When I started my "gig", I just kind of threw it out there. I fairly quickly started getting a lot of orders every week. Over time I had a few really good regular customers, my orders were about half from them and half from random one-offs.
A couple years into it I started reading in the forums about changes to the search algorithm and how it was hammering people and killing their existing gigs. It was all speculation since it's not transparent. Shortly after that, I started to notice the random one off orders completely stopped. I was still getting orders from my regulars, but over time their business started to drop off. A lot of those customers were using my services to fulfill orders on their own gigs (lots of whiteboard animation videos, things like that). So I imagine some of them also dropped off due to the algorithm and I went with it.
When they were gone, it was over. I'm left with a gig with over 500 completed orders with a perfect 5 star rating, that never gets seen by anyone.
There isn't much in the way of SEO you can do - you have your gig description and you can add some keywords. There is a system for buying ads - I tried that out, but it didn't lead to any clicks.
