Freelancefolder

Seven Tips to Keep Your Clients Coming Back for More

Posted January 13, 2010 in Managing Clients, Marketing 56 Comments »

In any business, existing customers are always more profitable than new ones. The same is true for freelancers. If you want to pump up your income, you’ll find it easier to get more business from your existing clients first, rather than looking for new clients. So, you should constantly be working to turn existing clients into repeat clients.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to persuade previous clients to hire you again. If you’ve been doing your job properly, they already know, like and trust you.

On the other hand, it takes much more work to find new prospective clients. And then, after you find them, you need to more aggressively “sell” your services to them.

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Five Ways to Start a Freelance Business Right Now

Posted January 12, 2010 in Getting Started 41 Comments »

Have you been meaning to start freelancing on a part-time or full-time, but keep putting it off because you think that starting a freelance business is too much work?

While it’s true that freelancing can be a lot of work, the good news is that you don’t have to do everything all at once. If you have a full-time job or do not need full-time freelancing income right away, you can ease into freelancing a little bit at a time–we’ll show you how to get started.

(Even if you do need a full-time freelancing income, you need to start somewhere. This post can help you find that starting place.)

This post describes five easy steps that you can take right away that will put you closer to your freelancing dream. You can choose to start your freelancing business with just one, or all, of these steps.

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The 20 Best Productivity and Personal Development Blogs

Posted January 11, 2010 in Productivity 54 Comments »

One of the things that many freelancers struggle with is that we find it hard to manage time. No matter how much we wish there were more hours in a day, the fact is that a day is only going to consist of 24 hours. If we can’t straighten our priorities, our productivity level and creativity isn’t going through shine through our work.

Having said good bye to 2009, it’s time to take control of our career and get things done, faster and more effectively. We’ve been creating lists of sites that we think will help freelancers learn more. We recently created a list of some of the top social media blogs and SEO related sites.

Today we are bringing you a list of some of the best productivity and personal development related blogs on the web.

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Organize Your Information with Diigo

Posted January 10, 2010 in How-To, Tools/Resources 18 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.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Web Development

Posted January 8, 2010 in How-To, Programming 37 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.

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How to Use Elance and Guru to Land That Client Every Time

Posted January 7, 2010 in Getting Started, How-To 36 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.

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A Freelancer’s Guide to Dealing with Difficult People

Posted January 6, 2010 in Business, Managing Clients 39 Comments »

Does being a freelancer mean that you no longer deal with difficult people at work?

At first glance, it may seem so. As freelancers, many of us work by ourselves (or at least, we are not in an office surrounded by other people).

The challenges of dealing with Joe who makes loud personal calls from the next cubicle while you are trying to work or with Susie who hogs the copying machine to make personal copies are gone if you freelance for a living.

However, no freelancer truly works alone. We may be alone in our home office, but all of us depend on other people to earn our livelihood. At the very least, all freelancers must deal with clients. It’s how we get paid

While we may not face those everyday irritations that come from working with other people in an office, freelancers still have to understand how to deal with difficult people. This post will explain when you might find yourself facing a difficult person and provide you with some basic steps to take.

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Bold, New Ways to Market Your Services

Posted January 5, 2010 in Marketing 32 Comments »

A brand new year has arrived and with it usually comes new hope and anticipation for better things to come.

The post-Christmas adrenaline rush makes this a good time to try new things. Use this season’s energy to propel your freelancing business to new heights.

If you’re making New Year resolutions, why not include one to try at least one new way of marketing your services — one you’ve never done before? The scarier it is, the better, because you’ll be stretching yourself and diving into something completely uncomfortable.

And doing something new that stretches you only means one thing: you’ll grow. You’ll learn something new, you’ll get better at something, and your confidence will soar. I guarantee it.

Here are seven ideas for bold, new ways to market your services in 2010:

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Should You “Fake It” If a Client Asks for Something You Can’t Do?

Posted January 4, 2010 in Freelance Stories, Managing Clients 45 Comments »

In this economy, many freelancers who are approached by a client about a project that they don’t understand may hesitate to turn the work down. After all, who knows if that client will ever approach them again?

Their fear is understandable — the ability to earn a living as a freelancer depends on a steady flow of customers. (There are marketing steps that a freelancer can take to build his or her business.)

A hungry freelancer who is asked to do something unfamiliar is faced with a really tough decision: should they turn potentially profitable work away and risk not having enough income, or should they “fake it” and muddle through the project anyway?

In this post we’ll explain how to clarify a project request so that you can determine whether you are really competent to do the job. We’ll also look at some of the ramifications of accepting a job that you really aren’t qualified to do.

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