Archive for the ‘FreeLancing’ Category

Ok today’s blog post is going to be all about doubling your prices. It doesn’t matter what field you are in, you can double your prices RIGHT NOW. Don’t worry I’ll tell you how to…but first lets tackle the biggest myths…

Myth : You need Experience to Charge High Prices

When I started with my freelance business about 9 years ago as a programmer… Something my first client that struck with me…

“You can’t charge high prices, nobody will pay you. Heck you have to work for free few months”.

It pissed me to no end when I heard it, moreover I can’t forget the most villainous look in his eye. Everything told me that I shouldn’t work with this guy… YET, I did it… Guess what, he robbed me on my efforts. He got the software without paying any single penny. Do you believe I was robbed off from 3 months of my effort?

Charging high prices is all about confidence. It isn’t about experience. Its just that with experience you feel like “You’ve arrived” that’s why you are start charging high.

Trust me it doesn’t matter much with experience. A 15 year old computer geek will write the same code as any 40 yr old computer geek. Heck there have been more than few occasions when 15 yrs kicked old guys arse.

Remember : Job Rules Doesn’t Apply to Freelancers

When I started with website designing… I adopted to new policy. 75% of payment first and then I’ll write a single line of code, 25% payment the moment you’ll clear the design. If they are worrying about prices, I’d told them how to get low price websites from college kids but you’ll get what you pay for.

Here’s your option, Get paid like a celebrity in 10 years from now or Get paid like celeb right now, what do you chose? There might be some unseen “getting paid” rule book for companies or getting JOB. but there is None for free lancers.

Ok here’s my secret of charging High…

Rule 1 : Stop Selling Yourself short : Throw all the negativity out the window. When you are talking to client, look directly into his eye and give your doubled price. Have confidence, heck don’t mind letting the confidence crossover to arrogance.

Rule 2 : Stop being an Expert in One thing. One of the biggest drawbacks of being the expert in one thing is that you can’t add-on the value. Let me explain… When I was a web designing, I knew about SEO(search engine optimization)… but never gave it a thought… I was an expert designer.

One day one of my client I was working with talked about SEO and grumbled how expensive they are… Well just for the heck I told him, I know how to do basic SEO and I could help him with SEO… Well to end the story short… I ended up being paid for basic SEO too. It literally doubled my income from that client.

Today If somebody ask me to design a website, I’ll end up selling him SEO service, Internet marketing consultant, copywriting services, blog consulting services and whole enchilada.

Rule 3 : Provide Value instead of service : Ok this might be bit of confusing to you. But read it carefully. Listen, anyone can provide service, but only very few can provide value.

let me explain this by a story : Last summer, I had to meet someone at one of the fast food chain(FFC for short). Now if you know about Indian Summer, its freaking hot. I sweat a lot and when I entered I was dripping wet. The person behind the counter greeted me and said “Its freaking hot today isn’t it?” and gave me paper napkin.

Now this is not something about courtesy. It had more about adding value.  This guy noticed did few things right.
1. Sympathized with my situation
2. Noticed that I wasn’t carrying the handkerchief
3. Gave me napkins and talked to me…

That’s it… If you learn any lesson from this blog post, then learn this… Provide Value instead of service.

Action Plan :
1. Double your price and be confident.
2. Add more expertise under your belt (even if its borrowed expertise or hired)
3. Provide more value.

3. Market Metrics
Get many Size estimates (current and future) for all of the following:

• Overall market
• Current size as it stands
• Potential size for the future
• Actual penetration of current products/service within the entire market

Individual market segments

• Current size
• Potential size
• Actual penetration of current products/service within the total market
• Usage rates
• Frequency of product purchases
• Growth estimates (current and in the future) for:
• Overall market
• Individual market segments

Competitive Analysis

You must include a Summary of who your Current Competitors are

Listing the competition by market share ranking (by each target market if possible) is a good way to size them up. You can also be more specific by searching for individual points listed below.

Current Competitors – full analysis of top competitors including:

• Products & Services (e.g., description, uniqueness, pricing, etc.)
• Their Market share at current
• Current customers (targeted audience)
• Positioning and promotion strategies
• Partnerships/Alliances/Distributors
• Recent news

SWOT Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats

It is extremely important to focus attention on the SWOT section of this report. While most other information in this report can be gleaned from company and secondary materials, much of what appears in the SWOT section is based on the researcher’s own opinions of the competitor based on the information that is collected.

Consequently, this is often one of the hardest areas of the report to write as well.

Potential Competitors (any competition in the future)

You will need to get an explanation (though it need not be as detailed as Current Competitors) on who they are or maybe and why they are seen as potential competitors

5. Additional

• Extraneous Variables
  Discuss factors that may affect this market (e.g., technological, social, governmental, competitive, etc.)
• Market Trends and what is expected to happen in the future

If you can follow these basic tips for finding and selecting your target market, you should be ready to search online and check out the competition and their rankings in the search engines.

If you are trying to research your market for online business, things doesn’t change much. The marketing metrics, competition, demographics from offline real world doesn’t change much.

In order to be able to conduct a decent targeting and marketing campaign, you must first understand the fundamentals of finding out who they are. They only way to do this is to follow a specific guideline for you to follow. Check out the guideline below.

1. Your Objective to the Research

Explain in one paragraph why the research is being done, what you hope to learn and for what purpose the information that you attain may be used

2. Description of the Market

This should be general like one paragraph

Who is your Target Market(s)

• Why you chose this particular market
• Get a complete profile of your market (e.g., demographics, psychographics, behaviors)
• What benefits does your market seek (i.e., what points-of-pain or problems are being solved)
• What factors can affect their decision to purchase or use your product/service
• What attitudes do they have about the products/services that are currently not on the market
• How is the product used
• Products and Services that appeal to the target market
• In general terms, what is currently so appealing to this market
• If there are no current providers, what types of products/services may appeal to this market in the future (i.e., what is used now to solve the problem).

Start Making Money at Home in your Free time.

If you have been following on my quick & easy way to make money series, then you should be making some serious cash by now. My believe is handling your money problems with some quick part time job like this can be really helpful for work at home moms, students.

In today’s series on making money on the side, we’ll deal with some internet opportunity. Now you can all take this lightly or another scam or you can work on this serious. The choice is yours. The only thing that’ll be holding you back is your fear. Your fear of rejection (calling or contacting all the business owners, its scary thought, I know I went through this)

Ok enough of rants. Here’s the todays formula. It deals with Skype, Your local business owners and some of your charm. Don’t worry if you are not a poster boy/girl. I’ll give you enough tips to get through this idea.

Well, to start off, you need a list of business owners. You can get it either from your Local Yellow pages or walk around 5 miles radius from your place and talk to each and every single business there.

You are going to tell them that you can help generate more leads and loyal customers without spending any money on the advertisement. If they are interested, then you can give your idea.

Of course, any business owner who doesn’t want more loyal customers is insane. So they’ll ask for your bright idea.

You’ll explain how educating their customer about their business will help them grow.

You’ll explain how relating and talking  with their customers will create relationship, increase trust in their business.

You’ll explain how this will make them as an Instant expert in their customers eyes for their market.

and so on… Again. You need to prepare a complete speech for this. Think of all the benefits you can if business owners interact with prospects.

Now, you’ll introduce yourself as a Expert Interviewer whose job is to interview important people in the market. You’ll tell them how you can use Skype and create a series of questions which you’ll ask them with a live audience and then this teleseminar will be like a live sales pitch going out to hundreds of prospects.

You’ll have to tell them, how he/she can differentiate their business on live teleseminar like this and generate more loyal customers.

The Only DrawBack: is when the business man is not into speaking. In these cases just tell them, you’ll be interviewing them on phone and there’s going to be no pressure on them to perform or You can ask his/her best salesman and help promote their business.

How much you can charge? You can charge anywhere from $600 – $1000 per interview. You can include a copywriting job for classifieds in this price. And rest is your efforts in interviewing them.

Now if you don’t know how to use skype to set up teleseminars, then Try out my Skype Secrets and Teleseminar Basics package.

To prepare for the interview. You should write out all the questions and give them to the business owners. Tell them to prepare on these questions. Give them direction that it’ll be more or less these questions paraphrased by you in interview. That’s it.

This is a technique that you can use it starting right now to make some serious cash.