Category: Advice Re-Posts


Boost Your Freelancing Career by Making the Most of LinkedIn Groups

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March 1, 2011

As a freelancer, you likely recognize how important the Internet has become to the success of your business. Potential clients and freelancers now regularly communicate and research each other online. As such, if you aren’t yet a member of the top online social networks, this should be a primary goal of developing your freelance career.

While some social networks are hit and miss when it comes to cultivating connections with potential clients and other freelancers, LinkedIn lists this as its primary purpose. Designed as a professional connection building network, LinkedIn offers immense possibilities for advancing your freelancing career and for building more connections than you may have thought possible.

Here are four tips for effectively using LinkedIn groups to build your freelance network.

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7 Reasons Your Website Doesn’t Bring In New Clients

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February 24, 2011

As a freelancer, you count on your website as an important part of your marketing system. It is like a sales representative, gathering leads and warming them up to become paying clients, 24/7.

That is, IF your website provides the appropriate content, attracts the right readers, is properly optimized for conversion, and is a pleasure to use.

Unfortunately, after years of observation and working with other freelancers, I’ve noticed that freelancers tend to make plenty of mistakes with their websites. In this post, I’ll list seven common website sins freelancers commit.

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Should You Connect with Your Prospects and Clients on Facebook?

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February 24, 2011

If you’ve been a freelancer for a while, you will eventually get a request from a client or prospective client to connect on Facebook.

While normally we encourage freelancers to connect with clients through social media, for many freelancers Facebook is different.

Because Facebook has become mainstream for many, particularly in the U.S., a freelancer may be connected to a wide spectrum of friends and relatives on Facebook who have absolutely nothing to do with their business. For that reason, many freelancers hesitate before accepting that friend request from a prospect.

On the other hand, some freelancers claim that a Facebook connection with a prospective client is much more likely to turn into a business relationship than other types of social media connections.

In this post, we’ll discuss some of the advantages to connecting with clients through Facebook. We’ll also look at some of the disadvantages of connecting with clients through Facebook.

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15 Professional Details that Can Land You More Work

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February 18, 2011

Congratulations, you’re a freelancer.

Now you can work from the comfort of your own home, in your pajamas, while blaring your favorite music so loud your ears bleed.

You can also take breaks whenever you want, schedule your day however you like, and take a two-hour lunch in the middle of the day to chat with your friends on Facebook if it suits you.

Meanwhile, clients are out there searching for a professional in your field who can help them with their problem–an authority in your niche that they can rely on to deliver results.

And while you were chatting on Facebook, they just visited your website’s coming-soon page, have already moved on to your competition’s completed website, and hired them for the project.

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Are Freelancing Expectations Keeping You from Your Ultimate Success?

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February 18, 2011

No matter what your freelancing specialty is, I think it’s fair to say that we all entered freelancing with a certain set of expectations. Of course, your expectations were most likely different mine.

If you’ve been freelancing for any significant length of time, you probably already realize that there are some differences between your expectations before you were a freelancer and your actual experience as a freelancer. In the past, we’ve done a really good job at comparing common freelancing expectations with the reality of freelancing.

In this post, I’m going to do something different. I’m going to explain why your freelancing expectations may be keeping you from success and why you should let those old expectations go.

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How to Partner with Others to Work on Your Freelancing Project

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February 15, 2011

Eventually in the course of your freelancing career, or even in your personal work, you’ll come across a project that requires more than what you can do. There are several ways you can handle this, and most often, I’m happy enough to only do the part I can do and send the client somewhere else.

But sometimes if the project is one you’re really interested in, or one that has a large budget, it can be to your advantage to take on the entire thing. But if the project calls for a designer and you’re a developer, or vice-versa what do you do? This is the time where your involvement in the community comes in handy.

Partnering with other freelancers can be a challenge. You both have completely different ways of working and invoicing, and sometimes those different ways don’t mesh. I’d like to offer some tips and the best ways to find and get along with another person you have to depend on for a job well done.

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8 Essential Steps to Starting Your Freelancing Biz

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February 14, 2011

Getting started in freelancing is pretty scary stuff. In all likelihood, you don’t know a lot of people who’ve done it before, which means you can’t get advice from people you trust.

You’ll be diving into dark, strange waters and may be terrified about your future as well as that of your loved ones.

What if I told you, you can take eight simple steps that will bring you closer to your goal of freelancing? If you just completed one step every few days, or even every week, you’d soon find yourself ready to take the freelancing plunge.

Are you ready for the eight steps? Here they are:

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Why Free Ultimately Pays Off

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February 12, 2011

Here at Freelance Folder we always recommend that Freelancers charge what they are worth. In fact, we’ve written numerous posts to help freelancers determine what to charge for their services.

With all of those posts about setting freelancing rates, you’d think that we’d be the last people to tell freelancers that they should give anything away.

The truth is, giveaways DO work as an effective marketing strategy for freelancers. In this post, we’ll discuss why it works and help you discover how to implement this strategy for your own freelancing business.

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Are Bidding Websites Good for Freelancers to Use?

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February 12, 2011

Is “bid” a dirty word? If so, no one told me until I had already started the dirty task of bidding. Now, people ask me all the time: Are those bidding websites (e.g., oDesk, Project4Hire and Elance) legit?

Seasoned writers often look down their noses at me and say in a snarky tone, “You bid on jobs?” And writers who are just getting started ask me if these sites are scams.

Yes, they are legit. Yes, I bid. And no, there is no scam. In this post, I’ll share my reasons for liking bidding sites.

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Learning When to Refuse Your Community

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February 9, 2011

Aside from your clients, your community is the second most important thing to have as a freelancer. The community includes your Twitter followers, blog commenters, Facebook fans, or any other website where you interact with fellow freelancers who often do something similar to what you do. This can also include your physical community like the business events or conferences you may attend.

To be seen as an expert in the community, it’s important to take the time to help others out. This can be done by helping them with issues, supporting one of their causes or just giving them some advice. People will remember that it was you who helped and will be more likely to return the favor and even to refer clients to you.

But what happens when the community asks for too much? When one person in the community is too demanding or rude? When your schedule is genuinely filled up? Sometimes you’ll find it necessary to decline the requests for help, and it isn’t always pretty.

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