I finally took the plunge and made my first venture into outsourcing and my very first outsourcing experience, turns out, was a fiverr experience.
Getting the Feel on Fiverr
I started out by ordering from 2 gig sellers for articles to be submitted to a couple of article directories. I looked up a bit for sellers with 100% ratings and positive client responses and narrowed it to 2 sellers, which I contacted through their fiver pages.
One is a lady writer, possibly Indian (because her name sounded like it) who writes nicely based on the articles I found on an article directory. The other is a man who hails somewhere in the southeastern part of Europe. He admits to having several writers under his employ, most probably outsourced too. And I must say his articles (or rather, his writers’ articles) in another article directory are also exceptionally good.
To make a long story short, the fiver sellers delivered although not necessarily in the way I expected my first ever fiverr experience to go.
The gig with the lady writer went well in the end, but there were creases in the time between the start and finish. First off, I made a mistake of ordering from the wrong gig (among her various gigs). There’s this gig page of hers that says she writes 500 word articles and can turn it around in 24 hours. Below the heading, she detailed that she can also write and submit articles to ezinearticles for the same price.
So, new as I am to fiverr, I dived in and ordered from her saying “This is my first ever fiverr order. I would like to have a 500 word article written and submitted to ezinearticles with this anchor keyword and link:….” And she responded with “Sure, it’d be done on Thursday”. Thursday happened to be 3 days later. I thought, hmmmm…that fast?
Of course, things are different now with ezinearticles. After the Panda update, they have tightened their belts and made their criteria for accepting article submissions stricter. Turns out the earliest acceptance can happen in 2 weeks, and even later.
So, we had a little confrontation about how she should have corrected me in the first place, after ordering on the wrong gig. Where she should have not promised me a 3-day submission and should have told me about the 2-week article waiting time. What surprised me was her abundant use of exclamation marks in her responses. I thought only buyers, and never sellers, are allowed leeway in using those characters in a text-based conversation. Had our conversation been oral, e.g. on Skype, I wonder how loud she would be.
Wanting my first fiverr experience to not go south, I stayed cool. And sure enough, she delivered as promised. And a very nice article at that. Unique and just perfect for my liking.
The other gig on the other hand did not really go as expected. Hubpages, I think, is even stricter in their filtering of articles. The seller received a rejection and thinks Hubpages is no longer accepting articles on the niche I wanted. Incidentally, I know there’s already an article about my niche with a link pointing to a competitor. Of course, I’ve no way of knowing whether that’s really the case, because it could also be about spinned articles that didn’t just make the cut. There’s one funny little thing I noticed, btw, during our chat conversations within the fiverr pages. One day, he’d respond in his cool perfect english style, then on another day, he’d go wacky with very obvious errors in grammar and usage. He’d most probably given his staff full access to his fiver account but did he know there’s one among his staff that could ruin his reputation?
So, with regard to the rejected hubpages article, and not wanting to do a rejection/refund on a fiverr gig, I accepted the seller’s alternative offer to instead publish 2 unique articles with my links on it, on 2 of his own sites (with homepages having a PR1 and the other a PR2). The articles were equally excellent and non-plagiarized (as far as copyscape is concerned).
So, how did my first fiverr experience go?
Fiverr is buyer-safe because you always have the option to reject a seller’s product within a given time frame.
Over all, I’d say my first fiverr experience is good. I think I’d be coming back to fiverr for more gigs later. One thing to remember though, is that one should be careful when it comes to deadlines. And the process of carefully choosing a seller is of utmost importance.
Have you a fiverr experience, too?
Whatever your fiverr experience, remember to take a break and have fun every now and then. Check out this non-fiverr video. 🙂