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?

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?

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.

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 the rest of this entry »