Putting Up a Writing Gig on Fiverr is Really Shortchanging Yourself

I put up a writing gig on Fiverr some time back, largely as an experiment to see what kind of work I get.

Some of the buyers were great to work with, though at just $4 per article, I was
really undercharging. But then, I wasn't getting a lot of work through it, and I never got around to closing down my gig. Whatever work I got through Fiverr, I completed to the best of my abilities, because I knew a one time buyer on Fiverr might turn into a regular client some day later.

But then I had a couple of completely obnoxious and rude buyers who perhaps stumbled onto Fiverr and internet marketing without a single clue in the world. One client requested an article on a local keyword. When I turned in the article, he shot back that it wasn't "witty and lively" enough, and that it was "dull and boring". He then messaged me a link to a New Yorker article and said "I prefer writing like that".

For $5.

I had no option but to tell him that my gig said "I will write an article for $5", not "I will write a New Yorker quality article for $5".

It was then that I realized that certain platforms attract certain kind of marketers. WF has more experienced marketers who know what they want, who understand what 'quality' means in internet marketing, and who can grasp that you can't get an article that can get published in the NYT for $5. But more than that, I learned that if you start charging less for your services, people assume that you are going to deliver less too. And then when you over deliver, few are grateful; most are busy trying to find out if you plagiarized the article from somewhere.

If you provide a service, would you undercharge just to meet new clients, even if the clients are not the kind you would like to work with in the long term?