Dear Aunty Entity,

I’m convinced my client hates me

I took over an account from someone who had been with the client for 3 years and they were disgruntled about them going. The last few weeks have been difficult in terms of establishing a relationship and getting things done because of this negative vibe. Today when I phoned to ask about an approval for something I got yelled at before having the phone slammed down on me.

Am I being paranoid and how can I get out of this? Click to Continue »

If freelancers could invent our own clichés, one might be: no two jobs are the same. Each gig we take on brings with it new personalities, new challenges and new rewards. Despite these differences, most any freelancing gig will fit into one of these twenty types.

Where does the job you’re (supposed to be) working on now fit in? Have you done each of these kinds of jobs before? My guess is that most experienced freelancers will have encountered quite a few!

1. The magnum opus

The job you’ve always wanted, the job you’ll tell your grand-kids about. You get asked to write a book, land design work for a super-company like Coca Cola or get an article published in Business Week. The money doesn’t really matter — though it’s probably pretty good! Because this kind of opportunity doesn’t come along every day, you make this job personal, you obsess over it and make sure every single detail has been polished to a brilliant shine.

The pros:

These kinds of jobs can feel more like play than work. They’re hard to forget for all the right reasons, and can take your credibility and perceived value as a freelancer to the next level.

The cons:

Magnum opus jobs can be time vacuums. Being paid $X,000 for a project doesn’t work out to much if you spend a total 100s of hours polishing up the bells and whistles.

Click to Continue »

Sometimes starting a freelance business means building it from the ground up. Which has worked superbly for Calvin Lee, the Principal and Creative Director of Mayhem Studios. Cal couldn’t afford to attend a four-year college or design school, so he taught himself about design and formed his business through a lot of hard work.

Cal says he’s always loved drawing as a kid. “A lot of my imagination came from reading comic books. I wanted to do something creative as a career one day or even draw comic books,” he says. While that never came to be, the 39-year-old Los Angeles resident did whatever he could to pursue a creative career. He attended a local trade school and enrolled in a community college design program—but the rest was up to him. Click to Continue »

Photo by firutin.

Ahoy all ye tanned inhabitants of Australia or its surrounding areas: Freelance Switch sister-site FlashDEN is giving away one free ticket to WebDU, the biggest web technology conference in the southern hemisphere for Flash, Flex, Air and Web Design. Attendants will receive hands-on technical training, new skills and breaking news from inside the web industry.

Head to the contest post and leave a comment explaining why you deserve a ticket to be in the running to win. Don’t forget to show some love to the new FlashDEN blog while you’re there :).

The winner will be mingling with salaried and “secure” (read: bored) counterparts, so it might be worth brushing up on the most aggravating assumptions people make about freelancers working from home. If you know what to expect, you can prepare a witty riposte in advance. To sturdy up your defenses even more, you might also want to identify the 10 most common misconceptions people make about the self-employed. Unfortunately for me, number 9, “You only work 45 minutes a day, and the rest of the time is spent playing video games,” became a truth when I discovered a particularly addictive Table Tennis Flash game… And to add insult to injury, my real-life Table Tennis skills have actually deteriorated. (Once I struggled to get the ball over the net. Now I struggle to hit the table at all.) Click to Continue »

The fourteenth episode of Freelance Radio, the official FreelanceSwitch podcast, is now available! This episode, we bring on Prescott Perez-Fox (official site at perezfox.com, host of the Twentyhood podcast on life for twenty-somethings) we discuss a number of freelancing issues, including your business image, how to use your website, suggestions for one’s about page and more!

Subscriptions to the podcast are available via iTunes and an archive of all podcasts will appear in the podcast section. We hope you enjoy it!

Click to Continue »

Photo by N_Creatures.

I had a client meeting this morning. This means I tossed on my best khakis, grabbed my portfolio and darted out the door feeling the rush of new business possibilities. Having already spoken to this potential client on the phone, I knew it wouldn’t be an easy sell. He had a tall order of information he wanted me to bring along. But I knew I’d be all right—I spent the night before updating my portfolio and working on rates for him.

Rates. I knew that would be the kicker.

While this new client will probably be a wonderful one, I did struggle to devise a set pricing scale for him. Why? Because he wanted a set rate for projects. Meaning one lump sum for website content. Another for brochures. One fee for a press release. And so on. Although my rates don’t vary too much, I usually give clients who want ongoing work a rate range, which gives me some flexibility in my pricing. Not this guy—he wanted one-rate fees for different projects. Click to Continue »

Photo by Sister72.

As a freelancer you are obviously offering a service to clients, whether it be designing, programming, writing, photography, etc., but what else are you selling?

You should be able to improve your overall effectiveness and your conversions of leads to clients by emphasizing and selling these aspects of your work as well:

Customer Service

Besides being great at the work that you do, you have an opportunity to separate yourself from the others and win clients over by providing exceptional customer service. Some clients will prefer to work with freelancers because of the one-to-one contact that they may not get with a large firm. Clients like to know who is going to answer the phone when they call and they like to have someone who is there to work closely with them. Click to Continue »

Have something to say about freelancing? After three months of being closed, Skellie has asked me to open up contributions for FreelanceSwitch once more to bring in some new blood!

We’re looking for both regular and one-off writers and we’ve got a new, super simple submission form.

If you’re post is accepted, not only will you have the happy knowledge that you’ve been contributing to the awesome freelancing community, but we’ll send $60 your way to say thanks!

So what are you waiting for? Get in touch!

Could you be in Switzerland on the 16th of May? If so, you might want to check out Going Solo, a conference for freelance internet professionals.

More information after the jump! Click to Continue »

Photo by Hub :).

I’m a big fan of playing tricks on my own mind to get things done. For example, I’m the type of person who sets all my clocks to run fast by a few minutes (each clock by a different increment, of course) to stay punctual.

Recently, it occurred to me that there are a few other ways I could, maybe not exactly trick my mind, but at least play with my perception to get my freelance career moving along further.

Pretend you’ve been fired

This is one for those slaving away at the 9-5 and merely dreaming about quitting to freelance full-time.

What if that safe 9-5 job vanished tomorrow? What would you do? Click to Continue »