Hand Holding for Freelancers
by Theresa Dorrans

It's certainly a good sign when you are reviewing a book that you are so carried away with nodding your head and agreeing with the advice that you forget you are meant to be writing about it!   Reading this e-book has coincided with my own steps towards freelancing so I was hoping to pick up some ideas and tips.

Gently taking you by the hand from the very beginnings of starting your venture and moving into each and every area, I found the advice straightforward and backed with substantial experience.

The most important part: what rate you charge as a Freelancer!  This is broken down into what you want to earn over a year and divided into an hourly rate.  Onto this you add tax, a buffer to cover you in the leaner times and what the industry rate is and you have your charge per hour for your services.

Websites are covered next.  Suggestions on how easy it is to have a professional site hosted and designing it yourself so you can update it on a whim are useful points as well as the added bonus of having a professional email address such as yourname@yourcompany.com.

Networking is essential and tips on where contacts can be gleaned are organised by bullet points.  Past employer, friends, family, BNI and affiliations can all bring new people beating a path to your door.

Websites for jobs are detailed and all the links are in a bulging appendix at the end.  An added benefit of the list being in an ebook is being able to access the website directly from the book without having to type it into your browser.

Advertising is outlined, pausing first to see whether traditional advertising would actually be useful for you.  A couple of tips on how to secure a discount on an advert as well as a suggestion to have the advert evoke responses even if they don't lead in direct sales as the respondents become part of your database of potential customers.  Business cards and marketing material also advertise your services and a suggestion of leaving such an item in a dentist's waiting room has paid dividend's for the author's tree surgeon son.  'Pay for clicks' is a good move because this is measurable advertising.  Sue explains the process behind ensuring your website is high in the search engine lists and with the tracking ability it is easy to see where the business is all coming from!

And finishing off on a sad fact of life: bad payers.   Ideas are given on how to help settle disputes before they begin.  If it does get nasty, there is good, solid advice on for to tackle small claims courts as well as links to useful resources.

This comprehensive approach should help all the stray thoughts you have when starting out as a freelancer become more ordered.  By the end of the book I personally had emailed BNI, had a look at the ecademy and worked out my hourly rate.  I recommend.

Theresa has recently begun freelancing as a Software Trainer (to pay the bills) and Writer (to hopefully pay the bills one day).  Although in its infancy she is intending to grow www.theresadorrans.com into an active and even more colourful site.