Freelancing Advice

Here is some advice for those of you that want to build a side business by freelancing websites for others.

Because I’ve done freelancing in the past, I can give you some advice (that you obviously don’t have to take!) that will hopefully help you out, regardless of how you decide to organize your own freelancing business.

After I finished building my freelancing website, what I would do is post my services on Craigslist on a daily basis (under services: computer), first in the city I lived in and neighboring cities, and then just random cities anywhere (Craigslist limits the amount of daily postings you can make). Beyond that I simply made business cards with my web address on there and handed them out all the time saying I was happy to make anyone a website. My rate was $500 per website. Doing this would get me at least 2-3 gigs per month, and every website I built eventually got put on my own freelancing website as a sample of my work.

Here are some of the “rules” I worked into my business over time that made my life easier:

– I would only take relatively simple jobs (personal or small business websites) where the client was pretty easy going and would be happy with something as long as it was professional and worked (not too many specifics).

– I would meet with clients at a public location with WiFi like Starbucks (assuming they lived in my city or nearby). Otherwise, Skype worked just fine.

– I charged clients half up front and half when the job was complete (they were usually comfortable with this and I used PayPal to charge them).

– I would sign them up with their own domain and hosting accounts using their own information (so that once the job was complete, they were on their own and completely independent).

– Once their website was finished, I would show them how to use the backend of WordPress, make their own updates, etc. Then I would write down all their information in an email (usernames and passwords, etc.). I would also include links to my video lessons 1.2 and 1.3 so that they’d have refresher video lessons available on how to make updates to their website, use it, etc. This pretty much meant I’d never hear from them again. 😀

Hope this helps!

Mike