WordCamp Austin 2013: How to Succeed At Freelancing with Bill Erickson And Jared Atchison

I recently attended WordCamp Austin 2013 and had the good fortune of being in the presence of many WordPress Gurus. This month I will release a series of five posts sharing my notes from WordCamp. Expect two posts this week & then one a week for the rest of June. In this series I will include many points & recommendations for various tools from the presenters. Please note that the views expressed are my interpretation of their suggestions & not a blanket endorsement. A lot of what I post I intend to try on for size & see how it works within my own business, I encourage you to do the same.

The first presentation I attended was by Bill Erickson and Jared Atchison on “How to Succeed at Freelancing”. Here are the points I found noteworthy:

• Set Project Minimums to Filter out Unwanted Clients.  Charge sufficiently for your services & make your prices visible to filter out clients that aren’t willing to pay for your expertise.
• Include “Currently Scheduling Projects for” Date on Your Site. Again this acts as a filter for clients who will need their projects completed in a time frame which is unrealistic given your current workload.
• Include a “Content” Clause in Your Contract. If there’s no communication for X amount of days the site becomes locked & a change fee will be issued to unlock it. This protects the freelancer from unresponsive clients whose projects linger well past a reasonable completion date.

New Tools

• Use WP101 for training clients who are unfamiliar with WordPress. This provides quality training at low cost to you & allows the client to choose which features they want to be educated on. Another plugin in the same vein is WPMU’s Integrated Training Videos, this is what I am presently using.
• Freckle time management. I currently use Toggl which is free & does what I need it to for the time being. My understanding is Freckle may have some features that would merit upgrading to in the future as the business grows.
• Freshbooks is a cloud-based accounting solution that allows payment through Google checkout. Numerous WP gurus spoke about how Paypal has serious limitations that make Google checkout a superior option.

That’s it for my notes from Bill Erickson & Jared Atchison’s presentation. I hope you enjoyed reading them. Please share any tips you may have for being a successful freelancer in the comments below. For a much more comprehensive report of this talk please check out Travis Northcutt’s writeup.