Fiverr is where to start
Not Upwork 👎
Hey 👋 I’m Caleb — a financial copywriter from London.
In this publication, you’ll find everything you need to know about copywriting and how to make money writing online.
I also write about SEO, AI and other relevant writing topics.
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In light of the poll I did last week, it seems like most of the pain points that copywriters face are finding clients, and how to charge them.
Finding a client is hard, but finding your first client is the hardest.
I got mine on Fiverr.
It was a website called Whatifgaming.com, and I would write articles for them on games and stuff related to games. Around £15-20 each.
(Shoutout to Dan for the opportunity back in 2019).
I had a few Fiverr gigs posted, and most were dead, but one where I offered to write about tech had some real traction.
This was it:
This one seemed to do well.
I also did some product reviews as well. One about cameras 📸
This was the start that I needed 5 years ago, and in my opinion, Fiverr is the best platform to start as a copywriter.
I believe this is how
started, or at least found her success. She’s recently gone live with on how she made over $230k on the platform.
I have noticed a lot of people also talk about Upwork.
My experience with Upwork was completely the opposite.
I had absolutely no traction, even though I started a few years later and had a lot more experience, and had one gig which was absolutely awful (stay tuned for another newsletter when I find the conversation).
I think this is down to the fundamental workings of the platform, and how people approach it.
In a way, this is still true of any client work.
How people approach or find you will determine the nature of the business relationship.
Here is why I think Fiverr is superior to Upwork for copywriting.
The dynamic of the platforms
With Fiverr, you create gigs that people buy.
With Upwork, people create jobs that you apply for.
In my mind, this is really the basis for how people behave on the platform, and why Fiverr is a much more harmonious business environment.
Tokens vs gigs
The whole tokens system is kind of annoying if you’re really trying to find a job, as you’ll quickly run out.
You’re constantly split between going for jobs that are expensive but look really good, or ones that are very cheap but look dodgy or mean.
Plus some people pay for extra tokens and just pile like 30 tokens into every job.
With Fiverr, you simply create gigs, and then you can sit back and let people find you. If nobody finds you, you can just create more gigs.
You can constantly tweak and update them, improve them, and even look at other competing gigs to see what you might like about them.
Even if nobody buys them, your gigs are working in the background, as people are searching and choosing gigs.
If you’re absent on Upwork, you are unlikely to receive any work.
Most people who find success with Upwork put a great deal of work in to apply to as many gigs as possible with high-quality pitches, sometimes hours per day.
Yet Upwork users can spend all their time and tokens and still get nothing. You could spend all night pitching, and wake up to nothing, which is quite disheartening.
Essentially, Upwork operates as a platform that you cold outreach on.
But then if you are doing this, you might as well cold outreach yourself, and skip the bottleneck of the platform.
I have all my outreach guides here if you want to learn (link).
Feedback
The thing with writing is that your work is always subjective.
You can create objective SEO data or open rates on emails, but often content writing, which is generally what you’ll start with on Fiverr, is simply creating subjective content.
This means that your work is likely to be criticised and edited (which is a great thing, as all writing can be improved) but sometimes it can be overboard and unnecessary, and clients will try to squeeze endless revisions out of you.
I think with Upwork, as you are the individual applying to their job, they are a lot harsher and unreasonable with feedback, as they can afford to be. They have a million other writers waiting.
You are a lot more expendable.
On the contrary, with Fiverr, because they have picked your gig through their own free will, they are a lot kinder with feedback, and in my experience a lot happier with the work.
Do you agree? I know some people have found great success with Upwork, so I’d be interested to know if anyone actually prefers it to Fiverr and why.
Happiest UpWork user 🤣 If I was just starting out again, I would now consider using Fiverr more than UpWork