Micro-Entrepreneurship For Dummies
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As a micro-entrepreneur, you can make some good money, just a few bucks at a time, through micro-tasking. Micro-tasks are small jobs you complete for a small amount of money. One of the most popular micro-tasking websites is Fiverr. This site is popular, and if you go to the site, you may be surprised to see what people will do just for five bucks.

Fiverr offerings are called gigs, and you’ll see gigs that sound useful (“I will put up a blog for you for five dollars”) to interesting (“I will sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in Swahili to anyone you like”) to the off-beat (“I will do a video of myself with your name written on my forehead”). Ask yourself what you would do for five bucks.

Of course, you don’t make a fortune on this site, but some folks do it in a way that helps them make sometimes hundreds of dollars with not as much effort as you think. For example, one person’s gig was “I will show you 101 ways to gain traffic to your site”. It really was an ebook, and the gig did well.

Another gig was “I will show you in detail how to use Twitter to make money,” and the person did it with a YouTube video. In these two examples they did a task that they could easily duplicate, and all they had to do was keep selling and re-selling the gig.

Other ways that you can use Fiverr and other similar micro-tasking sites to make money include:

  • Arbitrage: Arbitrage is essentially buying something at a low price and simultaneously selling it at a higher price and netting the difference. For example, one micro-entrepreneur freelanced graphic design work and sometimes used graphic design work he got on Fiverr gigs and simply sold it and charged a higher fee.

  • As a loss leader: A loss leader is a product or a service that is initially sold at a deep discount or even below cost (at a loss) to stimulate the potential for future sales that can be profitable.

    A financial adviser might offer a half-hour financial session for five dollars. Of course, he won’t make money at that moment, but in offering the gig at a low cost, he found a great way to identify prospects that he could then sell more of his regular fee-based services.

  • Marketing: Fiverr has many gigs that offer marketing potential for micro-entrepreneurs such as Twitter marketing (“I will tweet your message or affiliate link to my 5,000 followers”) and Facebook (“I will share your message with my 500 friends on Facebook”).

Fiverr and other micro-tasking sites are great reminders that your creativity is an important business tool.

If you’re seriously interested in micro-tasking, plenty of places offer tips and information on Fiverr (and other sites) and the art of micro-tasking.

  • eHow: This site contains lots of great articles on micro-tasking and other topics.

  • YouTube: At this popular site you can find lots of material and how-to videos on Fiverr.

  • EzineArticles.com: This site has more than 800 how-to articles about Fiverr.

As Fiverr’s popularity took off, similar sites soon popped up. Here are some more micro-tasking sites that also offer you some micro-task opportunities:

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Paul Mladjenovic is a certified financial planner, micro-entrepreneur, and home business educator with more than 25 years' experience writing and teaching about financial and business start-up topics. He owns RavingCapitalist.com and is also the author of Stock Investing For Dummies.

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