Freelance Radio, Episode 17: A Riddle Shrouded in a Mystery
The seventeenth episode of Freelance Radio, the official FreelanceSwitch podcast, is now available! This episode, we discuss a number of freelancing issues, including organization, dealing with tough economic conditions, working with clients who don’t adhere to payment terms, low-cost ways to get clients and advertise 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!
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The Shownotes:
- Theme of the Episode: This episode’s theme is organization, and we all share our strategies for managing our files and papers as well as our digital files.
- Fantastic Forum Post and Mailbag: We talk about dealing with adverse economic conditions (question from Antonio, from artificestudios.com) and how to deal with clients that don’t adhere to payment terms (question from melek in the FreelanceSwitch forums).
- Twitter Talk: We answer a live Twitter question from Paul about how to advertise and find new clients if you don’t have any money.
- Outro: This week’s song is by Justin Wong and is called Ever After from his album Crowd of None. The song can be obtained by going to Justin’s CDBaby page. Justin is a freelance web designer (in addition to an amazing musician!) who has a web design consultancy up at Vagrant Concept.
And that’s the seventeenth episode! If you like it, please feel free to rate it in iTunes or your favorite podcast aggregator (check us out on Digg at http://www.digg.com/podcasts/Freelance_Radio), and don’t forget to email your questions/comments via the Freelance Radio form. If you’d like to record a question/comment or submit an original outro song, you can upload them via this form!
love the podcast! You should have more questions via twitter
keep up the great work!
On the recession and economic problems: I have observed two things first-hand. First, the nature of freelance work has changed in that I am no longer able to find multi-week gigs, but instead my roles are very sporadic and only last for 3-4 days at a time. This is frustrating because it means I have lot more downtime, which is always bad in general. I think that staff is being worked harder because companies (both agencies and clients) are less likely to bring in freelancers. Even though freelancers are easy to “bill back”, if project budgets are smaller in general, it means that freelancers are the first to go.
The second thing I’ve noticed is that rates have gone down! Lately, I find myself making the same hourly rate that I was making in 2005! Forget cost-of-living increases, I’m having to take what I can get because the jobs are scarce.
There is a conventional wisdom that indicates that when times are tough, companies will cut staff in favour of freelancers. Therefore, it’s good for us. I have not observed that trend, or at least have not been in touch with those clients who are in a position to hire premalance or staff-replacement. Instead, as I’ve said, they will put more burden on the existing staff, or in general take on less work.
I have subscribed to this and will be watching them all on my iPod.
@ Prescott Perez-Fox= it could just be where i am but it seems agencies are hiring a lot of freelancers. They seem to have a smaller core staff and then just bring people [ like me
] in when then add projects. But like I said it couuld just be my location.
Enjoyed the episode. Think it offered many bits and pieces on how to improve my organization. Especially in the fonts department. When John mentioned tagging of files, I immediately thought of the application called Leap ( http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html ). Think that might be worth a shot. Haven’t tested it myself, but it seems the tagging module is pretty extensive. Keep up the great work!
Really good and helpful eps. I did have a great question. What type of pre-qualifying documents/elements do you guys use to weed out clients? I know some people use forums, others use very strict contracts…what do you guys use to stay away from those type of clients?
Freelance Radio Rocks!!
You guys really helped me and motivated me to go full time freelance, where as I was struggling with this for last one year.
Now I am ready to roll and will be launching my site on 1st Jan 2009 with all the tips I leaned from freelance radio podcast.
Thanks so much guys!! Keep up the good work!!
This is such an awesome site! Keep it up!
Regarding Font Management:
Why not spend a few dollars and buy suitcase. it’s a font management program that is both for mac and windows.
Great show!
Love your podcasts, listening from day one. Heard you mention OSX spaces. I’ve just switched over to OSX and made a vid about my setup with spaces.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXGcumd9iaE
Hope it helps some one.