when online algorithms go wrong and why it’s important to have multiple income streams.

thirty eight minutes ago I got upgraded to level one seller status on fiverr.com — I started working on fiver in 2010 and it’s taken them eight years to bump my account up again to level one status as they have changed a bunch of the ways the algorithm obviously works.

at once point in the past I was doing great with fiverr and got to the point where I could not actually keep up with the job requests with my equipment at the time, I had this big massive Mac Pro tower and it was struggling to deal with all the video work I was doing. I was running out of disk space and just didn’t have the processing power or the money to upgrade my systems to cope with the flow of work, I could go on vacation but that only works for short periods of time.

You can see that I was not making much per order but they were quick jobs, I could turn them around in ten minutes and I had done nearly 400 of them, every day I would turn up at the studio and fire up the camera and read back the scripts of things they wanted, some were terrible, some were for camera shop websites in Singapore — I remember that because the guy would come back at least five times a week and even wanted to send me equipment to review for an amazon style website (think drop shipping)

my seller status dropped from top rated to nothing

Literally overnight the orders stopped coming when I got demoted down because of time to deliver an order and a bad review, my all time rating is 4.3 out of 5 and because of that I’m stuck in this weird algorithm dead zone where my listings of work just don’t get seen! :) — look at this graphics below to see how stupid this situation is and the difference between level one and level two is and how if i earn $160 more and just had a rating of 4.8 I’d be level two and seen in the listings! :)

. .. . and here is the rub, while I’m in this deadzone I’m not getting orders to be able to flip me over to the next level and be seen more in the listings, I’m literally at the bottom of the list and nobody can see what I do! :) you can see I’ve only managed to dominate 20% of the world, I’m sure I’ve reached more areas of the world with steemit! (Actually that would be a neat thing to see as a map of the people that have read your blog as a stat!)

So anyway, I think it was kinda a little carrot and donkey situation of baiting me back in maybe or they just pushed an update to upgrade the level ones over certain amounts to get bumped up, because of it I’m gonna re-evaluate all of my ‘gigs’ as they are called on there and put some new ones up for banners, graphics, animated things, video edits and the such likes, I really used to love working on the fiverr system and recently the money you can earn is actually quite good — it’s just another residual, it would be stupid not to at least investigate! :)

moral of the story

Don’t rely on the online system to keep you in work, or rely on the income regularly coming, things drop off, payment systems go wrong, payments sometimes are no automatic, different platforms do different things — udemy for instance pays at 00:00 on the day you are supposed to be paid, skillshare when the intern turns up to press the pay button, upwork you have to set a level to payout at or manually go in and push to your account.

These payments systems are maturing, they are getting better for the end user (you) at getting your funds, these are not like the work payment systems you are used to getting money weekly or monthly from a job as a bank transfer or a paper pay packet, we get used to the form that finances are delivered to us, with crypto and these online platforms that changes, we have to be super flexible.

multiple revenue streams, that is payments for work you do across lots of different sites, some that is residual like ebooks on amazon, or courses that get watched per premium minutes that give you an amount each month these are the things that will get you through when a platform changes their code, is down or just isn’t receiving the level of interested parties traffic that it was before. I recommend that you have a shelf life of at least a couple of years and at least three or four residuals coming in if you want to be a digital worker.

i’ll let you know when I’ve added my new gigs and if there is anything I can do for you over there when I’ve done that let me know because I’m sure a few people over here on steemit can help me break that little deadlock! :)

Lots of love,
T E A M H U M B L E x