The Lady Programmer

Setting a price for one’s skills in many freelance job markets is one thing that new freelancers should always take care of. For sites that let the freelancer sets hourly rates, a newer freelancer should take care not to set their prices high. As a blogger, I find this also applicable in setting blog prices.

What should be my right price?

One good thing about online job marketplaces and paid blogging sites is that most of the information is transparent. It is easy to see the profiles of other freelancers offering the same job with their hourly rates posted out on most online resumes. Some freelance sites even offer information such as graphs and charts based on the pay rate of their active members. In one site that I’ve been working with, there is a suggested range of prices for each blog post that I can choose from.

photo credits: conmani (SXC)

The price is used for clients to handpick their freelancers. Clients often prefer freelancers who are in the middle of both extremes of high and low priced services. It is not true that the cheapest freelancer gets to do the job, because quality is often an issue in this case. The most expensive freelancer may also turn off the client, because there are other freelancers who can do the job. In the end the freelancer that gets the job is the one that is not too expensive and too cheap either, and delivers the sufficient quality of work that the client expects.

I can just watch with envy at the long queue of gadget lovers during the launch of the new iPhone 3G. Apple had definitely made a huge success on this phone as gadget lovers put up a buzz on this latest fad. From its launch just a few days ago this new Apple iPhone reached 1 million in sales worldwide.

Apple iPhone 3G from Apple

The most outstanding feature of the iPhone is the ability to browse the internet at faster speeds, similar to the loading that desktop PC experience. It can even run a YouTube video stream just like what the PC does.

Apple’s iPhone has not been launched in the Philippines yet, but this phone will be available a few months from now which will be launched using the Globe Telecoms network.

A US court sentenced a spammer to serve 30 months to prison, according to vnunet.com. Adam Vitale, the spammer with a long history of convictions, sent around 250,000 spam messages to 1.2 million AOL subscribers. He had worked with Todd Moeller to help him change the email headers and use multiple computers for the attack.

photo credit: yanyan92 (SXC)

The law enforcement officials still caught up to his act. He was caught through a sting operation where he unknowingly hired these officials to do spam just to promote a new security product. Aside from the 30 month prison sentence, he is required to pay $180,000 fine to AOL. His accomplice, Todd Moeller, gets 27 months to prison.

If the spammers and the crime happened in the Philippines, these criminals might have been escaped conviction. I still think the 30 month prison duty is not enough for them to learn their lessons well.

A common mistake done by new freelancers is to get jobs that are not within the range of the present skills and experience of the individual. Perhaps this has something to do with the desperation of getting hired on to the first job. There is also the mindset that applying to more jobs means more chances of getting an interview and eventually working on the first freelance job. I strongly believe that this is what many job seekers think when they applied for their first corporate job.

The similarities of applying to freelance jobs and permanent jobs are not at all different when it comes to having a resume, a portfolio and a cover letter to submit to the prospective employer or client. The big difference lies in the way that the new freelancer thinks about applying for a job. It is common to see freelancers apply for a job that is obviously short of the qualifications that are specified.

The client’s main concern is to hire the freelancer with all the necessary skills to complete the job. This is very important because they are paying the time spent on the job and not the time that the freelancer would study a new set of skills. The inexperienced freelancer runs into the problem of delaying the project because of a skill that he still needs to study further.

This is not to stress that the new freelancer has to find jobs that strictly adheres to the skill and job experience that he has, but he should consider jobs that he is confident enough to finish at the client’s reasonable time.

One of the known best ways to promote the blog is to be personal in dealing with the readers. I find it more appealing if the owner of a blog or even a website exerts effort in producing quality custom messages rather than the generic ones that accompany many free email widgets offered around the web.The focus here is on putting a more personal touch to email newsletter in your blog. Bloggers often provide the option for the readers to subscribe to the posts in addition to the feed reader widget. There are plenty of email widgets available to subscribe to blogs, but as I’ve said, it is often better to put further effort into making the email newsletters personal at all.

IZEA, the Social Media Marketing which launched the success of PayPerPost and the new SocialSpark paid blogging opportunities, is now out once more with their Zookoda, an email marketing application designed for bloggers on the go. I’m really thinking about switching to their email marketing services than the one that I am using for the blog, because I get a better control at designing my own email newsletter that looks a lot similar to the blog template rather than the generic one that comes with my present email subscriber. Getting a more personal touch to email subscription needs time, but I think this is indeed a better idea to retain the interest of readers who follow posts by email.Have I mentioned that all of these great services are entirely free?