I came across microgigs when my wife, Lisa, and I really needed to develop a new income source. Health issues had forced her out of the classroom and we needed something to help replace her income and give her something to do. That was seven weeks ago and we can’t believe how much you can make when you charge just $5 at a time.
I opened a free account on a microgig site just before the Christmas holiday and did some research. I looked at what was selling and what was not, my eyes popping over information about some sellers who had sold their online gigs thousands of times. I took stock of our abilities and posted a simple gig. Then another, and another. I posted four gigs over the course of four days and had no sales.
Five days later, I had just about given up.
Then one morning, I got up and turned on my computer to check my account. Our first sale! A simple order for a product review. Over the next few days another order came, and another. By the end of our first 30 days, we had over 25 orders and been promoted to a 1st Step seller, which meant we could offer more profitable add-on services to the gigs.
Our most popular gigs are writing related: book or product reviews, proofreading and editing. But we also offer some other things that are easy for me to do, like offering to send a tweet to my 9,000 followers. How long does it take to tweet? A few seconds, but I can get paid $5 to do it.
As I said, we are just seven weeks into our microgig journey. This morning, I found our largest single order to date: $55 from one client. We’ve had a total of 43 orders, or about $301 in finished work, with another $155 in orders waiting for us to finish. I’m counting the days when we will qualify to 2nd Step, which means we can offer even more profitable gig add-ons.
We’ve broken the work into different areas: I take the initial orders, Lisa works on proofreading gigs and does research. I manage the workflow and do the writing. It gives us some income, and something fun we can do together. We each put in around 30 to 60 minutes each a day on completing the orders and developing more gigs.
We love that you can do these gigs from anywhere. We’re U.S. expats living in Ecuador, and if we can do it, anyone can!
Now our goals are to build our new business to $1,000 a month, and reward ourselves with a trip to Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas and viva microgigs!
Better yet, we’ve just scratched the surface of what we can do. Ideas are crackling between us about future projects even beyond microgigs. It has brought us closer and given us a great promise for the extra income we need. We can’t be more thankful for taking the plunge into microgigs.
