5 Tips For Filing Your Taxes Easily
Posted March 17, 2010 in Business, How-To 23 Rockin' 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.
Elements of a Successful Project Proposal
Posted March 15, 2010 in How-To, Marketing 52 Rockin' 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:
Dealing With Negative Criticism
Posted March 11, 2010 in Business, How-To 35 Rockin' 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.
10+ Tips For Using Twitter To Grow Your Freelance Business
Posted February 10, 2010 in How-To, Social Media, Tools/Resources 62 Rockin' Comments »
Like it or not, social media is here to stay — at least for a while. More importantly, if you are not using the various social media tools that are available to grow your freelance business, you are missing out on a prime opportunity. The audience is global, the tools are almost all free and, with proper time management, the return on your investment could be phenomenal.
I have heard from numerous peers of their struggles to grasp the reigns of the wild stallion that is social media marketing, but I have had measurable success learning how to utilize Twitter in ways that have increased my clientele, enlarged my network of connections, and strengthened my standing as a member of the freelance and design community. In fact, without Twitter I would not be writing for Freelance Folder!
In this post I will share some basic transferable principles I have discovered that could help you not only get your feet wet with Twitter, but quite possibly could open doors you thought were locked to you and your freelance business.
What to Do When the Client Is Wrong
Posted February 3, 2010 in How-To, Managing Clients 41 Rockin' Comments »
Sooner or later most freelancers will have the pleasure of working with a client who seems to have forgotten why they hired you in the first place. This client may ignore or overrule all of your recommendations and even dictate decisions on the project that you, as the experienced professional, are certain will be detrimental to its overall success. Despite your objections, explanations and warnings, the client steamrolls the project toward something less than what your normal standards would require, all the while assuring you that they have a better idea and understanding of what their project needs than you do.
How should you handle this situation? Do you refuse to bend and lose or “fire” the client, refunding any payments? Or, do you submit to their demands and hope for the best?
Organize Your Information with Diigo
Posted January 10, 2010 in How-To, Tools/Resources 18 Rockin' Comments »
Have you ever wanted a way to organize the information that you find online?
If you’re like most freelancers, your answer to that question was probably “yes.” Every day, it seems, we’re overwhelmed with helpful information. For most of us, there’s more information than we can practically manage to apply.
Diigo is a free application and community that is designed to help manage the information that we find online. It can also be used for collaboration.
In this post, we’ll examine how freelancers can use the free application, Diigo. We’ll also explain how to get started with Diigo and provide some Diigo tips.
A Beginner’s Guide to Web Development
Posted January 8, 2010 in How-To, Programming 39 Rockin' Comments »
The web development field offers a variety of languages from front-end development, like HTML, CSS and Javascript, to back-end programming, like PHP, ASP and Ruby on Rails. So how do you start learning how to code?
In this post, I want to offer a variety of great tips on beginning your journey to learning web code. At the end of the post, I want to share a simple site structure with you to get started in HTML and CSS.
I’ll focus on HTML and CSS in this article. HTML and CSS are the most basic web languages that everyone must learn before they can move on to another web language. Even if you plan to do all backend programming, you’ll still need to use them often.
How to Use Elance and Guru to Land That Client Every Time
Posted January 7, 2010 in Getting Started, How-To 37 Rockin' Comments »
I know that a lot of seasoned old professionals prefer not to use sites like Guru and Elance. Often the clients who post jobs there are bargain hunters. They’re looking for the lowest price rather than the highest quality.
If you’re going to transition from the budget work into the higher quality jobs, you’re eventually going to have to stop relying on job boards to get your work, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely without value. I was introduced to many of my best clients via bidding sites.
Budgeting for Freelancers
Posted December 17, 2009 in How-To, Lifestyle 31 Rockin' Comments »
It’s tough enough to budget money correctly when you’re on a regular income, but it gets really tough when your income is irregular and unpredictable.
What do you do with all that money you make, now that you’re a fabulous freelancer? Do you throw it in a bank account and pray there’s enough for that flat screen you’ve been wanting and this month’s rent? Are you saving or always coming up short with your bills?
I’d like to show you a great budget system I use for myself. I’ve tried lots of different budgets, but this one is by far the best. It works great with my irregular income and helps find every free penny, so I have enough for bills, spending and saving. What is this system?
Try searching "Getting Clients" or "Productivity"
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Free Resource: Massive Web UI and Button Set
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