Posted in MicroBusiness Musings, Starting Out as a Freelance Consultant, Marketing Your Freelance Consultancy at 5:13 am by andy

Are you a “WE” or are you an “I”?  As a freelancer, do you represent yourself to clients as something larger than yourself?

Some freelancers consider it “dishonest” to represent themselves as being an entity larger than one person.  They figure that the client can see through your BS and see that you’re a “one man band”.

My view is that you present yourself the way you want your client to see you.  Read more…

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 8:30 pm by andy

Just a quick update: we passed 325 registered consultants today!  Canada and Australia are starting to generate more traffic now that we’re advertising in those countries.  We’re consistently adding about 25 or so new consultants each week.

We’re still seeing lots of clients come by and search or browse for freelancers.  The next Google site update should show lots more places that back-link to us (Yahoo! currently shows over 2000 back-links to us, although about 80% of those appear to be Google ads!).

Why not add a resources page to your marketing site and add FreelanceLocalTech to it?  The more back-links we get, the more organic traffic we’ll have, which means more people looking at your freelance listing, so everyone wins.

We re-priced our upgrades and ads to be more affordable and more in line with our current traffic numbers (about 2000 “uniques” per month visiting nearly 17,000 pages).  We’re VERY competitive with other methods you might use to advertise your services.

Meanwhile, coming up: we’re working on getting UK geo-coded, and are expecting to add that country by Thanksgiving.  We’re debating whether we want to add any more countries after that, since most of our traffic has been from USA, Canada, Australia, UK, and… India!  We could add India without too much effort, except that we’re not sure that local businesses in India would look on our site for local freelancers.  Any thoughts there?

Also coming up:

• We’re getting ready to send out our first newsletter with helpful tips and news about the site;
•  We’re collecting really useful links to content that would interest freelancers and plan to put up a page (or maybe a blog entry or two) in the near future;
• We’re discussing a site redesign to lighten up the place and help improve our ability to optimize the site for search engine placement.

As always, your comments are welcome….