Hello! I'm new here, and I'll offer a bit of a more positive view on Fiverr. I've had a blog-writing Gig posted there since April, and I have done fairly well with it, earning about $700-800 per month. That's mostly on Custom Offers and upselling; the $5.00 jobs are just come-ons, and I look at them as samples that earn me revenue.
Fiverr's commission is indeed high, but it is a very popular site that gets a lot of visits from potential buyers. So I figure I'm paying for the marketing. Also, the money that is going to be paid to me goes into escrow the second an order is placed, so I KNOW I'm getting to get paid and won't have to pursue my fees. I think that's pretty huge.
Of course, I'm looking to expand my business beyond Fiverr, but it has been a good way to get started.
I've also been doing contract editing and freelancing for a company that pays decently, but I'm not going to continue with that because I've found that I simply don't like editing very much and am not that great at it. The company I work for handles mostly academic editing, so there is a lot of persnicketiness about comma placement in APA style, etc., which I can't bring myself to care about. Much of the writing is ESL, too, and it's excruciating to try to wrangle those pieces into acceptable Standard English.
I live abroad, and can squeak by on $1,200 / month, live decently on $1,500 / month, and live very nicely on $2,000 / month. In many cities in the U.S., I'd barely be covering my rent and utilities on those amounts. So if you can swing it, I heartily recommend freelancing from abroad.
After a couple of months dabbling with Fiverr and the editing company while I was also working for a language school, I was able to start freelancing full-time at the beginning of June. (I don't name the editing company because they are super-secretive and tight about information; those of us who work there are only allowed to identify ourselves by number, even to each other, as if we were spies! "Agent 99" on
Get Smart or something like that.)
I kept several private language students, which is nice supplemental income.
Now I need to keep growing. I've answered a number of ads that have come my way through FreelanceWriting.com's Morning Coffee eNewsletter or ProBlogger, but haven't turned up solid work that way yet. Ditto for Elance and Fiverr Buyer Requests (which is the the part of Fiverr that is set up like Elance and oDesk).
I just read another thread here about sending LOIs to trade publications and other potential sources of work. This has good ideas for me:
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?91969-Asking-for-work
My writing at Fiverr has covered a wide variety of subjects for business blogs and websites.
I write reviews of indie books and films at my blog, and would be delighted to do some similar work for pay, but paid reviewing gigs seem to have dried up quite a bit in recent years. I'm always looking, though.
Here are links to my two blogs, the first focused on reviewing and culture, the second on my life abroad:
http://bookthemdanno.blogspot.mx/
http://queretaroencantador.blogspot.mx/
I am wide open to ideas!