Posted by lascott7 in Untagged on
Mar 06, 2012
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I finally have my prayers answered. I finally have the client I needed. The one who offers ongoing work permanently and I’m so excited about it. Now I have to juggle with 2 projects for a church anniversary, a new client with various tasks and my home. What shall a freelance mom do? Ok. I need to break down my priorities.
First of all, family always comes first. To me God is in my family and He always comes first (Deu. 8:18 – do not forget the lord and He will give you power to get wealth). I always talk with Him about everything and He always seem to supply my needs no matter how long it takes. It’s all about your faithfulness and having a close relationship with Him. This includes His Kingdom business. Since I am the church secretary, I also have to handle a couple of tasks, especially if there are big events like a church anniversary or a church revival, I am the one doing the design for the programs, promotional fliers and other creative things for those events. I must put God’s business before everything.
Posted by BillM in Untagged on
Nov 28, 2011
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In my first post on fees, I talked about deciding your approach to the marketplace – whether you were selling a product or a service. In a nutshell, products have set prices and clear deliverables, while services deal more with intangibles.
The advantage of selling a product is that you can be dumb as a pile of bricks about marketing yourself (OK, that’s a slight exaggeration for effect) as long as your price meets market expectations. The best example of this is the $5 for 500 words (or whatever the current floor is) postings on Elance. Do enough of these – or farm enough out at $1 – and you’ll make money with little bother.
Over the course of my lengthy freelancing career, which now stands a shade over eighteen months, I have come to realise that I bore easily. This is a phenomenon common to most geniuses (aswell as myself), but rather frustrating when one has to earns ones crust by the sweat of ones brow.
This becomes apparent to me when I reflect that the most exhilarating part of the entire freelance process for me is The Quote. The Admin is a necessary evil which I can just about manage (I had to submit a tax return recently for the first time ever -- how do you Americans manage every year?). The Scrolling Through Lists of Overly Optimistic Job Titles I can make my peace with. The Getting Paid I have no qualms with. The Work is good, but The Quote? The Quote is bliss.
Last month, I did something I never thought I’d do. I signed up for Twitter.
I never thought I'd do that because, quite honestly, I thought the whole thing sounded silly. I’m over here fuming about the attention span of the American public being reduced to 30 seconds or less, and here is a tool that practically encourages this. I thought I was witnessing the decline and fall of the human mind. Then I remembered my seventh-grade English teacher.
Posted by BillM in Untagged on
Jun 06, 2011
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For whatever reason, I find many freelancers don’t actually have a justification for charging the fees they do. I’ll admit I started out the same way. I thought about fees in terms of “What can I get?” and “What do I have to do to get that?”
Turns out there is a great deal of information from the business community about how to set your professional fees. I just hadn’t looked into it.
Social media is a trip and a half. It's communication on steroids, broken down into semi-connected fragments - a little like my Gemini brain seems to be. It mirrors my life, in a slightly warped way.
My life made a little more sense when I learned the word "compartmentalize." There are six groups of people I have kept in touch with over the years, depending on which part of my life was front and center at the moment, but in real life, none of these subgroups actually intersect.
Posted by fnre in Untagged on
Mar 29, 2011
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Disclaimer: I know this largely only relates to those of us who are in the creative fields.
I few minutes of reflection made me think about what is it that makes freelancing attract an unlikely large numbers of people either in the creative trades and/or see there place in their own trade as being a creative solutions person.
I finally met the guy who got outvoted on the “two spaces after a period” thing. He’s teaching my editing class this week, and today he decided to get on his soapbox about it.
The instructor is one of the many people all over the United States who was ordered in typing class to add two spaces after every period. It was burned into our brains. There are teachers still out there who insist that students add two spaces after each sentence simply because that’s the way they were taught. They’re not preparing anyone to function as a writer or an editor who uses current style guides. They’re just thinking, “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them. At least they're learning to type.”
Posted by BillM in Untagged on
Feb 24, 2011
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Come into my office. Here, lie back on the couch.
The reason you’re here today is because your friends and family members care about you. They see what this addiction is doing to you and they know you need professional help. Now, say it with me, “I’m a deadline addict.”
Posted by kdmccarty in writing , getting started on
Feb 05, 2011
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From start to finish, communication plays a huge role in the success of a freelance writing project. What you say, how you say it, and when you say it all make a difference in how well a client responds. On typical freelancing platforms, the first communication you have with a prospective client is generally through your bid. Detailed bids are great, but you don’t have to put in everything at this stage. Including every single stipulation that's in your standard contract in an initial bid could make you look untrusting, demanding, or difficult to work with. Take your time and get the client on board first.
