All Freelance Work is a Community for Freelance Workers Including Free Portfolios, Job Search, Job Posting, Helpful Articles, Forums, & More for the Self Employed.
HOW TO SET YOUR FREELANCE RATES - A GUIDE FOR FREELANCERS & CONSULTANTSThere are many factors which business owners must consider on a daily basis as it relates to the running of their business. Things such as how to find good help, where to acquire supplies and how much to pay one’s employees are all pertinent matters which must be addressed. There are a few ways to go about figuring out your rates when it comes to how much to charge the customers.Freelancers & Home Business Owners - 7 Steps to Managing Your Small Business' Time More Effectively
by Everett Williams
When you work a 9-5 job, your boss tells you what to do and when to do it. But when you have your own business, you’re the boss! You have to decide what to do and when to do it.
A 7-step formula for making a schedule that will provide you with time management skills that will allow you to complete small business tasks you need to run your freelance, home-based business well.
1. List all the tasks that you need to do this week to manage and promote your business.
If you’re an auction seller, you might need to buy merchandise, write descriptions, take photos, list your auctions, and make shipments. If you’re a net marketer, you might need to make pay-per-click bids, post to your favorite forums, research your new ebook, and write your weekly ezine. These are just short lists, but they show the kind of tasks you might put on yours.
you can live with while making sure you accomplish all the2. Look at your list of tasks and see if any need to be broken down further.
For example, if you make forum postings one day, you will want to check back later to see if there are any responses. These are really two separate tasks. Auction sellers need to buy merchandise. To do this, you might need to visit garage sales, attend an auction, and check the discount stores for closeouts. Make sure that your list doesn’t have two or more jobs lumped together as one.
3. Now take your task list and check any items that need to be done more than once.
Then write down how often you need to do that task. Auction sellers might list auctions on Thursday and Sunday. That is two jobs, not one. Net marketers might write an ebook chapter each day. In that case, each chapter is another task for your list.
4. Next, mark down any tasks that have to be done on a particular day.
Many auction sellers go to garage sales and auctions to find merchandise. These are often on Saturdays. Many ezine writers like to send their ezines out on Fridays. The more jobs like this you have, the less flexibility you have in making your final schedule.
5. Take your calendar or schedule and write in the tasks that have to be done on certain days.
Then look at the rest of your list and divide the jobs up as evenly as you can among the days that you plan to work. Make sure you take into account the amount of time and the amount of effort each job takes. If you know that putting together your ezine wipes you out, don’t try to do another tough job that day. If you want to schedule another task or two that day, make it something that’s easier for you, such as website maintenance.
6. The next step is to look over the schedule you’ve made and ask yourself some questions.
First, is everything included? Having your whole week’s schedule in front of you may remind you of something you forgot. If you think of something, plug it in. Second, is any one day really tough or really easy? If you’re a full time business person, you may want to even your days out. Part-timers, on the other hand, will probably want to make sure to have your easy days on workdays and hard days when you’re off from your regular job. If you don’t give your full time job your best effort, you may become a full time home business person sooner than you expected or wanted to. Third, is it realistic? Do you have the time and energy to accomplish all this? Don’t be too easy on yourself, but, if you know you really can’t do everything you scheduled, don’t set yourself up for failure. Scale back your schedule to what you know you can get done.
7. The final step is to work your small business plan.
After all, this is what you say you need to do to make your business a success. So do it. The Home Business Persons Hall of Shame is filled with people who made big plans but never carried them out. Don’t be one of them.
Do I have to do this every week, you ask? Well, yes, you do, but the more you do it, the easier and faster it becomes. Soon you’ll come up with a basic schedule that you just add to and subtract from each week. After a while, your new problem will to keep from getting stuck in a rut and just doing the same old things over and over. But that’s a subject for a different article.
Everett Williams is a home business entrepreneur. He is also a webmaster and writer.. Visit http://net-bookstore.com for exclusive ebooks and software. Discover how to get your own, customizable, residual income-building website, no experience needed at http://instant-turnkey-business.com.
Get Stinkin Rich With Your Niche
by Gary HuynhMore focus equals more profits and less work. When picking a market to target online though, the smaller market is the most profitable way to go.
Smaller markets, often called niche markets are an overlooked source of gold. There is a very small supply of information products that target niche markets. As a result, the demand is very high.
Look at it this way - just by changing your target market you can work less and earn more. Isn't that what you want?
The internet marketing industry is a very competitive market - there's no argument against that. So if you want to succeed with this target market, you'll need a killer sales letter, awesome graphics, powerful offers. In effect, you need to work really hard and be different just to get a decent conversion from visitors to customers.
Now turn your focus to niche markets such as left handed guitar players. Since you have less competition, you do not need to put forth your best effort. Just the fact that there is a low supply of information products for this niche leaves you in a very good position.
You can wipe the mat with the small number of competitors in your niche because it's very likely they don't have the marketing prowess you possess.
You can use some or all of the internet marketing strategies such as writing a catchy headline, doing joint ventures, creating upsells, backend selling, using guarantees and more.
Niche markets have always been popular and now they're catching on. You're leaving money on the table if you don't target these hungry folks who are willing to shell out lots of cash to solve their problems.
Now your only question is how to find what niches are profitable and second, how do you create a product for that niche?
You should use two tools to start out. Overture's keyword inventory too at http://inventory.overture.com and Google. Type in a single term in the inventory tool. You will get back a list of all the terms that are related to your term and the number of searches conducted in overture in the last month for that term.
This is the general method for determining the demand for a niche. Usually you will want to find a term that gets at least 30,000 searches a month. You will also need to find a term that targets people who will spend money.
For example, I typed in Jokes in the inventory tool and "michael jackson jokes" came up with about 30,000 searches. Now this is a niche of people who like Michael Jackson Jokes but that doesn't mean they'll spend money for your info product.
To find out the type of terms in which you can make a profit from you should go to Google and type in your niche terms. On the right hand side of the search results, you'll see a bunch of ads called Adword ads.
The more Adwords ads you see for a niche term, the better because it shows that people are willing to spend money on that niche. Advertisers pay for those ads so if it wasn't a profitable niche, they wouldn't pay for advertising.
Creating a product for the niche is much easier than finding the niche itself. You actually don't need a product to make money. If you can find affiliate programs within the niche, then you can just promote the affiliate programs.
To create a product, you don't need to know anything about the niche. Just hire some ghost writers to do the work of writing for you. Before you do that though, it's best to learn what type of information people in that niche would pay for.
You can search through forums and read through the questions and concerns or you can interview a bunch of people in the niche. Just interviewing them will help you learn a whole lot about the people in the niche and what they're interested in.
If you interview a few experts in the niche, you might not even need to hire a ghost writer because you can compile the interview into an audio product and sell it as is.
Once you have the product created, just set up a webpage, autoresponder course, and viral ebook. Go post in the niche forums, advertise in the niche ezines, write niche articles and you'll experience how much easier it is to sell to a niche market than to the internet marketing crowd.
Gary Huynh is a reseller for Niche Factor, an ebook detailing 6 strategies for effective niche product creation and marketing. Visit http://www.onesourcebiz.com/nichefactor for more detail.
Gary Huynh is an expert in using creative rebranding techniques to earn money by using 100% free advertising. Get his ebook Rebrand Profits and read more of his articles at http://www.rebrandprofits.comYou can find many more original articles from me at http://www.real-internet-marketing-reviews.com
BlinkList | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Netscape | Onlywire | RawSugar | reddit | Spurl | StumbleUpon | Yahoo MyWeb
