One of the most destructive ways of thinking, which can be a freelancer, is that the costs associated with business, should be avoided. At the same time is a reasonable belief that to maintain profitability, the costs must be restricted, too banal (especially for those who combine a number of jobs) will always look for free resources, or free alternatives. For designers, freelancers are lucky that at their disposal is a wide variety of tools that are available free of charge, however, in some cases spending a certain amount of money is a great solution.
Compromise is not acceptable when it concerns tools that are critical to your work. Ultimately, to be successful you need to do the job as best you can, but without appropriate tools and resources - this is impossible. In addition, will be situations in which when the existence of a free alternative, paid option will allow you to save time and give you the opportunity to perform more work during the day.
When it comes to business expenses, if it will help / enable you to earn more money than you spend - You should consider these costs. Ultimately, you will most likely be glad that they did, not to mention the fact that legal costs are excluded from the amount subject to income tax.
2. Recommendations - "gold"
Chances are - if you are an experienced designer and like your product to your customers, everything is really in your hands. The problem is that there is nobody to meet you, if you can not find the customer. Typically, seasonal freelancers much more control over their workload and their clients, while newcomers are struggling to find a sufficient number of orders and have a job. Naturally, for building a business takes time. What you can do in this situation?
There are several ways to determine the range of potential customers who can use a freelancer: identification of values, sites of proposals (enrollment), portfolio sites with high traffic, blogs, etc. Potential customers who will come to you for advice, will have more confidence in your judgments, and often will be more comfortable to use, and would be less inclined to seek commercial bids with cheaper rates. They come to you, because someone whom they know and respect, recommend you, and it has much more weight than any type of advertising.
The biggest advantage in the business of recommendation is that he aim to protect you from wandering in search of work. Saving time, you can devote the work, income, which will positively affect the bottom line. Treat each customer right and use the opportunity to develop recommendation "sources". Make sure that other people know about what you do for a living, and most importantly - ask to recommend you.
3. Avoid the "dummy"
One of my main sources of identification of customers is my portfolio site / blog. Initially, when I get traffic to the site and began receiving requests, one of the first lessons that I learned was that a certain percentage of people who fill out the form on the contact information, are unlikely to be the case with me, even if they claim that interested in this. Most people fill out the form on the contact information in hopes of obtaining services at very low prices or do they want to ask questions about business or website, they plan, but so far so nothing done in this direction.
Initially I lost a lot of time tracking these people. The difficulty, of course, is to determine who is the "empty shell", and who - a reliable guy. After some time I made a few changes on the site and in business practices, which reduced the amount of time associated with it. For beginners, I removed all the prices from a page of its services. When I started to do freelance work, I decided to use fixed prices for sites that fall under different packages, prices on them were low, because I was just beginning, and I felt somewhat uneasy to request more until I will have no further experience. I thought that potential customers would be easier if they see the price, but I realized that in fact it attracts people who are interested in ordering only a factor of price. These people are many, but the end result they do not come to any decision. The only thing they know is that they do not want to pay a lot of money.
Removing prices immediately helped reduce the number of such requests, but did not affect the number of reliable customers who come through the site. The second change I made - is the addition of the proposed budget to the contact form to the potential client can roughly indicate the amount you are willing to spend. Now I could also use additional information to determine what is actually looking for people. Of course, advantageous for them to indicate a low budget, but if they want a complex site for a low price, I can determine how much time should be spent on consideration of such customer.
Enough for today, do not want to overload you with information.
To be continued.
www.webcreativesolutions.co.uk
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