The Question:

I would like to start freelancing, but I am unsure what my rate should be for the skillset I have to offer. Here is my website: [WEBSITE URL]. What was your rate when you started out?

- James

My Answer:

Hi James,

I think your question about the rate you should charge really depends on a few things, but before we dig into rate, I’d like to make a few comments on your website and how you’re presenting yourself. I’m going to be brutally honest, because no one trying to strike out on their own is well served by false praise.

The Feedback (brutal)

First of all, before we talk about anything else, your domain name is terrible. It sounds like a russian spammer site. Get a new one, preferably a .com and one without dashes. I just checked and [READERS-NAME].com seems to be available…are you crazy? Definitely go snag that before someone else does

Second, your site design is pretty bad and this matters, because most people who will be hiring you have no idea what good code or bad code looks like, but they know what a good website looks like, and if yours looks bad, they’ll assume you can’t code very well either. Not fair, but that’s how it is.

Here’s the fastest way to fix it: go to http://themeforest.com, find an HTML / CSS or WordPress theme that you like, and reskin your site.

Third, almost all of the examples of your work on your site are terrible. You’ve included some of your class assignments, some pretty crummy photoshop work, etc. The overall effect of looking at your portfolio is that you have no idea what you’re doing.

But don’t despair, because you actually have an impressive list of WordPress sites that you’ve worked on, most of which look pretty good.

Dump everything but those WordPress sites. And since you have like 50 of them, just go through them and pick the ten that represent your best work and which look the strongest visually.

Do not go for quantity over quality. When I’m looking to hire a freelancer, I look at maybe 3 or 4 of their examples, picked randomly. If any of them look bad, I close the tab and keep looking. I want people who care about their work, and who care about what they’re representing to the world.

Fourth, you need to focus on what it is that you want to work on. I would suggest WordPress, as there’s plenty of work in that arena, and that’s where your strongest portfolio stuff is. So dump everything else off your site and just talk about how you’re a WordPress guru. Don’t mention HTML / CSS, Flash, Photoshop, etc.

Finally, rewrite your resume to reflect this new focus. Drop any position that doesn’t have anything to do with web development / IT. Rewrite your skills and experiences to include more about web development / IT. Get rid of that forklift thing.

Rates

Ok, now let’s talk about rate. When I started, I charged $50 / hr. And believe it or not, I probably wasn’t much better than you. But what I had was a few decent examples of my work, and no crummy examples (at least not public ones).

To sum all the points above up, when you’re done, you want something more like this: http://www.jaredatchison.com/

I found that guy via a little Googling for “wordpress developer”. I have no idea what the guy charges, but I would guess somewhere in the $75 – 95 / hr range, and I’m sure he’s probably swamped with clients. The reason he can charge that is partly that he’s more experienced and has better client references / connections. But it’s also because he’s presenting himself a lot better than you are.

Few people go looking for a jack-of-all-trades “webmaster” type. You’ll have a much easier time getting clients and getting high rates by specializing in something. WordPress is a good place to start.

Growing in your career

I don’t know you, but I note that you’re new to this industry and just graduated from school with an associates. And little things like how you’re presenting yourself, your domain, your newness to twitter, etc. tells me that you have a lot to learn. This is a good thing! Everyone was once where you are, and we all managed to get past it. You can too. I would recommend that you start a couple daily habits:

1. Respond to a couple dozen postings on the Craigslist gigs board, FreelanceSwitch.com jobs board, AuthenticJobs.com. You won’t hear back from hardly anyone, but that’s not your fault. This is a numbers game, so start putting in your time.

2. Reading everything you can from these sites:

http://news.ycombinator.com
http://freelanceswitch.com
http://problogger.net
http://copyblogger.com
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://wordpress.alltop.com/
http://freelance.alltop.com/

And as many more as you can.

You’re in for an adventure, but stick with it and you’ll see huge progress in the next couple years. Good luck, and let me know if you have any more questions.

If you enjoyed this post, join the conversation. I’ve been freelancing for awhile and I’d love to answer any questions on that (or anything else) that you might have. I won’t ever disclose your identity without permission. Hit me up!

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There are some side effects of always blogging about your life and your efforts to improve it. Some good, some bad. For instance, I feel like I’m becoming that guy who is always trying some weird lifehack. I’m not quite to Tim Ferris status yet in terms of bizarre behavior for the sake of improvement, but give me a few years.

On the other hand, people are often nice enough to humor me and ask for advice. A friend recently told someone that I could offer some helpful thoughts on developing self-discipline and habits. Afterward, my wife half-jokingly complained that because she isn’t constantly promoting herself, no one really asks her for similar advice, despite the fact that she’s 10x as disciplined as me.

I think the “10x as disciplined” part was the half where she was joking, but I can’t be sure. Regardless, it got me thinking: do people just ask me for advice because I blog about stuff like this? And should I just refer their questions on to someone like my wife?

After some reflection, I don’t think so. While it’s undeniable that my wife is more disciplined, she paradoxically doesn’t have any advice to share. Alexis doesn’t think about how to be self-disciplined, she just is. She’s one of those people who offer the annoying “just do it” advice, because that’s just how she is.

Meanwhile, while I’m not where she is (yet), I’ve spent the last few years working very hard at improving, and it’s working. I have the data to prove it. I’ve drastically improved a number of areas in my life and I fully expect those trends to continue.

Imagine two athletes. The first has been considered a prodigy since birth, the best in the world, the very pinnacle of their field. They were made for the game and it’s easy to see.

The second is a very skilled amateur, but wasn’t always much good. In fact, they were once downright terrible. But they worked hard and eventually got to the point where they were good. And then they got to the point where they were great. Not as great as the first guy, but still very, very good.

Now, you want to become a great athlete and you can ask either of these guys for advice. You ask the first guy, right?

Most of us would, but I wonder if that’s the wise move.

Yes, the first guy will have good advice. He’ll have info on technique and knowledge about strategy. He’ll say all the right words. He can tell you about the game. He can describe it. But he can’t share with you the heart and soul of earning it. He can’t tell you what it feels like to suck. He can’t tell you about the dark nights of incompetence and wondering if you should just give up. He can’t tell you how to change.

In other words, if you want to be faster or stronger, don’t ask the one who has always been the fastest or the strongest; they were probably born that way.

Ask the one who has improved the most.

In order to be the best in the world at anything, you have to have an incredibly rare combination of determination, genetics, upbringing, and luck. You will probably not be the best in the world. But that’s not really what’s most important in the long run.

The most important thing is that you’re faster and stronger and better than you were yesterday. And the person who can teach you how to do that day-in and day-out for a lifetime isn’t someone who was born great, but someone who became great.

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I’ve been doing web development full-time for the last four or five years, and in 2010 I started learning how to create iPhone and iPad apps. I switched to doing iOS development fulltime in early 2011 and I worked on a number of client apps throughout the year.

However, I haven’t released any apps of my own…until now.

My very first app just hit the App Store. It’s called SignPad, it’s iPad-only, and it’s pretty much the simplest app I could think of creating. I wanted my first app to be simple, and to give me a taste for the process of submitting an app to the app store, marketing it, etc.

The concept

You know how you see those people at the airport holding a sign with someone’s name on it? I thought it’d be cool to create an app that takes whatever text you type in and displays it on the screen as large as possible.

But I had a few criteria:

1. I wanted the text to automatically scale to be as large as possible, breaking text into multiple lines and scaling optimally to ensure that the text is as large as possible while keeping all of it visible. So typing in “Hi” should result in a very large font size, while “Hey there, good looking” would result in 2-3 lines of text, so as to maximize the area of the screen used.
2. I wanted the font, background color, and text color to all be easily customized.
3. I wanted it to be beautiful.

I feel like I hit all those items, and I just got my very first review today (4 out of 5 stars). Can’t tell you how exciting that is

What’s next?

My goal for 2012 is to release one app per month. I have a list of about 150 app ideas, and I have selected the apps for February, March, and April, and have a couple of those at the rough prototype stage. If you’d like to be a beta tester for future apps, shoot me an email and let me know.

In the meantime, check out SignPad and if you like what you see, please leave a review and tell a friend. Thanks!

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Check out our first post below, and make sure you subscribe!

How Cheating Has Opened the Door for Real Learning

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The other day at Starbucks, I watched the person in front of me get smoothly upsold from a cup of coffee to a $20 tea sampler set.

I’m not saying that the guy was pressured into buying it; he wasn’t. I’m not saying that he got ripped off; he didn’t. On the whole, he looked pretty happy about his purchase as he left.

But he came in for a cup of coffee, and the chances of him seeing and then buying that sampler set were almost nil. Until he was asked.

You have to ask for what you want. And a surprisingly high percentage of the time, you’ll get it. Maybe not high in the sense of 80% or 90% (though you might, depending on the circumstances), but getting what you want 10% of the time is better than getting it 0% of the time, especially when all it took was you asking.

This is similar to the maxim that if you want to date supermodels you need to be where they are. That’s necessary but not sufficient. You also need to ask them out. Talk to any practitioner of “the game” and they’ll tell you it’s a numbers game and if you have zero going into the top of the funnel because you’re not asking, you’ll get zero in return.

Yes, this is kind of a ridiculously simple observation.

And yet we don’t do it. We don’t.

Most people don’t really negotiate for their salary. Do you know how much simply asking for more is worth in this situation? (BTW, here’s a fantastic post on how to do it right).

I did it too; my first job offer out of college was at a large tech company, and I took the salary they offered without pushing back. That was incredibly stupid of me. I could have easily landed 10% more by pushing back a little. As it was, it took me almost a year to wrangle the 10% raise I should have had from the beginning. That’s thousands of dollars of income that is lost, forever. If I had simply asked for more, I would have gotten it. Let’s say I then put that raise into my retirement account (which I was severely underinvesting in at that time). By retirement, that would be worth a quarter of a million dollars.

$250,000.

For not saying the words: “Based on my research, this position is worth closer to $X”.

Decide what you want. And then start asking for it.

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There’s a recent guest post on Zen Habits about how you shouldn’t set goals. The headline was intriguing enough to pull me in, and then I was dismayed to find that the author had setup the story as a conflict between goals and habits. And concluded that since people fail to accomplish their goals, habits are the answer.

First, not everyone fails to accomplish their goals. I have set and achieved hundreds of goals over the last decade. Yes, I’ve failed at some, still working at others, but I definitely didn’t fail to accomplish any of them.

But the bigger point is that habits and goals aren’t alternatives to each other, but completely different tools that complement each other.

This almost seems too obvious to even have to say it, but you need both habits and goals to make effective forward progress. Without habits, your goals are just dreams, because they don’t propel you forward. And without goals, your habits end up taking you places, but you won’t know until you arrive if it’s somewhere you’d like to be. Plus it’s hard to know what habits you want unless you know where you want them to take you.

I used this picture of the half-sunken Costa Concordia because the disaster that befell her is an apt metaphor for what happens when you only have habits but not goals. Habits are the engine behind growth and change. You can’t actually accomplish goals on a weekly or monthly or yearly basis. Those are the timeframes, but all that work eventually comes down to a series of “today”-’s (no idea how to punctuate that, but you get the idea). What are you actually going to do today? And habits are an extremely effective way to answer that question. But having only habits and no goals is like having a ship with a powerful engine, but no rudder. The Costa Concordia foundered not because her engines failed, but because they pushed her into the wrong thing.

Also, I suspect that most people (perhaps including the author of the Zen Habits post) have little success with goals because they don’t set very good ones. Judging by the habits he mentioned, I’m wondering if the goals he’s setting are vague and open-ended, instead of SMART.

Have you had success with goals?

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Practice makes permanent.

Are you practicing the way you want to perform?

Knowing how to learn is one of the most valuable skills you can have, and I think it’s one that most people are worst at. A big part of learning is practice, and how you practice makes a huge difference in how fast and effectively you can learn something new.

I often get complacent in an area of my life and assume that as long as I’m putting in the time, things will turn out fine. It’s true that showing up puts one ahead of most people (sadly), but that’s not enough.

A key thing that applies to most endeavors is to find out what your bad habits or techniques are, and first eliminate those. Otherwise, you’re not only inefficient, but you put a cap on how much you’re going to be able to accomplish. This was nicely illustrated by another blogger in a recent post (warning: language).

The bottom line is that habits are powerful, and we’re always building them. If we’re not making a conscious effort to build good habits, we’re making an unconscious effort to build bad ones.

How are you practicing?

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- Solomon, King of Israel c. 971 – 931 BC
(found in The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 24, Verses 30-34)

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I planned out my morning, made sure I had stuff for breakfast, decided what time I was getting up, read before bed to relax, and went to bed at a good time so I’d get plenty of sleep.

It got me thinking about how we often make key decisions before we realize we’ve made them. It felt this morning like I was being really productive and making good decisions. And on some level, I was. But on another level, I was just landing after a good approach.

Let me explain.

I’m in the process of getting my pilot’s license, and in the first half of the student pilot training, you spend a lot of time learning how to land. The process for landing at an airport involves calling the tower when you’re a few miles out and letting them know you’d like to land. They give you instructions on how to enter the pattern, which is an imaginary box in the sky around the airport. You fly around the edge of this imaginary box and then land on the runway. When you fly this box, it’s called flying the approach.

The thing my instructors have stressed is that a great landing is all about a great approach. If you set the plane up with a great approach, it’ll almost land itself. On the other hand, if you fly a bad approach, it’s very difficult or impossible to pull off a good landing. Bad landings are almost always preceded by a lousy approach.

I think a lot of life is like this. We make our decisions ahead of time in many ways; true, it’s almost never too late to fix things. I could have gone to bed at 2am and gotten up early, but it wouldn’t have been a productive day at all. Setting things up in advance makes future decisions and achievements much more frictionless.

Building good habits are an example of flying a good approach. Running up a bunch of debt is a good example of flying a bad approach. Most people who are fighting to keep their home from foreclosure because they have too much debt and lost their job have already lost their home. They just don’t know it yet. They made the decision that new cars or vacations on the credit card were more important, and now they’re in for a rough landing.

What decisions are you making now that are setting yourself up for a good or bad landing later?

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It all sounds good, and I think there’s a romantic side in all of us that wonders if we should just let go and see what happens, what kind of serendipity and beauty emerges from the chaos.

But I can’t really see that. At least not for where I am. The thing is, I used to live like that. I did whatever I wanted, whatever I felt like doing, with little regard for discipline or habit or goals. If I felt like blowing off work and going to the park to read a novel, I did. I still live like that more than I’d like.

In the long run, that’s a bankrupt philosophy and a poor way for the majority of people to live their lives. I know people who seem to be attracted to that kind of romantic life, but the long-term reality isn’t romantic at all. Without fail, they’re almost all a wreck. Disorganized, perpetually late, flaky, undependable, adrift. They’re often not healthy, not financially secure, and just stressed out. I’ve been like that, and from time to time, I still am. It’s no way to live.

There are rare people who seem to have been born with a natural inclination towards being awesome, and when those people relax and do what they feel like doing, they end up living the kind of disciplined, balanced, and healthy life the rest of us have to struggle for. It’s not fair, but what’s really unfair is for people like that to assume that it’s so easy for everyone. It’s not.

And now I’m off to bed, even though I would like to stay up, because I’m getting up early tomorrow. Because that’s my habit. And it’s the only way I know how to change.

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