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.Self-Employed Freelancers & Small Businesses: Tips on Winning a Virtual Assistant / Home-Based Position & Keeping It
By Lori Redfield
Although still considered an uncommon profession, the Virtual Assistant / Home-Based Clerical role is fast becoming the best recognized choice for companies, particularly web-based companies, to pursue nowadays.
A Virtual Assistant (VA) is much like a traditional Administrative Assistant in many ways. VA’s handle correspondence, scheduling, customer support, website updates, writing and design projects, data entry – pretty much anything you can think of that an online company would require for their day-to-day operations.
Many parents who want to stay home with their children have opened their own Virtual Assistant (VA) / Home-Based Clerical Freelance Services.
It is a perfect career choice for Mothers of young children, or people who must take care of older relatives. You work out of your home office as an independent contractor. Often times the schedule can be quite flexible.
This is an ideal position for women who plan to return to the workforce when their children are older. It will enhance your resume’ and inevitably you improve your old skills and acquire new ones.Basic skills and equipment you will likely need to become a Freelance, Home-Based Virtual Assistant include the following:
§ Microsoft Office – Excel, Access, Outlook, and Word
§ HTML skills with either Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage
§ Instant Messaging software – ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger
§ Cable Modem or DSL – Dial up is far to slow for the pace most online entrepreneurs are accustomed to working at.
The above aren’t always necessary – but acquiring each and learning to use them will only increase your desirability and worth.
There are many places to start looking for Virtual Assistant Jobs:
§ One of the easiest places to land your first Virtual Assistant clients is through an ad placed in your own local classifieds.
It seems unlikely – but trust me, there is far less competition for local clients then for jobs being bid on through Internet Job sites.
§Find Freelance, Home-Based Virtual Assistant / Clerical Employment at Freelance Job Sites
such as elance, findafreelancer, allfreelancework.com, allfreelance.com etc. There is an extensive list of these types of resources here: www.freelancemom.com/gigs.htm
§ Find Work at Home Virtual Assistant Jobs Via Freelance, Home Business, or WAHM Jobs forums.
Virtual Assistants with an established client base often times search for reliable ‘Over-flow Partners’. Forums are an excellent place to network and seek out these types of opportunities.
§ Building your own Virtual Assistant Small Business Web Site.
Unless you do some very good website promotion, it isn’t likely you will actually gain clients through a website that you build to promote your service. HOWEVER, you really should have a website. Just as business cards are an expected and valuable piece of your traditional business, websites are like an online business card/resume. You should list your rates, your skills, your availability and your portfolio. A well thought out website will give you the edge when bidding on a position.
When you are applying or bidding on a Virtual Assistant or Clerical Freelance position, you must come across as a professional.
There is something about the online medium that invites a casual correspondence style. You will do well to avoid this temptation. Save similes, abbreviated internet slang (LOL, IMO etcetera) for later on in your relationship with your client.
Your client needs to trust that your Virtual Assistant / Clerical Business is going to help him/her run their business with professionalism.
Your first impression must come across as professional as a traditional cover letter for employment. Be confident and clear in your interactions with them. Ask intelligent questions and be very honest about the time that you have available in your schedule.
I strongly advise all aspiring Freelance Virtual Assistants to do an honest assessment of what their career objectives are before they begin seeking out work.
It is easy, and common to over extend yourself. If your main goal is to earn a part-time living specifically so that you can put raising your children ahead of your career… then be very clear about that when you begin to take on new work assignments.
Start off your virtual assistant / home-based virtual assistant freelance career slow and add clients or responsibilities for clients gradually.
Being too eager to succeed can quickly be your worst downfall. The quickest way to lose a good client is by under-delivering. Make realistic promises. You will gain their respect and their trust. And you will find that as their business grows, they will be more then willing to work around your schedule and needs in order to keep you as a valued independent contractor.
------------------------
Lori Redfield is a freelancing Mother of three, happy wife and blooming online entrepreneur. She is founder of newly launched http://www.freelancemom.com/ an esource for women who want to work from home.
------------------------------------------------------
Promotion Techniques
by Lori RedfieldSo you’ve done it! You’ve poured your heart and soul into the perfect design, the perfect concept, THE perfect website. Don’t stop there. I have seen countless websites – perfectly good websites sitting out there on the web, looking pretty – but not being seen. Here are some strategies to implement – over and over again if you want your website to be a success.
First of all, please! Provide content. Give your visitors a reason to be there and a reason to come back. It truly helps if your site’s focus is something you are passionate about. It is very difficult to succeed with a website you threw together solely because you thought it might ‘make you some money’. You’ve got to care enough about this baby to work on it constantly – even if it ISN’T making you money. So choose a topic that won’t bore you and in which you consider yourself a teacher. You’ve got to offer your visitor something. They aren’t coming to view your paid ads.
Once the site is created, make sure that you have good Meta tags on every page. You’ve got to have them. The search engine spiders feed off them. They are a breeze to make. You can find free tools all over the place to help you make them. I use the Meta tag creator at http://www.anybrowser.com, mainly because I like to support the site. They offer quality resources for free to their users. Even if you are getting a resource for free off of the web, you should realize that the webmaster benefits from you using it. You become one of their statistics – one of their visitors who find the site useful. The more useful a site is, the more it is frequented, the higher value is placed on advertising space. So support sites you love – go there often. If you don’t have any particular page set up as your home page on your browser, choose a site you respect and use it as your home page.
See, really I believe one of the secrets of success is generosity. If you covet your resources you close yourself off. If you fear your ‘competition’ instead of embracing them and networking with them, you cut yourself off. So take the time to support other sites and network. Network at least once a day. Set your mind to it. If you see a site that you love, write the webmaster. Tell them what you love about it. There is nothing better then a note from the ethers appreciating all that you have been working on for months. You never know what can come out of these notes. Make suggestions. Tell the webmaster (or webmistress) that you are interested in reciprocal linking, but that you would really much rather go a step further with them. That a reciprocal link really doesn’t do justice to the amount of respect you have for what they are doing and offer to exchange articles with them, or newsletter ads – anything. Make some friends!
Ideally you should rent Wordtracker from http://www.wordtracker.com and research the keywords in your meta tags before you create them. Wordtracker is a miracle! It’s very cheap to rent for a day (under $10) and it lets you research the words you feel are key to your business and see how many people actually search on those terms, and how many competing sites out there are using those terms. Now that’s valuable!
Once you have your metatags created and inserted into every page on your site (being sure to use a different ‘title tag’ for every page. Go ahead and start submitting to search engines and directories. That’s the first step. Please note that I said FIRST step. Too many people stop there.
The next thing to do is reciprocal link. If your site allows it, set up a directory or some form of a reciprocal linking page. Every morning, sit down with a cup of tea and search. Search for sites that you would like to exchange links with. That’s crucial. You don’t want to add links to YOUR site with just anyone. Their site needs to be worthwhile. Something that you WANT to send your visitors to. This is much more about integrity then it is about ambition. Keep your integrity and you will have something that people will be loyal to. Also – search for sites that will let you add a link WITHOUT reciprocating. That is where it pays to have a site with integrity. People will actually WANT to link to you simply because they want to offer the resource to their visitors.
Google and other big search engines rank sites according to (amongst other things) their link popularity. The more you can get links to your sites out there, any where – the better you will find that your search engine results are. Here is a trick for finding sites to link with. Go to http://www.google.com and do a search. Say you sell cloth diapers. You will search on, ‘add diaper link’ or ‘add baby link’ or ‘add WAHM link’, etc. You will be shocked at how many sites come up in your search. It’s fun!
Don’t ever consider yourself done exchanging links. You may set it aside for awhile, but do pick it up again. It can never hurt.
What CAN hurt you is: Linking to sites with a low Google rating (below 3) from your site. I highly recommend surfing with the Google toolbar AND the Alexa toolbar. Pay attention to the ratings of sites that you are considering exchanging links with. It can never hurt your search engine results if someone links to you, but it CAN hurt your results if you link to them. You may be willing to compromise if a site is particularly good. Why? Because, A. you want to support good sites and also offer excellent resources to your visitors and B. because chances are if it is a good site – the Google and Alexa rankings will only get better.
Another fun trick is to pay attention to your Alexa bar as you are surfing on sites that are related to your website. You will see that Alexa provides links to related sites on the toolbar as you are surfing. Imagine if people were seeing YOUR link up there! You want that! So take the time to submit your link as you surf. If you are on a site that relates to yours, tell Alexa about it. It only takes a minute to submit it and a second to click the email they will send you. The results won’t be immediate – but they’re ‘in the bank’.
One other promotion strategy I want to share with you is writing articles. Like this one! Write articles on what you know about. What you care about. Or what moves you. In just the same way as you searched for ‘add diaper link’, now you will do a search for ‘add article link’. Submit your articles all over the place. Good webmasters are often too busy to write their own articles and they LOVE to publish good ones on their site. You heard me! They will publish YOUR article on their site. They won’t pay you… but they will include a short biography at the end of the article with a link back to your website. Now THAT’S what I call payment! Free traffic that you earned! Someone read your article, recognized that you had something to offer to them and decided, based on the merit of what you have written that they want to know more about you.
I promise you – if you take these pieces of advice to heart, put them into practice and have a good time with it… Your site WILL increase in popularity. I wish you all the best luck with your promotion efforts and hope that you become excited enough and savvy enough to be one of the lucky folks who really are able to earn a living doing what they love.
Lori Redfield is a freelancing Mother of three, happy wife and blooming online entrepreneur. She is founder of newly launched http://www.freelancemom.com, an esource for women who want to work from home.
BlinkList | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Netscape | Onlywire | RawSugar | reddit | Spurl | StumbleUpon | Yahoo MyWeb
