherever you are in your career, you can always start on Fiverr by selling something, even if you have no experience. But there are people that are selling things for $5,000 on Fiverr. You can even hire me on Fiverr. I’m very expensive.

But it’s there, and it allows for people, as you get more skill, as you get more reviews, as you can partner and deliver higher value in these different niches, you can start to charge more. So you can build your whole career on Fiverr. Absolutely.

And you could even sell something that’s called a trip wire or a lead magnet. You can sell some very low-price offer, like a 30-minute audit or doing some small task, like edit one little video for TikTok, and then that sells the larger thing, which is, well, I’ll do a hundred videos per month, and I’ll charge you $10,000 to do that, but that’s the whole package service.

But you could buy one, kind of like, you ever go to Costco or one of these places and you try the sample so good that you end up buying the thing. It’s, think of it like that.

Yoav: How can you get more exposure with a new gig, with no reviews if you follow all the points and have a micro-niche?

Dennis Yu: So a lot of freelancers get lazy on Fiverr, and they’re dependent only upon Fiverr to drive all the business. I would put your gig and promote it on your personal brand website. I would put it on Quora, I’d put it on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, saying, “Hey guys, I do the thing that you need me to do, and you can hire me on Fiverr.”

I’ve met a lot of people where we’re just in chat or something, or I see them post something or they share some of the work that they have with client permission, of course, and I see that they have a Fiverr link, and they put a Fiverr link in their email. Why wouldn’t you put your best Fiverr gigs in your email signature line? If you don’t have anything in your signature line, you’re just wasting that opportunity.

They say something interesting, and I see their profile at the bottom. I click on it and then I say like, “Wow, they have all these gigs on Fiverr. I’m just gonna go ahead and click one because it’s only $20.” Sure, I’ll buy it. So you gotta cross-promote.

Gavin Lira: What I would say about that too, guys, is to what Dennis is saying, everyone understands that inherently if you had a thousand reviews, you’d be getting way more deal flow organically, right? So the question is, how do we get those thousand reviews? Well, maybe once you have 50, then you start organically getting a good amount of traffic or whatever number it is. And it differs depending on how many people are already there and all these different variables.

But what Dennis is saying is absolutely the truth of, in the beginning, I think so many people, if they get promoting their services on Facebook or whatever it is, or cold email or whatever, and they get someone who’s interested, they immediately say, “Okay, pay me through Payoneer this or whatever.”, because they’re like wanting to make that extra 20% or whatever percentage it is. But that’s a very short-term way of thinking about it.

So if I’m in your guys’ shoes, I’m thinking, how can I build up an engine that people are just coming to me non-stop without me having to do any work. And that means in the beginning, if you make a little less of what you actually keep, it’s actually beneficial to get those reviews because those reviews will make you way more in the long term, because then you’ll have people just coming through Fiverr that you can work with on the platform.

There are a lot of different ways to do it. Use it to your advantage, though, that you’re promoting, let’s say, off-platform your Fiverr profiles because then you can say if somebody is kind of sketched out, you can even include in your original message, “Hey, just to let you know, I would do this all on Fiverr. So that way if you’re not satisfied with my work, you know there’s a third party who could get your money back or whatever. Cause I know I’m gonna do a great job for you. I know it’s our first time working together, but I wanna make this a no-brainer for you. So I wanna do this on Fiverr where there’s a third party that can validate to make sure I keep my promise to you.”

Dennis Yu: I absolutely want to hire people through Fiverr. I don’t care about the 20% because in case there’s a problem, I know that there’s a platform. I know that there’s a whole system. I know that I can hire them again through Fiverr. It’s just worth doing it that way. And you should know that the clients that you want are the ones who want to do it through Fiverr. The ones that want to try to save the 20% are probably gonna try to screw you in some other sort of way. You don’t want those sorts of people. You want long-term relationships.

Yoav: I want to thank you again. I cannot express how I’m grateful for having you. Your time is, all of the audience here will agree that it’s priceless, and I can just hope that you will be willing to do the next session hopefully soon with us.

Dennis Yu: Thank you, guys, and thank you Fiverr. And we wanna see you guys grow. So keep us posted, like share your Fiverr profile, tag Gavin or me on Twitter, and we’ll give you some help along the way. We wanna see you win. We’re not being paid by Fiverr to do this. We’re doing this because we believe in abundance, and we believe all of us could win. We see all our friends win, and if you’re a successful freelancer, we see some folks that are making 20 grand, a hundred grand.

I’d encourage you to help other people be able to level up. You know, think about where you were a year or two ago. Think about the kinds of help that you would’ve wanted, the things that you would’ve wanted to know. And so when you help other people, that’s just a good thing. Like whether you believe in karma or whatever you believe in, that’s just like a good thing for the world, and it helps you level up too.

Gavin Lira: Thank you guys very much. The main thing here that I’ll wrap up in saying is we talked about a lot of different things. Think about where you were at the beginning. Think about where you want to go. You don’t have to implement everything by tomorrow. It’s really easy to feel overwhelmed or whatever.

Pick one thing to start with, you know, write down whatever it is, but think what is gonna be the most important for me to do and how can I do that today? Because I promise you guys, the biggest thing that killed me and my growth in the beginning of my journey was not taking enough action. I used to think, I’m like, well, it’s okay if I get this done, but like by the end of the week and this and this, once I got further on the game, I realized that people who were crushing it, they were taking action and moving at such a faster pace than everyone else.

And because they were moving faster, they were making mistakes faster, which means that they were learning way faster, which means that they could have success way faster. So take one thing, implement it today, and then just keep looking to implement one thing every single day that we brought from this and maybe know, you take away four things over these next four days, make sure you implement all four of them.

Yoav: I like that. Words of wisdom.

For the entire podcast episode, click here