Fiverr Adds Upwork Inspired 'Professions' To Their Freelance Offerings

Fiverr Adds Upwork Inspired 'Professions' To Their Freelance Offerings

Morgan Overholt

Fiverr recently announced the release of a new way for freelancers to expand their service offerings – the "Professions" catalog. While the platform’s flagship gig-based system remains the core of Fiverr, the new Professions system allows freelancers to offer three unique expertise-focused service offerings that grant more flexibility to the sales process. Like Upwork's professional profiles, Fiverr freelancers can now boost their reach to higher-value clients looking for more depth to their freelancer hires.

What are Fiverr Professions?

While Fiverr’s gig-specific structure makes it easier for freelancers to sell services in niche offerings, it does have the potential to pigeon-hole sellers into specific “packages” or “services” rather than highlighting their broader skills. 

Rather than selling “blog writing,” freelancers can now reach clients as “content marketers” or “full-stack marketers.” A web developer can sell services under a “front-end developer” umbrella rather than just a “UX designer.”

Vasily Kichigin – a Fiverr Pro seller – offered his hopes for what the new Professions catalog could bring to the table for established sellers:

"It's a great opportunity for freelancers to be featured in the marketplace based on their profession. Often, buyers may not know exactly what type of service they need, and I believe that with the introduction of professions, sellers will have more opportunities to attract new clients. This feature brings us, as sellers, extra traffic, which is always great to have."

- Vasily Kichigin (@VasilyKichigin)

An sample Fiverr professions page

How Do Fiverr Professions Work?

Fiverr’s Professions catalog is still in its early stages. The initial application rollout will be to Seller Plus members and Pro-vetted freelancers on the platform. 

Based on Fiverr’s announcement of the system, Fiverr is beginning to rollout the Professions profiles to buyers simultaneously as they admit new sellers to the Professions catalog. 

This new offering – along with Fiverr’s NEO AI search system – means that freelancers who create and submit their professions to the catalog have a higher chance of being seen by buyers.

Here’s how the process works:

Step 1: Get Approved for Professions

Like current gigs on Fiverr, freelancers must create and submit their professions for approval by the Fiverr team. Currently, vetted and “Pro” Fiverr freelancers can create and submit profession gigs – along with a photo to complete an ID verification process (if not already completed.)

Step 2: Create Your Professions

Once you’ve been approved to submit a profession, you can create up to three unique profession gigs. For each profession, freelancers can build a detailed profile that includes:

  • The types of services offered within the profession

  • The related skills and expertise to back up the profession

  • A description of the freelancer’s capabilities within their profession

  • The years of experience and related expertise behind the profession services

  • An FAQ (great for keywords!)

Step 3: Build Your Professions Portfolio

Like the traditional gig structure, Fiverr Professions can be enhanced with portfolio projects demonstrating your expertise and track record. This is a great way to help the unique profession portfolio stand out as the catalog grows.

Potential Benefits, Freelancer Response

So, is taking the time to build out a Professions gig on Fiverr worth the effort? While the catalog is still in its early stages, there isn’t a ton of data to back up the success of the system compared to traditional gigs. 

Even a fast search of top Fiverr freelancers online has shown little experiential evidence so far:

"My prediction here is these new features (professions/hourly rates) will take 6-12+ months at minimum for people to get comfortable using. They're very different exp from Fiverr's current UX and will require mindset shift from the average buyer - more focus on the person vs. the project. But still net win for both freelancers/buyers long term. Definitely will be growing pains though."

- Harlan Rappaport (@TheFiverrGuy)

There are some potential benefits that may come as the program expands – both from a Fiverr perspective as well as a career perspective:

One of the key ways to grow and succeed on Fiverr is to be seen on the platform by top-paying clients. For sellers, taking the time to make sure your seller profile is built out to reach the best clients matters – and the Professions catalog is another tool in the toolkit. 

So, building out a Professions profile can only help expand your reach within Fiverr’s platform search – particularly in these early stages. Plus, the more you can build keywords into your Professions gig, the more likely you will appear in client searches.

One unique benefit that the Professions catalog can bring to sellers is the ability to negotiate scope and increase seller value. Traditional gigs can connect buyers to specific services, but it takes some skill to negotiate an upsell or scope increase. 

With Professions, sellers have a bit more control over how they sell themselves – boosting their values by showing buyers a more holistic view of their skills within a larger “profession.”

Time will tell how the Professions catalog performs, and freelancers who jump in on the program in these early stages have the chance to stand out first. What do you think about Fiverr Professions? Let us know in the comments below.

1 comment

Fiverr would surely be making better use of their existing resources by improving their famously very poor search function. When searching for a service I’ve often been shown completely irrelevant results. The rule tends to be that the more specific the search then the more wide of the mark the results are going to be.

So the safest you can get is to enter a very general search query. A search for VBA coders will return those, lots of those. But if you want a specific type of VBA coder then it isn’t going to work.

Surely such a thing can be rectified? How difficult can it be to search for an instance of specific text strings? But it hasn’t been changed. So I’m left thinking that Fiverr has hobbled it’s search function on purpose. And, like so many other anomalies on that platform, there doesn’t seem to be any rational reason why things are as they are.

So I get much more success in hiring talent from Upwork and Freelancer.

Gordon Gee

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