As a freelancer, we get to decide what our benefits package will look like. Often, though, we’d rather not think in those terms and instead just focus on whether we’re raking in the cash.

Bad things happen, though.  Many corporations provide you with ways to protect your income and your family’s finances in case something bad happens to you while you’re employed.  But being the business owner means you have to take ownership of this side of your finances.

What happens if you get hit by a car and end up in the hospital for a month and then need another 6 months of physical therapy before you can sit at a keyboard and work again?  How about you contract a tropical disease on one of your frequent vacations to the islands and can’t work for a year while you recover your strength?  That would be pretty devastating to your finances, huh? Read the rest of this entry »

I have a policy for CustomBytes: all of my new clients are going to become references to any new clients that come along after them.  I tell my new clients that, so they understand that they’re going to be treated just as wonderfully as all my past clients.

Some consultants collect testimonials for their web site and other marketing materials.  They do that so that potential clients can see at least a brief amount of feedback from their past clients.

Why have references or testimonials?  Read the rest of this entry »

One of the big pet peeves of freelancers — especially creative ones — is that they hate the client who decides one thing one day and the exact opposite thing the next day.  Or they tweak something endlessly because they can’t decide what they want.  The funny thing is that most freelancers will blame the client for this situation and not themselves.

I’m here to tell you: if you can’t produce what your client loves, it’s your own fault for not spending enough time to figure it out what the client wants and to help crystallize it in the client’s mind.

How do you do this? Read the rest of this entry »

We cleared 600 consultants today.  Our traffic is also up about 40% from 2 months ago.

Let us know how we can help your further or how we can help freelancers who don’t feel like this is a good place to list their services.

March 12: Sphider, our search engine, died.  The latest set of countries took the number of dynamic pages over the 150,000 mark.  Sphider’s indexer wasn’t designed to handle anything that big, and it couldn’t complete a full re-index of the site.  Sphider also supported only single-threaded indexing and with that many pages (and we expect to have nearly 300,000 pages when we’re done adding countries later this year), the time to re-index ballooned from about 18 hours to nearly 130 hours (estimated, since the indexer never finished).  That’s too long for our needs.

So we temporarily removed the search boxes for everything but the blog area.  Our plan is to try to have a replacement in the next couple of weeks.  We think we’ve identified at least one open-source search engine that will work well for us, but the proof will be in our test box as we try to get it to run a full index in under a day without wiping out our box’s ability to serve pages to users.

We’ll post an update to this blog entry when we have a replacement in place.

March 21 UPDATE: We finally have DataparkSearch Engine in place.  It’s a native Linux application that runs as a CGI.  Searches are fast, indexing is still slow, but I can now see that indexing speed is a function of the VPS on which this site is hosted.  However, unlike Sphider, I don’t think we’ll need to do full re-indexing every week to catch any new pages.  We’ll see.  I’ll post another update in a few weeks after we see how the search engine is doing.

I just got laid off and want to start freelance consulting.  Where do I start my marketing?

1. Create a real marketing site for your services. Your question didn’t say what you do, so you’re possibly not doing a good job telling people what you do and why they should hire you. The site does not have to look perfect, but it must quickly capture the client’s attention and convey what you do and why you’re different/better.
2. Once the web site is at least functional as a marketing site for a professional services firm, spend between $200 and $300 on Google Pay-Per-Click ads targeting your local market (because those are cheaper ads and will be quicker to see results).  By “targeting your local market”, I mean to include your city name along (or the name of any other large city near you) in the search terms you buy. E.g., “Paris web design” if that’s what you do, etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

What should I charge for subcontracting to an agency?  Do I need to discount my time?

I’ve had many different roles in my career, from employee to manager to owner.  Here’s what I found about rates:

• As a consultant, your employer wants to bill you for at least 3 times your salary on a per-hour basis.  If you make $100K, they want to bill you at $150/hr and so on.  Some industries actually look for a higher return — e.g., SAP consultants – because they may not be able to book you full time, but 3x is a good rule of thumb.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hopefully, this is the last infrastructure post for a while.  We added another 14 countries this morning, bringing the total to over 25 countries and 8000 new cities in the past 3 weeks.  New to the site are Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Israel, Pakistan, New Zealand, and South Africa!

We’re likely done adding more countries for a little while, because we have some big projects starting up tomorrow on the consulting side.  In the meantime, tell your freelancing buddies in Europe and parts of Asia to sign up while we’re offering the listing upgrade bonus.

On our radar for the next places for FreelanceLocalTech are the Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, and Russia, but I don’t think we’ll get there before July….  In the meantime, let us know which countries are important for us to add by leaving a comment.

We’ve only gotten a few backlinks by offering a 2-month 60-mile upgrade, so we’re going to take a page from our competion: sites that link back to us will automatically be pushed toward the top of the city listings, so that they appear before sites that don’t have a backlink to FreelanceLocalTech.

We now have a script running twice monthly to look at all freelancer web sites.  If we detect a backlink from your web site within either the home page or any page directly linked from the home page, your listing will be displayed higher in the city pages than any freelancer’s listing where we didn’t find a backlink.

Anyone with an existing backlink upgrade will get to keep the upgrade until it expires.

We’ll be publishing and e-mailing our next newsletter containing this news and other tips in the next few weeks.  Any topics you’d like to see covered in it?