Editor’s Note: Skellie is the director for the Envato Tuts+ network and drives the social media promotion for nine brands with over 100,000 Facebook fans. This article is an excerpt from her newest book, Successful Facebook Marketing, sold by Rockable Press.

Your goals with Facebook should not only be to get more Likes and more traffic. One of the first things people learn at Business School is that it costs much more time, energy, and often money to add a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. Keeping your fans loyal and happy is just as important, if not more important, than finding new fans. For this reason, it’s important to use your Facebook Page to build more loyalty among your existing fans, and to gain a better understanding of them.

As I mentioned earlier, comments are one of the most useful ways fans can interact with your Facebook posts. Every time a fan leaves a comment it is shared on their profile and in their friends’ News Feeds. While you’re building brand loyalty and interacting directly with your audience, you’re also creating pathways for new fans to find your Page. For this reason, content that encourages discussion will be one of the best possible additions to your Facebook Page. Continue Reading

Credit: TheGiantVermin on Flickr

Whether they’re designers, developers, copywriters, or some other creative professional, most freelancers ask themselves the very same question: How can I find more clients?

We’ve updated our monster list of over a hundred ideas designed to help you do just that. Not all of these ideas will make sense to everyone, but we hope you’ll find at least a few to help you find newer and better paying freelance opportunities. Here we go … Continue Reading

If you don’t have a client tracking system in place to measure how long it takes to convert a prospect – your potential customer – into a client – a paying customer – you probably will have a hard time predicting what your monthly income will be.

I am not an Excel guru, but I have created a quick spreadsheet that you can use to track how long the process takes.  If you are diligent about filling in the data, you will soon be able to analyze where your new customers are coming from and what the fastest method of converting them is.  I know, not all customers are the same, but with more data you should find more consistency.

I hope you find this useful – and I already know that it’s not pretty, I’m a writer, not a designer, but it should be a good tool to help you start to predict your revenue for the coming months.

Client Tracking Spreadsheet

Kudos to you if you recognize any of the clients. Continue Reading

The last survey was quite fun, and seemed to generate some great discussion and results. This time, I’d like to suggest that we share where the majority of our clients are coming from.  If you have any tips or tricks on ways that you convert  a prospective client into a paying client – we’d love to hear that in the comments.

Setting your rates as a freelancer can be a tough decision. You have to determine what amount you have to earn each hour in order to not only pay your bills but have a little extra left over. You have to decide what your work is worth. You have to decide what clients will be willing to pay. And once you’ve spent all that time and energy figuring out your rates, a client will come along and want to negotiate an entirely different rate.

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As I plan my business activities for 2010, I’ve decided to create an ideal project profile. You may have heard of an ideal client profile – it helps you visualize the exact type of client you’d like to work with. The ideal project profile describes in detail the exact kind of work you’d like to do for your ideal client. This post will show you how to create an ideal project profile for next year and beyond.

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The first few years of my career as a freelancer, I figured that an in-person meeting was logical in order to get jobs. After all, not everyone is comfortable hiring someone they have never met face-to-face.

And it does make sense for clients to want to meet with a prospective freelancer, but I have come to observe the same thing with most face-to-face meetings: They don’t land the work for me.

At first, I thought it was me; that I wasn’t getting the jobs because I didn’t present myself well in person or did not do enough to hook the client. Perhaps my portfolio was lacking, I figured. But after finding out that many of the people I met with had postponed their project or still have yet to complete it, I’ve realized that there has to be more to it. It’s them…the prospective clients.

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Every so often, I come across a request for a freelancer who can pass a background check or has a security clearance. The background check is more common: especially with clients more used to working with full-time employees, it’s standard practice to ask a freelancer to submit to a background check. There are also situations in which a freelancer might be working in a sensitive situation where a background check isn’t just a matter of a client who just reused HR hiring procedures for full-time employees.

There are also occasions where clients might ask for a freelancer with a security clearance. The cases in which a freelancer actually might need a security clearance tend to be rare — long-term projects for government contractors are just about the only possibility. I have seen some occasions when clients who weren’t particularly familiar with the differences between clearances and background checks asked for a clearance but meant a background check.

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Imagine we’re having a conversation, and I’m telling you about where I live. I might describe how Eagleby is located between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and mention the names of important roads. I might explain that Eagleby is situated between twin rivers, and the bird life in our wetlands—including eagles—attracts bird watchers from around the world. I might also mention that the reputation of some parts of Eagleby is summed up by the name given it by the locals: “Illegalby”.

While I was talking, most likely you were only half-listening. Perhaps you were also thinking about lunch, organizing three things you need to get done this afternoon, daydreaming about how cool you think eagles are, evaluating some ideas for a new website, and wishing I would change the subject.

Now imagine that the context of the conversation was that you were about to drive to Eagleby to meet with me about an important job. You would have listened in an entirely different way. And that’s the difference between passive and active listening. In this article we’ll look at why active listening is an essential skill for freelancers.

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