Start Freelancing on Fiverr: Gigs, Pricing, SEO & Client Management

1. Welcome to the Fiverr Freelancing Masterclass!: Welcome to the Fiber Freelancing class. Freelancing has opened up many opportunities for creative and professionals all over the world. And Fiber is one of the most accessible platforms for you to get started. But while creating a gig is easy, building a freelance presence that actually attracts clients takes strategy. In this class, we're going to see how fiber works. We're going to start with setting up your account, pricing your services, getting visibility with the correct SEO, and then how we can manage the clients once they start coming in. Hi, I'm Hosta Kithie a freelance designer and creative, and I've worked with clients on various platforms, including fiber. In this class, I'll be sharing practical steps and workflows based on real freelancing experience. You'll learn how to set up your fiber profile the right way. Then we're going to learn about Fibers ranking system, which is unique. Every freelancing platform has their own. Fiber is a little bit different, and that's what we're going to explore. End, we're going to learn a little bit more about task management, how you can meet deadlines, and what are some tips and tricks that you can implement in your own workflows. This class is designed to be actionable and beginner friendly, so you do not need any freelancing or fiber experience before taking this course. By the end of the class, you're going to have a clear fiber setup and the confidence that you're going to need to start taking in clients. So let's get started. 2. Setting Up Your Account: So this is the first thing you will see when you look for fiber. They recently changed their interface. But essentially, over here, you can get freelance works and you can become a freelancer. So right now I'm looking at this as a client looking for freelance services, and the way that you would change to becoming a freelancer is by clicking on Become a seller. So now this is a whole different interface, and essentially you make your profile, you make your gigs, you set your terms, and there are two different ways in which you can actually get work. One is where the clients come to you and the other one is where you go to the clients. So you can see a bit more about some success stories, steps, some Q&A, pretty simple and straightforward. What we're going to do in this lesson is make an account and set up our profile, and that way we can get started. So let's click on Become a seller. So make your new account with whichever way you prefer, and then we can just go ahead and continue. Now that I'm signed in, I'm going to see my image right here. We're just going to click on it and head over to profile. All right. So this is where I get to set things up my way. First of all, we're going to change our display name into whatever we want. Now we're just going to come down here and edit our stuff. So first is your description. Here, it does tell you to put in your hobbies, additional expertise, et cetera, but it's best to be upfront about what you can do for the client. Say you were a lawyer for 13 years, that's what you would add here. If you're a graphic designer, specializing in posters, that's something you would put in here. So be very specific straight to the point, first sentence, what can you do for your potential client? So you would add that here. We have languages. Basically, any language that you do know, I wouldn't suggest putting in languages where you're not fluent in because clients will come to you and basically ask for maybe a translation of a document. If you're a graphic designer, design something in, say Spanish, and if you put a language that you're not fluent in, then that will be an awkward conversation that you're going to have to have with your client. So only put in your native language and those that you're fully confident in. So I'm just going to go over here and put in Spanish, and going to say I'm fluent at that there with English, can put our native language. Skills. We're going to come back to descriptions later. So with skills, we want to start from the thing that we're best at and make our way down from there. But we don't want to oversaturate our skill set just because the main thing that could get you clients on fiber is actually your niche rather than the number of skills. So it's actually quality over quantity in this case. And the first skill that the client should see is going to have to be your best skill. And then the other two, because we're only doing two to three, the other two should be something related to that. You can't say that you do anime voice acting, and then you do three D printing on the side. That kind of does not help in gaining the trust of your client. However, if you do three D design and you do three D printing, as well as say three D modeling, things that are in the same category, This is actually giving your clients more options if they were to expand their project. So say they only wanted you to design a three D character. They've come on your profile and they see that you also do three D printing and you also do maybe game development. Instead of going to another freelancer, they could just come back to you because it's in that project requirement or related to that project. So let's go over here, and I'm just going to go and focus on graphic design. So let's do graphic design and get more specific with it. If I'm really good at logos and that's what my portfolio is composed of, I'm going to have to choose that. So say this is my main skill. We're going to add that there. Branding is related to that. So you have a logo for your business, but your business should have a brand identity. So that's something that I could add here. So logo, brand, third, we think about a business as products. That's where product design comes in handy. So if one of my clients comes for either one of these, I'm giving them the option to expand their business, the project more because I offer related skills. Next is your education. You can either not put anything in here, put in your certificates instead. That's completely up to you. Obviously, if you have the right credentials, they're going to trust you more, but you don't necessarily need to have a huge educational background because at the end of the day, they're going to see the work that you've done. If they like it, they'll hire you. If not, then they won't if you do not have an impressive educational background, don't be frazzled at all. Okay, so let's go back to our description. You could type this out, but a faster way to do it is to go into Che GPT and have it compose a description for you based on what's popular on fiber. So that's kind of like an SEO thing. So let's do write me a fiber seller description as a logo designer. With ten years of experience. In the second half here, put in what makes you credible. It could be ten years of experience or with a niche in the food industry, whatever works for you, and it's going to write it up for you. It may give you a lot of text. You don't necessarily have to put all of that in because they're not going to read all of this. But as you can see, it is driving you in with things that would intrigue a client. Are you looking for stunning, memorable professional logo, perfectly represents your brand? You've come to the right place. So rhetorical question, or you could start from here. I'm blank, seasonal logo designer. Then after this, you could put the other stuff that could potentially convince the client to choose you over them. If you've worked with any high profile clients, you can put their name there. You can say how many projects you've worked on. Are you self taught? Did you graduate from Harvard, you know, whatever, and you would put it in your description. There's obviously all these categories that you can look at for inspiration, see what the top freelancers do in your niche. So if I go to Graphic Design, let's go to Logo Design, and we can see some of the gigs that are doing so well. So this is what the services that other freelancers have put out look like. They show up like this. We see their name up here. You can also do ads. So notice how these guys are ads. These are not. There's levels, and the higher the level, the better the freelancer we have top rated that will obviously catch your client's eye. Look at how we can level up in fiber in a further lesson. You can also become Fibers choice, and that is just dependent on how much people like you and by people, I mean, past clients. There's that one liner that is going to show up here, what will you do for this client? The IWL part is going to be there, and you're just going to put in the rest yourself, the ratings of these freelancers, their services, and how many people have used this service. If you go on the photos, you can look at the others and there's ways to filter them. You can also choose in the logo style. So this again goes back to your niche. So what kind of logo styles are you going to do for your clients? Let's choose minimalist. So file format, I'm going to be offering them PNG, AI and JPEC. Service includes transparency, factors, source file, all that. Let's apply. Seller detail. Let's choose what a top seller offers. They speak English. Does it really matter where they live? And then the budget. So how much will I be charging my clients? I would choose that. So let's go with value for now. Apply delivery time, let's say, up to three days. All right. So this person right here has had over 1,000 clients, 4.8 and they do the pricing from 33. So what you want to do is to go on fiber, same way that we just did and study what they're doing. So what are they doing right? How do they preview their skills and what are they informing their clients about? We can look at their packages. You will have the option to make a basic package, which is your cheapest package level up to standard, slightly pricier, and then we have premium. So when we look at how we can set up our services, we will be able to make three packages for skills, for our service, and you can come and look at these people and see what they offer. And if it's doing so well for them, we could do something like that. You can go down here and see what they include in their gig description. So there's a YM section, deliverables, notes, and this is their profile. So this is the description that they created, the one that we were looking at earlier. So that's where it's going to show. We have a compare packages section between these three helps the client choose which one's best. There's frequently asked questions. We get to set this up ourselves. We ask the questions and put in the answers. Of course, finally, we have the reviews. There's a contact option, so that's just a chat box. We do get to choose how the clients can contact us. Is it via only email? Can they chat with you? And they call you, that's all up to you. Take your time to study some of these things. In a further lesson, we're going to dive deeper into this and see what we can gather from all of these freelancers. 3. Creating Your First Gig Pt. 1: So now we're going to set up our very first gig on fiber. This process is going to require some market research, as we did in the last lesson. So if you want to take more time and find a niche that you want to focus on for the rest of this course, do pause the video and do your research before coming back because that's just going to make your experience a lot easier. And you would be spending time making a gig that's going to have a chance. As we talked before, if you put something broad like graphic design, the chances of you getting a client is going to be very little. You want to have your own niche, and we chose a brand designer, and we specialize in logos and I believe product. I know that one. So I'm basically a brand designer, and I focus on logo and product design. Now, as you can see, I don't have a button for create your new gig. That's because we haven't completed our profile, and we can do that by clicking on this. It's a little onboarding process. Now, regarding profile picture, it's really important for it to be a headshot that is close to the camera. If you're just some small figure in the background, you're not going to be able to gain the trust of your client immediately. So you want to make sure your face is visible, your eyes are open. You're not wearing sunglasses or anything. And right through that eye contact, that client can kind of get to know you and trust you better. So try not to add any sketches, family photos or anything, and then we can continue. I'm just going to upload my photo and then I'll be right back. Once we have our personal info, I'm going to add in an occupation, graphic design, and now this is where we go into the categories. So I'm definitely logo design. And let's take a look two to five. So let's say we are a graphic designer from 2014. And next, we want to choose something else packaging and label. That was another one. We can also add other occupations if we want. Say you're also doing programming or marketing, but try to stick to that niche that we talked about. Alright, then we have education. You can add it here. As you can see, it's not required certification, and then you can add your personal website if you want to have, like, a portfolio for clients to go and take a look at. We have some safety measures. I already have an email, so I don't need to put anything else. And now we're able to actually create our first gig. So we're going to start by telling the clients what we're going to do for them. So as I mentioned before, IW will be there, but you get to put something else of here. You have an 80 character max, and you basically want to be straight to the point what you're going to do for them. So if you're designing logos for finance businesses, that's what you want to put in there. You can also put in the style, which I would recommend. So let's go with I will design a modern finance logo for your You can't say business, but I'm going to make it even more specific with startup. So this already tells me that tells the client exactly what it is. If anyone is a startup with some sort of relation to finance, they can come for my gig. Next, we're choosing your category. So graphic design, subcategory logos, and we want to choose your style, which we said modern logo type. We can go with one of these. You could choose up to three, but try to minimize your amount. I'm going to go with wordmark, abs, emblems. And then what kind of file format are you going to show provide for your clients? Some people give the source file. You can also not do that and just give them the SVG and JPEG. Now, the great thing about fiber is that no matter what category you choose, it has its own gig metadata. So say I'm going to be in programming and tech, it will not give me the stuff that I was getting for graphic design. If I go into writing and translation, choose proofreading and editing, it's going to have its own things. So with languages, content type, and all sorts of other things. If I choose a subcategory here for website, it's going to have its own stuff for me to choose from. So no matter what you choose, you will boil it down to exactly what you want to offer. Okay, so we have that. Now we're going to put in our search tags. If you're familiar with SEO, search engine optimization, this could be easier for you, but essentially, you want to put up to five tags that are basically the things that you're hoping the client will search for in order to find your gig. So in relation to what I'm doing, I'm going to type in start up Logo. Let's do finance logo, and modern logo. Then just logo and business. So these are the stuff that are very specific. The problem with putting, say, just logo design is that you're going to get mixed up with people who do three D logos, fashion logos, food industry, and all that. So you want to make sure that you are adding in your niche in all of these tags. You have to declare that continue and this is where we introduce our packages. If you recall from our last lesson, we saw that on all of the gigs, people had three sets of prices. There's a basic, the cheapest one, and it goes all the way up to premium where you offer the most expensive and the most that you can offer. So this is why you have to do a market research to see what the standard pricing is and what they offer for that price. So I'm just going to the fiber buyer section and find one gig that I want to kind of mimic in terms of pricing. So let's search startup logo. There we go. So, these guys work for work with logos that are suitable for the startup industry. Let me see which one do I want to get? I'll go with this one just 'cause they're top rated. And from here, I want to see what they offer. Obviously, as people who just started, you cannot go ahead and put in 73 pounds for your basic package and around 244 pounds for premium. But what we're going to look at is what this person offers for this price, and we will have to start with a cheaper price when we're starting out and then gradually add that up. Okay, so let's go down here where it compares, and this is what we want to mimic. So it's going to give us two logo concepts, high quality JPEG, transparent PNG, and a vector source. There's no three D mockup, no stationary, no social media, and these are the other specifications. Now I will go for a budget to the budget section and choose one for value. These are usually the people who either started early or they're counting on a high number of orders. So let's go with this person. They start from. Actually, this guy nine is pretty good. This person has only had 15 clients, and this is their pricing. Starts from eight, goes up to around 49 pounds. So let's go back to our package. First, we want to give it a name. Go with the starter package, standard, let's go with, and then go package. Now we're going to describe the details, I think I'll do two local concepts, JPEG, Files, and say, I'll add PNG in there as well. Delivery time, how long is it going to take for you to deliver this package? I'll go with two days because I'm not giving much. And by the way, in here, you can add more description about the type of logo you're going to provide. So feel free to add more in here. Revisions relate to how many times are you going to implement the feedback your client will give you. So say I gave a logo of a star, and that's my finalized logo, and then the clients like, can you add a moon next to it? If I accept that, I am doing a revision, and when I give them that star and moon logo, that is a singular revision that I have allowed the client to do. If you put it at zero, they cannot change it. They have to take what you've made for them based on their initial request. Because a lot of times clients they ask you to do something once you give it to them, they may think of other stuff they want to add to it. Maybe they changed their mind completely. And in order to protect yourself, you want to choose revisions wisely. So for a basic package that we're going to put up for nine pounds, there is no need to put nine or unlimited revisions because you're not getting that much. It's a rather quick delivery, and you're just kind of making it harder for yourself. So if you go back to one of these guys, let's come. Here, we can see that we can see that this person has unlimited for all three, but they're not giving a vector file or the source file, any of that. So we can assume that this is a quick, high quality logo, whereas for this guy, we can see that because he's going to take time with it due to the fact that he's a pro, he has only three revisions for a two day delivery, five revisions for another two day delivery, and then unlimited because you're paying a lot more. So think about that and choose what you want to do with it. I usually go with zero for something this basic just because I want to give an option to the people that just want a rather quick logo and be on their way. I will definitely put unlimited because they will be paying more here, and for the second one, say three. Next, we have number of concepts. So I kind of listed it here, but we can add it over here as well, just so there is that just so they can compare the tables as well. So if they give me an idea or a request of a star logo, I would be giving them X amount of variations of that concept. So I have two, two, and three. You could go up to five. Obviously, if you're going to give them more for each of these concepts, choosing five is going to be a lot of work for you. But you could argue that it's quality over quantity, and each of those concepts use, like, psychology, color theory, and all of that and kind of make them okay with this. If they wanted more, I think they can ask for an additional logo. You can charge them. So think about how your workflow is and if these numbers are possible. All right. The second one, I'll write in two local concepts. The difference we can say is that you get a JPEG. PNG. And this time you get an SVG and you get mockups, too. Let's say three mockups. For the premium, which is the best that you can give them, let's go with three logo concepts using psychology. We can say that we're going to give them five mockups. And then, of course, the formats are going to be JPEG, PNG, SVG, and then we can say the source file. And just to make it even more, let's add a PDF in there if they want to print. Okay. Next, we have logo transparency, and that just talks about whether you can isolate your logo without a background. Usually, that's what PNG files are for, so I'm just going to add them for all three. Vector file is the.ai that we chose, so it's going to be available for this one. Printable file. That's PDF, three D mockup. That here. Then we have source file. Stationary designs is like you can make them stuff that relates to documentation. So you can make them headers for documents. You can make a footer or business cards and all of that. That's if you want to offer it. It's going to be obviously a bit more work, but that just depends on whether you want to offer these. Social media kit is kits designed based of the brand that you made for them. So if it's say Instagram, all of the posts that you design for them needs to have the same color. Palette, the same font, and all of that. You don't want to give them some random social media designs because they could have just made it themselves on Canva or something. So if you do want to offer that, you can put that in there. Finally, we are here for price. So I want you guys to analyze what exactly you're offering, bearing in mind the market research that you've done and put in a price for yourself. So that person kept in eight pounds for unlimited revisions and a rather fast delivery. I would obviously have to lower my amount because I'm not giving them unlimited revisions. I'm delivering that in two days. Forgot to add this, so three delivery, three day delivery. So I'll go with $5. And then this one, we can go with 15. And then this one we can do 25. You can always come back and change the prices, so this is not set in stone. There's this thing called Extra Services. This is where you can allow your clients to take more than what you've initially offered. So if they wanted to be super fast, we can put one day for the first one and then two days for the others, and we can charge them like $10 more. It's like $3 additional revisions. Do you have the time to do all of these revisions? If not, you can just uncheck the box. Do you want to offer more logos within this package? If yes, put a price. If no, turn it off. The vector files, if they want the vector files for say, the basic package, how much would you want to charge them for that? So I'm just going to do like $5 for another day. The D mockups, let's do $10 for another day. And you can just go ahead and add even your own customized gig extra. Okay, let's continue. Now come to one of the biggest parts of your gig, and that's how you describe what you're going to do for your clients. We're going to continue this in the next lesson because it's going to be very long and elaborative. So for now, just make sure that you have all your prices sets, all your conditions set in the pricing section, and then come back here where we can add a nice description and milestones. I will see you guys in the next part. 4. Creating Your First Gig Pt. 2: Now we're back with writing our description for our first gig. So as mentioned in the previous lesson, the description is one of the most important parts of your gigs, because it's basically going to convince the client to stay on your gig and purchase your packages. So what you're going to start with in your descriptions, let's go to this person. Is tell them a bit about you, but only about the stuff that they would care about. So they want to make sure you are a graphic designer and you are qualified and what you promise to the client. Then you can tell them a bit about your process and why it's better than the other people. So this person has a questionnaire where they will take the stuff in order to make the process easier. And they're just telling the client a bit about the packages more in depth than what you can see here. Okay, so let's go back and here. This person, let's view what they have. Okay, so they didn't introduce themselves, but again, very straight up with what the client will get and call to action for if they have questions. By the way, if you were wondering, clients can easily message you like this. So I'm in the client view right now. So recently they have the milestone workflow. This is for gigs that are rather expensive, so $100 or more. We don't fit into that category, but essentially it ensures that you get paid throughout this longer process. So say if we add something like this person, let me see if they have milestones. Okay, they don't have milestones, but they are charging $244. So they want to make sure that you stick around till the end to get everything that you need and, of course, for this person to get paid. So with milestones what they're going to do is say, after they give you the logo concept that takes a day or something, they're going to ask you to approve it and then pay them, say, $40 from this entire amount. Then once they give you the three D mockups, they're going to ask for another 100 and they go on this way to get the finalized money in small increments. This is kind of like an insurance thing and it guarantees that your client doesn't just cancel and go away. Of course, when they do cancel, there is a cancellation fee, I believe, but a lot of sellers like to use the milestones to make sure they get the full amount. Okay. Now, just to show you what this looks like, I'm going to go back and turn my premium into 150. This way I can show you what that looks like, especially if you're going to do programming and all of that. Now it needs the basic package. If you're going to do some sort of programming, you want to make sure that you are getting paid for all the time that you're putting in. And there we go. So my basic is $500. It just has to be above 100. There is templates. So that includes the first milestone is onboarding. Make sure we align for the project. And if you want to make up a project brief document that you want to share with the client before you actually start coding in this sense, you can put that in there. I will say for the basic package, then there's a research and preparations. Can you put in a price design. Now that you could delete any of these. If it's too many, you can add a fifth milestone. Just anything that can guarantee that you're making sure that you and the client are on the same page. So definitely use milestones if you're offering a service that just takes a lot of time, and it would suck if they canceled mid project. Okay, let's go back here, I believe that was 25, Save and continue. We don't need milestones anymore. Then we have this section for frequently asked questions. This is a great way to let your clients know exactly how you conduct your business, what they need to know before even contacting you, what you're going to need from them, et cetera. So here is an example. Can you provide a British accent? Of course, I've lived in England for three years and that sort of thing. So in regards to my business, we can do, let's say, can you accept reference photos when designing I'm going to think that someone may have this question in their mind, and then I'm going to answer it. So that's my first question, second question. Can you copy a logo that I like very much? Alright, so anything of that sort, let's continue to the next section. So now requirements, you can list the things that you're definitely going to need from the client before starting. It's not a good idea to rely on them, you know, answering you on time, responding to emails. So before they even get your package, you want to make sure that you've taken every information you need for your project. Okay, so these are mandatory. So if you're ordering for business, what's your industry? There's multiple choice, part of a bigger project you're working on, and then you can add your own questions. Let's go with what is the name of your business. This will be on your logo. And then you can put it as free text. That's a required thing. You can make this unrequired when you're asking questions that you could do with or without their answer. So let's say what kind of colors do you want in your designs? Not required. I can still continue making my designs if they don't tell me this. Okay, continue. And now here is your gig image. This is another important thing because it's essentially the first thing they will see on your gig. So you can add up to three images. And then there's videos which actually work better than photos because they get to listen to your voice. They get to see you. You can put in some of the works that you've done and just kind of convince them in 75 seconds. Then we have documents. So if you're maybe a writer, you work in law, that's where you upload these. With logos, we would want to use the image part, but we could also take it up a notch and use the video, which underwrite, you can see that it increases user engagement by 40%. So that is up to you. So you can use any platform to either put in the logos you've done before, maybe the mockups. But a lot of people, they'll do. So here, they have the mockups, they will put in the actual logo file. Let me go on this, guys. You can do a collection of your logos, the different ways or mockups. Some people put their own photo just to show their personal identity, and it's really up to you which one you want to do. Now I'm just going to add in some logos and then we can move on to the final step. So the first one is going to be your primary image, which is what's going to show up first. And we can add tags to this to make it easier to identify for your client. So logo type. These are the two that we chose, and you can add in some tags about your service. So let's do pastel picture. Stuff like that. It's not really a word mark, but I'm just going to put it on there. So repeat that with the other ones, and then you're good to go. All right. Now we can save and continue and fill in some questions. So if you work in the US, you do have to have this guy, so confirm whether or not you're doing that. Just going to say no, just to save time here. But if you do work in the United States, definitely choose yes and grab the Form W nine for tax purposes. All right. You have to add in a phone number, and then once we're done, our gig will be reviewed and then published on our profile. That's how you fill up your gigs. There is no limit as to how many gigs you can have. But for starters, I would say cupids at around one, two, three. Once those guys do well, you can do variations of that successful gig and build up your business from there. I hope you guys enjoy this lesson. I'll see you guys in the next one. 5. Level Up and Pricing: Setting your prices on fiber can get a bit tricky, especially when you first start out. You don't want to put a price that is way too expensive for what you're trying to give and you don't want to sell yourself short. So there are many ways to calculate how much you should charge, given the commission that fiber will take, the time it takes for you to deliver the service and the value that you're putting in there. So I have some tools again to show you guys that will help you calculate your prices better. And if you're completely new to Fiber, I will tell you how much fiber will take as commission and how you can best calculate your prices. So in the last lessons, we kept our current price, starting at $5 based off what we saw in the market research section of the course. So if Fiber is going to be either your primary or secondary source of income, you want to make sure that you're putting the right price so that it can cover the time that you're putting into your work, the tools that you're using, the value you're putting in there, and that it can help you pay your expenses. Now, a lot of people use fiber as a part time role, but a lot of people fully rely on Fiber to get steady income. So first, let's talk about time. I know we said in the gig that we're going to deliver the logo in two days. There's actually a lot more that goes into that and it's not going to be really told to the client. I'm going to stick with graphic design for this lesson just because that's what we have as our gig. Designing a logo is going to need you to do some brainstorming, some research, communicating with the client, and some resources such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and so on forth. So if you're saying that you're going to deliver in two days, how much of that two days is dedicated to this particular logo? In order to calculate that, you can try timing yourself every time you're working on this project, and then use that as a reference when you're trying to say, increase your prices or set your prices for another gig. So there are many tools out there that can help track your work for each project. One of my favorite tools is a mobile app called Toggle Track. It's right there, I believe. I think there's a web version too. But on the app store, this is what it looks like. The great thing about this is that you get to have different projects, and then you are going to just start a timer on each of them separately. So it's not like the built in clock application, but let me see if I can show you guys. So let's try using it for free. I'm going to make an account. And then I'm brought into this interface. So the way this works, this is also available on the mobile. I'm not sure if I mentioned that is that you add a project, say logo for client B. We have some advanced option. If you're having a certain time frame, we have a deadline, you can put it and just give it some additional stuff. There's different plans. Let's create our project. And then once I have my project, I'm going to just start the timer. So whether I'm brainstorming, thinking, sketching, editing, and all of that, I would want to have this timer go off. If you're taking breaks, make sure to turn this off, and that way, you're not charging extra for your client without knowing. Once I stop my entry, it's going to show up right here. Then I can see how much time did I spent on Local for Client B in the span of two weeks, one month, two days even. Then based off that, I can decide how much I want to charge for just the amount of time I'm putting in. Let's go to project and I could do multiple projects. I'll go for client C, create project. And then I could just select it here. So now I want to switch to client C. Start by timer and see how much it takes. Using tools like this, you can get an average and try to set a bit the hour rate based off the Internet too. So that's for time. Next, we want to look at what stuff are we using, what programs are we using, and are we even paying for them? So if you're using the free version of Canva, say, for your logos, you don't really need to charge extra for that program since it's free. But if you have an Adobe subscription and you're paying X amount every month, for Photoshop, you want to make sure that the amount that you're taking from your client can cover that as well. Because if you undercharge, then you won't be able to pay for your Adobe program, and that's not going to be very helpful. So that was your time and your program. Next is the value that you provide. So if you've just started to design and you have, say, five months of experience, you obviously cannot charge as much as someone who's worked as a graphic designer for ten years. So try to see what the minimum amount is for someone with your experience and your value then set your prices based off that. Now we can get into the fiber fees calculator. I have four websites here plant to choose from. Just as a general rule, fiber takes 20% commission when you first start. If you're a level one, 20% of what you make will be going to fiber. As you upgrade, it does get less and C starts at 20%, and then when you get memberships, it goes down. Bottom line it's 9%. The more you sell on fiber, the more clients you the less you have to pay in commissions. So I'm going to go here to finalfot com slash FIVE. If I made $50 from this client and the tax rate differs from and I'm not going to put a tax rate now. It differs on your country. You see that FVR will take $10. And if you're getting the money with PayPal, Pay Pal is going to take 1.75. Tells us the profit, the margin, the return, and all that stuff. If you want to see if you're undercharging or overcharging, these calculators are great, and there's just tons of them out there. So $5 right now is suitable for me that's going to spend 2 hours on designing these logos with a Canva tool, and I am a complete beginner. $5 is perfect. As I get clients on this, and I saw that I have, say, ten people in my queue. They're all trying to get my gig that is an indicator that I get to upgrade because when you have clients, that adds to the value that you're providing. You're providing the experience you gathered from those projects. So if you've never had a clients before, $5 is a great place to start. Once you start getting clients and you just have so many of them coming at you, you're kind of overwhelmed, then you can increase your prices. And it is just a gradual process just as leveling up is. The levels in fiber lets the buyers know how experienced you are on this particular platform. So it doesn't matter if you've had ten years of experience. When you first sign up on fiber, you will start at level zero, and that is precisely what we have here, even though we have experience. So if you go to level overview, I just went to dashboard level overview. We can see what I need to do in order to level up. So there is Level zero, level one, two, and three. And three is the top rated one. You can see the minimum requirements down below. You can compare the benefits. The higher level you are, the less competition you have to deal with because fiber will just put you above everyone else automatically. You can find out more about the systems right here. So I need five success scores. If I click on them. It's going to Now, the success score that you see here relates to how many times you were able to deliver the stuff to the client successfully. So it's just about how many times you finish the project. If the client cancels halfway, that does not count towards your score. So in order for me to get to level one, I need five successful clients to be eligible. The next metric is the rating they give you. So you finish the project is the client happy with what you've given them? You're going to need 4.4. Next is a response rate. This refers to how fast you respond to clients, whether it's via chat or email. I would highly suggest having fiber on your phone, turning on the notifications, so you never miss a request from your clients because as we can see, it matters a lot. You need a score of 80 for that to happen. The next one is your orders. This is not really about whether the client liked it, whether it was successful, it's just about getting that order. We only need five in order to qualify for level one. And a great way to get started because it's rather difficult to get those five orders is to ask your friends and family to just come up here, put in an order, maybe write a review for you. And that way, you're kind of getting your foot in the door and will be more visible towards actual clients. Now, those friends and families can, of course, be clients as well, but that is just a great way to get started with this whole competition that you're in. If you have experience with your expertise, you can go ahead and ask your previous clients, the real clients to come up here and write you a review. Now, they don't necessarily have to come in and buy something from you, but their review alone will help you a great amount. It will give you a rating. It will make your profile pop and appear more on those search results. So whether it's a friend or family or an actual client, try to get as many people on your profile as possible. One is for unique clients. So friend buyers, you can't have the same person buying five times. You're going to need different people each time. Then finally, it's earnings. They have it listed here, and that is it. Six criteria that you need to focus on of course, it all comes to you with time, but it's good to have these in mind when you're responding to clients and performing your duties as a freelancer. So those were some tips on how to better price your services and how you can level up within fiber. Now, going forward, we're still going to be constantly talking about these two topics. This was just a general overview to bear in mind before we move on with the next lesson. 6. Fiverr SEO Tools Pt.1: The only way the clients can find your specific gig is through the right keywords, and that leads us to the topic of SEO within fiber. So previously, we did talk about it and we went over other profiles, looked at what kind of stuff they were selling, and we tried to incorporate specific words that would best describe our business. So now I do have the gig that we made in the previous lesson before we begin, make sure you have a gig as well. And that way we can compare what we had before with what we would get by the end of this lesson. My profile is now complete in terms of information, and I have my first gig. So the gig isn't live yet because they're still reviewing my gig, but that should not take very long to happen. One disclaimer that I do want to give is that my username right now is not my real name, and that's because I wanted to start with a new account, show you guys how this works. So make sure that that's not the case with you and that you're using your professional email. So this is just for the purpose of this course. So the traditional way of finding the right keywords for your gigs is researching the market, jotting down the words that you see most often. Say the word minimalist logo is in every single successful gig that you're looking at. That may be something that you would want to consider putting in your gig as well. Doing that is going to take a while and would have to read everything from their title to the description, and that could just be time consuming. I do want to introduce a plug in in this course, a chrome extension. That's going to analyze the fiber profile of the gig and just highlight the keywords that are making that gig successful. So that's going to save you a lot of time, and we're going to have that extension throughout the rest of the course and go back to it when we need to. Let's open a new tab and look for the fiber made chrome extension. As you can see, it's a fiber gig SEO tool. G to add it to chrome. And they do have some packages. I'm just going to go with the free version right now. I suggest you do the same. If you saw that it's working out for you, it's helping your gigs get reviews. Then, of course, you can go ahead and upgrade to the pro version. But for the purpose of this lesson, this is enough. I'm simply going to subscribe and basically make an account, and then I'll be back so we can see how it can be implemented for our purpose. So once you verified your account, you just go down to my add ons and get your login key right here. Once I've logged in and verified, added my log in key, can go ahead and start using this plugin. So it's right over there in the top right. And the first thing that I need to do is switch to buying and start looking at the very successful logo gigs. So let's go with this one. First is three modern minimalist logos. I'm just trying to demonstrate how this works. It is obviously not for startups. But when you scroll down, you can see this new bar added by fiber Mt. You can either search manually and see if this is, like, concentrating on the niche that you're trying to concentrate on. So let's search for a logo and see how many times this person mentioned it. So they mentioned it seven times, and that may seem like a lot, but that's the whole point of the keyword emphasis. So notice how they're always adding an adjective before the logo. So I'm less logo, high quality logo, sentic and custom logo, detailed logo, minimalist logo, real estate, and so on forth. Now, another cool way to use this plugin is to search for your niche and then have this plug in analyze the tags that are within the search results, and, of course, their keywords. Let's search for startup logo. And this section is going to pop up. So immediately, we can see all the tags. So if you want to improve your tag list, just go ahead and copy all of these guys or some of them, can copy them right here and then put it straight into your gig. So let's actually do that at the same time. Go to Seller dashboard, go to profile, edit our gig and try to make it better. So I'm just going to look at what I have here. I have logo in all five, but over here, I can see that the top ones are obviously startup logo. There's tech logo, technology logo, crypto, and all that stuff. You just have to incorporate some of that in there. So, for example, the word business is very broad. You can have all sorts of business, so I'm going to remove that and instead put in technology logo, since we said we're going to work with the finance sector of startups. Technology logo, and then we can do some other stuff. I believe we have modern. I'll remove the word logo since it's very broad, like we said. Instead, I'm going to add in brand logo because it relates to our brand designer title. Now, one thing that I do want to point out, a lot of these guys, they are used in the gigs below, such as, let's see, I just saw one flat minimalist, typography, wordmark, letter mark, and all that stuff. These are terms used in graphic design in relation to a logo. It basically tells you the type of logo that is being designed. So if you search types of logos, you can see that this is what wordmark is. We saw letter Mark as well, and other stuff. So my point here is that a lot of clients are not graphic designers, and they're not familiar with these technical terms that a graphic designer would know. So you don't want to have that in your tags because the chances of people knowing the difference between a typography logo and a wordmark logo is very low, especially when they are the buyers and not the designers themselves. Rarely, there is a designer that comes on here, but it's usually someone with a business who wants a logo and they just want something that looks good. So try not to get too technical. However, the word minimalist is something used almost everywhere. Everyone's familiar with what that means. It calls for something clean, something minimal, and the person doesn't have to be a designer to know exactly what that's going to look like. Things like technology logo. Everyone can imagine what that is. But try not to use too technical terms just in case most of your buyers are not familiar with them. Let's go up here. We do have some additional stuff that we can work with. There's a suggested keyword analyzer, and I'm just going to I only have five left, but that's because I'm on the free version. Let's search startup logo and generate keywords. So these are the keywords that it generated from the stuff that's on fiber right now. Again, we're seeing business card, website design, even though that's not what we're offering. These keywords will at least help you get to the first page of the search results. We have some other features that are not available at the moment, but it's going to be available soon. I just clicked on Analyzed keywords, and we can see that for branding, we have quite a lot of competitors. Average orders, this much revenue, reviews, grading, dominant level, and stuff. We do have this recommendation section, which is very cool. It basically tells you if you should even compete with this keyword in this saturated market. Because graphic design is one of the biggest categories within fiber. So definitely use these tools to get a heads up and hopefully get your clients. So recommendation for graphic design, as it's the broadest term is not that easy, and the dominant levels are level two. So right now, we're level one. So trying to compete in a Level two dominant group is going to be a bit difficult just because everyone within that competition is Level two, and we're just kind of already behind because we need to upgrade first. So this right here, brand style guide is something that I can add into my gig, and it's pretty easy to get in there. So let's copy that. Over here, positive keywords. I will remove brand logo and just paste in the brand style guide. There we go. So now my keywords are a lot better. Let's close this off. Some of these features are not exactly working that well, but I'm sure they'll fix it up soon. Download us metadata. That's a pretty cool feature. I just clicked on the gig titles, and it gave me this CSU file. Alright, so it gave me all the titles of the best performing gigs. This could be helpful when generating your own title, and you can just save this Control F and search for the keyword that you were fixated on to see if it's even that popular. Let's do start up 52 times. That's pretty good. Let's go with brand. Just brand eight times. So it's probably best to not use the word brand in my title. Let's go with modern 28 times. Logo 52 times. Okay. Try minimalist. Okay, so modern is better than minimalist. And yeah, so this is how you would check your keywords to see if they're even that present in the search results. Still at that. We have the gig tags gives you another CVS file, and you could get the descriptions, too, but you need to upgrade. Alright, so these are the tags, I believe. There we go. So each gig has five tags, and let me just search my tags, the one that I wrote and see how popular they are. Startup logo. What else did we do? Finance logo. Let's see if that's even there. Not there, technology logo and modern logo. 13 times modern logo, 12 times. Okay, so the finance is pretty niche. Now, the chances of someone searching the word finance logo in the search bar is quite low, but with you keeping this tag in your search tags, you will be one of the first ones that show up on that search result page for those small amount of searchers. So just because it's not there in the most popular tags, it doesn't mean that you have to remove it. So it's good to have a combination of really niche tags such as finance logo and popular tags modern logo. And, Jeff, be sure to check back with it and you can basically get some of the newer features that they still haven't released. So when we scroll down, we can see that it has some additional stuff as well, but not for every gig for some reason, but in particular, it's focused on the top gigs, which is actually a good thing for us. So we can see can't really see how many people bought it, but immediately the five tags they've got, we can see some common tags, and I can just copy them all at the same time. And we are getting a keyword match, as well, from what we initially searched the word logo. So it's a pretty cool plug in, and I do suggest you guys having it. It will make your SEO job a lot easier. Now I want to show you guys some other tools if you're not into plugins or you're having a hard time installing it. And those are just stuff that you can get on your browser, their websites, and let's get started with those. 7. Fiverr SEO Pt. 2: The first one is Fiber lytics. You can just find this on Google. That's their URL. Just search Fiber keyword generator, and you can see it on the first row. So we're going to give it one keyword, and over here is where you want to add that niche that we discussed. So I believe we were modern startup logo. So I'm just going to put in startup logo for this. Generates. And it's giving me these suggested keywords, and you can see how they rank it for you. So here it gave me seven keywords, just from the one that I gave it. Notice how they're giving ranks for each one. Those are basically what's the most related to the input that you gave it. So I need to make sure that the word branding is visible in my gig multiple times like the logo situation we found. So they said it seven times I should try to do something like that with the word branding. Also business card, which may not be your main focus, but that is clearly something that a lot of people search for, and that's why they're on this list. So anything related to logo, people find it through these keywords. So make sure you include them depending on how important they are, rank them, and then put them in your gig multiple times. So brand guidelines maybe once or twice, but branding definitely more. We have a free AI fiber description generator. We already wrote our description. But if you'd like to make a generated one and then compare it because they generated data collected from all the other gigs, you can just type in your enquiry. Let's do Startup logo, generate and see what we get. So here I got some pretty good description. So I hear it's saying as a startup, it's crucial to make a strong first impression. And then after that, I can tell them that I could make that a reality with my many skills. There is also good call to actions here. We're talking about brand identity, recognition. And all of that. So it generates these descriptions from the other gigs on fiber that have the keyword startup logo. Those gigs are probably doing great compared to ours since we just started hours. And we can use that information to improve our descriptions. So if you just click on either one and ask you to sign in, but you get the idea. You can just add in a few of these sentences and improve your description. Other way to find out the best keywords for your gig is to just look it up for your niche. Let's go for top keywords on fiber for startup, logo design. So here it's telling us with any logo gig, there should be the following. So these are what buyers are looking for. And whatever keyword is popular, you can easily find them on the Internet through Google Search or AI Tools. And that way, you will have a better chance at showing up on the buyer's top results. So those were some tools that can help you enhance your SEO game fiber. All of them are very cool. There's plenty more out there. But these were just some that I wanted to share with you in this lesson. So I hope you guys enjoy this lesson. Let's move on to the next one where we learn how to upgrade the gig itself. M 8. Ways to Improve Your Gig Exposure: So before starting the lesson, make sure that you have a gig on Fiber, you've completed your profile, and that way, we can make sure we're all going at the same pace. So previously, Fiber used to have something called seller request, where sellers would have clients come to them. So that means that the buyer, the client would come on Fiber and be I need a logo. I have $25 to give and I want it by Friday. And then you would be, along with other freelancers, bidding on that project, saying that I can do one for you for $20 and give it to you by Thursday. Another person would do the same, and it was kind of like a bidding process. The client would then choose the one that they like the most. On fiber, you can have clients come to you and have you going into the clients. So it works both ways. And it's definitely a good idea to do both of them when you're first starting out, just so you have a baseline that can grow from there. So I'm here in my dashboard. I just went to Dashboard and this whole thing that I just mentioned is in the My Business tab. So click on that. First, we have our orders. Anything that is active, denied in Queue and other stuff is going to show up on this page. So priorities are the ones that are about to be expired, and you have to get them done ASAP. Active ones, the ones that are late, delivered, completed, canceled and start. You can manage them perfectly like this. You also get a lot of information on that, and if you get a lot of clients, you can just search to go back to one of them and just get all the information. I believe that Fiber does keep all the history of your projects. There may expire after a couple of months or so, but for the most part, you can always come back here and review what you've done and what happened with those projects. Second option is the gigs. So currently we have one gig. If it's active, it's going to show up here. Pending approval here requires modification, draft, denied, pause. So as I mentioned, when you make a new gig, it kind of goes through a review process by the fiber team, and if there's anything wrong with it, you will be notified, and then you're supposed to fix it before it goes live. So when I click on this, I have the option to edit it, whether it's to publish it, modify it, or I could just delete the whole thing. You can create new gigs right here, and this is where the brief situation was. So you want to make sure you set a rate for these briefs, basically your minimum. So far we've been doing by project, but now think of this as your hourly rate. Going to go with 20 for now since I'm a beginner. If you don't want to get briefs, just turn it off. And there's this other thing called custom orders. If a client wants something like what you're offering, but once a few tweaks, you can make a custom order for them. And there's an option that the clients can click on. However, if you feel like that's way too spontaneous and you want to stick to your routine, you can just turn it off. Next, we have the profile, which we've been here before, and then of course, the earnings. So here you can see all that you've earned and even get some exports. For example, a statement you need for something. You can just ask Fiber to give you one. Pretty easy to do. You will also, of course, get notified via email if you've got new earnings, if there's some problem with your bank, et cetera. You want to see how well your gig is doing, the impressions, the clicks and orders. Now, one thing that I do want to point here, if you saw that you are getting impressions but no clicks, that's not a horrible thing. The most important thing that you want to focus on is getting impressions in the first place. That means that you are at least on the search results and people are looking at your thumbnail. If you're not getting any clicks, that's an indication that you need to work on your thumbnail and your title. So your thumbnail, as we mentioned, should be very straight to the point. You don't want it to be some random drawing, but rather exactly what you're trying to offer. So right now we have a bunch of logos as our thumbnail. And if I saw that it's getting 100 impressions with zero clicks, and it's been say a month, I need to step up my thumbnail game. Now, there are some ways that you can do that. I'm just going to head over to Canva. Right so it's similar to YouTube thumbnail. Some people like to put their faces on there, you know, nice headshot professional, and then a big text next to it. So minimal modern logo or amazing anime voice. So the big title immediately grabs the client's attention, and the photo next to it just earns their trust. You're telling them that you are a real human and not a bot. You're not AI, like a lot of the other designers on this platform, and that really does increase your chances of getting an order. You can design it yourself, but there's all these templates that you can use. You can change it to the way you want them to and put this instead of your current thumbnail. Now, in terms of title, we looked at the plugin, which was five or Mt. Use those information that you can extract with that plugin to find the best title for your gig. Be sure to use some buzzwords. It doesn't have to be bland. And that way you can increase your chances. Now, if you did all of that and it's still not working, you can turn your gigs into ads. If you go to growth and marketing scale your business, you can, first of all, have a badge to put on someone's website or a blog. You can also share your profile on different social medias. Now, let's copy this link. This goes to my profile and look at where we can put this. A lot of these social media platforms have huge communities for five or freelancers sharing their gigs, and the biggest ones are actually on Facebook. So search for Facebook Fiber Groups, and there are so many. G to close that. So not only do people come here for request, but you can also advertise your work. So this person is advertising their logos. This person wants a logo designer. It's a pretty big community. I believe, yep, there's 30,000 people here. Are obviously smaller groups if you feel like this is way too intimidating. Facebook is a great place to put in your work samples, whether or not you have them done on fire. Put them to impress them and showcase your skills and then direct them to fire. The next place is on reedit so it's called Five or gigs or straight to the point. People will say what they will do, and there's a link to it. So that's another way that you can do it. There are other places, too, but Facebook and Redit are pretty popular in this field. I have also seen people advertise on YouTube in the comment section, but I'm not too sure how many people will see that. If your gig is not doing so good, there are many ways to change that, whether it's going onto social media and advertising, whether you pay Fiber to promote your gig and have it show up as a sponsored post, or if it's just by improving the way it looks through changing the title and putting in a better thumbnail. Those are things that you can keep in mind moving forward with the lesson. And before going to the next lesson, I do want you guys to create a thumbnail for your fiber gig. Whether you choose to put your photo or not, just something that's very bright, grabs the attention, and then I want you guys to put it as your primary image. So it's the first thing people will see. You can add the logos that you've designed around that thumbnail in the background or have it be on the next slide. So I hope you guys enjoy this lesson and good luck improving your gigs. 9. Fiverr Paid Services: There are a lot of paid services that Fiber offers for freelancers and agencies to use. I will be sharing six of them with you today, and each of them have a different price point. There are cheaper options included in the lessons agenda, but these tools are made by Fiber, so they are trustworthy. They have proven to give more exposure to your either gigs, agency, business, and other stuff. So it's just a matter of making the choice to invest in it or not. The first one is promoted gigs. If you see that your gigs are not getting any views, clicks, impressions, it may be time for you to make your first ad. I do suggest doing this at least a couple months after you made your gig, maybe one month, just because starting on fiber is already a slow process. So promoting it isn't going to help that much because you still have zero orders, no rating, and whether the client sees it in the search results or as an ad, your gig is the problem. It doesn't have enough credentials to be selected. So wait until you have at least one or two orders. Again, as we talked about, you can use friends and family or people on social media to get those first orders. So if you just search for five or promoted gigs on Google, you will be brought to this page. You can go down here, pay only for results. Pay for clicks on your app. They have this feature, which I think is pretty cool. You only pay for the clicks on your ad, and you can manage it at any time. So you set your daily budget, pay only for clicks. If anyone clicks on your ad, you only have to pay for that and no credit card required. So it's pretty flexible. As mentioned, it's because it's made by fibers, so you're already a trusted client for them. So if you go on create your first ad, you need to be at least level one. So that's why you need to get those orders in first. My gig is not eligible because I'm level zero, so you can see you need to be a level one, two, or above. And there's this thing about eligible gigs. So if you are level two, if your gig is not eligible, maybe it doesn't have enough reviews, doesn't have enough reading, you will not be able to promote it. It makes sense. Fiber doesn't want to run ads where the service is like two stars, and there's only one client. So try your best to satisfy the clients that come your way, and that way you will not have a hard time with this promoted gigs feature. The next service that FFR offers is Fifer Enterprise. Is for a business. If you are a big company, a team of either freelancers, consultants, et cetera. This will be a good place for you to come to manage everything, essentially. So not only can you hire people from either Fiverr or other places, you can manage your payments and invoices, manage your team, see what they're up to, and do a lot of other things. So down here, it's giving us a few previews, setting budgets for different departments. There's AI engines as well. If you need someone else for your team, you just hire directly from Fiber. There's payments. So here are the use cases, marketing, finance and legal, procurements, and IT services. So this is a rather new thing that they brought, and you can book a demo to see if this works for your company. Now if you're an agency on fiber, trying to manage everyone and everything that they do on the traditional fiber platform can be exhausting. As an agency, you want to make sure that projects are getting done on time. People are responsive. They're not bringing down the rating of your fiber account or the Agency account, and investing in FFR agencies can be a great way for you to make sure everything goes well, and your business just thrives. So let's go down here. There's meetings. You get your own dedicated page. You get filters and other stuff. They're still expanding it to go here. So this is what it would look like if you were an agency. Zoom in here. So a type of work that you've done before on fire, it's essentially like a website. So your business name, what you do, 19 employees. This is the team. They could still contact your team. Individually, portfolio and other stuff. So when someone searches for Instagram account management under regular people or just freelancers, you're going to get the agencies. They still have a rating and a minimum price. Next, we have fiber Workspace. This is a workspace for freelancers, not for agencies or big businesses, but it's just about you getting your work organized, setting deadlines, having effective communications, and other stuff. So this is the fiber workspace. You like the fiber enterprise. You get IT services, payment services, and all of that, except that this is for a singular freelancer. So invoices, this is how it works. There's a template. You put in your logo and all that, sets it for you, and you can connect your card and other accounts. There's also the time tracking and task, which is great for working with deadlines. We will go over some external websites if you're planning on not paying for any of these. Plenty of free options out there. The problem with that is that each platform has its limits and they still want you to pay for it. But we're going to look over those free platforms later. We got time sheets to make sure that they don't overpay you. There's an application similar to what ApworH and you get different stuff, too. So if you want to set contracts with a client, which I highly recommend you do, this place can be great. They probably have templates for you, and they have consultants that you can talk to. There's expense, time tracking, reports, task and payments. In another lesson, we're going to talk about proposals and contracts. This is very important for kind of works where you have to give a client something after they've given you a request. So whether it's a video, it's a image, it's a graphic design work, proposals and contracts are extremely important because it kind of covers you in case things go wrong. So we'll talk about that later. Next is the fiber Pro. So this is if you want to stand out as a freelancer on the search results, you would subscribe to become a pro. So as a free freelancer on fiber, rating your ranking depends on your rating and how many projects you've done. But with the pro freelancers, it doesn't matter if you've only gotten two orders. You only have 4.5 they're still going to do their best to make sure that you show up on those search results and you get recommended to the clients. So it says here that it's free, but you start as a free member. If you do want to run ads, and you obviously have to pay, but they do have money back guarantee. So there's no problem on that. It can become only pro vetted freelancers. So I guess you have to qualify. Have multiple users per account. You can collaborate with your team, different payment methods. You get invoicing and other stuff. And these two user interfaces where you get to manage your project and your business. So something cool to invest in, you can try it for a little bit, see if it works for you, and then cancel if it didn't. The last thing that I'm going to show you for this lesson is a platform that was for freelancers in the past, but Fiber bought that platform recently, and that is the Wing, no Working platform. So this used to be very popular. It still is, but it was not run by Fiber before. Over here, you still make your accounts, you show up on people's feeds, you send them a message, and you basically get clients. Down here is your portfolio. It's a pretty cool platform. It's a lot different than five. So if you want, you could also have your account here and have a bunch of gigs here in case you're looking to get more clients. So this is another platform that you can check out. As far as I know, it's free to start. I'm sure at some point they want you to pay, but you can completely operate it without paying for anything. So you just go over there, sign up, and you can get started. Those were some of Fiber's paid services. They vary in price, but all of them have money back guarantee, and since you are Fiverr member, you can just migrate all your information onto one of these paid services. So if you saw that you're not getting enough traction, you can definitely try one of these services for a few months or a few weeks, see how it goes and then see if you want to depend on that or not. I hope you guys enjoy this lesson. In the next part of the course, we're going to look at how we can successfully operate as a freelancer in terms of project management, dealing with deadlines, communicating with clients, and how you just create your own workflow as a freelancer. 10. Project Management Tips: So there are certain basics that you have to follow for every freelance project, whether it's on FFR or any other freelancing platform. I've listed some of them out here, and we're just going to dive into each one going forward from this lesson. So the first thing you have to know is what does the client want? They either make this clear to you in a proposal or they to your gig and fill in those requests that you set. Sometimes they email you, they chat with you on social media. Other times, they may decide to ask for a meeting. Now, when I say effectively communicate, I'm not really talking about your tone or what words you use. I'm talking about documenting exactly what they need. So instead of you getting on a phone call with them and then telling you what they want, you should have them write that out in an email so that you have it in written format. That way you can always refer back to it. If there's any sort of misunderstanding or you forgot one of the deliverables. So when you first meet with a client, greet them and all of that, but make sure that they somehow give their needs in written format. Now that you know what their needs are, you have to send them a proposal telling them exactly how you're going to address those needs. So this is the place where you tell them about the timeline Uh, the pricing, any sort of things that they need to know. Is there any copyright concerns, any license concerns, et cetera, and you want to inform them about the way you conduct your business within this proposal. And then you would want to go back and forth if they're like, Oh, you missed this part. I also want X, and you just fix up that proposal. Once a proposal is finalized, that goes in a contract. So within a contract, the main point of it is that the client accepts your proposal. They accept your pricing, they accept the deliverables that you promise. And they just sign it. Once you sign a contract, you can't really go back on it unless you terminate it. So if something comes up, depending on the terms that you have in that contract, you want to make sure that your client is informed. We are going to look at some proposal and contract templates in further lesson, but this is just the general order. Right. So up until step three, that's the communication with you and the client. From step four onwards until I think the step, it's about how you start that project. So first of all, you want to list out the deliverables. If it's a website, you want to give them a pay portal, user management, maybe an ecommerce section, whatever it is that they asked for, list them out either on a project management platform or on a piece of paper and try to see which one is the most important and which one takes the longest. That way you would know what you're working with if you put everything in one giant box, project X, it's really hard to approach it. And if you're not feeling that motivated on that day, then it'll be hard for you to even start it, and that can lead to you falling back on the deadline. Speaking of deadlines, now you want to set time for each of these deliverables. So section A of your project that takes the longest, you're going to allocate five days for it, and you're going to set a deadline of July 3. And having these little deadlines for yourself at the moment, it's going to make sure that you complete the project in little and attainable increments. Now, if you want to set milestones with the client, so if you've done part A of the project and you want to get paid for that part alone, not that you're canceling the project, but as we spoke, you're basically making sure that you and the client are on the same page and that you're going to get paid for that that's going to come at the end. If you're planning on setting milestones, if it's on fiber, they have their own thing. But if they don't want to do it on fiber, make sure you include the milestones in your proposal and have them sign the contract, as well. So once you've done all these parts, say, there were three parts of this huge project, you want to notify the client via email. Again, you want written format, no text messages or phone calls. You want to make sure you have evidence of everything that's going on. You want to notify them of your changes. If it's a website, you can give them the visitor login credentials for the staging website that you did. User name and password, have them go on there, give their feedback, and you can go on from there. If it's a graphic design work, you're sending them the JPEG exports, not the full thing because you're not sure if that's what they want at the moment. It's something written, you're going to send them the final draft. So there's different ways to do it. Definitely, don't send them the full final work because a lot of times they take it and they just ignore you, and that could be bad for your business. So once you've notified them via email, be sure to ask for feedback and give them a time frame, have them list out all the things that they want fixed. And if there's nothing, then that's great. But once you have your feedbacks, you want to take them and notify them that how long it's going to take for you to implement those feedbacks. So if you're doing a website and they ask for a whole new page, first of all, we have to get that in writing, and then you have to tell them that, Okay, this whole new page is going to take me another two days or so. So make sure you voice out this additional term so that they're aware. All the feedbacks has been implemented and both sides are happy, you can now go ahead and invoice. So Fiber, if you get one of those paid services has invoicing capabilities. If you don't want to pay them, you can go to this platform. It's free, and you get to create a really simple invoice over here. So this is what it looks like. You can put your logo in the corner, the client's billing address, the name, the currency. You can put your payment information down here. It's very flexible and it's easy and free until, I believe, three clients. So you can just if you're dealing with one time clients, you can just make that client account, delete it, make a new one, and that way you don't have to pay for anything. Can also go onto Canva or Adobe Express to make your own invoice template and just change the numbers every time. The problem with that is that you can't really see how much you've received, how much is pending, there's no management for invoicing. Now that you've been paid and everyone's happy, it's time to take your work and put it on your portfolio or resume and most importantly, get a review. Lot of people skip this step because it feels like it's awkward, asking for people to provide a review on your account, say how well you did, if they liked you or not. But that is actually what gets you more clients in the future. So make sure you do that again via email, professional. Be like I was great working with you. I would appreciate if you could leave me some ratings on myFberPfile or my LinkedIn, wherever that you're working. You could also just get it as a text format and put it on your website. And you can just tell other future clients that there have been a history of happy clients. Okay, so those were the steps. Of course, depending on the industry that you're in, there may be some additional or some of these can be skipped, but this is just some basics that you should know if you're starting to become a freelancer. How do you manage your projects? There are tons of platforms out there that are very nice and interactive when it comes to managing deadlines, project, notes, research, and all of that. And I'm going to share with you four of them today. Again, there's many out there, but these are just some that have been very popular in the industry. So I'm on it right now, the first one, and that's Notion. Noia not only lets you publish websites, it lets you have personal pages, work pages, different accounts. You can have teams if you're an agency, and there's just so much to this platform. I'm just going to go to notion dot so slash Gallery, and this is where you get templates. Now the reason why we're here is because starting a notion page from scratch for project management can take some time. I think it's best to come up here and look for freelancer. Immediately, we can see that we get tons of resources. First is this dashboard. Open in a new tab. Let's preview. So project task, clients invoices, active projects, and you can change this to whatever industry you're in. Back here, we have outreach sheet. So this is where you would reach out to potential clients with cold emails, and you can put them out here. It's good to keep track of all these communications that you do. Go back here. There is a contract as well. So notion is something that you should definitely check out. If you're not familiar with it, they have a mobile and desktop app, so it's very convenient. Second thing is monday.com. This one has also been pretty popular. It's an easy user interface, like Noson, you can customize every part of it. At different templates and make sure that you get things done on time. We also have Trello. This is similar to notion andmnday.com, but it does have the automations feature. So say you want to have an automation for when a project is done, it automatically emails maybe the next person in your team that you've finished your part of the project. So you can set that up. There's rules, buttons, email reports, and send feedback. Those are pretty cool, and this is something else that you can consider. We have open source project management. I came across this recently, but I haven't used it as much. However, I've heard that it's pretty good. These are some of the previews. So let's go back to search results and look for project management. So I just got this from the search results. You add it to your workspace and it duplicates it. So over here, you can list out all your projects if they're finished ongoing or to be done in the future. You can make groups and have them listed down below. Once you click on one of these, you can put your project name. Status of people in there if there is anyone to completion and your deadline. You can put a few of the information that you know. Perhaps you can put in the part of the em where the client is telling you what they want. And you can always come and look back at this. And these are the sections that I was talking about where you break down a huge project into smaller sections. So let's say section A, which is the most important, and you just make your way down from that. Now, one thing that I do want to mention is that you want to have the biggest just have them in order from the biggest to the smallest as the biggest parts are usually the foundation of the project. So, for example, if it's a website that you're doing, the first thing you got to do is, you know, get the host, get the domain, put out a layout the pages, the menus, and all of that. So that takes the longest, but it's also the first thing that you would have to do before you put in this custom page that the client wants. So list them out like this, set out a due date, and you can put whether they're done or not and change their status. You can add additional things here if you want, such as photos, et cetera, and it's overall a very flexible platform. Now, when you go down here, you can take a look at the task that you have to do. So this is the one we made. This is another view. If this is going in here is too much work. You just scroll down and look at it here. You can put in calendars as well, I believe. There we go. So you can see what's d and what's up and coming. When it comes to these projects, of course, having a dashboard is great, but setting realistic goals is another important thing. I know when you go on Fiber, you see people make these gigs where they promise to deliver a huge project in one day, and that may intimidate you and make you want to set that term for your own project. However, I do not recommend that because a lot of the people on Fiber actually use other tools to get their work done. Perhaps they have templates they've made before, and that speeds their process. If you try to replicate that without having your own templates or additional tools to speed your work, you could get in a lot of trouble. Client communication is another lesson that we're going to do, but you definitely don't want to promise something that you cannot do as a freelancer. If the client is unhappy with your terms, they could accelerate the problem and just be a really big headache for you. You're working within a team, having platforms like Slack, Google Workspace, Google Chat is also great, just because you can make different channels and things can be very organized. But if you're a solo freelancer, you can just depend on platforms like these. So now that we know how we can start our project management dashboard, and what are the basics of freelancing, we can now move on to working with deadlines and how we can best utilize our time to deliver these projects in an orderly fashion. 11. Deadlines and Time Management as Freelancers: Deadlines can be pretty overwhelming, especially when you first start out as a freelancer. You got all these deadlines, these big projects. You're not quite sure if your client will even like it, and that can lead to you messing up your schedule and eventually not being able to deliver the project on time. So we're going to go over some deadline tips and some tips for you to better manage your time as a freelancer. So as we mentioned before, you want to break your big project into smaller increments. And that way you can allocate certain weeks or certain days to each of them and ensure that you're getting them done in an orderly fashion. But first, I want you guys to list out your process for that specific project. If it's for copywriting, what is your process? What do you do first? And what are some things that you're going to need some extra time for? So it's always helpful to write down your process. This would be something you would be adding in your proposals as well, but it really helps to make sure that you're doing everything right in your own terms. Let's go over an example for copywriting. I'm going to need a topic from the client. I'm going to have to spend some time researching on that topic, writing out my ideas, brainstorming them, and then writing a draft, fixing that up for a final draft. So so far, I have five steps, five personal steps for copywriting. This will be different for you, and it especially changes when you have when you're working with different industries. Whether you want to add that in your notion workspace, on a piece of paper, on a blackboard, chalkboard, whichever way you prefer, make sure you are familiar with your own process and that you familiarize your client with it as well. So now that you have your process and you've broken down your project into smaller increments, we are going to see how we can allocate a time and set milestones for ourselves every week. So what I'm going to do is go to a platform called whimsical. Whimsical is a great interactive place for you to brainstorm, adding links, add in inspirations and so on forth. There's different shapes you can add. You can make tables. There's sticky notes. You can have wireframe modes if you plan on using them. You can do mindmaps and so much more. So what I'm going to do is to work with a sample project. So I'm going to have my get a rectangle right now and say that I'm doing copywriting. So this is my project. I got it from my client. They've told me what they wanted, which includes let's make a thing below. Make it a bit smaller. So they want it to be about burgers. That's our topic. From this topic, they want nutritional information, maybe pros and cons, best recipes, and stuff like that. I'm just going to drag this here. And I'm basically just making a map for myself to break down this big project. So this is project A copywriting. Okay, so I'm just like writing this stuff. So if the person that requested this project wants me to write an article for burgers in New York City, I'm going to break down exactly what I think would make a great article out of that topic. You can add links here for me to refer to later. I just search best Burgers in New York City. And these are my three main increments. For each of these, I first have to have a research phase. So I need to research each of these stuff and allocate time for the research. So I'm just going to go ahead and save one day for this whole research process. Say one to two days. I only have three, but that can differ for you. And then after that, I need to write down my ideas. So for best locations, do I want to talk about maybe Brooklyn, like, bringing narrowing down the list with nutritional information? Do I want to talk about the iron or the protein? And as I go forward, I'm going to keep increasing this. So this will be tailored to copywriting. So do I want to look out for iron and for tips, let's see, fresh burgers. How do I get fresh burgers at these restaurants? And these are things that I just want to make sure I include in my article. Once I have this and I have all the information, I can use sticky notes to add in some important things that I want to add that I found during my research. I can invite people in here for them to share their ideas and just put in links reference. If you're working with a different type of project, this would be, say, logo for nail salon. This would be a research. What did you find? Do you have some photos you want to add here? Some sketch ideas that you can add here. You can link the stuff you sketched on paper or on Photoshop Illustrator and just narrow down your steps. Now I want to see how long it's going to take me to do each of this. So we said that the research process is going to take one to two days. I will say another one to two days for drafting. So that is my map right now, and I can maybe turn the thing green once I've done that and leave out the ones that I haven't done or canceled as red. So visualizing the process is a great way for you to understand what's left and what needs to be done, and automatically, you're going to think about how much time it's going to take for you to do each one. So once I have this, I want to now plan out my days and then my weeks. So for my day, I'm going to pick one of these bigger stuff and use 60% of my work hours on that one thing, and the rest of them, I want to use it for the other stuff. So every day, try to focus on one increment. So on Tuesday, I'm going to spend maybe 3 hours on best locations and maybe 1 hour on each of these. My main focus is to get this done first, and that's why I'm spending most of my time. This is what I mean. I'm trying to visualize it here. Say I am only working with this particular project on Sunday. One of the main bigger increments was best locations, this room. So I want to spend a majority of my time on this bigger thing and 1 hour on that smaller thing that comes after doing these big stuff. So we said research comes first and then drafting. But I'm going to do most of my time. I'm going to allocate most of my time for the research and a smaller bit for the drafting. This way, I can make sure that by Monday or Tuesday, my best locations research is complete, and then I can move on to the drafting process, switching this up, so this would be out the picture, and then I would have drafting where I'll be spending most of my time on this, 4 hours, and then the next smaller thing, maybe siting Okay. And then once that's complete, I can bring drafting up and then put in another smaller thing below it, just to make sure I can get stuff done at the same time. But of course, keeping my focus on the bigger thing that's going to take the longest. So that's a good way to do it. And in terms of project, if you have to work on multiple projects in one day, unfortunately, you do have to allocate most of your time to the most important one. That would usually be the one that's closer to the deadline or the one that you're going to be struggling the most with or the one that takes the longest. So it may seem possible to do three projects at the same time at the same rate, maybe spending 3 hours on each, but that can reduce your productivity. So try to focus on one thing for your workday. Now, let's take a look at some tips that can help you manage your time better every day and every week. You do not have a daily schedule, I do highly suggest that you start doing it, whether it's on paper, on notion, on email, whatever, place you feel most comfortable, it's good to set your daily goals from the day before. And the reason why I say this is that you don't want to spend that day that you could be very productive, thinking about what you're going to do when you could have done that before you started that day. So if you are starting on Monday, use Sunday to think about goals you want to accomplish by the end of Monday. If Monday is going to be a day where you're also going to be outside on someone's birthday, try to think of a realistic time frame that you can have for actual work. So try to set realistic goals from the day before. Next, as we spoke, have one main focus for that day and try not to put everything in there or repeat the same schedule every day of the week because when it's repetitive, you're just going to be tired of it and not get anything done. So for each day of the week, have one main focus. You can allocate 60%, 70, depending on how big that focus is. But this will make sure that you can get those increments done as you progress in a week. Third is breaks. Now, it may seem like it's a bit unnecessary, especially if you have tight deadlines, but you don't want to overwork your brain as it really does reduce your productivity. So take some time to go out for a walk, maybe clean your workspace, and then you can come back to work with a fresh mind and make sure that your productivity doesn't drop. Next is brainstorming sessions. Even though you may know what you're doing, it's always helpful to maybe look at some other stuff on the Internet, get some fresh ideas on the go as you're making progress in your project. So if you're doing graphic design and you're trying to give a logo to your clients, maybe pick up a few logo design books, scroll through Pinterest, just as a brainstorming session for you to get some creativity juices flowing. The last thing is to check in at the end of the day, how many of those goals did you accomplish and what is left? If there is something left that you couldn't get done, say for Monday you were doing increment A, B, and C. If you did not have time to do C, that part is going to go at the top of Tuesday's schedule. So that way you can make sure that you're not falling behind schedule. So do that. Do not neglect any of those increments because you will probably forget about it, and that's not going to be very helpful when you're delivering stuff to the client. For your weekly schedule, when deciding whether or not you want to work on the weekends, check your planner and see what you could not finish doing last week, and then you can decide whether or not you want to work with them during the weekend. That's where it's really important to jot down everything you're doing. It helps you keep track of things, helps you stay organized. It's easier on the brain when you know what's been done, what's been left, how much time you have left. If you decided to keep milestones, this is the time where you would be adding them in. Did you reach those milestones? Do you need to spend more time on them? Do you need to alter them for next week? All of that goes into this section and if you've told your client that you're going to be reporting to them, this is the time to do it, as well. So perhaps every Monday, you would be giving them an email or if they're on your notion workspace, you would be having a report section for that. And this way, you can make sure that you meet your deadline. Another thing that you must bear in mind is to set the deadline for yourself a couple of days earlier than the official deadline. And that way you are allocating time for anything that may come up unexpectedly, any emergencies, and those extra days that you give yourself is going to be there for you to bounce back and not miss the official deadline. With freelancing, you are working at your own pace at your own time. A lot of people work from their homes. But the problem with that can be that there's a lot of distractions if you're living with your family, all that noise, all the stuff in your bedroom can kind of make you not stay focused on the task at hand. There are a lot of freelance workspaces in the cities. You can rent some of them or just go to the library. And just psychologically, when you change your workspace, you can focus better. So if you see that you can't get the things get the task done every day, that may be indication that you need to change where you work and perhaps remove all distractions from your phones, notifications and all of that. Also a lot of productivity apps out there for alarms, setting timers, et cetera. So feel free to look at those and see what can help you with the issue that you have. So just to recap, you own your own time as a freelancer, so it's very important that you organize it well, do check ins, use any of these tools that we mentioned to keep track of what you're doing. Keeping a planner for your daily and weekly activities is another great way to organize your time. And lastly, you want to have everything ready a few days before the official deadline. So those were some tips on working with time and deadlines. Now let's talk about how you need to communicate with your client and how you can propose your ideas and services in the best way. 12. Client Communication: Now we're going to talk about how we can effectively communicate with our clients, and that all begins with even getting that first client. Now, on fiber, you have to depend on your SEO skills, your title, your thumbnail in order for the clients to click on your gig, and then you can get that client. Other ways that we explored was going on social media, promoting your gigs through ads, sharing your badge and all that stuff. But what if you just simply cannot wait that long and you want to find other ways of gaining traction and finding clients? Stuff that I'm going to share with you are not 100% tailored towards fiber, but just towards freelancing in general. So the first thing that you need to do when you see a company, when you see their CEO, just like posting on LinkedIn, or you just come across their website, you're walking by their posters is making a cold call. In this case, it would be a cold email. You basically see that there's a lack of something in their business, and you're going to convince them that, Hey, I can fill that up for you because I have experience X, Y, and Z. So with cold calls or better yet cold emails, you can just straight to the point introduce what you're going to do for that client. Unlike a regular email, you're not really spending a lot of time on the formalities, on introducing yourself fully, telling them about your background that much. You're just telling them that, hey, I'm blank and I can do service C for you for this price because I saw that you have a lag for that service. Let's take a look at a few examples on the Internet. So this right here, based in blank, they offer writing services. So third sentence, I already know why this person is contacting me, and they're sharing their price, the limitations, and I'd like to talk to you more about it and the most important thing, a call to action. So that's how you want to format your emails, as well. There are tons of other stuff. You can see here. They want to write. They want to see if there's a need for any writers or content. Lot better when you specify your rate and your service. So these are the stuff that you're going to have for cold email. It doesn't matter where you share this email. It could be a message on Link Dent on Instagram. This is a great way that freelancers use to get clients. Now, while you are giving all this information and try to be very specific, don't linger anything in the email, would be really helpful to have some links for the reference, some PDF, some samples. If you're dealing with logos, attach some of those logos, your best logos to that email, so immediately they can see that I can get something like that for $50. So cold emails is one way. Performance based approach is another popular way that freelancers, especially the beginner ones use to gain the trust of the clients and basically convince them to pay them or at least give them a shot. For the service that they're providing. So what this means is that you're going to go up to that person with a cold email or cold message, and you would be like, I'm willing to do this service for you, and only once you're satisfied, will I be asking for compensation? They can see how committed you are and how much you believe in your own capabilities and services. So if you saw that no one is answering, try switching to this method. And I know not getting paid for your work can be a concern of yours right now, but you are going to be having them as work experience, and you can just use what you made for them in your fiber profile, and you basically have a real client to show the feature ones. Now, what if you don't want to do this approach? No one answers you, but you still need to get some sort of clientele in your profile. Other approach that a lot of beginners take is the fake brief method. With this, there are a lot of generators on the Internet. But essentially, they create your clients profile, and you get to not only practice your skills, but to get a fully developed project out of these fake briefs and then put that on your profile. Of course, you're not going to mention to the potential clients that they're fake, but because of how much detail goes into these briefs, it can easily convince the future clients that you are experienced, even though you didn't really have real clients. So if you just go to the Internet, Design brief generator. You can choose the field. So let's say you want to be an illustrator on fiber, generate brief, and there you go. So you have this fake client named Kai. They want a watercolor illustration of Robin Williams wanted to look realistic. And then you can do this watercolor, write down the name Kai as your client and just fill in your portfolio like that. There's also stuff for web design. Let's try that. So the new California fish market, someone that can design a professional website, a new login page for employee web portal. So gather a bunch of these, design their stuff, and put that on your fiber, and that can get more eyes on your profile. The next thing is social media. This is, of course, no secret, but a lot of times people just reach out to CEOs, founders, business owners, give them a cult message that they can do. Maybe perhaps give them a better logo, give them a better Instagram layout. Either for free or for price. On social media, you want to sound very human because there's a lot of bots emailing these people every day that, Hey, I'll take this much and I'll give you this, but they can immediately tell that those are bots. So make sure that you have the right social media account when you're approaching these clients and that you have some work examples on that account. And that way when they see your name, click on it. They can see that you have actual followers, even though they may not be that much when you first start. We have actual followers, actual posts, real people comment under them, and you can ensure them that they're not dealing with another bot. If you'd like, you can put your fiber link in this message or just have them reach out to you through a more traditional method of fiber. So now you have your first client. But how do you make sure that you're communicating with them in an efficient way and that you're not getting scamped or tricked throughout the process? So the most important thing is to keep everything on record. I've said this multiple times throughout this course, but it's really the one thing that help you out if things go wrong. Anything regarding numbers, payments, deadlines, dates, the stuff that the client wants from you, you want to be as blunt as possible. Have them on record on an email, not on any message platforms where they can delete that message and then say that they never said that. So email is the best thing. It doesn't matter if this client is your best friend, your father's friend. There's always that chance that they want to go back on what they said, make you do extra work, and maybe not even pay you. So keep everything on record and save yourself the headache. So sometimes you get this client. It's great in the beginning, but then out of nowhere, they start acting like they don't want to continue with you. They don't even like your services, and things just turn around 180 degrees. So when that happens, immediately detach yourself from that commitment because they will perhaps try to report you. And on fiber, that's a big deal. You don't want to get on anyone's bad side. To be as professional as possible. If they start saying mean things or start harassing you, for whatever reason, just report them immediately. Do not reply to them. Do not try to get back at them because you could get blacklisted on fiber. And if you're on any other platform, it's usually the same thing because customers will get their way one in these situations. So you don't want there to be traced of you saying bad things to them or you perhaps ignoring their request. By ending it, it's all a matter of ignoring or reporting if necessary, and just know that you're a freelancer in this situation and not just a regular person chatting with someone on the Internet. Next, we're going to talk about personally identifiable information. This is a huge concern on these platforms because people will start sharing their information such as their address, their email, their phone number. And maybe their social medias, and that should be an immediate red flag for you. When you see someone getting a bit too close to you, even if they're your favorite client, you need to report them immediately because if Fiber or any other platform finds that out, they could cancel your account and basically you lose all business. So, of course, you as a freelancer can never share any of these private information. But if they even start sharing a little bit of that with you, know exactly when to stop and when to report them. Let's talk about some red flags that you will probably notice when you're on these platforms. First thing is when they try to move the conversation off to another platform, they maybe give you a phone number. They give you email, and they're like, maybe they'll pretend like they're an old person. They're like, I don't know how to use fiber. Can you come over here and we talk privately? That is a red flag. Any time you move fiber away as the middleman, they will figure that out and they might suspend your account. So when you see that happening, tell them that I am not allowed to do that. Fiber has very strict rules regarding that and just declined the offer. Secondly, is when they want to pay you outside of fibers payment methods. Maybe they're like, give me your paypal, use your name or address, and I'll pay you this much more. Thank you for your time and whatever. That's another red flag, even though it sounds good. As mentioned, it could get you suspended. And sometimes there are people who are trying to do just that, especially when you first start out because you're an easier target. Next is when they refuse to tell you exactly what they want. So they're being too generic. They're like, I want a logo. Ask them what kind, they don't reply, and you ask them a bunch of times, and they still say, I just want a pretty logo. Even though they may not actually know what it is they're looking for, you as a freelancer want to avoid wasting your time on these type of clients. So inform them that it's really important for you to know the details of the request, and that way, it would be beneficial for both sides. Next is when someone who contacts you is pretending to work for Fire. So they'll message you saying that, unfortunately, your account is getting suspended. You've been reported. Usually, there is a link to perhaps redeem your account. That is a scam. You will never receive a message like that from Fiber's official team. They don't usually do that. If there is a problem with your account, you will get an email and, of course, check the email address to make sure it's from fiber. So sometimes you may get a concerning email from Fiber, but when you check the email address, it's like 230 four@gmail.com. So that's obviously a scam. Do not click on any links and just ignore or report that email. Next is, when people try to showcase themselves as someone that can help you get better results, they'll come to you and say, I'm really great at SEO. Let's work together. I can make your accounts shine or something. That's another red flag. If you really want someone to help you with a service like that, which takes a lot of time, you want to pay them. So go on Fiber as a buyer, find that person who offers SEO services and conduct your business that way. Don't rely on these people that again give you links or are pretending to be your friend. Those are usually scams, and you should report them immediately. So those were some ways of communicating with clients. Bear in mind these red flags and all the concerning stuff that we talked about. Keep your accounts safe, keep yourself safe, report anything that is suspicious. And that way you will have an easier experience finding clients and dealing with them in the future. 13. Proposals and Contracts for Freelancing: Proposals and contracts are something that you should never skip and need to understand how important they are. A lot of freelancers, they end up trusting a client, so they skip these procedures, and when that client perhaps doesn't do what they promised and doesn't pay them, things will go south and there's no way to prove that you and this client had an agreement. So that is why I emphasize again, to keep everything via written format. And in this lesson, we're going to learn how to make a proposal. And how we can write contracts. The stuff that I'm going to show you are from the Internet. It's standard all over the place. But if you are living in a country where there's strict rules regarding pricing, taxing and all of that, be sure to do more research for your specific documents. Proposals are a document that you give to a client after you've understood their needs, and you're basically telling them everything about how you're going to make those needs come to life. Doesn't matter if you're a copywriter, voice actor, video editor. You all have your way of doing things and you want to inform the client as much as you can before you even start the project. Without a proposal, you are just giving a small amount of information about how you conduct things, and then later in the project, they may not like that. They may ask do more things, they may cancel the whole project. So you're guaranteeing your own safety with the proposals and then securing it with the contract. So one app that I really like to use for proposals that is very easy to use, and it's also not boring is toma dot app. The thing about this is that when you a written document, a bland document to your client. It's not as engaging and they may not even end up reading the whole thing. But with Tom, what it does is that it kind of looks like a presentation, but it's web based, and you have freedom to change everything about it. So this right here is tome dot app. I just made an account. And this is where you get to not only make your proposals but do a lot of other stuff. So if you're fundraising, going to share a resume, your moodboard, brand guidelines, designed to develop or handoff, just click on them and it copies it for and you just take a look at the template. Everything you can edit. But here, you can add your text, images, drawings, tables, charts, and many other stuff. Once you're done with creating your document, you just go into Share and you can either get a QR code to put into a poster or something. You can even put this in your business card. If this is your portfolio or something, you can share a link and add people to your workspace if they want to change this presentation. If you click this play button, it's going to show you how the client is going to see your document. So this is the client view, and it's pretty good. That's exit. Now, for the purpose of this lesson, we're going to focus on a document that showcases your services and the prices for them. I'm not going to focus too much on portfolios and whatnot because you would have that on fiber and if not on another website. This is an example of a services document. I kind of remove these specifics, but you would put in a logo if you have one, a photo of yourself, if you don't, the name of your company or your full name. And then we have table of contents for your client to know what they're getting at then we have an about and contacts me page. Here you would want to give your clients a little bit of an explanation about what you do and then have an email for them to reach out to or fill out a form. And then over here, you want to put your portfolio. Next, you're going to tell them about the list of services that you do. Even if they only ask for one of them, it's good for them to know that you can also do some other things that they may want in the future. So they don't go to another freelancer. They just stick with you. So anything that you do, you would put it here. Maybe you can put your work sample, and here you would go more in depth. Everything that you do. I just kept some animations here for now, but ideally, they would have to be the works you've done before, put in a little credit for who you did it for. So now you want to inform them about a process. You could do it in this format or if there's more to it, do a map sort of thing. But essentially, they need to know exactly what's going to happen so they can refer back to this presentation if they are confused or if they're just not familiar with how you do things. You want to put in a few case studies in relation to the service that you're providing. So if it's websites, put in the website you've done recently, explain about how you did it. If there's any sketches or something. This helps them to kind of get a visual for how you conduct your business. Next is terms of service, which is very important. Every freelancer should have their own terms of service. Of course, there's the obvious ones, but again, depending on where you are, there's any sort of time difference you want them to know about, take your time to figure out what you want the client to know. Let them know if there's anything like rush fees that I got down here or if they should know about voice memos and such. That way, if they do end up doing one of these things and you're not accepting it, it can be like I already informed you in the proposal that you agreed to. So nice to have this here. And then finally, we have prices. So like fiber, you can bring those packages that you designed over there, put them up here, put the pricing in. And if you want to conduct things off fiber, it would still be the same thing. So the only difference is that fiber will not take your commission if you work with this freelancer, if you found them outside of fiber. However, I believe Fiber is very sensitive about taking clients that you found on there and then taking them out of the fiber platform. So avoid doing that. I think they are monitoring the chats and everything. So if you find someone on fiber, keep everything on that platform. But if you found someone outside of Fiber, there is no need to bring them on there unless you want to perhaps boost your profile and get more reviews. Explain everything in the packages in depth. If there's any concerns or so, you want to put that at the bottom. Then finally, if you want, you can have additional costs and fees. I got a fee over here that's applicable to design and any sort of media production. But it may be different for each industry. So RushersFee is definitely something that you should put in there. And then just like fiber, we have extra stuff that if they wanted to, they will be charged for, and they need to give you a few days to do it. This is a personal slide, so tell them about you as a freelancer as a person. Maybe you can list your hobbies, where you studied and stuff like that, just to gain their trust. You want to tell them that you're a person. You're not some company, you're not just a logo, and they can connect with you and you will be understanding of their demands on another level. Once we have this, as we said, you share it. We put the link in the email and maybe the QR code if you want to make a business card out of it. So send a proposal to the client via email, and you would be basically telling them that this is my terms. If they have any question, they should reply to that email. Any problems about cost or the time frame, this is a time for them to address their concerns once they signed the contract, they're basically saying that they're okay with everything you told them. And this method can be used for any sort of freelancing on fiber, you kind of have the proposal made out for you, but I still want to share these with you guys just because you may want to have fiber, upwork, and some other ways of income as a freelancer. Because when you first start out, one source is not enough. So that was a proposal. Now let's look at a contract. Again, I'm relying on the contracts available on the Internet, the standard form, but be sure to read every part carefully and if needed, alter it according to the laws in your country or place. For example, the United States has very strict laws, income tax laws, so you cannot apply something from for the United States because they have different rules. So make sure that you check that or address it in the search bar when you're looking for a template. So this is a very popular template for graphic design. It is applicable to other sorts of media work. If you're editor, photographer, you could still use this. You can also look for copyright or contract template or just look up for freelancer contracts and add the specifics yourself. So I downloaded this. It's free, and this is what it looks like. I have it open on Adobe Acrobat. It's talking about a different parties. Each time you would make a copy from this document, put in their name, the address, and whatnot. And then here is where you are going to deliver the services. So exactly what they asked for and you agreed upon, put them up here, the deadline will be here, and there's any sort of expenses, fees. But here, right here, you need to address the country that has the governing law, so that's why it's important. And then there's you and the client. Read everything, you sign it off, and then you're officially ready to go. Fiber does not have contracts in this extent. Try to make your way of communication on the chats as thorough as possible. So bullet points and constant check ins is very helpful for your case in case things go wrong. Let's look at some other contracts and see where we can get them. So now we're searching for a web design. Panda Doc has one. So this is for web design, and there's also a way for them to sign it online and you will be notified. So every project that you do, no matter how small or how big it is, make sure that you have these two at hand. The proposal, you would have to make it once and then make copies and just alter it according to that project. The same thing with the contract. Once you have the base, you're just changing the different areas to your client's specifications, and that way you're secure and good to go. That you know how to talk to clients, manage your time, work with deadlines, it's time for you to start getting out there and finding your next client on Fiber and on other platforms, so you can start making additional income. 14. Conclusion : So that concludes the fiber course. I hope you guys enjoy these freelancing tips and how to make an account on fiber and start your five journey. Fiber is always adding new tools and new ways to improve and promote your profiles. So always check in for the updates and the emails and stay on top of everything and good luck freelancing. So be sure to check in for updates and your notifications and stay on top of the game, and I wish you all good luck on your freelancing journey. 15. Class Project: Create Your Fiverr Gig & Freelance Workflow: Now it's time to work on the class project. For this project, you're going to be creating or improving your fiber gig using everything that we have learned so far. You can choose a real service or a hypothetical one if you're still exploring some ideas. Your project should include the service that you're offering, a gig title, and a brief outline about it, pricing structure, some key SEO terms that really describe that service, and a brief outline on how you'll handle communication deadlines, and revisions. Don't need to publish your gig publicly if you're not ready yet. Screenshots, drafts, or written texts are perfectly fine for this project. The goal here is clarity. By the end of the class, you should have a fiber setup that feels confident, professional, and very well organized. Once you're ready, upload that project to the class project gallery, where I'll be checking in from time to time to provide you with some feedback. Take your time with this project as it's the foundation for your freelancing journey. 16. Congratulations! What’s Next?: You have reached the end of the class. Well done. Freelancing is a process. Your first gig won't be perfect, and that's completely fine. What matters here is consistency and commitment. As you gain experience, you will find yourself refining your gigs, improving your prices, and working around to providing new services as you just continue talking to more clients. If you haven't already, be sure to upload your project in the class project gallery, as I love to see your work and provide you with some feedback. Thank you for learning with me, and I wish you all good luck on your fiber freelancing journey.