So, today we’re going to talk about Fiverr. Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles popping up that list different ways to build links and boost your SEO using the service. In case you don’t know, Fiverr is elance for stupid people a site where people offer services (known as gigs) and they all cost five dollars. Now, these services can range from singing you happy birthday in German, to adding 10,000 likes to your Facebook page. The trouble is, only one of these things is valuable. Can you guess which it is?
Alles Gute zum Geburtstag baby.
There are a lot of digital marketing services offered up on Fiverr, and as crazy as it may seem, real live SEO professionals are actually purchasing them. The main culprits seem to be:
1. Custom (yeah, right) articles written for your business blog (by people who learned all of their english by reading bathroom stalls.)
2. Links to your website (from digital wastelands) with your anchor text of choice (now with 100% more Google penalties!)
3. Thousands of social followers (all of whom are bound by Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics.)
Quite a lineup, am I right? Let’s go down the list and point out the obvious flaws:
1. You will never get a quality article for five dollars. It just won’t happen. It will either be ripped off, poorly written, or too short to do you any good. The reality is that decent writing will cost you. Not necessarily a ton more, but I believe $10 for about 300 words is the minimum you can pay and expect any kind of quality.
2. Google penalizes purchased links 100% of the time. That’s all there is too it. You think the person setting up the link for five bucks cares about you or your business? That link is going to be put up on a site with hundreds or thousands of others, none of them related, and you’re going to be the one who has to deal with the fallout. Meanwhile, the linker is buying themselves lunch on your stupidity.
3. Buying social followers is an attractive proposition. Full disclosure, it’s something Wikimotive dabbled in buying fans when the social frontier was still wild. We’ve learned our lesson though, and so has everyone else who takes social seriously. If you buy fans and followers, there just isn’t any value. They will all be bots and fake profiles. Maybe you look impressive for a second, but most people these days can spot inflated numbers. It will be especially obvious when you have 20 thousand fans but only 1 like per post. If you want to buy likes, run Facebook ads, but even those are sketchy with more than the occasional bot slipping in. Your best bet is to put in the work and build your audience the slower, more organic way: by putting out quality, shareable content.
So that’s my take on Fiverr, but I’m willing to be proven wrong. Have any of you found a realistic way to use the service to your advantage? If so, I’d love to hear it.