Freelancefolder

Working on Your Business, Not Just in It

Posted August 31, 2010 in Inspiration, Productivity

When you’re a freelancer, you often find yourself doing several jobs. You may design, develop, write, manage, bill, consult and answer the phone. Unfortunately, while we’re busy taking care of all these roles in the day-to-day management of our business, we forget to step back and take a look at the long term.

Working on the business may not seem important when you’ve got ten active clients and six projects due this week, however it’s an important task you need to take care of, if you ever plan on growing your business (whether you plan to stay a single person business or not).

What exactly is working on your business versus working in it? Working in your business means taking care of the daily things, the clients, the billing, and the actual work. Working on your business, however, deals with stepping back and seeing how your business can improve, where you want your business to go, and so on. You should aim to try and work on your business, at least for a few hours every month.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can work on your business.

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Finding Success Through Your Strengths

Posted August 30, 2010 in Inspiration

It’s the ultimate goal and dream of every grade school child. To be able to grow up and do what you love for a living, at the time it may be flying in space, driving large red trucks, or protecting and serving. As we grow older, some of us reconsider which profession would make us happy but the dream of doing it for a living stays alive.

For most freelancers this dream is the root of the choice we have made to enter the freelance market. Whether you operate as “your own boss” on a full time basis or just on the side, you probably love what you do. What happens, though, when love doesn’t pay all of the bills? When we need that extra boost up the learning curve?

When love for the job isn’t getting you all the way it’s time to turn to your personal strengths for assistance. Focusing more effort into an area you are strong at, but may not be in love with can make the difference between a mediocre freelancing career and a truly fulfilling one.

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Are You a Good Sport Freelancer?

Posted August 29, 2010 in Inspiration, Managing Clients

If you work online (and most freelancers do), how do you handle it when you encounter someone who doesn’t agree with you (or even like you)?

I grew up attending my brother’s little league games, and now I have the opportunity to watch my own children participate in sport activities. The one thing that nearly every coach stressed was good sportsmanship–which included the ability to get along with others on the team as well as the ability to handle losing gracefully.

Not only is good sportsmanship vital to good teamwork, it’s also a crucial attitude for the successful freelancer to have.

In this post, I’ll share some of those early lessons that I learned about good sportsmanship. We’ll look at how good sportsmanship can help your freelancing business. We’ll also list several ways for you to find and keep a more sportsmanlike freelancing attitude.

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Two Special Words that Will Make Your Clients See You Differently

Posted August 27, 2010 in Managing Clients, Marketing

What if there were two words that you could use that would help you get along better with current clients and also improve your chances of getting new ones? Would you want to make use of those words?

Of course you would…

It almost sounds too good to be true, but guess what? There actually are two words that can help improve your client relations and help you get new clients. What’s more, you’ve probably known about these words since you were in kindergarten.

The words are simple: thank-you.

In this post, I’ll explain how saying thank-you will help improve your relationships with current clients and may even help you get new clients.

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5 Good Ways to Close a Client Deal

Posted August 26, 2010 in Getting Clients, Marketing

Do you have trouble closing client deals? Do you find yourself really close to getting a new client, only to find that the deal (and the new client) never materializes?

It’s happened to me in my freelancing business, and it’s probably also happened to you. It’s really frustrating, I know.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. You can be become better at closing deals with some practice. In this post, I’ll list a few techniques that you can use to close client deals and get more clients.

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Top 3 Ways I Find Clients

Posted August 25, 2010 in Marketing

Finding clients is one of the biggest challenges for any freelancer. Even when you’re fully booked, you need to have your sights set on the future–after you finish your current projects.

In the ideal world, clients and projects will come in a steady stream. However, for most freelancers, the more common experience is that described as “feast or famine.”

You’re either so booked that you barely have time to sleep, even if you work all day, all night and on weekends.

Or else you feel like the whole world has forgotten you. That maybe you did such a crappy job your clients have forsaken you.

A happy medium would be to have enough projects to keep you busy–while still having a personal life–and have projects lined up for months to come.

Below are the top three ways I know for freelancers to find clients. You can carry out these client-getting strategies on a regular basis, to keep prospects at your door.

During times of famine, you can up the ante and get your schedule filled up fast.

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How to Find Your First Client

Posted August 24, 2010 in Getting Started, Marketing

Once you become better known in your profession, clients will constantly come to you instead of you looking for them. You’ll often be so busy with work and won’t need to market yourself as often.

But, what do you do when you’re just starting out or not well known? Before you begin getting clients, it can be tough to figure out what to do all day. That’s the perfect time to make yourself well known.

Finding clients is different for everyone and what works for some doesn’t always for others. However, I’d like to share several of the ways I got work in the beginning.

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The Best of FreelanceFolder: Our Top 10 Resources for Getting Clients

Posted August 23, 2010 in Getting Clients

Nearly all freelancers face the problem of finding new clients. Whether you’re just getting started as a freelancer, or you’ve been freelancing for decades: getting clients is the backbone of any business.

Over the years at FreelanceFolder we’ve written dozens (if not hundreds) of articles on how to get clients, how to find better clients, and how to keep clients coming back for more. As our way to kick off Client Week here at FreelanceFolder, we’ve taken the best of these posts and created a list of our top 10 resources for getting clients.

Let’s take a look:

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It’s Client Week at FreelanceFolder!

Posted August 23, 2010 in Getting Clients, News

You’ve spoken and we’ve listened. Getting clients is one of the most common problems that freelancers face, and here at FreelanceFolder we’re making it our duty to help you meet that challenge.

As a way to honor this commitment and to celebrate the upcoming launch of The Client Machine (our new client-getting product), we’re going to do an entire week of articles about getting clients. Whether it’s finding your first few clients, finding better paying clients, or just plain getting more clients — we’re going to cover it this week.

Keep your eye on the blog for the first articles, and if you haven’t signed up yet, make sure you’re on our Client Machine notification list to keep up with the latest news and get a big discount when we launch.