Why I Have Suspicions About Alex Fasulo’s Claimed Fiverr Income
By: Daniel Rosehill
Tags: Suspicions, Course, Freelancers, Fiverr, Freelance

2. The Writing Gigs Fasulo Mentions Aren’t Typically High Paying; Her Rate Appears Suspiciously Low Given The Massive Income She Claims

A blog post gig that Fasulo is selling on Fiverr. The rate starts at just $100 per blog. Screenshot 17/03/21, Fiverr.com

During the CNBC interview, Fasulo divulged several insights about her freelance writing business that made me immediately suspicious about how she could have reached the level of scale that would generate almost $400K in revenue doing what she says she is doing.

Firstly, Fasulo says that she “mostly ghostwriters blogs and ebooks.” (We’ll get to the kind of ebooks she is writing later.)

But here’s what jumped out to me more than that: blogs and ebooks don’t tend to be the most profitable writing formats to work in, particularly when you’re charging rates as low as $100 for the former.

With volume of course anything is possible (sell a million one dollar t-shirts and you’re a millionaire).

But Fasulo doesn’t mention that she outsources — remember that she says that she makes her extraordinary income as “a freelance writer” (in the singular). Which leads to another big loud ‘HOW!?’?

As a general rule of thumb, copywriting pays more than content. And things like landing pages and UX copy tend to be more lucrative than blogs, which are sort of a beginner-friendly format at the bottom of the writing ladder (not putting them down; I work on plenty for my own clients).

If I were trying to make an astronomical income on Fiverr, firstly I probably wouldn’t even attempt to do it through writing. As a brain-intensive activity, it’s just too hard to scale, at least without outsourcing. And I definitely wouldn’t choose these formats or price at these rates.

Fasulo’s Fiverr handle — Faswaldo — has a blog post gig listed with rates that start at just $100 for a “500 word SEO-optimized blog post with keywords included.”

Speaking of which, here’s one of the negative reviews from her Fiverr handle (to be fair, her overall rating remains positive; 4.7/5 at the time of writing).

A few of the negative reviews allege that Fasulo is using some kind of automation software which would be one explanation for her apparently superhuman work volume. This is one of the few possible explanations that make sense to me if her income is truly what she claims it to be.

Fasulo’s turnaround times also seem suspiciously fast, particularly for one person who would need to be churning out projects at Herculean volume to organically make the type of income she claims to.

Check out her Fiverr profile and you will witness an almost constant stream of deliveries. It almost seems like the freelance writing version of a factory production line.

A random screenshot showing delivery two hours’ ago

During the interview with CNBC Alexandra Fasulo claimed to put out a 10,000 word ebooks in two days.

To me, this signals a very high probability that she is writing low quality fluff kind of work, which — and here’s the problem — also tends to pay poorly.

Writing 5,000 words of quality material per day is almost impossible if you’re working with a continuously changing marketplace clientele such as the one that Fasulo is presumably working with.

According to a title during the video “she [Fasulo] charges $1,000 for a 10,000 word e-book.”

But here’s the problem with that: $1,000 for a 10,000 word e-book works out to just ten cents per word.

That’s a pretty dismal per-word rate that would be more typical of rookie freelancers. Per-word rates can range as high as $2/word.

For context: the Editorial Freelancers’ Association (EFA) lists a recommended per-word rate for business/sales writing of $0.16-$0.20 per word. Even against this very low bar, Fasulo is undercutting the market rate (a worthy bone of contention in its own right).

So again we come back to the volume hypothesis. And again have to ask: how?

The EFA’s recommended rates chart

During the CNBC interview Fasulo mentions that she has written “ebooks for quite a few dogs.”

Call me suspicious, but writing ebooks for dogs on a freelancing marketplace doesn’t seem like the logical way to me to scale your annual income to close on half a million dollars.

All these details together make me very — nay extremely — suspicious about who Fasulo is working for, and how these kind of projects at these kind of rates could possibly add up to an almost $400K yearly income.