Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 8:03 pm by andy

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.

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 10:35 am by andy

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.

Posted in Starting Out as a Freelance Consultant, Marketing Your Freelance Consultancy at 1:55 am by andy

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 more…

Posted in MicroBusiness Musings, Starting Out as a Freelance Consultant, General Freelance Info at 7:59 pm by andy

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 more…

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 8:33 pm by andy

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.