Posts Tagged ‘tricks’

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!

Something that a lot of bloggers strive to achieve and in most many situations end up giving up on, is a little thing called originality.

There are two main ways to be original and keep the originality: Personality and Original Content. We’ll talk about both.

Personality

When starting a blog, most bloggers try to give it a “personal” touch, or to have a unique way of delivering content. One blogger that particular stood out to me in doing this is Jason at The University Kid.

He gives his posts a personal touch by talking directly to you, and steering clear of talking in third person about himself. This is something that looks professional at first, but can really become irritating to readers eventually.

In the same way, many bloggers make their blog original or personal by using techniques like these. But the problem is keeping the originality in there.

It’s not so tough throwing in personal touches, or a corny joke here and there , but eventually, if you don’t keep at it, your can lose your originality, and eventually lose your charm as a blogger, and your revenue, readers, and reputation may be lost.

Original Content

As is having personality in your blog, having original content is not hard at all; when starting out. After the first week or two, maybe a month, it will become extremely hard to have original content.

One of two things usually (and unfortunately) happens when you reach this point as a blogger.

1. You get “stuck”, and give up blogging.
2. You end up just reiterating what someone else has said.

When you do this, you end up killing your blog.

Don’t Give up!

But don’t give up friends, as that doesn’t have to be the end!

I’ve learned that you can do one thing to “spice” up your blog and content, and really keep that personal touch and originality to it, is to talk about unique viewpoints on something already brought out by a friend or blogger.

At some point, you are just not going to have something to write about that absolutely no one will have ever said, hinted to, or thought about for that matter.

But you don’t need 100% unique content! I know you guys are going to trash me for it , but hear me out.

Like I said, you’ll have extreme difficulty at some point to find something totally unique to write about. But what you can do is this: Take a point, story, tip or anything else talked about by someone else, be it a blogger, friend, co-worker, etc.

Than what you do is take whatever it is, and revamp the meaning and the way it’s portrayed. What this means is take something someone says and either change the point or meaning of it, or take something said and then write about it from a different viewpoint. If someone looks at the grass from this side, write about it from the other side! You’ll get more buzz for contradicting/agreeing with another blogger, and people will just eat up the content and try and piece together each side.

I think that this is a great tip and I personally use it myself, and I hope you will too!

And if you want to see more examples of this technique and how to use it, Subscribe to the RSS Feed and keep up with the MonkeyBlogger!