Looking for Advice

Doing freelance stuff (that's how l get my start; it's painful l warn you!).

Here are a few tips l can give you.

1.) Don't under value yourself! If you charge dirt cheap prices you'll attract dirt cheap clients (those are the worst - they want everything for nothing). Bumping your prices up will attract serious, professional clients.

2.) Always require a down payment of 50% *upfront* before you do anything.

3.) Always work off of a SoW (Statement of Work) or contract. Be sure to include some of the following provisions in the contract to protect you and the client:

a.) Customer provides content in full to you by date XYZ, if you don't get the content/assets needed to complete the website on or before that date they are subject to a "rescheduling" fee. -- People don't realize how much writing they're going to need to do in order to provide you with content for their web site and often times ignore/delay it. This is going to cause a backup of work for you, and you'll never fully finish the site and get paid because you're waiting on them.

b.) Limited # of revisions. If you leave the # of revisions open ended you'll get yourself into a nightmare situation.

c.) outline exactly what pages you are creating for the site, and what they will do.

d.) Outline any additional services provided (ie onsite training for posting products, posts to wordpress, etc).

4.) Offer hosting! Get a reseller hosting account at one of the 10,000,000,000 hosting companies out there, and set up/handle the hosting for the client. It amazing me when web developers don't offer this as a service; it's a way to generate long term recurring income! For example, l started out with a semi-dedicated server ($75 bucks per mo) and set my clients up with hosting on my own server -- with packages ranging from: $12 - $40 per mo. It's an easy sell because you can tell them you'll create/support their emails (if they want it); if the server goes down they can contact you, and not some random web hosting company. A good way to assure them that it's a good idea is to tell them you host your own sites on the very same server; so if it goes down it's a big deal to you and you'll be ON IT!

One good upsell that l did with my hosting plans was $40 gave you 1 hour per month of "use it or lose it" website maintenance. 99.99999% of the people who paid me for this never used it but once or twice and it was for very minor textual tweaks or updating wordpess.

5.) SEO services as an upsell - SEO is so easy to sell when you're pitching a new website to a client it's like shooting fish in a barrel. If you don't have any SEO tools, or knowledge buy some basic software and tools that will allow you to offer this as a service. Similar to above this can be a recurring package - or a one time "new website seo kick start" package -- both are very easy sells.

6.) Learn to do both front end and back end development. To really shine you need to be an expert at the front end stuff (photoshop, css, xhtml) and the back end stuff to make it all happen (php, mysql). If you don't know both very well you'll end up outsourcing the parts you can't handle; thus losing money and quite frankly dealing with out sourcers can be a nightmare.

If these have spurred any other questions let me know!