A common horror story I hear is from makers who hire someone on platforms like Fiverr to “promote” their store for a really low price, and end up tanking their store traffic or their SEO ranking.
I am all for spending as little as possible – but it’s also true that you often get what you pay for… and in some cases…
…what you pay for isn’t something that’s gonna help your handmade shop.
I totally get why you might want to hire someone to help you with your marketing.
In fact, I am all for it. I think being able to delegate work is important as you grow your shop so you can work smarter, not always harder.
It’s understandable if you feel like “I’ve got so much to do and not enough time to do it,” and so it’s not crazy to think that someone else might know how to do it better than you AND save you a bunch of time by doing some of the marketing work for you.
But not all money turns out to be money well spent, so today I want to help you make sure that if and when you are hiring out marketing work for your shop, you are delegating something that’s actually likely to help you get results, and that you are delegating it to the right person.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
First I want to make it clear that I’m not saying that Fiverr is bad; that is NOT what this video is about. I’m sure there are some really good freelancers out there. I’ve hired people on Fiverr myself for some tasks here and there in the past and will probably do it again in the future. It’s a really convenient platform to delegate some work.
So why do I think it’s important to talk about this?
Because I think that delegating some tasks to help you grow your handmade shop is VERY smart and a great way to make sure that you are staying in your zone of genius and reclaiming some time for yourself…
…but I also know that if you don’t find the right person for the job, you’ll end up spending more time fixing things than you would have spent doing them yourself in the first place.
So again this is not a stab at Fiver itself, there are some GREAT gigs and freelancers on Fiverr – but they’re not the ones I am talking about today – today I want to make sure you don’t sign up for the bad ones 😉
Quite regularly, I get messages from makers saying “I’ve just hired someone to do this or that for my shop and it didn’t work at all – if anything, things are worse now – what do I do?”
Or they comment in forums or groups and say “Hey I’m considering hiring out my SEO, would any of you guys recommend it?” – and some less than great experiences often get shared.
The two most common things handmade shop owners tell me they either used or are considering using Fiverr for are:
So let’s talk about each one of these.
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Here is an example that happened to one of our members inside Tizzit, before she started working with us: She hired someone—for a very cheap price on Fiverr—to optimize her Etsy listing’s titles and tags for SEO.
She had the right idea to optimize for Etsy search, just didn’t hire someone who knew anything about how to do it or took the time to do it properly.
This person not only deleted the titles and tags that were bringing people to her shop, but used titles and tags that were way too broad to be anywhere close to effective, coupled with a few keywords that brought the wrong type of customers to her shop (think “DIY kit” when you’re selling Digital Patterns only). As a consequence, her conversion rate tanked – which then sends a negative feedback loop to the Etsy search algorithm.
She lost a lot of traffic, her sales went way down, and she spent months fixing her titles and tags and trying to build her sales back up to where they were before she hired the SEO person.
Look…
I am sure you’ve heard it before:
“You get what you pay for.”
SEO takes TIME to do—it’s a process, with a lot of time spent on understanding your shop, your customers, your market, and researching keywords alone —and if someone is getting paid $50 for that there is absolutely no chance of it getting done properly.
What commonly happens is these people don’t pick at all the right keywords, they delete some keywords that actually were working well before and now they’re completely gone.
I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear, because I know how tempting it is if you think of getting help on your SEO for not much money.
Ok, the second thing I hear about a lot is from handmade shop owners who hired someone to “promote” their store and “generate traffic and views” for them, essentially “purchasing traffic to their shop” and I want to warn you:
Don’t do it!!
Here’s why:
I stopped counting how many times a handmade shop owner reported to me seeing an ad that said “I will bring thousands of visitors to your shop for $15” and they think “Wow! That is so cheap for so many visitors! Great deal, let’s go!”
So they pay their $15, and -here’s the kicker – many times the person they hired DOES deliver on that promise and DOES send traffic to their shop.
So what’s the problem you might wonder?
Well, they might send thousands of visitors to your shop but, often, what they do is they go and post the link for your listings or for your shop in, for example, big Facebook groups, promo groups, or just in places where essentially it’s not at all your ideal customers that are on there.
It’s just a big promo-fest where businesses drop links and it’s share for share or clicks for clicks or like for like.
And what happens is you do get thousands of people coming to your shop, but no one buys, because no one is actually your ideal customer. . .
. . . and what that does is it tanks your conversion rate, which is a strong signal to a platform like Etsy that something is wrong with your listing. . .
So now they aren’t going to push it in search results because they’ve seen thousands of visits to this listing and no one has purchased it.
The goal of a handmade selling platform like Etsy is to make sales, and the conversion rate is an element of the algorithm. When your conversion rate tanks it tells them you are not a business they should feature in search results.
Even worse, it can be really hard to rebuild from that because you have to start bringing really qualified traffic and get sales again to bring your rating back up with the sales platform.
So what you really purchased is just a bunch of bad traffic, that not only didn’t help your handmade shop, but actually hurt it.
I know all this advice might seem like a lot, but if you just remember to use common sense you can avoid a lot of these problems.
For example, you may be tempted to hire someone for cheap for things like writing product descriptions or copywriting or similar stuff for your handmade shop.
The ads are so tempting, I get it. It might say “I’ll write you 10 product descriptions for $50! ” and you think “Wow that would be so great to have someone write those for me.”
But you need to remember, this person for such little money will not have time to do proper research, meaning no understanding of your ideal customer. They won’t know how to bring emotions into your product descriptions—and that’s what makes people buy.
At the end, it ends up being a waste of money; it’s a lose-lose situation.
So remember, if it looks too good to be true, it probably IS too good to be true! You are MUCH better off just learning to do the thing—or spending good money on someone that is really good at it—because this “in between” is a waste of time and money.
Here’s how the TIME vs MONEY decision really goes:
On one end, you spend nothing and invest time, and learn how to do it yourself.
On the other, you hire an expert. Experts are expensive because they are in demand. They are in demand because they are good and get results.
In the middle is the “hire out for cheap” option and there are 2 things that you can expect with that option:
Being a part of a community like Tizzit HQ, having worked with thousands of handmade sellers, and hearing many stories from people just like you has helped me recognize that there are not any shortcuts that actually help you in the long run.
If someone could come in for $10 and suddenly bring thousands of qualified buyers to your shop, they would charge $1000—not $10—AND be in high demand!
Here’s what a member who has had several failed attempt at hiring cheap help reflected on inside the Tizzit HQ community recently:
“Over time I have learned that trying to get things done really fast instead of figuring out how to do them yourself really never works.
The best thing to do is bite the bullet, relax, and know that if you do the right things by following the Maker’s Roadmap and rely on yourself to get it done—it will be better for you in the long run!
This goes for ads, for buying shop reviews, all of that stuff. I’ve done it all and ALL of it was a BIG FAT WASTE OF MONEY.
I hired Fiverr to write product descriptions – waste of money. Get ads, get this, get that, jack things up. The problem was, if my shop was not set up to perform well, if I didn’t have a big picture marketing strategy, or I wasn’t sending the right people to it – I was just hurting myself.
For me it was always about this feeling of ‘I’ve got to get this done and I haven’t got time to learn how to do it myself and they probably can do it better than me and….so on and so on.’
This community really helped me recognize that there are not any shortcuts that actually help you in the long run. It may seem like it but it’s essential to be able to make the connection between the changes you make and the impact of those changes.
When you do it yourself it puts YOU in control of growing your business, instead of giving your money away to a whole bunch of other people and either not getting anywhere or actually having it hurt you.”
This is brilliant—I could not have said it better myself!
If I had to add anything it would be:
Unless you’re willing to pay good money,
don’t hire out something that you don’t understand well enough yourself.
If you’d like to learn how to start and grow a successful handmade shop, or have a community of wise handmade sellers by your side as you decide if it’s time for you to outsource some of your tasks – check out the community of handmade shop owners and all the step-by-step courses we’ve created for you over at Tizzit.co.
We make starting and running a handmade business easier for you by walking you through each step in the process and providing support for any roadblocks that come up along the way.
Thank you for reading, and until next time, au revoir!
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