Archive for June, 2009

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11 tips on filling out your profile

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Your profile is a thing that must be taken very seriously. A good filled profile gives the client not only information about your working skills, it can also show that you are responsible, accurate and that you are basically the man for the job! So in this article we will present eleven tips about how to fill a good profile.

  1. Examine the rules of the website concerning the profile and the profiles of the top freelancers in your field. This will help you with some basics of how a good profile must look on this website.
  2. If you already have a resume use it as a basis, if not take some time and make a document with your complete work experience and skills. It is important to remember all your previous work experience before filling out your profile.
  3. Try to choose a general strategy of yourself as a freelancer. For example if you are good in SEO focus the first lines and words of your resume on SEO skills and experience. Try not to present yourself as a do-all guy.
  4. Try to highlight your main skills in the description and make sure that the client will immediately see these skills when he goes to your profile. There is no need to mention all the programming languages you know if you use only PHP or JAVA. You can make a list of these languages in some secondary information fields.
  5. Avoid bright colored elements and any additional creative stuff, focus on the main thing – presenting information to the client.
  6. Post samples of your projects if you have done some outside the website that you are working on. It is also good to post the offline working experience, especially if you worked for some serious companies.
  7. Check the project sample links from time to time, especially if you are in search of new projects. It might happen that the website with your work is down or the URLs were changed. Also be honest about your work, if the work was done some time ago and it was done not very well, better drop the link from your resume.
  8. Be sure to have everything clear with the copyrights of the work that you’ve done. If you are not listed as a developer it is better not to present the project in your portfolio. It can lead to some misunderstanding with your previous clients.
  9. The best thing in a profile is a list of projects already done on the website. So if you are a newcomer try to get three-five properly done projects, it will show that you are a trustworthy person.
  10. If you are a writer – get a blog. If you are a web-developer or a SEO guy – get a website. And give your best effort to keep this website good looking and properly coded. Be sure that it presents you as a professional.
  11. Make a small downloadable and printable version of you portfolio.

That’s all for today, folks :)

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Posted in tips | 5 Comments »

Pricing, fees and flat rates

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

So you are a fresh freelancer, you have a properly filled profile, good working skills and some minor work history. The time has come to work on the pricing strategy. A big part of freelancers starts to plan the income and that is wrong. Usually freelancing has no fixed salary, so there is no need to drop a project if it does not fit your salary paradigm. The first thing that you need to remember is — don’t try to fool yourself and the client. It is always better to say the truth. If you ask more because of the quality of your work, tell it to the client. If the rates for this project are too low tell it to the client. Your pricing strategy must have one simple basis — the amount of money that you need for living. The work of a freelancer is hard and at some points you will be definitely left without a large, profitable main project. During such times it is vital to reconsider your salary. A good solution is to have few pricing schemes that include different rates for your main types of jobs. As a good real life example I have minimal and preferable rate. Usually I post the preferable one, or a little less than preferable and I also post the minimal one (for a possible large project) in case the client has more work. Pricing for large projects is tricky. On the one hand I usually offer lower prices if the project is large and ongoing. On the other hand during large projects (especially if you need to be available for some tasks 24/7) it is okay to ask for some additional payment for reliability.

Keep in mind that you are advertising yourself to the buyer and use the most effective strategies of advertising. For example everyone knows that buying a larger pack of snacks for example is economically more effective than buying three small packs, but not everyone can use such ideas in freelance. In negotiation with the client you are selling your time and skills, so try to show that you have good quality and most important flexible and negotiable prices. It gives the client a feeling that he has an influence of the situation, while you are the one who will define the price in the end.

Another good pricing strategy are bonuses. Don’t hesitate if you see that a part of clients website for example is poorly coded or needs additional search optimization, offer to fix the problem for a bonus fee. In one of my latest projects I easily raised the article price by %5 with simply offering additional meta tags for each page. Of course %5 won’t give a huge sum but for a 200 articles project it will already be a difference. So remember to grab as much extra work as possible especially if the buyer pays well.

The most important thing that you need to know about pricing is: don’t be afraid to loose the project because you wanted too much; there is always another project nearby.

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Hints for a freelance article writer part one

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

With this article we will start a series of publications with hints for article writers.

There is one thing that most of the beginner writers don’t want to accept — more work, less creativity! You need to be creative only if you are asked to. 99% (okay maybe 90%) of the buyers actually don’t need imagination. If you need to write a large number of articles most probably the ideas will be borrowed from other websites. The buyer sees something he likes and he needs to get a similar article for his website. So there is no need to bother with inventing something new. The facts will always be the same: this law is specified in this part of the Criminal Code, this car has this air conditioning installed and this hotel is rated with five stars. Everything you need is to spice up the existing document and facts. Before you start writing an article it is better to search the web for some similar articles. This will help you with choosing the style for your article and definitely help you with some additional ideas. Your best friend in most of the cases will be Wikipedia. Usually my articles consist of 40-70% original article + 20-50% Wikipedia facts and related ideas + 10% of my own ideas and thoughts about the subject. The result — an article where buyer sees the facts, something he liked in the previous article and most important some new thoughts. Of course this strategy helps not in every case, but it works for any large project. And… oh yeah this article is completely original.

Another common problem is the level of English. The best solution is to write simple. A large part of the web comes from non-English speaking countries, so it is best to focus on some plain and understandable English if possible. Try to avoid some complex sentence structures and if there is a choice between a simple word and a specific term choose the simple word. Of course it doesn’t mean that you need to write in monkey English.

As for the large projects, there is a thing that beginners usually don’t believe in: it is actually very hard to write big amounts of articles. So if you are negotiating a big project don’t be a hero and promise to finish everything in one day, better take some more time. I manage to write not more than 8-10 500 word articles (this article is a 500 word one) per day and this is very hard. It is hard to maintain a good writing tempo; it is hard to generate new ideas and thoughts starting from like article number six; it is hard to avoid mistakes when you are tired. If you can write a 500 word article in 30 minutes, it doesn’t mean that you will be able to handle 10 articles in 5 hours. It will most probably take like 10-12 hours with breaks. So in every case it is always better to split large projects into smaller parts.

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Posted in writing | 4 Comments »

Documenting your work

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Documentation is a thing that most of the freelancers usually ignore and I took it not seriously for a long time. Still one of the companies where I worked had strict rules concerning documentation and I just had to organize and label my doc files. Today I understand that is it was actually very helpful, because proper and organized work with documentation is very important for a freelancer in many ways. Most of the buyers will be impressed by nice documents and this can lead to additional work for you. Also it will be easier for you to search your own old work. So let’s move to some practical things.

In letters don’t forget the greetings and goodbyes even if your client already dropped them, be professional. Of course this is not crucial for your work, but it will keep you more disciplined and the client impressed. Also check grammar in your letters even if your English is good, you can always miss some mistakes. The topic of the letter is important, all the good buyers (and OnlineFreelance recommends to look only for good buyers) usually have about a dozen projects running. Labeling your letters like “GetAFreelancer – yoursite.com project – php forum complete – 06.06.2009″, will make it easier for your clients and will give additional points to you.

Common documents like reports for example, are the main working element, especially for article writers, translators and marketing guys. I have one professional secret: if I can’t concentrate and start working on a new article – I create a document. Sounds stupid but it works, this will bring additional order to your thoughts and with an open document hanging you will be always reminded about your unfinished article. Contents of the documents must have basics like headers, numeration and even a table of contents if the document is big. Remember that your documents will be read, they must look good and be well formatted. A bad document is a direct disrespect of the reader, still there is no need to focus on this too much. In a while you will find your most common documentation templates that you are comfortable with and this problem will be solved for you. Labeling of documents must be also done properly. Add dates, numbers and topics to file or archive names. Keep the work in special folders and keep the folders clean and organized. It will help you to find parts of the work if the client lost them or if you need to look at a certain part of some previous project.

It will be useful to master the Google Docs. This service will keep your documents online, stored in a special place and your clients who have a Gmail account will be able to access these documents. The documents will be safe from disasters like hard drive crashes, still you work will be tied to the Internet too much. The best way here is to keep your docs both on Google Docs and on your hard drive.

Posted in uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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