this is a three-part webinar series called bootstrap freelancing the first part is gonna be aa on how to start your freelancing business if you don’t know me my name is Chad Fullerton I’m from the Hamilton freelancers Association and run my own company my own marketing company called Fullerton media and also a website for freelancers that’s in private beta right now called web and ciders com you can check that out if you haven’t signed up for the list I’ll make sure that you get into that so I’ve been doing marketing and design for over 10 years as a freelancer close to 12 now and I decided to make this presentation to help you guys if you are just starting out thinking about freelancing and don’t really where to start so we’re going to be going over a lot today and as I mentioned earlier this is a three-part series so the first part today’s webinar is called the freelancing model so this is where i’ll be going over ah what freelancing really is how to monetize your skills and make money doing it and how to start a business from scratch we’re going to be going over a lot of really cool things like branding yourself picking out a name if you haven’t picked a name for your business yet how to price your services how to find clients how to invoice clients we’ll go over a few project management tools you can use to help manage your project to make it easier for you and also how to get some marketing materials made if you don’t have a business card yet or flyers or anything like that so we’ll go over some options for that as well next Saturday we’re going to be going over setting up shop so this is the part 2 of the series and I’m going to be showing you how to set up a website from scratch using WordPress for those of you who don’t know what WordPress is this would be a very insightful up webinar and also next week if you if you already know WordPress maybe even have a website up I’m going to be going through a dozen or more plugins that are essential I think for starting up a wordpress website from security to just setting up a membership site if you want member logins on your website all going were a lot of really cool advanced plugins as well so for those who already have oppressed site you might want to check that out as well then part three is called credibility model this is going to be the presentation talking about how to generate leads from your website that you have set up already and I’ll also go into some tips about list building so that’s going to be exciting so just check your email inbox for the sign up links to those later on but for today we’re going to be talking about the freelance model and I just wanted to jump right into talking about that so for uh in the chat box if you if you are just starting out just let me know and that would be great because I’m really excited to to help people out when they’re just starting and they haven’t even you know got a website or got a a business up and running yet what is the advantage of freelancing well for those of you who don’t know what freelancing is freelancing is basically where you’re working for yourself and you’re taking projects on for yourself you get to pick and choose the projects that you want which is great you’re in control you’re the boss and what’s cool about this is that you don’t have to if you already are working a corporate or a full-time job right now you don’t have to quit your job and just jump right into freelancing you can you can start freelancing slowly and you can pick some projects to do in evenings or on weekends on your free time you can start just taking on passion projects basically and start making money that way and we’ll go into some ways where you can find those projects and find those clients but really trillion thing is all about realizing that your time and your skills are all worth money so making money from your time and from your favor knowledge and your skills and if you don’t think that you have skills right now you definitely do because think about it if you have if you’re working for a company right now then that company is paying you for something right they’re paying you for a skillet you have whether it be design or programming or writing or managing projects or customer service whatever it is there’s some sort of skill that you have that you can monetize so if you work for a company right now and you already have a salary think about the skills that you that you currently have and just think about putting your own name on those and selling those two other clients and building up a client base of people that are looking for those skills and then as you sell that out as a contract project or a one-off project then you build that client base up and eventually you can start to raise your rates and start picking and choosing clients and again if you are already working full time you have a lot more freedom because you well if you’re working full time you have some freedom because you have a steady income flow right now so you can get started slowly and you can start picking projects as you go and and not really worrying about you know putting food on the table per se but once you do get to that level of having a larger client base and having a steady monthly income flow then you can always look at doing freelancing full-time so we’re going to talk about hope i’m at that slide making money from your knowledge and skills super important and that’s why we are here today so we’re going to be going over five really cool things the first is branding yourself and branding yourself super-important right you need to have some sort of differentiating factor because there are a lot of freelancers out there this is a very competitive market and there’s a lot of freelancers overseas that are low hourly rates and most the people in this webinar most likely in North America and have one be able to charge higher hourly rates right you want to be charging fifty dollars an hour eighty dollars now or even up to a hundred dollars an hour and and those rates are very competitive when it comes down to your skill set if you are very skilled and you are very fluent in English he’s going to focus on your the advantages that you have and why you’re better than a lot of other people and make yourself stand out next we’re going to be going over building your client base we’re going to talk about some market places that you can find projects in but not only marketplaces also other ways you can find projects that you might not have thought of that are a little bit unique we’re going to go over pricing your services so hourly pricing versus project pricing what’s the difference in which what are some advantages and disadvantages of each we’re going to go over info ease and clients so we’re going to talk about a few different invoicing services and the one I like a lot which is based at a Toronto here in Ontario called FreshBooks and how you can charge for your projects with credit cards so your clients might have credit card and that’s great because you can charge the money without having to worry about going and collecting a check or having a check mail to you or doing everything that also we’re going to show you for invoicing how to charge clients automatically so once you get clients in a monthly reoccurring situation you can charge them automatically you don’t have to worry about sending them invoices all the time and it’s just a lot easier when you have things automatically set up and fifth we’re going to go over project management tools some really cool project management tools that you can use it are but some of them are free to start out so again this is boobs start freelancing so we’re trying to come up with tools and services that are as free as you can get or as little cost to you and also throw in there some marketing material solutions you can look at as well so let start off with branding yourself so first of all I you know don’t worry about there being a lot of other people out there with similar skills because there are gonna always be people with the same skills as you right but if you can build up your brand and you can market yourself well and have integrity and be reliable credible and trustworthy then that’s what makes you say no from the crowd so you want to have you want to you might think you have you know common skills but those skills are in demand so you just need to find the right people looking to help and sell them your services to start making money right away on smaller projects and as you do those small projects then you’re going to lead those are going to lead to bigger ones and eventually you know you build up your client base you build up your reputation you build up your testimonials and you can start taking on bigger projects because you have the proof and the portfolio to back up what you’re saying but it all starts with little projects and there there’s many ways you can get those little projects going and get those testimonials built up and then you put all that on your website to show that you know what you’re doing you show you work and eventually your website starts to sell sell your services for you overnight really because your websites like a like an online brochure essentially that’s helping sell your services when you’re not to there to talk about them so for example let’s think about let’s think about the real estate industry for a second and how thousands of real estate agents they’re all they’re selling the same homes essentially like think about your local market and the real estate agents that are trying to get business in your local market they’re all selling the same homes from the same mls ID listings so how come how do they differentiate themselves well they build their own personal brands you know personal brands with their pictures everywhere because they are a single person that’s an entrepreneur that wants to get their own clients right so they build their own brand they show their own face on billboards and bus signs and whatever it is but those personal brands build credibility and they rely heavily on really great customer service right when you have really great customer service you’re going to tell your friends about it you’re going to feel good about it and that’s going to lead to two more leads to more referrals and that and word of mouth is the real really the biggest the biggest thing that you get as a freelancer word of mouth if you can get a client telling another client that just snowballs into a lot of clients really fast so word of mouth and great customer service is key and being a freelancer is very similar to that real estate agent because you’re trying to build a personal brand and credibility online since you’re a freelancer a digital freelancer you can do everything online now so it’s even easier for you there’s really no excuse it’s so easy because on on the internet you don’t have to meet people face-to-face you don’t have to you can just chat with them on skype if you want you know you don’t have to do door-to-door calling cold calling any of that stuff you can just use these marketplaces i’ll be showing you in a minute and just connect with people over the internet they could be anywhere in the world all you need is a laptop in an internet connection so think about how cool that is right you can make money and have clients all over the world you can be an international business now from your home just using a laptop it’s pretty cool and that’s very uh you know very different than a real estate agent which has to seek out people who are in their market looking to buy a house right these marketplaces that we’re going to be looking at the people that are looking the people that have projects are actually looking for the freelancers it’s the opposite way the you know real estate agents are looking for people buying homes you have a marketplace of people already looking to hire freelancers and they were looking for you they’re seeking you out which makes it a lot easier so the clients come to you and if you are a shy person like I was when I was starting out don’t worry because you know again you don’t have to do any cold calling you know to talk to anybody in person if you don’t want to you can still take on small projects just completely online and and you’re going to be generating revenue from doing things that you’re really good at right and that you enjoy doing so it won’t feel like work because you’re going to be just loving what you’re doing doing things that you’re passionate about if you’re passionate about writing you can do writing if you’re passionate about drawing you can do illustration you can do web design graphic design video music you’d be really into music lots of people need music for their projects there’s so many things you can do the list is endless and again you’ll be picking things that you’re skilled at but you also enjoy doing and you’re passionate about so next up we’re going to be talking about how to build your client base so building client relationships is not very different than building personal relationships right the key is always to to be yourself to not be phony right and you know even if you feel inexperienced and that you don’t have as much knowledge as you think you do just being yourself and having your own personality is really key when you’re starting up as a freelancer there’s four factors that I think are really important as a freelancer when you’re starting out and and when you’re not starting out obviously but there’s four things trustworthiness trustworthiness comes as you follow through with your promises you know it’s always about under under promising over delivering right you’ve probably heard that a lot of times and it’s very true when you do that it helps build your credibility build your trustworthiness and your clients will come back to you if they feel that you’re over delivering and under promising all the time so for example if a client comes to you with a website project and you know it’s going to take you maybe five days to complete then you tell them that’s going to take it’s going to take longer and then what happens is you come back to them say hey you know a guy doesn’t early I got done quicker than I got it done quicker than I thought I would and here’s your project early so that’s one thing you can do you can also do things like some freelancers charge a little bit extra and then what they do like a quote a little bit extra and then they actually give their clients a rebate or a refund when they when they complete the project early and they purposely do that they’re already planning on doing that and the reason why is that they have a new client and say that you quote it’s going to take you ten days it really takes you six days and you go back to the client and say hey this is actually a lot easier than I thought it was here is your project already done for you and I’m going to give you a credit of a hundred dollars say if the projects out of a couple thousand dollars i’m going to give you credit of a hundred dollars and you can because it was I finished early and I finished a lot it was all easier than I thought and this hundred dollars can go towards your next project with me so really you’re not losing any money because you’re keeping them in as a client and and they have to use you again for a second project and use that credit right so it’s also a great way to try and keep them with you and get a second project from them and they feel great because they’re they feel hey this guy got things this guy or girl got things done early and also they’re giving me something back which is really different and unique because not many people do that so definitely trustworthiness is a big thing competence show that you’re competent in your skills and this can be conveyed by a number of different methods but really the easiest and the most powerful is through social proof so social proof is you know having testimonials having recommendations you can get those are the recommendations I have you have a LinkedIn profile people will search your name right if they want to look you up and your LinkedIn profile comes up you can have recommendations from people on your different skills they will recommend you for different skills you can get there you can get them to leave a paragraph writing about you on there and you can use those on your website as well if you’re using any of these marketplaces that I’ll be talking about they all require the buyer to leave a testimonial of some sort so they have to leave a testimonial for the project and that’s awesome because you know some people that are shy forget to ask for those testimonials don’t feel comfortable asking for them after a project but these marketplaces require it so they have to tell something about how they worked with you and how great you were you use that snippet of a testimonial and you put that on your website and again the more testimony is you can get the better and when you take on small projects you can you can bus um you can get those testimonials out really quickly just do you know five really quick small projects that take you under an hour and you can get five quick testimonials and use those testimonials on your on your portfolio and on your website so that shows your competence that shows that you have those skills and people are backing you up through social proof the third thing is confidence having confidence in your performance and your work you’ve done these skills before right most people have been doing these various skills in their corporate life for many many years so you’re doing nothing different you’re still doing the same skills just you’re picking the clients that you’re working for and you’re picking the projects right so the the freedom that you’re given as a freelancer it should give you even more confidence because now you’re choosing the projects and you know that you’re going to be able to get these projects I hid these projects out of the park and do a really great job on them so so yeah you’re picking projects that use that suit your skills so that’s what makes this really a really fun thing to do so the last thing is focusing on the client and not yourself this is sounds pretty obvious but a lot of people don’t do it and this is what leads them to not getting the job and the reason is you have to focus on the client at all times this means when you’re talking to them you have to focus the conversation exclusively on them and not yourself clients will open up to you and talk to you about their problems you know because every client has some sort of problems with their small businesses but you have to learn to be a very good listener because elicit a listener gets the project done gets the project given to them because you listen to the client you pull out various pain points that the clients talking about and then you repeat them back to the client and you insert how you can help them what your solution is and when you do that and you repeat back to them in their own words what their problem is they think that you are definitely giving them a solution that’s tailored custom tailored to them that’s a little bit of psychology going on there but the more that people like the people like to talk about themselves right and the more they talk about themselves the more they fall in love with in with the other person there talking to right they they feel like they’re getting everything off their chest they feel like they’re there they’re really laying all the cards out on the table and they’re becoming vulnerable to you because they’re telling you all their problems and you’re going to be saying well mmm no prob you out I have the solution I have the skills to help you out and you have to you want to orientate your services to the perspective of the potential customer and and once you do that like I said earlier they will think that you were custom tailoring to solve exactly the problems that they were discussing earlier so definitely do that listen become a very good listener and take out those pain points that they have and turn them around into solutions for them alright so that is that focusing on finding clients so this is fun finding clowns is the really exciting part because you get to look through all the projects out there that people need help with and you get to pick and choose which ones you want to do so we’re going to go over five different ways that you can that you can get clients there’s a lot out there marketplaces are the easiest we can go through service listing directories those are great for more for long-term projects for bigger projects that are on contract for a longer period of time we’re going over job boards which is the same sort of thing existing contacts are great to tap into I’m also go over networking events and why networking is super important and we’ll go over that in a minute so let’s go over them one by one marketplace is for freelancers so there’s a lot out there marketplace wise they have consolidated over the years there was a lot more than this but I think consolidation is great because it makes it so that there’s more projects in one place right just recently odesk that you see on there an elance actually elance purchased odesk i believe so they are now the same company but they’re still operating separately so we’ll count those as separate marketplaces I personally like odesk better so we’ll go through them one by one we got freelancer com freelancer com has been around for a while they purchase another one that I used to use called script lance and they’ve merged or get a freelancer they used to be called and they are huge now they have acquired a lot of the other smaller marketplaces and they are definitely the powerhouse when it comes to freelance project marketplaces they’re also one of the more expensive ones their fees are up there and how these marketplaces work if you haven’t seen any of these before marketplaces essentially clients come on to those marketplaces and post projects that they need done and once they post the project you get to browse those projects for free and pick ones that you want to a bid on so if you want a project you have the skills to do it you can go in these marketplaces and bid how much you want to be able to do that project so someone wants a website or someone wants a brochure for example right they want a three page brochure and they explain everything about it you think okay well I can do that I’ve made I’ve used Microsoft Word before and made ‘basic brochures before so sure I’ll take on that project so what happens is you’ll bid how much money that you want for that for that task so the client usually puts a budget they’ll say hey I got between a hundred and five hundred dollars to spend and you go new bid on the lower end because you’re starting out right so you’ll go and bid 150 dollars and you have other bids that are for fifty dollars up to four hundred dollars right people will bid all different range prices and and then what you do is you contact you can contact the person privately and say hey you know I have these skills I’ve done brochures before four for four or five years and I show them some of your work and you can get the project right and if it’s something simple you’re most likely going to get it and show that you are that you are fluent english speaking person from Canada or the US or wherever you’re located and and prove that you are a really reliable person right because you’re going to be competing with people who are bidding lower and those people most likely we’re going to be from overseas and can’t speak English very well so they’re going to write in the brochure might not come across very nice or they might have their design skills might not be as good as your so just really taunt you know tante your your skills and how great you are to the person anyways so these marketplaces there’s three of them that are the biggest freelancer com o desk and elance and what happens is once you bid on a project if the person accepts you as the freelancer for their project you get an email saying hey congrats you just got this project and the the client will pay you through paypal or some sort of online payment system paypal is the easiest if you haven’t heard a paypal it’s the sort of like an online banking service payment service when someone pays you the money goes into your PayPal account and you can withdraw that money then to your bank account for free but also you can use paypal on many different websites to pay for things online as well so if you don’t want to withdraw it to your bank you can also use it to spend it on things online so so what happens is they accept your project say it was a hundred fifty dollars the marketplace takes a small percentage of what you’ve you’ve contracted out for so that hundred and fifty dollars you don’t get all 150 of it the marketplace will take a few percentage points off of that as their fee and once they do that whatever is remaining that goes into an escrow or they hold it for you and essentially you don’t get to touch that money yet because you haven’t done the project so they hold it for you in an escrow and essentially you complete the project you give the brochure for example to the client and say hey this is done the client says great looks great I accept this project it’s complete and the money gets released to you so you have to finish the project first and then once you do that the client approves that it’s up to their standards and then the money is released to you and then it goes to your paypal account and then it goes to your bank account eventually then you can spend it right that’s how the cycle works so these three marketplaces are the most popular odesk I like odesk a lot because some cool things about Oh deaths that are different with most is that odesk lets you also hire other people so if you want to contract things out to other people and build your own team of people and have just not your son not only yourself but have other maybe you’re not a really good writer right and you want to hire a writer to help you with this project that you’re doing for this brochure you you know that you can design brochures great but maybe you can’t write them very well so if you don’t know any money locally to work with and team up on on this project and you can go and hire other people within odesk and build up a team of people that you can call upon for your own projects and also it’s a it has a lot of higher quality people on their freelancer com also has a great range of people but the competition on there is also a lot more fierce and the bidding is also a lot lower on there so you can make more money on elance and odesk I find because there’s higher quality projects and we’ll go over one more marketplace that I have I believe in a slide that’s after this one so there is a new marketplace from envato that that i’ll show you called the studio which is really cool and i’ll show you that next some unconventional places you can get projects kijiji i’m sure you’ve heard okay Gigi it’s a classified website right posting projects on there I have got a few leads on there it does work and you can post that yeah you but it’s great for finding people that are looking for projects so they’re looking forward for help you can go on there and there’s a section for business posts you can find owners of small businesses that are looking for people that do websites and you can contact them on there and the great thing about kijiji is that it’s local right each of the market places within kijiji are local to your city into your area so that’s also great because you can find someone local that you can meet for coffee and you can talk to them face-to-face which is the best fiverr com if you haven’t heard of it it’s a marketplace where everyone does everything for five dollars so this is fantastic for building testimonials out when you need to build your your social proof and you want 10 testimonials you can go on fiverr com and post your service there so think about what you would do for client typically in an hour and and take about you know ten minutes of that divide that up by ten whenever you can do in 10 minutes offer that as a service on Fiverr for five dollars so for example if you’re a writer and you normally would write say 500 words for for for your regular hourly rate then you just divide that up by 10 and you only write you know say you know a lot smaller like 50 words a hundred words as a five dollar project so it’s you just you don’t do what you’re normally would do for an hour and just charge five bucks because you’re not going to get very far doing that right you’re going to charge you’re going to do something that’s a lot smaller in scale and really quick to do and then charge five dollars for it and once you do that you post it on here and you’ll get lots of inquiries about your service and you complete it really quickly you can get you know if we’re doing if we’re doing this in 10-minute increments then yeah you can get a lot done in one hour right you can get maybe four or five of these projects cranked out in one hour that’s five really valuable testimonials because everyone has to leave you with testimonial at the end so use those testimonials on your website use those projects even if you want to it as your portfolio pieces and build those out on Fiverr also fibers great if you have a project that’s large and you want to again outsource some of it you can go on fibre and get things done for five dollars if you will need a logo for someone or you need a mock-up of something and you want to show the client more options then you can go on fibre and spend ten dollars and get a couple options made for really cheap and show the client those as well if you want some diversity with what you’re showing a client warrior forum com is the biggest market place of marketers so it’s the biggest forum for marketers online it’s huge and it just got bought out actually by freelancer and they have a section they’re called warriors for hire and that’s a section where you can post well your services on there and find marketers and need help with say copywriting if they’re the writers for their sales pages and graphics for their sales pages it’s great if you are interested in marketing services and you want to help other marketers linkedin groups linkedin groups are often neglected but they are very popular and if you haven’t been in LinkedIn groups definitely check them out because there’s a lot of people in there there’s a lot of people in many groups just like Facebook groups similar sort of thing but it’s usually all business oriented and LinkedIn groups are great because you can message everybody in the group you can get to if you own the group you get to email blasts all the people in the group email blasts not like Facebook where you can’t email your group members anymore linkedin actually let you email them if you own the group and also you can post articles to your blog post if you wrote a really great blog post showing how to do something you can post that in those groups and build up credibility in the group’s and then when people ask questions and look they’re looking for help then you can answer their questions on there and turn them into leads and prospects so here’s freelancer.com here’s what it looks like and here’s how many just to get an idea of how many categories there are four projects right I’ll see if I can zoom in here I can’t zoom in here so just look Ellie’s this is just like a third of the list the list just goes on and on and Scrolls down here on these are all the different skills of project categories so web design graphic design doing different things here look at all them there’s so many projects in each of these clearly if you don’t have there’s some skill that you’re going to have in this list you can look in so once you click one of these categories you’re going to get something looks like this which is a listing the projects within that category so here are some of the projects you can see on the right hand side here there’s the price of the their budget so you can see how much they’re willing to spend on this project and you can quickly see there’s some cheap projects for twenty bucks an hour there’s some projects for hundreds of dollars right and typically projects on here are fixed rate projects which means they’re fixed fees so doesn’t matter if you take 10 minutes to finish the project or five days to finish the project you’re going to pay they’re going to pay you the same amount of money so those fixed project fees are great because if you can get something done quicker than everyone else then you just get the same amount of money it’s not hourly right so you can get something done in 10 minutes or an hour and normally the you know they’re there they’re going to be giving hundreds of dollars then you or you’re making a really good profit because something that would have taken other people many hours to finish you may be finished in half an hour and you profit from that because they’re paying the same amount of money no matter what it shows the skills required it shows when it started you want things that are not bid it not a lot of bidders in it because then there’s less competition so look at how many bids are on the project there’s like dozens and dozens of bids probably going to be hard to crack that one there was only a few bids then your chances of getting selected are a lot higher and finally I want to throw this one in this is another marketplace that just launched recently called studio and Votto studio envato is a great company they have a lot of different marketplaces for purchasing stock photography scripts wordpress themes audio a whole bunch I things that you can use in your creative projects and they just launched a new marketplace for freelancers and creative people you can go that website on your screen their studio and Vodacom it is free I believe and I like this one because the quality of the people in here is really really really high you get to showcase your hourly rate you get to show some of your portfolio samples so when people are when clients are searching for freelancers they get to see everything about you really quickly at a glance to get to see how much you charge some samples of your work your design of your designer your design style really quickly and they have a lot of categories you can see on the left-hand side there it’s a great marketplace for finding projects and the people in here because it isn’t very well known yet on the people that are in here are high quality people so the project quality is going to be high up there as well you’re going to get projects for hundreds of even thousands of dollars versus on them other marketplaces where you might get you know twenty dollar fifty dollar or 100 dollar projects just to start out ah job boards job boards are also great for finding freelance projects here’s four of my favorite we work remotely is a great one crop calm authentic jobs these are all places where you can look up jobs for freelancers that our contract job so these are going to be jobs that are longer term jobs not one-off projects so on these marketplaces you finish a project once you’re finished you’re done you move on to the next project or you go back to the client later in the future for another project but it’s all project by project one by one when you finish it you get your money you get paid and you move on on job boards these are usually contract jobs these are larger jobs that are about six months maybe a three months or six months and they pay you on a weekly or bi-weekly basis so sort of like an actual job except its contract which means that once it’s over you’re not you’re not stuck with that client you’re not stuck with and you can also take a multiple project so you can take on one contract job then you can also be doing other smaller freelance jobs on the side as well if you want a more steady income while you’re doing the freelance project maybe you’re just starting out and you you’re you know this thing of having– going project a project scaring you because you don’t know that income is going to be there and you need to support yourself right if you have a family you need to support them so having a a six month contract job gives you that that peace of mind that you can have money always coming in existing contacts are a great way to find clients and a lot of people don’t utilize your own personal networks you have people that have companies or know someone that owns a small business and those people are always looking for for people to help them out so I definitely tap into your existing personal network and you can do that very simple by just going in to your email inbox and looking up people that might know someone that needs a project done and tap into those existing contacts send them an email something looks similar to what you see on your screen here um and this is just a sample email of what you can send your friends and family saying hey I just started doing freelancing check out my portfolio of my website here once you have it and I know you’re corrected the creative people so I’m wondering if you knew anyone who may need a website I can sweeten the deal by offering you a finder’s fee as a token of my gratitude so that is a great way to let your friends refer you to other people and also reward them for doing so and finally networking events are huge networking is a great way to meet new clients super easy to do you can go to meetup com and find local meetups in your area and you can use those for you can go to those and once you’re at them you can meet new people you can give out your business cards you can find other freelancers at some meetups to work on projects together with one of the things that I learned when I was starting out freelancing is that hey there are a lot of people out there but not all the people there are competing with you okay they’re not all all your competition sure they might have similar skills as you but you are unique as a person right you’re unique as your skill set is unique your design style is unique everything is unique about you so when you go to these meetups don’t be afraid to meet other freelancers that have other skills or even similar skills as you and you can work with them and collaborate with them on projects together so if you can find someone who complements your skills and you can work on projects what’s great is that you can work together and take on bigger projects so the pay day ends up being a lot bigger in the end because you can take on bigger paying projects and work together on them and as a solo entrepreneur it can be a little bit lonely when you’re at home or at your office with no one else there and you’re working on your own you know it easy it is easy to get stuck in your own little bubble and and feel like you’re just on your own so if you have other people around you that are supporting you you have it you build up a support network at these meetups it is great because you don’t feel alone you find other people who are creative just like you and and you can work on projects together and when you’re working together it’s fun because you can brainstorm off with each other and and that’s always a great way to kick start a project off so you use go to meetup com and you type in your postal code and find within a radius of your house where the closest meetups are okay pricing your services so we’re going to talk about our Lee versus per project versus daily rate so our Lee is pretty self-explanatory it’s your hourly rate you try and figure out how long something’s going to take and then you work that into an hourly number so say you’re going to design a brochure and you think in your head okay well typically brochures take me about three hours to do so you charge the client for three hours and your hourly rate is say a hundred dollars an hour so that’s three hundred dollars for three hours that’s pretty self-explanatory and pretty straightforward the advantages of doing it hourly is that when the client comes back to you with changes or modifications or they want this something new added to it or they change the scope of the project it’s called the the number of tasks within a project that happens a lot as part it’s quite frequent that a client will come and change what they originally agreed on so no problem you don’t say no you say sure I can do that but it’s going to cost you money and what’s great about hourly is that you just add more hours on the project right onto that invoice you just keep adding the hours as long as it takes you to get things done you just keep adding those hours on and you charge the client at the end for however many hours it took you which is great the next way is per project and some clients like to be charged per project because then they can obviously estimate how much money total it’s going to cost them and they can budget for that some kind like the some clients like the budget things ahead of time right maybe they only have five hundred dollars to spend so they don’t want to do hourly it ends up being more than five hundred dollars so they’ll just do a per project basis and you just just be wary of those because if a client is that type of client that likes to add things on they on top of what they initially agreed on then you don’t get paid any more money right the project is a fixed fee so they’re gonna pay you five hundred dollars no matter what so just make sure that you say no when are sorry that you don’t say no always say yes but that you always push back when the client is trying to add more on than they originally agreed to say yes I can do that I can i can add those extra features that you’re asking but you have to pay me more money because it’s going to take me three or four hours longer than was originally anticipated so on top of the five hundred dollars i’m going to need another hundred dollars or whatever you can negotiate with them sometimes there’s a lot of wiggle room there you just have to ask make sure that you ask daily rate is something that’s happening a lot overseas in in the in Europe they are doing this daily rate thing we’re basically you charge clients per day so if projects going to take save five days to complete its a website projects can take five business days you charge them per day and charge a large money per day say five hundred dollars a day a thousand dollars a day whatever it is you can charge them a daily rate and then you commit to dedicating that entire day to their project and some clients like that because you’re not going to be they’re not going to be competing for your time with other projects on the go right you take one project on them at a time and you you you you charge out your days and also you can take days off right you could make sure that your you can tell clients you only work monday tuesdays and thursdays and wednesdays and fridays you take off so you only charge for three only work three days in the week and you charge it say you know eight hundred dollars a day so that works out to a very good healthy a weekly rate for yourself income wise and and then you just just make sure you communicate to your client which days you are working when you’re doing that always ask for fifty percent up front this is huge when you start out you don’t know these clients right there are strangers most of them so you want to make sure if you’re not using a marketplace which automatically holds that money in escrow for you so you know that money is secured and they actually have the money if you’re not using a market place to start out then you under using something like a GG or one of those other marketplaces that don’t do escrows then make sure that you ask for half of the money up front so if you’re doing that that brochure example I always refer to it’s three hundred dollars for three-hour project so you’re going to charge the claim three hundred dollars and the client agrees to the 300 our price you come back to them and you say okay um thank you for giving me this project before I begin working on the brochure I need fifty percent up front fees this is a deposit for the project so I know that we are serious about working on this project that you have the money don’t say that you have the money but in your head you’re thinking got it this client may not have the money right they might just take you for a ride and this happens a lot frequently with freelancers online a client will hire you for a project you give them the project files over which is a bad idea you just hand them over the work that did that that that you spent three hours on and they don’t pay you they don’t pay you after the projects over and they take the file on they that you never hear from them again so don’t fall into that trap ask for fifty percent up front it’s actually a quite common thing for freelancers to do is not like you’re being greedy here freelancers do this almost all the time because they want security and knowing that the client does have the money and hey if you start the project and the client doesn’t get back to you or the things things fall through then you the fifty percent is non-refundable so you keep that fifty percent no matter what you know that you have that money in the bank and that’s what’s great about it okay invoicing clients let’s move along here the invoicing of clients so invoicing clients is a quite simple to do there’s a few ways that you can do it the first way is through the old-fashioned pen and paper yes you can still invoice clients through pen and paper just go go out to your local staples or your business store and find a bilingual invoice book that has duplicates what that means is when you are riding out an invoice for a client duplicates and carbonless duplicates means that when you’re writing on the invoice you give the client that nice shiny white paper and when you rip it off there is a receipt and a copy of it underneath of what you wrote so you get to keep a copy and you know what you gave the client you need to keep your own copies for your own records for your own bookkeeping in your accounting make sure that you keep copies of everything you’ve receipts invoices all that stuff you have to keep a copy of so if you’re going to go paper go with paper which is not there’s nothing wrong with going paper if you’re meeting clients in person it’s better to use paper and get checks because then there’s no fees right if you’re charging clients online there’s always a fee for charging them through PayPal PayPal takes a two point nine percent plus thirty cents fee on top of whatever you’re charging so if you can you can get an e transfer which is through the bank and you don’t pay any fees for that the client pays the fee so you can do Annie transfer from bank account to bank account / / digital so it’s a so there’s no checks that have to be cached or young to go to the bank to cash the check or you can take checks and the only bad thing about checks is that when you get a check you have to actually go to the bank to cash it right so that can be a pain if you don’t live near a bank or you don’t have time to go to the bank but I getting checks or doing a transfer is the best solution because that way you you don’t have any fees you’re paying anyone you get the full amount of the money for the project never ever ever ever ever take cash for a project okay the problem with cash is that you have to first go to the bank to deposit it and you don’t want to be taking cash from it from people for projects and then going and spending the cash because that way it’s hard to track everything cash is very hard to track you want a paper trail with everything that you do so taking a check doing any transfer paying online through these online payment methods I’ll be going through in a second all these have paper trails you know how much money came in and how much money is going out for your expenses and that’s really important if you’re taking cash and just putting in your pocket it’s really hard to track that and it will be a nightmare when it comes to bookkeeping for the end of the year the online way in the easiest way is to charge your client online remember we want to be dealing with local clients here we might be dealing with clients that are overseas that are in other parts of the world which is great and you won’t be able to go to their business and take a check right or they might not be able to do a need transfer they’re not in the same country so paypal is accepted in lots of countries not every country but almost every country and it’s widely accepted and it’s a well known form of payment for international clients so paypal is great two-point-nine percent plus thirty cents is the fee that they take and that’s pretty low when you’re talking about the convenience of PayPal so paypal itself has an invoicing feature if you already have a paypal account you might not even know that paypal does have an invoicing feature built into paypal it’s completely free to use and you just go to requests or what is it yeah the request money section and you can create an invoice in there and you can email the invoice to your client through paypal and they could pay online when they get an email or you can use a specific email email driven invoicing software as a service such as FreshBooks FreshBooks is great i love FreshBooks there a toronto-based company and they have fantastic customer support and they make beautiful invoices and the best part is that you can automate everything and i’ll show you how to do that so check out freshbooks com there is a free account you get one client on it so you can try it out see if you like it here’s the plans here so you get one client for free and to just go and check it out it’s really great and it’s an easy way to make invoices but the best part about FreshBooks is that it integrates with a whole bunch of other services and one of those services is stripe stripe is a credit card processing system that is the same fees as PayPal so it’s two-point-nine percent same sort of fee structure except that when someone pays you through stripe the payment goes right into your bank account straight away it direct deposits it right into your bank account which is awesome because in paypal the money goes into paypal and sits in paypal and then you have to actually manually go and request that they send the money to your bank with stripe the money goes right to your bank automatically without you thinking about anything so that’s always great and FreshBooks lets you set up stripe automatically so when you send so see that you have a client where you’re doing some website work for them and it’s the same amount of work every single month so you’re maintaining their website or doing their social media for example so that you’re doing their social media marketing you’re maintaining their social media pages on Facebook and Twitter you’re tweeting for them you’re posting for them and you’re charging them four hundred dollars a month so that four hundred dollars a month if you were doing this mainly you have to go every single time to the business owners place of business get a check from them and that’s a pain in the butt right having to drive to their location the amount of money that you spend on gas and transport alone would be not worth it right so um in such a hassle having to go collect checks if you’re doing Annie transfer you have to go and email them remind them hey you know make sure you paid my each transfer I didn’t see the money come through it’s the first of the month where’s my money and you got to keep hassling them and emailing them and if you have five or ten clients on the go that can be a pain because you have to track which clients at page you which ones haven’t right and that can be a real pain in the butt so if you use freshbooks you can have it so that you input your clients information including their credit card into FreshBooks and then FreshBooks automatically on whatever day you want see the first of the month it will charge their credit card a specific amount create an invoice automatically for you with a new number so it auto increments the invoices so they’ll send invoice number one invoice number two etc it’ll automatically email the client and invoice the invoice has what your monthly service is it has the amount and it’s a receipt because it’s already charged through credit card automatically so they get the credit card charged the money goes through stripe to your bank account emails the client and invoice receipt automatically and you have done nothing everything is completely automated you’re just sitting back relaxing taking the money and doing the work so you don’t worry about invoicing the client following up with them and think even if the client’s credit card doesn’t work then you can freshbooks will automatically email them to update their client there the credit card info so i know it alert you if they don’t pay also if you want to if the client doesn’t like the automatic billing then you can just do one off payment with fresh books as well so you just do one off payment for say a website that costs five thousand dollars you you can put it through the system for that one time payment fee send them the invoice and wait 30 days for them to pay for example net 30 so usually that’s pretty standard that you don’t want the cut you don’t usually ask the client to pay everything immediately right so you asked for that fifty percent payment up front but then once they get the fifty percent when you finish the project sometimes clients like to wait 30 days because they don’t have the funds ready so 30 days is pretty standard you give them 30 days and if they don’t pay in 30 days then freshbooks can automatically send an email out to them and remind them to make the payment so you only have to follow up with the clients you can just let FreshBooks do that for you which is cool so stripe same as PayPal two-point-nine percent plus thirty cents for your first for all your payments stripe also has a mobile app which you can use if you’re on the go if you are selling something physically at a market or in a shop you can use strike on your phone and charge people through your phone alright let’s talk about organizing your projects there’s a lot of services out there to help you organize your projects and the first one that I’d like to use and probably you are using already is google google has gmail and gmail is great and also they have hangouts which is what we’re using for this webinar today google has calendar they have google plus they have drive which is a online storage service plus they have the office suite of services docs google docs google spreadsheets there’s a powerpoint type of thing it’s not very good but they have a power point online PowerPoint type thing all these services are free right so that’s the great part about Google’s that they have all these services for free but there also is a business version of these services called google apps for business so the advantage of this is that you get your own domain name for your email so instead of people emailing you at you know marketing company at gmail com you can pay five dollars a month and you can have your own domain name so people would email your name at your business com whatever your business website is so say it’s marketing company com you can have Chad at marketing company com and when people email you there it actually goes to a company Brandon gmail it is technically this gmail but it has your company logo on it and there’s no there’s not the usual Google branding which is nice also you get you can share the drive space with your employees if you have employees you can set emails up for them and they have their own inboxes and you have Google Drive which you can use to collaborate on files work on documents together using Google Docs it’s a really great way if you have a business where there’s more than one person in the business you can use this as a great way to have email services for your business but hey you don’t have to pay five dollars a month you can use the free gmail and the free gmail email does allow you to setup a domain a custom domain for free so if you have a domain name you can set up email forwarding you can set up email aliases a whole bunch of cool stuff look into that on Google there’s lots of YouTube YouTube tutorials showing you how to do it gmail active inbox active inbox is a google chrome extension so if you’re not using google chrome as your web browser like firefox or internet explorer google chrome has extensions that you can install for free and they add cool features to different websites and to the brow itself active inbox is a has a free option and what it does is it adds some really cool organizational features to gmail it adds a drop-down for projects you could organize emails into projects really easily but the coolest feature that I like is that when you’re in an email there’s three buttons over here I don’t know if you can see my mouse but there’s three buttons right here once called next one’s called action and one’s called waiting on and what these three buttons do is when you’re in an email you can click on those buttons if you’re waiting on a response from someone so if you’re emailing a client and you want them to reply to you but you don’t want to have to remember to to follow up with them you can click on waiting on and that will organize the email into a special folder that will tell you how many emails you’re waiting for responses from you can quickly go back to those emails that you’re waiting on a client from it’s really great for organizing action is a nice button you hit that button if you there’s an action item that you need to categorize so you click on action and then you can get back to it later to turn the action into a bunch of tasks and make a to-do list out of it and next just means something that you have to do really soon so let’s just help helping you prioritize emails if there’s something you have to get to right away so definitely check out active inbox it’s free and you can use it to make your gmail inbox a lot more productive plus if you’re organizing projects there’s a lot of project management tools out there these project management tools help you to organize your projects and when you’re taking on more than one project it can get really really confusing to yourself there’s a lot of tasks going on at once right if you’re taking five projects on at once which is possible when you’re taking them project on you can get confused with which tasks are due for what projects so using a project management tool like one of these on your screen here helps you to organize tasks and know what to priority first for each of your projects base camp is the most popular one out there but personally i don’t really like base camp when it comes to collaborating with other people just because they’re there to do list is very primitive and it’s hard to organize heart just do searching and to filter things in base camp um it’s great for just one person but I don’t want to like base camp how they have their tasks broken down I can’t prioritize tasks tasks very easily base camp Reich is one of my favorites right now Reich in a sauna are great um definitely check those ones out they have free plans and they are great for collaborating with teams setting up tasks and prioritizing those and it can send you email reminders and a whole bunch of cool things plus there’s another bunch of there’s a whole bunch of different ones out there huddle frida free to camp zoho has a project management tool go plan is one that’s been around for a little bit activecollab as one specifically for freelancers and for single freelancers like solo entrepreneurs so definitely check all those out on and we won’t be going through them all but definitely check out Reich in a sauna those are my favorite okay so we’ve gone through almost everything here we’ve gone through everything except for marketing materials and I wanted to throw this one in because marketing materials are very important especially if you’re going to be going to those networking events that we talked about earlier from meetup com the best tool that i have found for business cards sure you can go to your local printing store and i highly recommend that you go to your local printing stores if you can support local businesses right try and support as many local businesses you can if you just a printing house it’s just a one mom and pop shop definitely go to those because you’re going to get the best customer service at local stores that are written that are run by one one or two people as to these chain stores like the staples of the world right every time I’ve used a proposed I’ve had bad bad experiences they’ve been as taken way longer than they should of or you know the people there some people there that are working at those printing stores and in the big chains they don’t really care about your projects they don’t care about your success right there just there to get paid an hourly rate and just get their job done right so if you’re going to a mom-and-pop shop a smaller printing store they will go above and beyond to get your projects done quickly and on time and looking perfect and take that extra care with all your projects but if you’re looking for something cheap and really affordable because we are bootstrap freelancers right we want to have the most cost effective way of doing things then sometimes local businesses local print shops are can be expensive and there’s a website called vistaprint which is available at vistaprint CA and vistaprint lets you design your own business cards for free and once you design them you can get a hundred business cards printed for you know ten or fifteen dollars max so very inexpensive to get a hundred business cards or 500 business cards a very small amount of business cards for a really low amount of money the other thing about some of these printing stores that you have to have minimums right you can’t just print 10 business cards you have to have you have to you have to have like five hundred or thousands and business cards to get the better deal pricing and I’m vistaprint you don’t have to have you have a lot lower minimum so you can have a hundred business cards printed for very cheap pricing and the best part about vistaprint is that they have a drag-and-drop editor that has templates already built in so if you are not a designer and you want a business card you can go on vistaprint and you can design a business card using their templates drag drag things around on your screen and change the text around and have a really professional-looking business card finished in 20 minutes and have a hundred of them shipped right to your door for not a lot of money and you don’t need a lot of cards 100 cards is a lot of cards when you’re going to these networking events you’re not going to give a card to every single person that you need I’m just the ones that that you think you might have contact with later on so trust me you don’t need to have a thousand business cards under business cards is more than enough to get you started and that’s only kind of cost you ten bucks and you’re all set to go so not only do they have normal business cards but they also have other options like glossy business cards raised print shine metallic finish cards which is what I got there really really nice you can add those premium touches to make your card stand out as well which is nice all right um you can go to try to float in calm / vistaprint for that coupon code as well okay so that finishes up finishes up our webinar for today you can email me at any time at Chad at Fullerton Mediacom or you can follow me on twitter chad underscore Fullerton there’s also my blog on there and you can get your beta invite for web and ciders by going to web inciters calm and filling out your email there and i’ll make sure that you get in on that private with freelancing community called web and ciders if you have any questions I will take them now in the chat room but I will and the I will end the recording for now so that we can stop the recording and if you have any questions you can ask them in the chat box during this live webinar thanks guys
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