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 »

Most people wait until after they have a disaster to think about a decent backup strategy.  Considering the cost of permanently losing your work — both the time lost and the money spent recovering what you can recover — you’d think people would be a bit more proactive about this… but I suppose that a disaster is a great teacher.

So what kind of backup strategy should you have?

Start with this assumption: your work space is going to be leveled one day by a fire/flood/earthquake/hurricane/tornado/iceberg.  Or your computers are going to get stolen.  You want to be able to recover from this in a reasonable amount of time (say, a week, since you’ll need to get new hardware).

Second assumption: you are going to change files regularly throughout the day and want to back those files up at least once a day.

Third assumption: if you have a project-level screw-up, you want to be able to recover any files you lose within a few minutes. Read the rest of this entry »

After a really slow holiday season — and totally stopping our marketing for December – we finally made it to 500 listings!

Interestingly, our traffic without having to advertise has been about 70% of our traffic when we were advertising and the cost is a lot less.  So we’re going to spend more time on organic marketing and delay any further advertising until we add a new country or two (Ireland is next!).

Although we’re not the biggest directory by any measure, we definitely have high-quality listings, which is important to clients.  Ever been to a directory and found dead link after dead link while the site owner claimed they had thousands of links?  Not here!  If there’s a dead link, we want to remove it as soon as possible.  Clients appreciate not having their limited time wasted by chasing dead links.

I’m working on a web site for a client and he keeps adding one or two more new features every time I talk with him.  I make those changes or create those new features and then it’s “Just one or two more changes…”  I want the web site to go “live”, but there always seem to be one or two more features or changes that have to be made before we can do that.  What can I do to wrap this project up already? 

It sounds like scope creep is infecting your relationship with the client.  You need to get a grip on the client relationship. 

Your first step: Stop! Just stop. No more “just one more things”. No more immediate response to every new feature request. Continue immediate response to important bugs, of course. Read the rest of this entry »

What should you include on your freelancer web site?

1. Make sure every single page has a way to contact you without viewing any additional pages.  You just never know how many clicks you can get a person to do on your site.

2. Never include pricing unless you plan to offer products or packages that are the same every time.  It’s just distracting and — since the customer wants to know the price anyway — provides an excellent reason for customers to contact you.

3. Don’t be too verbose.  This is especially hard for non-writers, so it might be worth having someone who is a good writer look over your text when you’re done to see what you can pull out to “tighten” your message.  If you want to be verbose, add a blog to your site and do it there.  Your marketing text must get to the point quickly to keep the client’s attention.

4. Include the latest news about jobs you just landed.  You don’t have to have more than one sentence on each job and aren’t required to even list the client name, but it’ll give customers a sense that you regularly land new business.

5. Make sure your site includes specifics on why choosing your business is a smarter choice than some of the alternatives that get a lot of press time (like outsourcing to Elbonia).  What’s your hook that makes you different/better?

Remember: you likely have one minute of eyeballing time to impress the client with your web site.  Don’t waste that time with things that aren’t going to convince the client to contact you.

Finally!

We finally changed the look to something brighter, more appealing, and — we hope — easier to use.  We tested it a bunch, but it’s possible we missed something, so please let us know if you find anything that doesn’t look or work right.  Drop us a note to the support e-mail address listed in the Support/Help page (the link is at the bottom of every site page).

We finally added England, Scotland, and Wales (Great Britain).  We will likely add Ireland next, which brings up the question as to whether we should group Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, even though Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.  We’re thinking that we’ll list it as the country of Ireland and break out the two areas as though they were different “states” or regions.

We also changed the Technical Writer category to also include writers who write documents and articles that are not necessarily of a technical nature.  So, Welcome Writers!

During November, in anticipation of rolling out our new look and adding Great Britain, we cut our marketing and advertising budget in half.  Our traffic only dropped by about 10% and our sign-ups by about 30%, so we think our organic (free!) traffic is starting to pick up enough that we can permanently cut back on our pay-per-click ads.  Our thought is that in December, the only pay-per-click ads we’ll run will be in Great Britain and we’ll look to purchase ad space in places where it’ll reach freelancers who haven’t heard about us yet. 

If you have any ideas about where we can hunt for more freelancers, please let us know.  Also, if you’re already signed up, tell a freelancing buddy about us!  And let us know if you get a client call based on your listing here.