Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 8:43 pm by andy

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?

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 2:40 pm by andy

We just added 12 new countries to the site: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, and Switzerland!  Over 5000 new cities in this new batch of places where we can help freelancers hook-up with local clients!!

Any freelancers from these countries as well as India and Ireland (which we just added last week) will automatically receive a 2-month 60-mile upgrade.  Add a backlink to us from your site and we’ll extend that by 2 more months!

Another interesting tidbit: I did a quick query on the database and we have over 52,000 listings out here.  With just over 550 consultants, that means that the average freelancer listing has nearly 100 chances to be viewed by potential clients who browse the site.  How many directories can say that?

Our next batch of countries will include Japan, Israel, and parts of northern and eastern Europe… and should happen in the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned!

What countries would you like us to add next?

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 10:49 am by andy

We now support freelancer listings in India and Ireland!  Woo-hoo!!

Because the Republic of Ireland does not support postal codes outside of Dublin, we needed to invent a new way for people to sign up and declare their ”base” location.  For other countries, it was the postal code; in India and Ireland (and likely for many countries we plan to add over the next few months), we ask the freelancer to select the city nearest their location from our list of cities in their state/province/territory.  That city is then used like the postal code: all cities within 30 miles (48 km) of the selected “base” city will include the freelancer listing.

Now that we have this new technique for handling countries without postal codes, we can more quickly add new countries.  I think the next set will be Western Europe, then Eastern Europe, and then we’ll look at our analytics and see which region should follow.

Posted in MicroBusiness Musings at 2:59 pm by andy

My previous post was on what to do before disaster strikes.  Part of my disaster recovery plan is to make sure all project work is backed up off-site in an online repository.  I’ve been using Iron Mountain’s connected.com for the past 6 years, but I was starting to wonder about the competition, so I researched them, tested them, and here’s what I found:

 MOZY: Owned by EMC Corp now, these guys have a great pricing structure, free for up to 2 GB or ”unlimited” for $4.95/month if you pick MozyHome, but if you go the Pro route for business use, it’s $3.95 per month for the account and $0.50/GB for storage.  Retention policy is to keep everything that has changed for the past 30 days; after something is 30 days old, if there’s a newer version, it’s deleted from storage. Read more…