AnywhereMan

One of the best things about co-hosting Freelance Jam so far has been learning new things. I learned a lot in this week’s chat about typography featuring Sean McCabe from Bold Perspective.

Sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed as a freelance web developer in the sense that I am the commodity, manager, CEO, bookkeeper, salesperson, and customer support representative all rolled into one person. This is nothing new and I can guarantee most freelancers have moments where they feel stretched (to say the least).

However, from a sales perspective this is something that offers us a huge advantage.

Who better to sell the services that you offer than YOU? YOU are the expert. YOU can give people the most accurate information related to the service that YOU are offering to them. YOU can make promises that YOU know YOU can keep.

When I am working with a potential web client, I am able to give them a first-hand demonstration of what I can bring to the table in terms of knowledge of my craft and assurances of the success I’ve had with past clients. They can ask as many questions as they want, as specific as they want, and I can answer them. I don’t need to make a call to the experts or make something up. I do what I am selling, and that’s worth a lot.

In fact, that’s probably why I’ve never really felt like I’ve had to sell: People inquire about what I do and I tell them about it. I even give away a lot of my so-called secrets for free. I don’t really need push any harder than that, and I don’t.

Accurate knowledge and first-hand experience build trust, and people either make the decision to do business with me or they don’t. Likewise, I can choose to take on their project or I can refuse it if I feel we’re not a good fit. I am, after all, the person who will be doing the work.

This post was inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk‘s new book The Thank You Economy which I just started reading this week. At the beginning of the book he talks about how he built up WineLibrary. He spent a lot of time just being helpful, and success followed.

So get out there, do what you do (and do it well), share what you know, and let the business come to you. Sometimes being the person that has to do everything in the company can be a chore, but it can also be an advantage.

We had a blast talking with Jason Schuller about the web design process on last night’s Freelance Jam.

Just wanted to give a quick testimonial for a Chrome/Firefox plugin that turns your Gmail inbox into an absolute “getting things done” (GTD) factory. It’s called ActiveInbox and I am proud to say it’s allowed me to finally create a good system of managing tasks, follow-up items, and project-related items within my Gmail inbox.

I use Gmail interfaces for both my personal and business accounts, and I find that (especially with my business account) many of the items that get emailed to me are tasks: Update this, change that, etc. With ActiveInbox, I can assign those emails as task to specific projects, give them a due date, and even leave associated internal notes.

A few weeks ago I had literally thousands of emails in my inboxes, and after a day with ActiveInbox I was at inbox zero with both of them. I consider that a major victory.

Have you used this plugin? If so, share your story and experience in the comments below.

For the rest of you, check out ActiveInbox today.

Ironically I was just sitting down to figure out a good system for my wife to back up her photos when I noticed the announcement on Amazon about their new Cloud Drive service which offers 5 GB of storage for free.

You can upgrade to premium plans with additional storage, and if you purchase a full MP3 album from the Amazon store they’ll give you a year of 20 GB storage for free.

Check out the Cloud Player, too, which allows you to listen to get those gigs and gigs of music off your local drive yet playable from anywhere.

Anywhere? Hey I kind of like that.

I just signed up for Michael Hyatt‘s email list so that I could download his new e-book, Creating Your Personal Life Plan.  I haven’t even read it in full yet but after just skimming through the topics I can already tell it’s going to be a good one.

There are so many things in life that we plan: vacations, projects, events…but do we ever set out a plan for our life itself? I certainly haven’t and I can’t help but think planning everything else would get that much simpler if I had a set of goals and actionable items for my life as a whole.

Definitely take the time to sign up for Michael’s email list and download this free e-book. Also, his blog is one of my favorites so go ahead and add that to your reader app. Lots of great topics on everything from leadership to technology to lifehacks to book reviews. A goodie-bag of awesomeness.

After last week’s discussion on Freelance Jam – specifically the portion about billing based on hours versus a flat fee – I’ve been analyzing my entire billing system. For the past three years I’ve billed based on hours and it’s worked fine.

However, in the past few months I’ve been taking on bigger projects. I also feel like I’ve dramatically improved my design and development process. And I’m also realizing that the better I define the project scope and strategy up front, the better the project turns out. I’d love to invest more time into that but I’ve always done things somewhat “open-ended”  (read charged by the hour) to allow clients to change their minds along the way. But that seems to be incredibly in-efficient, especially when working on larger projects.

I still don’t have a complete plan for making the switch to flat fees, but it’s looking like that’s the direction I will go. Herre are a few of the articles I’ve been reading that are making me re-think the whole billing thing:

• Why I Believe in Pricing Work Based on Value (by my Freelance Jam co-host Brian Casel)
• 7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Charge By The Hour (some very good points I hadn’t considered)
• Why You Should Never Charge Hourly (great idea to charge even more if it seems like a high-maintenance client)

So if anything, in Freelance Jam’s short existence so far, it’s helping me evaluate my very own freelance business. Hopefully it’s doing the same to some extent for our viewers.