Freelancefolder

5 Steps to Winning Any Client Project

Posted October 26, 2009 in Business, Marketing 22 Rockin' Comments »

The ability to win new client projects is an essential skill to any freelancer. It’s something we freelancers practice from the day we get started, and it’s usually a skill that builds over time.

Aside from just practice, there are actually a lot of things you can do to become better at winning new client projects. Winning projects is not a confusing process, and it can actually be broken down very methodically.

In this article we’ve done just that, and divided the project-winning process into five steps. Read on for an explanation of each step, and a few tips for what you need to do to win at each stage of the game.

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How To Maximize Your Freelance Income

Posted October 20, 2009 in Business, Marketing 41 Rockin' Comments »

Freelancing income often seems as though it is a limited commodity. It seems limited by time, limited by ability, and limited by the number of opportunities available. Many freelancers behave as though there is a specific number of freelancing jobs out there, and that once those jobs are gone there are no more jobs to go around.

That’s not necessarily how it works, though. First, there are new freelancing opportunities daily. Second, it’s possible to influence your freelancing income by making your own income opportunities.

In this post we’ll teach you how to maximize your income by both finding and winning opportunities that are already out there, and then by creating your own new income opportunities.

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Get More Subscribers With An Email Subscription Box

Posted October 19, 2009 in How-To, Marketing 31 Rockin' Comments »

Many of us freelancers run blogs, and with good reason. Creating a blog is one of the best ways to prove your expertise, build a strong following, and get more clients. Making it easy for your readers to subscribe is a key factor in building this following and growing your blog, and it is a fact — not all of your readers know how to use RSS.

So are you missing out on potential subscribers without an email subscription box? Most definitely so.

If you are unsure what I mean by ‘email subscription box’, see the “Enter your email” field to the right? This allows users to enter their email and subscribe to your blog from every page of your website. They don’t have to click through to another page to subscribe, making it much easier for readers to subscribe.

You will find my subscribe box prominently on the top right of my site Just Creative Design (see screenshot above) and at the top of many other blogs. In this article, I will guide you through how to get an email subscription box for your own blog.

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How To Build The Ultimate Job Finding Dashboard with iGoogle

Posted October 7, 2009 in How-To, Marketing 85 Rockin' Comments »

Picture this: You wake up in the morning, grab your cup of coffee, and meander over to your computer. After checking your morning email and twitter accounts, you get started looking for some new work. You check a number of different job boards, look for keywords on a bunch of job-finding sites, and complete several twitter searches. After about hour or so of looking, you’ve got 5 or so potential leads. Not a bad start!

While 5 leads is pretty decent for an hour of searching — what if you could accomplish the same thing in 15 minutes? What about 5 minutes?

In this article we’re going to show you how to take that entire job search process and replace it with a single customized job finding page on iGoogle. We’ll aggregate all of the various job boards, grab feeds for different twitter searches, and create a single dashboard where you can look for jobs at a glance.

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5 Reasons Freelancers Can’t Ignore Twitter

Posted October 5, 2009 in Marketing, Social Media 24 Rockin' Comments »

These days, it seems like Twitter is unstoppable. It’s all over the web, talked about on TV, and lately I’ve even been receiving corporate brochures with company twitter accounts listed.

Twitter is becoming a mainstream business and networking tool, and it can provide power and reach for your freelancing business that can’t be ignored. I have personally been a Twitter user since 2007, and my active presence on twitter has become one of my most valuable business assets.

People are using twitter in many different ways. Some use it to network, some to sell products, and then there are some who even use twitter to turn lights on and off at their homes. Lets quick take a look at a few reasons that every freelancer should be using twitter.

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Does a Freelancer Need to Be Hypercompetitive to Succeed?

Posted September 29, 2009 in Business, Marketing 31 Rockin' Comments »

Competition.

The very word can strike fear and excitement into the heart of even the seasoned entrepreneur.

“What is the competition doing?”

“How competitive are we?”

“How can we beat the competition?”

These are all questions that every businessperson wonders at one time or another. There’s no doubt that a freelancing business must be competitive in order to survive.

But, what does being competitive really mean?

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Why Online Friends are Important to Freelancers

Posted September 25, 2009 in Lifestyle, Marketing 57 Rockin' Comments »

“What a total waste of time!”

The sharp words the hung in the air between us. My offline friend had just watched me check in at some of my favorite social sites.

Of course, her sentiment shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. She’d mentioned before that she didn’t see any value in sites like Twitter and Facebook. To say that my friend didn’t get social media would be a complete understatement.

For the freelancer, online friends are not a waste of time. Rather, they are a very valuable part of a freelancer’s networking. While freelancers can always benefit from networking locally, social media sites allow us to connect with individuals and organizations that we might not otherwise have the opportunity to connect with.

Online friends are very important to freelancers.

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5 Simple Steps To Rock Social Media

Posted September 22, 2009 in Marketing, Social Media 23 Rockin' Comments »

If you’ve ever wondered whether or not social media can help you as a freelancer, the simple answer is — absolutely. Being social on the web has many rewards; including connections, community, interaction, exposure, and trust. These five elements are critical for a business to survive, and with social media you can make sure you are building all of them.

If you’re new to the idea of social media for freelancers, or aren’t sure how it can help out your business, I recommend you look into these social media basics to get a better idea of what this is all about.

Once you’re familiar with the idea of using social media for your business, then this post is for you. Here are 5 simple tips that can make a big difference to your success with social media.

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Why You Aren’t Landing Clients You Want (And What To Do About It)

Posted September 18, 2009 in Marketing 20 Rockin' Comments »

A few days ago I had the idea to go through all of my past client and prospect communications. My plan was to see if I behaved and communicated differently when I managed to land the best clients, and to see how it differed from when my attempts were unsuccessful. After going through around 50 emails I came to a conclusion — I couldn’t find a clear dividing line between the two.

Sometimes I had sent a huge pitch in PDF format and the prospect loved it, practically begging for my address to send a check. In other cases I had done the exact same thing, and never heard from the person again.

There were times when people contacted me with a budget, a timescale, and exact outline of what they wanted. I didn’t have to convince them, they knew they wanted my services already. Yet there were times when I had to work my socks off close the deal (which, of course, didn’t always work out).

Before I did give up on my quest to find some kind of useful information from all of this, I came to a realization that I think will benefit all of us. I know the following statement will cause some discussion but I stand by it 100%.

The way you communicate with your prospects doesn’t matter as much as how your prospects found you in the first place.

Let me explain in detail.

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