As you build your freelance business, you get the satisfaction of touting the work you have already done when talking to new prospects for your services. Demonstrating that you have experience delivering the services your prospects are looking for can make all the difference in landing that next project.

Make sure you tally up that experience so that you can present it with maximum impact. Continue Reading

I’m a great believer in targeted marketing and specialization. Focusing on particular types of clients and offering services aimed tightly at specific needs enhances your appeal to those clients at the same time it improves your efficiency, resulting in better margins on your work.

But it is possible to market your business by having more than one target for your services. Unfortunately, many people expand their targets haphazardly, drifting into others kinds of clients and services by accident as opportunities come up.

If you are looking for ways to expand your audience for your services while still taking advantage of the efficiencies and other benefits of focusing on a target market, examine the two-sided relationships:

• between you and your client
• between your clients and their own customers, suppliers, and so on.

By taking this “two-faced” approach to relationships, considering the alternate perspective that you usually leave to your client, you may find new services to sell, and new customers to sell them to. Continue Reading

One of the things that comes along with the freelance life, especially early in the game,  is a “feast or famine” cycle, both in terms of revenue, and in terms of time. Sometimes you are scrambling to keep up with your work, pulling all-nighters to keep several projects on track. Two weeks later you have little to keep you busy.

Can a “Swiss Cheese” method of scheduling your project scheduling can help you manage your time and get you off the feast and famine roller coster? Continue Reading

Most readers of this blog provide creative services of some kind, largely as designers or as writers. And if you are contemplating a switch to the freelance life, you may be wondering about your own creativity, about your ability to constantly come up with new and better ways to do things for your clients.

While there are many different kinds of freelancers offering many kinds of services, all the freelancers I have known have been able to demonstrate outstanding creativity in at least one aspect of their work:

Avoiding it! Continue Reading

Freelancers are great list makers, and it is little wonder. Running your own business, handling multiple clients and projects, leaves you with lots of things to manage and remember.

I know that I start every week, and every day, with “to-do” lists. I consider what needs to get done, what I want to achieve in a given time span. Then I generally end up with a list that is too long, and cut it down to focus on priority items.

Unfortunately, for a long time I found that items I dropped from the day’s “to-do” list didn’t really go away. Continue Reading

It is easy to see why “the marketing funnel” is such a popular concept. Marketing is a process we use to extract a small stream of prospects and clients from a vast sea of strangers. So many writers and speakers use the funnel model to describe the process: that large crowd of potential customers at the wide end, and those select few, our actual customers, at the narrow end.

Visual images can be powerful tools to help us understand complex ideas, or to simplify sequences and processes so they are easier to work with. But they also can mislead, if the chosen image does not accurately reflect the concept in question. That’s what happens with “the marketing funnel.” Continue Reading

There is no question that social networking sites are a hot topic in business these days. Whatever size company you run, you’re probably seeing notices for seminars and workshops on how to use Twitter or Facebook as part of your marketing strategy. Articles abound pointing to social media as the new “silver bullet” that gives you quick and easy access to a flood of new customers.

Unfortunately, many freelancers, particularly, have seized upon the concept of “social media networking for business” without taking the time to find the appropriate boundaries between “social” and “business.” This is in part because people who do, say, copywriting or website design tend to be “early adopters” of new tools and technology.

Sad to say, however, “early adopter” often means “someone who adopts or applies a new method without thinking about it very much.” Explore what some business people are leaving on their social networking sites, and you will quickly come to the conclusion that some of them are doing themselves more harm than good.

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Photo by Antediluvial.

With economic conditions rather on the grim side, it makes sense to look for ways to distinguish yourself from the competition, to strengthen your appeal to existing and potential clients. This goes beyond just a general increase in marketing activity. It is a matter of enhancing your value to your customers, of showing them how doing business with you can stretch their tight budgets a little farther.

Most freelancers can add value to the services they offer by tapping an area of expertise they may not realize they have. The fact is that as you work with clients and complete projects, you become more and more knowledgeable about the world your client contacts live in: their constraints, their needs, their preferences, their goals, their habits, their procedures, their biases and assumptions about working with people just like you.

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Photo by alexia.

Read a few books and websites with marketing advice and you’ll soon encounter a discussion of the “elevator speech,” the compact little monologue you’re supposed to have prepared to deliver at a moment’s notice at networking opportunities and chance encounters.

The theory is that you should be able to present yourself effectively to a complete stranger in the time it would take you to share a ride in an elevator. Whether that is thirty seconds or a minute, or even slightly longer, you are supposed to distill the essence of who you are, what you do, and what you offer into an irresistible mini-pitch that opens up opportunities for you with new contacts.

Great idea. In fact, the only things wrong with it are:

1. the basic concept and expectations, and
2. its execution by most freelancers.

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Photo by rick.

A note before we get Will’s post started: winners of our birthday bash competition will be announced tomorrow! Now, for our regular programming… — Skellie

Although many experienced freelancers generally price on a project basis, there is still an hourly rate lurking behind their calculations, much of the time. We tend to derive those project rates from estimates of how much time a standard project typically requires. And we bid on new projects, that don’t fit established patterns, or tweak our project rates to fit unusual situations, all relying on some concept of an hourly rate — even if we don’t share that with the client.

Especially when you are new to freelancing (although it’s a lingering issue even for people who have been at this a while), the question of where to set that hourly rate consumes a lot of mental energy, and generates much stress.

Now, I’m not about to tell you what you should charge per hour of your time for the kind of work you do. But even more fundamental than the question of your “hourly rate” is the question of whether you calculate your bids based on your rate, or on your rates. Continue Reading

Image by Darwin Bell.

There are probably some types of food you like, and some you aren’t so crazy about. When you’ve just enjoyed one of your favorites, do you make your next snack something that complements your diet?

Or do you just have some more of the same?

As most of us know to the detriment of our own waistlines, the “balanced diet” is an elusive creature. We reach for the things we enjoy, the ones we’re comfortable with, without even thinking about it.

Your prospects and clients tend to do the same thing when they pull together their project teams. Instead of a “balanced diet” of the skills and knowledge needed to achieve the desired results, they pile on more of what they already have. They make their teams fatter without making them better.

As a freelancer, one of your challenges is helping your prospects get what they really need (you!), instead of just what feels good to them. When you complete the team, rather than just enlarge it, you produce results that will bring your clients back to you again and again. Continue Reading

Many of us, perhaps most of us, moved to freelancing from a “no” as much as from a “yes.” While we were attracted by what we believed (perhaps a bit naively) a freelancer’s life would be like, we were also saying “no” to a whole bunch of things that annoyed us about working in a larger organization. We figured we would say “no” to idiot bosses, endless meetings, mountains of paperwork, the need to look busy, dressing up, pretending to agree with stupid ideas, and so much more.

Of course, a couple of funny things happened on the way to the freelance life:

1. We discovered that most of these annoyances were still part of making a living through self-employment, and
2. We forgot all about that little word “no.”

Most of what you can do about #1 requires reversing #2. The most successful freelancers, the ones who are really happy in their work and life, are the ones who know how to say “no,” and often.
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