5 Tips For Filing Your Taxes Easily
Posted March 17, 2010 in Business, How-To 18 Comments »
One thing that scares a lot of professionals away from becoming freelancers is the thought of doing taxes.
Taking care of your taxes shouldn’t be scary. Especially if you’re a one person business, filing your taxes can easily be done in less than 30 minutes.
In this post, I’ll share some of my tips for filing taxes, as well as some great tools to help make tax time painless and easy.
Pros and Cons of a Public Price List
Posted March 16, 2010 in Managing Clients, Marketing 41 Comments »
As freelancers, we can be very flexible on pricing. We can charge by the project, charge by the hour, increase our rates for rush jobs, decrease them for charities or work completely for free for our friends and family if we choose.
However, some freelancers instead choose to publicly disclose their prices on their website or brochures, eliminating some of the flexibility they may have on pricing. There are pros and cons to this issue. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the issues so that you can think about them before putting your prices up where everyone can see them.
Elements of a Successful Project Proposal
Posted March 15, 2010 in How-To, Marketing 38 Comments »
Whether you’re actively looking for clients on freelancing job boards, or you only get clients through referrals, you’ll have to submit project proposals.
The project proposal is your sales piece. It’s what will ultimately “sell” your services to the prospect. To be successful, your proposal should perform the following:
- show that you understand what the client is looking for
- prove that you are the best person for the tasks at hand
- convince the prospect that either they can afford you or they cannot afford not to hire you
To accomplish all this, your project proposal should have the following elements:
Open Thread: What Are Your Most Productive Hours?
Posted March 14, 2010 in Open Thread 40 Comments »
Some freelancers work best at night. Others rise early and do their best work first thing in the morning before the sun even rises.
One of the benefits about freelancing that many of us enjoy is that we can arrange our schedule to work during those hours when we are most productive rather than when an employer requires us to work. The flexibility of freelancing is a great perk.
Over on our Freelance Folder Fan Page we asked our readers to share whether or not they were a night owl or worked best during the day and we got a great response.
We’d like to give the rest of our readers a chance to respond to the question as well:
Ten Plus Ways to Help You Get Paid
Posted March 12, 2010 in Managing Clients 34 Comments »
It’s the one thing that every freelancer dreads–collecting a payment from a delinquent clients. No freelancer ever wants to have to pick up the phone and call a client to ask about a late payment.
Yet, sooner or later, many of us are faced with a client who doesn’t pay us on time. It’s normal, I think, to procrastinate in such circumstances. You tell yourself that the check will be in tomorrow’s mail, but in your heart, you know it’s not really coming.
Getting paid is vital to a freelancer. In fact, the money we receive for our services is what enables us to keep doing what we love. It’s how we support our families and ourselves.
Fortunately, there are some steps a freelancer can take to prevent payment problems from occurring in the first place as well as some steps to follow when a payment is late. In this post, we’ll discuss ten of those steps.
Dealing With Negative Criticism
Posted March 11, 2010 in Business, How-To 35 Comments »
As freelancers, we do everything we can to get our names out there. Whether it’s writing blog posts, twittering, using other social media, or just dealing with clients, we try to be everywhere on the web.
Unfortunately, the more you put yourself out there, the more you open yourself up to those people. You know who they are–the ones who disagree with you and aren’t afraid to point that out, the ones who hate your work, writing and thoughts.
While not the same as outright rejection, negative criticism can be just as upsetting and hurtful. So how do we deal with it while staying professional and cool headed? Here are some tips from someone who’s also received lots of criticism in her freelancing career.
9 Plugins Your Clients Will Love For Their WordPress Website
Posted March 10, 2010 in Tools/Resources, Web Design 64 Comments »
There are countless blog posts with lists of plugins for WordPress, including some great lists here on Freelance Folder, but this post focuses on plugins that will make your clients’ experience in WordPress more enjoyable, easier to navigate, rich with important statistics and completely branded to match their website. For freelance web designers or WordPress consultants, taking a small amount of extra time to set up these plugins can boost the professional appearance of WordPress installations you provide for your clients, strengthen their confidence in you and score high marks as you impress them with their own personal WordPress experience.
MediaLoot is Live! Join Now to get 50% Off For Life
Posted March 9, 2010 in News 5 Comments »
It’s finally here! Months of hard work have led up to this moment, and I’m very happy to say that MediaLoot is online and accepting new members!
For those of you who haven’t heard yet, MediaLoot is a premium membership site for designers. You can join for $14 per month (with the 50% launch discount), and as a member you’ll get tons of new design resources every month. Forget paying $5, $10, or $15 dollars for every little thing you buy — MediaLoot is all about bringing you the best design resources for a lot less money. If you think that’s cool, check out the tour for more details →
We’ve got icon sets, web elements, print templates, textures, and a lot more. We’ve also got a bunch of free stuff for those of you who aren’t ready to join yet (some really cool free icons). There’s definitely a little something for everyone, so even you non-designers out there can benefit from the new launch.
Hope to see you there!
The Slippery Slope of Creeping Scope
Posted March 9, 2010 in Managing Clients, Productivity 26 Comments »
Uncontrolled scope creep costs you money.
When a client asks you to do something that wasn’t part of the original agreement it’s called scope creep.
Some scope creep is relatively minor and doesn’t really make much difference to your freelancing business. Doing a little bit of extra work for a client can be a good way to build up some good will.
In other instances, however, scope creep can drastically increase your workload and negatively impact your bottom line. These are the cases of scope creep that can really damage your freelancing business if they are not addressed.
In this post, we’ll explore some options that a freelancer has for dealing with scope creep.
Try searching "Getting Clients" or "Productivity"
FreelanceCommunity
Free Resource: Massive Web UI and Button Set
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In November 2009, 5 jQuery plugins were born that are new and useful for web designers. Read this post to learn more.How Well Do You Understand CSS Positioning?
The css position property seems easy to grasp, but it works a little differently than it appears on the surface.
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