Freelance Switch

Linkswitch #55: User Experience, Blog Content, Scheduling Software
The Guide to Crazy Comment Personality Types – Part 2
How To Tell When Your Rates Are Too Low

Linkswitch #55: User Experience, Blog Content, Scheduling Software

Posted: 06 Feb 2011 05:30 AM PST

Strategic Customer Service: An Interview with John Goodman

If you ask any chief marketing officer about the importance of "positive word of mouth" for their product or company, they'll inevitably say "It's absolutely critical, word of mouth is definitely a top priority for our business." But, when you follow up with the question "What specifically are you doing to create it, measure it and monitor it?" you'll get a mixed bag of reactions.

Business Objectives vs. User Experience

Here's a question for you: would you agree that creating a great user experience should be the primary aim of any Web designer? I know what your answer is… and youʼre wrong!

Okay, I admit that not all of you would have answered yes, but most probably did. Somehow, the majority of Web designers have come to believe that creating a great user experience is an end in itself. I think we are deceiving ourselves and doing a disservice to our clients at the same time.

Are You Still Afraid of Failure?

Fear is like a toxic poison – it seems you can't get rid of it by any means and it prevents you from living the life you always wanted to live. I was being "poisoned" with fear for myself and continuously worried about the events that might take place in the future, which included – besides many other things – messing up with my grades or not being able to master the defiances of my life.

Eight Ways to Combine Typefaces

Good typography is paramount to any good design.

An otherwise-beautiful design can really suffer if the typography choices are wrong. But combining fonts beyond the basic serif/sans-serif pairing can be tricky and confusing to a lot of designers.

While a lot of what goes into good typography is subjective, there are some guidelines that can point you in the right direction. From there, it's up to you to experiment and try out different things.

12 Free Appointment Scheduling Software Packages for Freelancers

Have you moved from providing a service to clients to including consulting or coaching as part of what you offer? Do you struggle to keep track of client meetings?

If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, you may need appointment scheduling software.

26 Ways to Enhance Your Blog Content

Do you blog? Are you looking for actionable tips to improve your content?

What follows are 26 tips, from A-Z, related to the craft of blog writing and a number of critical factors that will help to ensure the production of high-quality posts.

Why Freelancers Should Never Retire

Being a freelancer is great. You get to work in a way that fits around your hectic lifestyle and while you may initially put more energy into building up a client list (than working for an organisation which already has clients), once you've gained a good circle of regular clients and marketed yourself well, you've got a career for life.

Turn Your Computer Into a Cloud With Tonido

Have you ever wanted to access all of your files from anywhere, without having to store all of your data online? Online storage tools like Dropbox are incredibly useful, but you likely can't fit all of your files in your Dropbox. Then, what if you want to stream your music to your work computer without downloading it all? The cloud is great, but sometimes it seems like it's more trouble than it's worth when you're waiting for files to upload and sync.

Useful Icon Packs for Your Creativity

For all of you out there who can't get enough of icons, we have compiled another round-up of 35+ very creative icon packs which will most probably come handy and useful for your personal as well as commercial projects. If there is an icon set you'd like to share, please do so in the comment section below. Enjoy!

______

Supercharge your freelance business with the FreelanceSwitch Job Board, the only hand-moderated job board built around the way freelancers find work. Check it out now

The Guide to Crazy Comment Personality Types – Part 2

Posted: 04 Feb 2011 05:30 AM PST

Monitor Hopefully you were able to catch our previous introduction to crazy comment personality types. Last time, we covered the delights of First! Freddy and Angry Andrew.

As we move along into the second half of our list we will be introduced to two more delightful characters. This week: Grammar Gertie and Self-Promotion Sammy.

Writers and bloggers beware.

Grammar Gertie

Nothing can make a writer feel more like a complete idiot like Grammar Gertie. These Internet mavens are famous for jumping into any article to tell you how many unforgivable grammar and spelling mistakes you have just made.

Whether it's not enough o's in "to" or too many in "loose", Grammar Gertie is there to expose your dirty little spelling mistakes to the world.

I like to picture Grammar Gertie as a blue-haired, horn-rimmed glasses wearing, retired English teacher. With her face inches away from the monitor she carefully examines each and every word while muttering phrases like "That's an incorrect comma splice!" or "She better pick up these dangling participles."

Tsk, tsk lazy Internet writer.

I'm sure if Grammar Gertie could find a way to mark up her monitor with a red pen, she probably would.

How to deal with it:

What has to be the most frustrating thing about the Grammar Gertie types is that they are almost always right. Isn't it true that they were the ones that got perfect marks on tests on sentence structure while we slept through English class?

Tsk, tsk lazy Internet writer.

So while Grammer Gertie is almost certainly correct, it is far better to learn from our mistakes than give in to our first impulse of throwing a brick through her living room window.

Another often used technique is to blame everything on our Editor. After all, shouldn't they have caught all these embarrassing mistakes?

While a sharp-eyed editor is worth their weight in whiteout, as a writer we should really be personally responsible for proofing and correcting our own work; no matter how brain numbingly boring that may sound. Besides, Editors have better things to do – like lie around all day by their swimming pools as they drink dry martinis from their solid gold cocktail shakers.

I'm on to you Editors! [Ed Note: Don't listen to Travis! ...I prefer mojitos with solid silver spoons.]

A note to writers who write in a second language: If you're learning English as a second language and you're brave enough to write in it, I say go for it!

Grammar Gertie's will constantly be jumping down your throat when you make mistakes, but they are just jealous because they only wish they could write as well in your native language as you do in theirs.

You're an inspiration to people who know how difficult it is to learn another language. Don't let the spelling Nazis discourage you from letting yourself be heard.

Self-promotion Sammy

Ahh…good old Self-promotion Sammy. No matter how good a job you've done in writing your article, Sammy is there to tell you how much better he is than you.

These are the types of guys who liked to pick on you in school but would break down in tears when the teacher called on them.

I’m looking at you, Steve!

Whether you've written a tutorial or an opinion piece, Self-promotion Sammy will either have a link to a better article he's written or a put down on how bush league your work is compared to his.

My favorite Self-promotion Sammy has to be the guy who rips your work to shreds and then refuses to show any of his own work. They're enough to make you want to jump into your car with an IP Google Maps application and a jerrycan of gasoline.

How to deal with it:

The best way to deal with Self-promotion Sammy is just to ignore them. More than likely your other commenters will call them out. And there is something very satisfying about seeing one of these guys being called out.

However, if you find Self-promotion Sammy is often showing up with a link to one his own articles, chances are he's a SEO spammer. In cases like that, delete his comments with extreme prejudice.

Another version of the Self-promotion Sammy is Sexy-photo Sally. These are typically spammers that are disguised behind a photo of a pretty girl. They often have comments like "Great article. I learned a lot!" while their name links to a web hosting company or something similarly spammy. Feel free to ban Sexy-photo Sally immediately.

And by the way, Steve! Guess who gets the last laugh now that he’s an Internet superstar? And I told you you couldn’t hang a guy on a coat hook by his underwear. The light fabric clearly couldn’t hold my weight.

Stay tuned for next week when we conclude our guide to the crazy comment personality types!

How To Tell When Your Rates Are Too Low

Posted: 03 Feb 2011 05:30 AM PST

credit: stuartpilbrow on Flickr

A few months ago, I needed a designer to team up with on a project. I decided to work with a friend of a friend who had just graduated from art school and was desperately looking for work. She emailed me her rate and I about lost my mind.

She wanted $13 an hour — more than she’d ever earned at a job in her life — but she was willing to take less if I thought it was too high.

I’ve heard this story repeated time and time again, even from freelancers who have been in the game for a while. Most freelancers don’t have rates that painfully low, but odds are pretty good your rates are too low.

Signs Your Rates Are Too Low

There are plenty of situations that will tell you that your rates are too low. The best response to any of these situations is to raise your rates.

Your clients accept your rates with no complaints whatsoever. If a client hasn’t at least said, ‘that’s a little higher than I was accepting’ when you send her an estimate, you’re in trouble. Most clients will want to at least try to negotiate downwards, no matter the price point, unless they find a freelancer who they think is a real steal.
You haven’t raised your rates in over a year: Between the experience you’ve gotten and any increases in cost of living, it’s reasonable to raise your rates (at least for new clients) every year.
Your rates aren’t in line with what other freelancers are charging. When I first started freelancing, I heard about another local freelancer who was charging triple what I was (I’m not going to give you the dollar amounts because I’m a little ashamed of what my starting rate was). She wasn’t particularly experienced or skilled compared to me, but she was getting what she asked for. You better believe I raised my rates immediately.
Your budget is perfectly balanced: A perfectly balanced budget isn’t a good thing, at least for a freelancer. If just one missed payment from a client would throw your budget off entirely, you’re not bringing in enough money. A perfectly balanced budget (even if you’ve budgeted for savings and retirement) means that you still have room to stretch.
You’re charging less than double what you could make hourly working for an employer: In most places, freelancers ought to be aiming for at least double what an employer would pay because that’s the real amount an employer earmarks for salary, taxes, benefits and generally the cost of having an employee.

There are, of course, more obvious signs — like you’re eating ramen for the third week in a row — but it’s the subtle signs that I particularly worry about. If you’re in a tough spot financially, raising your rates is probably an obvious move. But if you are getting by or you’re even comfortable, you might not think of raising your rates. But if your work, between skills and experience and general ability, is worth a higher rate, you should be getting it.

There’s Nothing Wrong With Charging More

I thought very hard about the title of this article — I considered ‘How to Tell if Your Rates Are Too Low’, but the fact is that there is a time in every freelancer’s career when your rates really are too low. Maybe you started out low because you weren’t confident in your skills, or maybe you didn’t raise your rates to keep up with demand. But we’ve all been at a point where we were effectively leaving money on the table.

It’s okay to have rates that make your clients have to decide if you’re worth it. More often than not — they will. While you may think that you’d never pay as much for your skills as you’re asking, you have a prejudiced point of view. For you, designing a website or writing an article or doing whatever other type of work you do is a simple matter. You’ve done it often enough to get it down to a science. But someone else, who doesn’t have your experience or your skills, would require triple or quadruple the amount of time to handle such a project (even assuming that they wouldn’t need to buy the right software or training). Be confident in your rates.

Photo credit: stuartpilbrow/Flickr