Fiverr, a marketplace where people offer to do jobs at competitive rates, ran a Super Bowl ad saying you could hire freelancers from their platform to perform all the marketing services your business needs.
While the ad may have had some clever humor, they sure made it sound like what you receive from Fiverr is of much higher quality than I — or plenty others — remember.
That’s not to say every freelancer on their platform is bad or that you’ll always have a bad experience.
However, their promise that running all your marketing efforts through Fiverr will “get you where you want to be” (which, apparently is driving a mini Tesla truck around a botanical garden where the groundskeepers are flying around on jet packs) is equally untrue.
Here’s why using freelancers on Fiverr in an attempt to create marketing content or complete your digital marketing tasks is generally a bad idea.
Quality of work on Fiverr is hit or miss
The only personal experience I have with freelancers from Fiverr and other services like it is ordering written content, but seemingly no matter what you order from platforms like them the quality varies greatly.
With SEO blogging and other writing I’ve purchased, the issues I always come across are:
- The content is duplicated (they wrote it for someone else and are sending the same article to you)
- They don’t match your brand’s “voice” (ours incorporates goofiness whereas yours might be stern and serious)
- Sometimes bloggers on these platforms promise lots of links for their articles to boost your SEO but they come from low or no-traffic blogs they built themselves. This can actually damage your search engine rankings. Oftentimes, they’ll even disappear after they get shut down and further be a waste of your money.
As for other lines of work, here’s a user on a Fiverr forum explaining his issues with deadlines and quality of work on some graphic design work. The first reply explains how (yes it’s true) quality is not an accepted reason for canceling a work order per Fiverr’s terms of service.
In my opinion, Fiverr should only be used in a pinch or as supplemental work for a project.
Does quality really matter when it comes to blogs? Yes, in fact, it does.
Without diving too deep into searcher’s intent and other Google ranking factors, here’s an example of what focusing on quality in blogging for SEO purposes can accomplish.
A client of ours owns a hotel in Branson and was having complaints about the bagged breakfast they were serving during the height of COVID restrictions. So, we wrote a blog for hotel guests on where they could go in Branson to get a quality, hot breakfast instead.
That best breakfast in Branson blog currently ranks top five among the organic results for a lot of queries surrounding breakfast in Branson.
Why is it performing so well? Because I did the work. You can tell it isn’t copied and it answers the query completely and contains high-quality information. There was also some SEO research that was done prior and results always vary but I had a good feeling it was going to do well even before I pressed publish.
Unethical practices that aren’t worth the risk
It’s been several years so you may not remember, but Fiverr was actually sued by Amazon because there were over 1,000 users offering to create fake Amazon reviews.
Put aside the fact this is incredibly unethical, fake reviews can negatively impact your business.
Now that the public has become aware of fake reviews to boost ratings, people are generally skeptical and your fake reviews may not even work. Even if they do, what do you think will happen if you don’t live up to the false praise? In either case, they’ll tell their friends you’re phony bologna and now no one trusts you.
Furthermore, Google and others don’t like when you try to game their system. Google will tank your rankings or remove your entire listing. Yelp will put a consumer alert on your posting. Amazon may remove reviews, de-list products, or shut your entire account down.
There’s really no way around just putting in the work to get reviews. And by working to get them I mean simply asking people to give you one.
Usually, you get what you pay for in marketing
Sure, there’s competition in marketing. You’ll find some who are overpriced and others trying to capitalize by giving out good deals. To be quite frank, even 2oddballs Creative isn’t going to be the cheapest option every time.
But we do believe we are very fair in our pricing compared to the amount of work we do.
Do your research and remember the old adage, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.”
A freelancer on Fiverr offering to do a graphic design, blog, website development, or even public relations for less than half a local marketing company here in Springfield, Missouri likely won’t measure up in terms of quality or execution.
