The Savvy Freelancer

Let's put the "freedom" in freelancing

Readers Corner Q&A #3

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Today’s question comes from Tyler who’s just starting out.

I have just started trying to work on freelancing, I don’t have any experience or clients just a blog (www.IamTheFutureMe.com) I started and hope that I can start freelancing to make some additional income. What’s the number one thing I should do?

Hey Tyler, thanks for the question.

The number #1 (and only) thing you should be doing right now is talking to potential clients.

Here’s a link to how I moved from employment to freelancing.

You say you’ve started a blog – what do you plan to do with it? Is it going to be a personal blog or do you hope to get business through the site at some point?

You didn’t say what your skills are, so let’s assume you haven’t got them mapped out yet. Check out the “How To Win High Paying Clients” free series. That covers selecting your most profitable skills,  finding a targeted niche, packaging your service to that niche, understanding and speaking to a clients specific needs, and how to make contact.

You want to find clients with problems, make sure that those problems that are profitable, and that the clients your targeting have the means to pay.

There’s no point in running a $1250 course on teaching college kids how to travel the world and earn money on the side – they might be interested, but they probably don’t have the money to pay.

There’s also no point in running a course for senior citizens wanting to train as bodyguards – they probably have the money to pay, but they’re not interested.

I’ve picked two particularly extreme examples, but hopefully you get the idea.

To summarize – talk to people, find their needs and problems, charge to solve. (But the 5 day mini course will give you far more detailed steps on exactly what to do and how)

Comments? Questions? If I didn’t cover anything, just leave me a note in the comments box.

Readers Corner Q&A #2

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Today’s question comes from David, a seasoned freelancer and tech journalist.

I am a full-time freelance technology journalist / writer / corporate writer for the tech space. I have been doing this full-time from the start, and for 16 years now. Last year I earned just into six figures for the first time. I expect that by working fast, finishing as many projects as I can weekly or daily, I can maintain and perhaps increase that income. I seem to have marketing down. I currently have 8 to 10 new potential clients contacting me out of the blue as often as monthly and occasionally within a single week alone. I find that by sticking to the kind of work I want to do and my pricing, about 2 to 3 of every 8 to 10 come to the point of wanting to follow through and hire me. I typically end up having all the work I can handle at least a month ahead, and sometimes into the foreseeable future.

I charge by the job, based on a per-word rate X the word count. Offering hourly rates killed my business and not everyone works with a per-word rate. Everyone is happy to work with a flat rate per project. What I have found is that there is a ceiling in this business on what any client, even a Fortune 100 company in the tech industry will pay. I am finding there are other things they will buy, such as consulting on story ideas, editorial calendar planning, and, for content providers looking to serve a new industry and topic area, and understanding of that technical field and what is important to that readership. I work faster to get more done in the same amount of time while maintaining quality. I am confident, thoughtful, and professional. I could go on about all the things I do to market and ramp up clients, work, and remuneration.

What is the next level for me? What can I add in marketing, content types, subject matter, and approaches to what I already do in order to grow my business and my income?

Let’s summarize with some bullet points:

  • Full time journalist & writer in the tech space
  • You just hit 6 figures per year
  • You have 8 to 10 new leads per month, converting to 2 to 3 sales
  • You pick the best work, but could close more sales if you wanted to
  • You’re booked up at least a month in advance
  • You charge per word
  • You’re at the ceiling for what a client will pay

Congratulations on building up such a successful business and reputation. You’re earning well and have a continuous stream of new business. One of the biggest pains in freelancing is the peak and trough of work, and it looks like you’ve got that nailed.

As you can see, working on a per word basis has a ceiling. Even if the content you’re producing is the best in the world – quote $3 per word and watch them balk!

You mention that every client is happy to work on an agreed fixed price. That’s because they know what they’re in for from the outset, and it also mitigates their risk that you would pad out the content (that’s not a criticism of your integrity, more a realistic fear that any client would have on a per X arrangement). That being said, realize that you’re still working on a per word basis in the client’s eyes. The client knows that $700 for a 2,000 word editorial works out at $0.35 per word.

I see a couple paths forward, which are not mutually exclusive:
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Readers Corner Q&A #1

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I sent out a mailing to my wonderful subscribers over the weekend asking them for their freelancing questions and problems. Here I am answering them! The first question comes from Dustin in Ohio:

I’ve been freelancing for about 6 months now as a programmer (PHP and web stuff). I’ve picked up a couple of jobs on oDesk but the rates are terrible. I’m going for anything I can do to try and build up more projects. I average about $23 an hour, when I was getting $25 an hour in a full time job ($50,000). I’ve lost my company health insurance, job benefits, stability and $2 an hour. What can I do to increase my rates and get better clients?

Great question Dustin – you’re definitely not the only one struggling with this. You’ve made a great start, don’t negate that! You have your own business, you’re earning close to what you were in your job and you’ve got your own Clients. We do need to do something about those rates though.

What are your specific programming skills? If you’re advertising yourself as a “PHP and web programmer” then you’re competing against a million others. $23 per hour is a pretty good average rate for a US based freelance junior web programmer.

Here’s my advice:
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How I Built My Freelancing Business

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So head back about 12 years, and I was employed in a small networking company. After deciding that employment wasn’t for me, I transitioned my job into a freelancing gig. I had one or two small freelancing projects on the side, generating about $400 to $600 each month, but it was my networking job (and now new freelancing client) that was generating about $3,000 per month as my main source of income.

I knew that the company’s financial situation wasn’t fantastic, and relying on it for 85% of my income wasn’t a smart move.

Tip: Even if your largest contract is financially stable, make plans based on losing that contract. Companies come and go, change direction and change ownership. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

Image Credit (CC)

15743502615_b9486c61da_zSo, I decided it was time to broaden my client base. I had some tech skills – mainly embedded hardware, PHP programming, networking and Linux server admin. I got on “Rent A Coder”, which later became vWorker, which is now Freelancer.com and started hunting for projects.

I don’t recommend Freelancer.com any more. It’s changed a lot, and I haven’t touched it in over 5 years now. The structure, pricing model, and huge number of very low quality freelancers and projects make it very difficult to find decent clients and make a solid, stable income. 12 years ago though, there was about 1 good project for every 9 bad ones.

I was applying for anything I could get my hands on that paid “OK” and loosely matched my skillset. I’ve written technical tutorials, customized existing software, built PHP web applications, and more! After working with about 9 or 10 different clients, two of them turned in to longer term requirements.
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Getting Away From Bad Clients & Bad Projects

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Freelancers often think that they have to take anything and everything that’s offered to them. It comes down to a mindset of scarcity – “There’s only so many paying clients, and a seemingly unlimited pool of freelancers. If a client wants to pay me, how can I say no?”

Lets start by separating fact from fiction.

  • Myth: There’s only so many paying clients. The number of potential clients is unlimited. If you can find a problem, a client will pay for you to provide a solution. The bigger the problem, the more they’ll pay to have it solved.
  • Fact: There’s an unlimited pool of freelancers. That’s true – there are millions of freelancers out there. If you learn to reach out to clients correctly though (see here), then you’ll no longer be price-competing with other freelancers.
  • Myth: If a client wants to pay me, how can I say no? Once you lose the scarcity mindset and understand that there are opportunities everywhere, you realize that you don’t need to be stuck doing work you don’t like or aren’t particularly good at, and you definitely don’t need to be working for clients you can’t stand.

What Makes a Bad Client?

There are a couple of different clients that, at this stage, I just won’t deal with:

  • Bad attitude: Rude or condescending.
  • Price obsessed: Fixated on getting everything as fast and cheap as possible.
  • Lack of understanding: Has no idea of what he’s asking for or what’s involved. Not interested in learning.

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You Don’t Need Permission to Start or Grow your Business

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Most of the freelancers I’ve met (myself included) have experienced “imposter syndrome” at one time or another – the fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. This shows up as a lack of confidence, using wishy-washy and non committal language in outreach, hesitation when it comes to billing and a lack of growth into more profitable niches.

So let’s look at the idea of expertise. People think that being an expert means being in the world’s top 10 in that subject, possessing degrees and PhDs and having decades of experience. That’s not what an expert is! I have a slightly different take on what expertise is.

If you’ve read 3 books, 3 blogs and 3 forums on a given subject, then you’re an expert. You know more on the subject than 99% of other people. Those people are your clients – you’re able to help and teach them through your knowledge and skills.

Needing Permission (Approval) to Start

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5813566564_f9c8dcd9be_zA lot of would-be freelancers get stuck before they’ve even started at the “waiting for permission” stage. That bit of paper that says, “you’re qualified, you have my permission to work in this area.” Aside from a few professions (medicine, law, structural engineering, etc..) you do not need any more qualifications than those that you do or don’t already have in order to find clients that you can provide a service for.

Here’s a personal example… 5 of 6 years ago, I wanted to move away from standard web development and more into high end web security testing. I already had a reasonable level of knowledge, but was scared of being “called out” as a fraud in the industry. Rather than going out and finding clients with web security needs and problems, I decided I needed more qualifications first. I went out and over the course of 2 years, I took (please don’t laugh) no less than 13 high end professional exams and accreditations.

How much extra business did that result in? 0, nothing, nada.

Did it address my “imposter syndrome” fears? Not really. I now had a new list of reasons for why I wasn’t qualified to start offering my services:

  • I haven’t had 5 years experience working for large internet security firms.
  • I haven’t contributed research papers to the security community
  • I still don’t know enough about technology X, Y and Z

Come on! Seriously?!
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The Importance of Setting Goals as a Freelancer

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This is a guest post by Ryan Battles, the co-founder of Harpoon—a financial goal setting, time-tracking, and invoicing app for freelancers. Feel motivated to set and track your financial goals after reading this post? Try a 14-day free trial of Harpoon and see how easy it can be.

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When I first started out freelancing, I was in panic mode. I took on every job that came my way, and even took on projects that were way out of my area of focus.

The answer was always “yes”:

  • Can you make me a website? Yes.
  • Can you do X for $80? Sure.
  • Will you take my dog to the groomer? I’d love to.

I lacked direction and clarity. I had no idea how much money I was planning to make, what types of jobs would get me there, and which skills to market. In short…I didn’t set any goals.
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How to Avoid Free Work and Unbilled Hours

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It’s easy to let free work and unbilled hours creep in to a relationship with a client. Sure, a potential client could just come straight out and ask you for a free article or some free development code to “prove” you’re up to the job. I’ve talked about how I handle that. Here though, I’m talking about the more subtle ways we can end up working for free:

  • Phone calls that turn into a free consulting and brainstorming sessions.
  • Back and forth email communication
  • Delivering the work to the client
  • Management and billing

5930039474_7a5af71e59_zImage Credit (CC)

With a defined sales progress, it’s not too hard to avoid working for free before closing the sale. What happens once our lead has become a client?

Let’s give an example of a freelance writer on $40/hr. The freelancer has agreed with the client that a given article is going to take 3 hours to research and write. Great – that’s $120.

Now lets look at what actually happens:

  1. Communicate back and forth with client discussing ideas and topics (30 minutes)
  2. Research and write article (3 hours)
  3. Client asks for “a couple of quick things”:
    • Find a few free images (15 minutes)
    • Upload the articles to WordPress, with tags and categories applied (10 minutes)
    • Format the article so it appears in line with the other blog articles (25 minutes)
    • Link out to other articles on the client’s blog (10 minutes)
  4. Generating invoice, chasing payment, confirming payment (15 minutes)

Should the short amount of time to handle billing of the project be attributed to the client? No, not really. Factor it in to your hourly rate. So setting that aside, the total time handling the project has been 4 hours and 30 minutes. Our hourly rate has just dropped from $40 to $26.50!
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Why You Must Have a Sales Process

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A lot of the freelancers I’ve spoken to think that sales processes or “funnels” are for marketing guys or large companies with sales departments. Wrong! I’ll get straight into why, with a personal example.

About 5 or 6 years ago, one of my existing clients recommended me to one of his business associates. The company was a reasonably sized e-commerce platform, and I was looking forward to speaking with them. We set up an initial call, which spanned 2 hours! The guy wanted to see multiple examples of e-commerce admin panels I’d built for previous clients, go into detail on his existing system and strategies to migrate it over, and share stories of past development problems.

suit-673697_1280No problem I thought, this is going to be a long term job.

We scheduled a second call for a couple of days later, and pretty much the same thing happened again – 2 hours of free consultancy on technical strategy, followed by emails back and forth, research and more free consultancy.

After that call, things went quiet. I followed up a couple of times and got no response. Eventually he got back to me, said that other things had come up, and assured me that he’d be back in touch very soon. I followed up a few more times in the month after – no response.
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How I Transitioned from Employment into Freelancing (and What Not to Do)

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Whenever I approach a new venture or a change, I like to minimize risk. I prefer taking small and calculated steps rather than big risky ones.

So… rewind about 12 years..

I’d been doing a bit of freelancing online, and was doing OK but not earning anything significant – somewhere in the range of $400-$600 per month. I decided to compress my freelancing projects to Saturdays and evenings, and I took a job at a small wireless networking company.

After a couple of months, my hunger to be doing my own thing was back. See the problem is, I work very quickly and efficiently. I would get my day’s work done in a couple of hours, and spend the rest of the day just passing the time in the office, dreaming about what else I could be doing. Sure – I could always be getting more done, but what for? I wasn’t going to get paid any extra. I guess the passion was lacking, but how passionate can you be about someone else’s venture?

banner-997375_640 Anyway, after a while I plucked up the courage to go to the Director and tell him that I wanted to leave my employment role but continue working for them in a contract/freelance capacity. The crunch was that I was going to be working remotely and offsite now. I felt confident – I knew I’d proven my value there, and I knew they wouldn’t find someone else with my skill set easily or at the same rates.

After a lot of huffing and puffing about it, the Director agreed. So, what made this happen?

  1. It was a very small company (4 staff) with reasonably flexible schedules.
  2. I had already proven my value.
  3. The work could easily be done remotely.

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Adam Palmer, The Savvy Freelancer. PO BOX 306, HA74ZN, London, UK, +44 7739 022 412