Archive for April, 2008

In Part one of this series, “The Freelancer’s Guide”, we talked about how to find jobs.

Today we”ll go into the second point I spoke about, and the next obvious step in freelancing. We will talk about “How to land a job“.

How can I land the job?

Once you find a job, unless your at the point when people come to you for work directly, or you have some great connections, it’s going to be tough to some extent to land a job. We’ll talk about 5 ways in which you can do that.

1. Outbid the others

When you start off, I’m sure you won’t have a problem taking $5-10 PayPal cash to take care of a logo that will take you 30 minutes. So when someone bids $20 on a job, say you’ll do $15! You’ll already have an advantage over them that way. Of course, don’t sell yourself too short! This is a problem that I struggled with when I first started freelancing. I refused to work cheap, and wanted as much as the big boys. But of course, if someone was willing to spend that much, they wouldn’t have gone with the big dogs. Also, look at it this way. You can view the first few (5-10, not first 2) as just tests. To learn how to deal with the clients, meet deadlines, etc. Also, any and all small or large projects, whether you worked cheap or not, will build your portfolio. This way you are more trusted. So don’t feel bad if you worked a little cheap for the first couple jobs, it’ll help you out in the end.

2. Be Friendly

I will be talking about this in more detail in a later part of this series, but it’s very important, so I’ll make mention of it here as well. If you are not friendly to both the person looking for the job to be done, or the other freelancers looking to take the job, people will not trust you, and you will most likely not end up with the job.

3. Have a Portfolio

I know that it’s going to be hard or impossible to do this at first, but why not try and mock up just a few of your own ideas, and set up a quick portfolio? This way, your clients will have something to take a look at before they trust “dsingrz194″ with their business’s logo.

4. Follow up

Even if you send a PM or email regarding a job and don’t hear back immediately, send another. Now, do not be annoying and ask over and over, but if you don’t hear back in 2-3 days, shoot another email, just to follow up with them and see if the position has been filled or if they are still looking. People really love an ambitious freelancer.

5. Don’t ask for full upfront Payment

I know this is an oddly specific point, but it’s true. If you ask for full upfront payment, especially if you are new to freelancing, you will scare off the potential client, as this is a way that “fake” freelancers scam some out of their hard earned money. If anything ask for 25% or maybe even 50% upfront payment, and make sure that you offer a refund of that deposit if the client is not happy with the product. Once you get larger, you may be able to say “25% upfront, 10% non refundable” or something of the like.

Those are pretty much the 5 most basic and important ways to land the job, and I hope you all can use them. In part three we’ll talk about how to gain repeat clients, or “regulars”. So Subscribe to the RSS Feed and don’t miss it!

Well, I won’t be posting the part two of my freelancer’s guide series tonight, that will be saved for tomorrow.

For today, I’d like to talk about a great purchase I made this week.

It was for a Wordpress Plugin of sorts called “OIOPublisher”, and what this plugin does is extends the wordpress functionality to include a full blown ad server.

It allows you to sell banners, 125×125 ad blocks, text links, paid reviews, in post ads, and even a custom download purchase, such as an eBook or premium Wordpress theme. The difference is it automates everything. The sales, the tracking, the follow-up emails, the renewal reminders, the cancellations, everything.

It includes a PayPal module so people can automatically send you a payment and have their ad put up. You can also set it to wait until you approve it.

In addition, you can set it to rotate the banners, mix up their positions in relation to each other, and much much more.

One of my favorite features is that you can have a custom purchase, which I will use to sell an upcoming premium wordpress theme.

In addition, there is a great forum over at www.oiopublisher.com for you to browse through, and some great docs.

In addition, use the coupon code QWERTY-17 when purchasing, and the price will drop from the already reasonable $37 to $20. That’s a $17 discount!

All in all, this is a great plugin, and I fully support it, Simon, (the creator) has done a great job with it, and it’s continuing to grow nicely.

Well, that’s my review of it, I’d give it 4.5/5 MonkeyBlogger Vines

Tomorrow I will be releasing Part two of my series “The Freelancer’s Guide”, so stay tuned in to MonkeyBlogger.com!

**NOTE** I Should mention, the site will be down from 12:00PM Eastern Time tomorrow (Wednesday April 30th) for 90 minutes while my site is being moved to a stronger server by my host. I am sorry for the inconvenience. **

This is the start of a new series, I was going to hold off on releasing it, but I figured with the success of the first MonkeyBlogger series on Networking With Digital Point, I’d go ahead and start this one now.

In this series we’re going to be talking about freelancers, and where to find work, how to land a job, how to gain repeat clients, how to deal with clients, and how to create smooth work-flows when you have numerous jobs.

In this part one, we’ll cover where to find work.

We’re going to go over 3 websites you can use to find work, and the pros and cons of each.

Digital Point

Now, I know I’ve talked about Digital Point before, and I know that a lot of people are going to give me a hard time about bringing them up again, but they do provide a great place to find freelancing work. Let’s start off with a few pros and cons of this freelance work resource.

Link: http://forums.digitalpoint.com

Pros

• Free to use
• Provides you with a resource for any kind of freelance work
• Fairly easy to gain a good reputation

Cons

• Requires you to make 25 posts before you can access the Services Section
• You must be a member for 7 days before your allowed to access the section
• You will most likely be scammed a time or two (I’ve been scammed 5 times or more)
• People are cheap and you won’t get paid too great

All in all, it’s a good place to get your freelancing started, but eventually, you’ll want to move on and find some better work.

Get a Freelancer

Get a freelancer is a directory of freelancing jobs in every category you could think of, from writing to data entry, to graphic design, heck, even video editing services.

Link: http://getafreelancer.com

Pros

• Huge directory
• Any kind of work you can imagine
• Most jobs pay well
• It’s free to sign up

Cons

• Costs to find freelancers
• Hard to get jobs when you don’t have much experience
• Jobs get so many bids, that it’s hard to always get the job

All in all, Get a Freelancer is a great site for freelancing work, highly recommended by me.

Freelance Switch

This site is well designed, has some great work, and it’s pretty cheap to use.

Link: http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/

Pros

• You can find a lot of long term work here
• Jobs are usually very well paying
• There’s less of a chance you will be scammed than at any other freelancing site

Cons

• Costs money per month to join as a freelancer
• Most people will want strong portfolios, which as a new freelancer you will most likely not have

For the most part Freelance Switch is a great resource for freelance work, although it has a few things about it.

So this will conclude the first part in this series, where we talked about where to find work. In part two, we’ll cover “How to Land the job” and I think you’ll enjoy it, so Subscribe to the full RSS Feed and keep updated.

Ok guys. I full apologize for not posting yesterday, had a crazy day, but everything is back to normal now.

I’ll have some better content for tomorrow, but I thought I’d do just a little bit of a round-up for today.

My Picks of the Week

The following is a list of my favorite posts of this week.

• Don’t be an a**, show some class

Despite the minor language, this post is a winner. I feel strongly about this personally, that if you are nice and polite with others, and are genuine about it, you will have more success.

• How I Made $2,000 This Week And How You Can Follow My Success

This post was written up by Jason today, but I thought I’d still mention it. I will be talking about this in the coming weeks, as I’m trying this offline marketing method myself. So we’ll all see how it works.

• 8 SMO Tips To Nitro Boost Your Traffic

This is a great post on MMA (Mixed Market Arts ) that really goes into the essentials of social media optimization. It’s a great read, and highly recommended by me.

Well, that’s enough round-up wise for this week, I’ll be featuring more bloggers next week. But onto the next part of this post.

Updates

Just a few updates, the Alexa has dropped about 200k from last week, from around 5.5 million to 5.3, not that great at all, but it’s slowly moving down.

Also, in the last week or so, we’ve been averaging over 80 visitors a day and over 115 page views per day, and slowly rising, so that’s great news.

In the last week, we’ve also gain 6 new RSS readers, so that’s always great news.

I’m really happy with the growth of this blog so far, and I can’t wait to see it grow more, and I hope you guys will all be there to see it.

Regards,

- Mark

This is a guest post for MonkeyBlogger by Breakaway from Link Building Bible, an ever-growing list of one way link building tips.

If you have a website or a blog, then there are two things that you should be concerned with:

1) Getting traffic
2) Getting to the top of search engines (for more traffic)

There are many ways to get traffic and backlinks to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings position. One of those ways is to sponsor someone’s contest.

There are always tons of contests going on throughout the many different blogs that there are online (and there are many!) Each of these contests needs prizes to be given away. Many times the owner of the blog that I hosting the contest is not rich enough (or is cheap) and doesn’t want to spend their own money to sponsor the blog, and if I was a blog owner, I probably wouldn’t want to spend thousands for a massive contest either. So, the blog owner looks to other people to donate prizes!

Here is where your opportunity comes. Why not sponsor a prize for the contest. You’ll get listed as a prize contributor with a backlink to your site, which can be one more backlink in your arsenal in the search engine rankings wars.

But, how many people constantly browse over the prizes list for a contest they are hoping to win! They see that you donated a cool prize, and they follow the link that is listed, and it brings them to your site. What a fantastic way to get people to your site. This is also a great way to promote an ebook that is related to the contest blog’s content. Many people will follow the link, want to win your ebook if it looks appealing, and then go on to buy it if they don’t win.

You don’t have to host your own contest (even though this is an even better way to get traffic and backlinks) but if you aren’t ready to start your own contest, then why not sponsor prizes on other people’s contests and get some great backlinks and most importantly traffic from all of the people viewing the prizes.

If you want to sponsor a contest right now, then head on over to MonkeyBlogger’s contact page and send them a note telling them what you’d like to sponsor!