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Nice Blog Essay and Site for Freelancers: 10 Absolute "Nos!" for Freelancers

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mouser:
Nice looking site and some nice tips on succeeding as a freelancer.

When I first started freelancing as a college student, I was eager to do any website and would say "Yes" to anything, regardless of my skill set or the time involved. It was just nice to know that someone needed me for a skilled task. Unfortunately, I quickly found myself working all the time, eating Ramen noodles, and not getting anywhere in terms of paying off my wonderful college debt. To make things worse, these people were also giving my contact info out to other such people (you know, the lady who has been thinking about selling dog sweaters online and has a $100 budget for an e-commerce site, 1000 brochures, and a guranteed #1 Google search result for the "dog", "sweater", and "love").

Anyways, now four years later, my world (AND financial success) now requires ample use of the answer "No." And here are ten questions I nearly always answer "No" to:

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http://www.wakeuplater.com/freelance-lessons/10-absolute-nos-for-freelancers.aspx





from http://www.veign.com/blog

Ralf Maximus:
You'd be surprised (or maybe not) at how even bigger companies have trouble saying "no" sometimes.  I once worked for a CEO who always negotiated deals to success.  He literally believed even a bad deal was better than no deal at all.

So we'd end up doing these insane projects for little income, the promise being this was a "strategic" project and would lead to bigger, more lucrative deals with the same customer.  It's a slippery slope, though... once the customer got a whiff of free stuff, it was difficult to throttle them back.

Then money we'd get from new projects would go to fund existing "strategic" projects and the hole dug itself ever deeper...

Veign:
I still evaluate clients who can't, or won't, pay my going rate at how important could this client be for me and my company's image - since I do web development and a lot of my projects are tagged with Veign sometimes a highly visible client could be of benefit to me.

This benefit factor is actually used in the initial calculations of a projects cost.  The more benefit the lower the cost.  A zero benefit client doesn't affect the final cost in anyway, meaning it won't raise the cost.

Maybe I should do a blog post oneday that discuss how to determine the cost of a project.  For me there are a lot of factors beyond my hourly rate.

housetier:
A very good article. I should have read this before ruining my freelancing career.

mouser:
Maybe I should do a blog post oneday that discuss how to determine the cost of a project.  For me there are a lot of factors beyond my hourly rate.
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yes please  :up: :up:

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