The popular gigs board Fiverr just recently opened up an affiliate program with Linkshare. As someone who started my freelancing career with Fiverr, I thought that was pretty cool. Promote the fact that you can slip someone $5 to handle that annoying task for you, get some spending cash out of it.

It’s a good effort, but I think Fiverr really needs to activate deep linking. I could see freelancers who actually have active gigs on the site wanting to use it to promote their gigs and earn a little extra money on the side. I know somebody who lost her job because the convenience store she managed went out of business, and now she earns money as an English as a Second Language tutor. But if you want to find her gig, you have to either ask her for a link or search for it on the site, and good luck finding it.

That makes promoting your own gig incompatible with the affiliate program. Need somebody to create a logo for your new business? Bam – there you go. I just couldn’t use deep linking for that because somebody apparently didn’t think about how that would be useful.

Some Stuff You Can Find On Fiverr

Fiverr’s actually pretty cool otherwise. I’ve heard of people paying off credit cards just from doing odd jobs in their spare time. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme and you do need to remember that you’re competing with every other freelancer in your category. It’s kinda annoying that Fiverr has given clients the option to pay in Bitcoin but still insists on making payouts using Paypal. However, it’s easy enough to turn on your gig and post it in the usual places around the Internet any time you need a little extra money to cover the bills this month.

Some people even use it to connect with clients for larger and long-term jobs that aren’t easily covered by the Fiverr system. Fiverr doesn’t seem to like people doing this and, in fact, will claim that exchanging outside contact information between clients and freelancers is against the rules. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who has basically ignored this for the sake of getting a job done or developing an ongoing relationship with a client.

Maybe you’re a little more like me, though. You’d rather just create awesome content and then let it sit on a blog, earning residual income from web traffic. There’s no shame in that when you have a busy life and would rather not take another chunk out of it just for the sake of chasing more money. In that case, Fiverr’s got one of the coolest affiliate programs I’ve seen.