Project Management for SEO Companies the right way

Successful Project Management for SEO Companies is not just about executing SEO tasks in a good and timely manner; it also requires excellent process management to allow for the team, the clients and all the people involved in the project to work together as efficiently as possible even when they are geographically distant.

To achieve such efficiency, communication and organization are key. Those two parameters are then critical when choosing the tools you’ll be using to back the project.

We have talked to many SEOs around the world, and surprisingly, we have found quite a few commonly used tools amongst the SEO community. We have also been able to identify three major types of tools:

File Sharing tools

Dropbox

Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc., which offers cloud storage, file synchronization, and client software. Dropbox allows users to create a special folder on each of their computers, which Dropbox then synchronizes so that it appears to be the same folder (with the same contents) regardless of which computer is used to view it. Files placed in this folder also are accessible through a website and mobile phone applications.

As you can see, it will mainly help you access your data from any location in the word as it is cloud based thus making it easily sharable with other project members, that’s extremely useful when you have large files that you cannot send via e-mail.

Dropbox also has a set of iOS and Android apps that make it even easier for anyone to use.

Project Management tools

Mavenlink

Mavenlink is a cloud-based team collaboration and project management application, sometimes referred to as a professional service automation software, developed in the United States. The company’s SaaS platform enables professional service providers and their clients to efficiently manage their project from start to finish.

In this Mavenlink review, you can see for yourself how this amazing tool can help you take your project management to the next level as an “end to end” project management solution.
Trello

Trello is a free web-based project management application made by Fog Creek Software. It lets you organize anything easily, from life goals and to-do lists to group projects. It works wonders for teams. Assign tasks, streamline communication and get everyone on the same page, fast. It’s just about everything you need to accomplish great tasks. Check this particular tool here:

Communication tools

Google Docs

Google Docs is a market leading free web-based office suite offered by Google within its Google Drive service. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users.

Skype

Skype service allows users to communicate with peers by voice using a microphone, video by using a webcam, and instant messaging over the Internet. Phone calls may be placed to recipients on the traditional telephone networks. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones are charged via a debit-based user account system. It’s so simple to use even for business, family or friends communication.

GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting is a Web-hosted service. It’s a remote meeting, desktop sharing, and video conferencing software that enables the user to meet with other computer users, customers, clients or colleagues via the Internet in real-time. It’s a professional and easy to use.

Tools are great but do not be mistaken, they will never do the job for you and direct communication with your colleagues, partners, and customers is also critical to an SEO project’s success.

Face to face meetings and phone calls with the client are aiming to set the goals and the expected results of the project as a whole. Internal weekly meetings with colleagues to assign and adapt tasks, responsibilities and check on the results,

Using the right tools and implementing the right processes is very important to a successful SEO project, it saves a lot of time and lets you build a good organization. It allows you to expose your work more explicitly to the clients.

The last key is the client’s satisfaction. As an SEO, your tasks are vast; they include optimizing pages, building links, improving rankings, driving traffic…

“There is only one boss-the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” – Sam Walton.

Posted On July 25, 2023 By Randy Poulsen In Digital Marketing / No Comments

“Operationalize” Customer Centricity

Since smartphone have been one item of your needs, online shops also has growing larger. It changed the way customer buy. From face to face buying goods to be a loyal online customer. It can not be deny that eCommerce get the influence too.

As we speak with many eCommerce companies there is a trend — the desire to become a more customer-centric company. And this is a topic usually coming from a level above the eBusiness or Web department.

Posted On June 2, 2022 By Natalie Issa In Digital Marketing / No Comments

Ratings “J Curve”

We’ve talked to several advisors and prospects who expect to see a “U” shape in the distribution of their review submissions by ratings. In other words, there should be an equal number of “1” ratings as there is “5” ratings, displaying the extremes of customer opinion. We weren’t sure what to expect when we got off the ground a year ago.

Posted On May 8, 2020 By Randy Poulsen In Digital Marketing, Other Thoughts / No Comments

Increasing Customer IQ: Website Analytics Meets Word-of-Mouth Analytics

I am really excited about the potential of our partnerships with Coremetrics, Omniture, WebSideStory, and WebTrends. Marrying word-of-mouth and clickstream data will enable us to pioneer analyses that have never before been possible. Ultimately, it will increase our clients’ customer IQ.

Ever since I took my first marketing class at the University of Texas at Austin, I have been fascinated by customer behavior. It has been the driving theme of my career. What has been most exciting to me is being there when a company finds out how their customers really behave and the lightbulb goes on. When their customer IQ is increased.

At Coremetrics, I had the good fortune of seeing this transition many times. It was the biggest part of what drew me to start the business in the first place and, especially, with a services model at its core. It is hard for me to believe now, but back in 1999 the acronym “ASP” (“Application Service Provider”) didn’t exist. I knew from my background in consulting that an outsourced model for Web analytics would ultimately be the best way to deliver real analysis to clients. Because of my background, this was intuitive to me; it just made sense. It was later, in 2000, when someone told me, “you guys are an ASP”. The label had been born, although I’m not sure who gave birth. Label or not, the business model works. The ideal ASP is a marriage of services and software to create an ever-evolving solution.

At Coremetrics, it was exciting to be with a client when they saw, for the first time, where they had been wasting their online marketing dollars and decide how to reinvest their budget. Or witness that the home page creative they had debated for hours every week really didn’t drive sales like they thought it did. Or learn that a product had an abnormally high shopping cart abandonment rate and they could increase sales by tweaking the price, the message, or the placement. Or see their customers close their browser when the “next step” button on their checkout page was below the fold. We drove real value. Got real feedback. Turned on the lightbulbs. Liberated with data. And ensured that the service would always work. And customer IQ skyrocketed.

And now I am seeing the same thing here at Impactloud. Except this time the data are conversations. Conversations between real customers. When customers speak to each other, they do so in a different way than they speak to companies. They speak in an authentic way. They have no agenda. Do you really care if your friend sees the movie you spent five minutes telling them about? Not really. You just want to express yourself. The pursuit of the real. There is a little bit of maven in all of us. It’s human nature. It’s called word of mouth. And it is only increasing as we get overloaded with marketing messages and choices with the compression of less time.

Our clients are dramatically increasing their customer IQ. They are tapping into conversations that they have never heard before. And it is driving their business in fundamentally new ways. Straight from the customer’s mouth to the EVP of Merchandising’s ear – direct and authentic. Products will evolve. Customer service will morph. Marketing will change. And customers will vote with a renewed sense of loyalty. This will be taught in business schools one day.

I am going to make a prediction. When you put website analytics and word-of-mouth analytics together, it will have a synergistic effect on customer IQ. And, to me, that is very exciting. For our clients, it will be game-changing.

Posted On March 10, 2020 By Randy Poulsen In Digital Marketing / No Comments

Consumer-generated ads and General Motors

This is probably old news to some of you, but I find it fascinating that Chevrolet is allowing consumers to create their own ads for the new Tahoe. As you can imagine, some consumers have created some very critical ads. However, I applaud General Motors for finally taking some risk. I’m sure the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” would also applaud this bold move.

There is no doubt in my mind that we will see more of this. This is the start of an open and honest dialogue between General Motors and their customers. Is the dialogue always going to positive? Of course not. It isn’t always positive offline, but it is too easy for General Motors to ignore private customer-to-customer conversations. It is a bit different when the conversations are out in the open, staring them in the face.

Sam Decker calls this “customer oxygen”. No matter what you call it, it is healthy. I have long believed that a company should design its products with customers. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. I created Coremetrics, a successful Web analytics business, based on the premise that companies like Accrue and NetGenesis had failed to do this. And their customers defected quickly.

Then I read Ron Bloom’s, the CEO of Podshow, article on “advertising 2.0”. Outside of the fact that there are too many 2.0 terms, I agree with Ron that advertising must evolve. We are more cynical than ever about advertising because we are more educated. If you are reading this blog, you are likely far more educated about marketing than most consumers. And you are probably much more likely than most consumers to ignore advertising altogether – skip it with your TIVO, read news online via an RSS feed, get the straight scoop from your friends. The question is – what form of marketing works or is going to work on you? Is it “keeping up with The Joneses” all over again? Only this time, you actually trust “The Joneses” more than you trust any corporation.

Every social networking, blogging, user-generated content, “authentic media”, and Web 2.0 company has a common goal in mind: monetize their business model with advertising. There are a ton of venture-capital and public-market dollars chasing this aim. My bet is that several will evolve entirely new forms of advertising. For some, the bets are already paying off. Last I heard, Facebook is making over $10 million per month on advertising and the buzz is that it may be acquired for as much as $2 billion. And you probably heard what Rupert Murdoch’s #2 is publically saying about their acquisition of MySpace. Considering the Murdoch empire and the newness of social networking, that is a pretty mind-blowing statement.

In full disclosure, my wife, Debra, just bought a new GM SUV after trading in her Volkswagen SUV, an unfortunate lemon of lemons (it actually pains me to write that after many years of loyalty to Volkswagen). I also bring this up because I found myself genuinely impressed with the 2007 redesign of the model she bought, and I wonder if Bob Lutz and his team are really starting to figure it out by listening. It is the first American car that we have ever bought. Imagine how odd it would be to read that statement if we lived in the 1950’s instead of the 2000’s.

Posted On February 28, 2020 By Randy Poulsen In Digital Marketing / No Comments

Use AdSense Sparingly to Avoid Smart Pricing

It can not be deny that today is the age of information technology. The way to make money change also. Making website as a business is one of business. What is the reason people like to buy onmAdSense is perhaps one of the easiest ways to monetize a website, but that doesn’t mean that you should use it willy-nilly. Judging by the number of emails I get telling me that I should be using it on my blogs, or in my RSS feeds or whatever, it seems clear that most people feel that you should slap AdSense ads up everywhere.

Every Little Helps Doesn’t It?

The general theory seems to be that every little helps, and therefore, even if the ads aren’t clicked on all that much, surely every click is worth having? If AdSense can bring in a few extra bucks a month, then you’d be stupid not to use it, right? Well not quite, here are a few reasons why you should be sparing with your AdSense placement:

AdSense Takes Traffic Away

Some sites are built with the primary intention of getting AdSense revenue, but not all of them. This blog is not one of those sites. However, when somebody clicks your ad, they click away from your site, so that is a click that could have been directed elsewhere. Most people do not click back after they have clicked an ad!

Some Audiences Dislike AdSense

This is a problem that only affects a relatively small number of sites. Not all internet users are the same. I’m betting that you, as a reader of my blog, are pretty internet savvy, I imagine you have heard of social media sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc. I’m sure you know what an ad looks like, and I’d bet quite a lot of money that you would very rarely click on an AdSense ad!

Now, of course, the only way to know for sure if AdSense is suitable for your site is to test it, but here’s a good metric to use: search engine traffic tends to respond well to AdSense, and social media traffic does not. If more than 50% of your traffic is social and not from search engines, then you might struggle with AdSense.

The Big One – SMART PRICING

At this point, you might still be thinking, so what? But here is something that many people don’t understand. AdSense allows you to put ad units up on multiple websites very easily, but it tracks your performance across your entire account, and it can apply penalties as a result. If one or more of your sites suffer from a particularly low click-through rate (I’m not sure the exact number but get worried if you’re generating less than 3%), then your account will be smartly priced and what this means is that you will only earn a fraction of the amount that you think you should.

I am pretty sure my account is smartly priced right now. None of my clicks are very high, and even in a very high paying niche, I only got $0.39 for a click that I would have expected to generate at least $1.00.

So if you just slap up AdSense on sites that don’t respond well, then you will drag down your CTR, which affects your whole account – the sites that were doing well will suddenly start making less money.

How to Avoid Smart Pricing

If you are smartly priced, then the only way out of it is to remove AdSense from the sites that have a very low CTR. Now recently, I started to add custom URL channels to my AdSense account so that I could track all my performance on a per-site basis, but I kept finding that the impressions and clicks that were being reported were less than the total number. In other words, I had AdSense running on some site that I had forgotten about!

Eventually, I tracked down the rogue URL – it was a hubpage! Back in the 2007 Thirty Day Challenge, I set up some hub pages, and back then, I knew nothing about how AdSense worked, so I just signed up for their revenue-sharing scheme. I started to track the URL, and sure enough, it was generating impressions (the hub still gets traffic now), but the CTR was appalling, so I removed it from the page.

I still have work to do because some of the niche sites I have setup are also performing badly. However, some of them have such little traffic right now that its difficult to accurately depict the CTR because just one click can cause it to vary greatly. Therefore my new approach is not to put AdSense on a site until it starts to generate a reasonably steady stream of traffic – around 25 visitors a day. That should be enough to track the clicks more accurately.

Posted On November 11, 2019 By Natalie Issa In Digital Marketing / No Comments

10 Great Ways to Repurpose Your Old Blog Content

Some of you from the previous decade might have liked to read magazines or books printed on paper, whether it’s good quality or simple paper. Now, magazines or books have become digital devices that you can read anywhere and anytime while you are connected to the internet.

Curation and crowd-sourcing in action! Today I’m summarizing 10 of the most actionable and creative answers to the following question:

Blogs are not vacuums. Each post, after circulation and promotion, after initial discussion, still exists and adds value. But how can we take a blog post and use this content in some other way after it has been posted? I am speaking here of ideas like converting to PowerPoint presentations and posting them to SlideShare, etc. Your ideas? Thanks!

Repurpose away!

1. “Best of”: Create special tabs, lists or pages for posts based on popularity, subject matter or number of Tweets, Facebook shares/Likes, etc.

2. Print pieces: Collect similarly themed content, and print booklets for distribution at trade shows, conferences and networking events.

3. Supplements: If you have a YouTube video, Sribd upload or Slideshare deck on the subject, link to a corresponding blog post.

4. Dig & link: Before you write a new post, review some of what you’ve written previously on similar topics and selectively link to related work.

5. Footer recommendations: After each post, collect links to related previous content. Several WordPress plugins can generate these recommendations automatically.

6. Internal resource: Your colleagues should know that your company’s blog is a content source that can inform their presentations, reports and other work projects.

7. Mash it up: Pull in content from multiple channels onto one page per subject. A page about word of mouth marketing, for instance, would have all applicable tweets from your company, blog posts, public slide decks, pod casts and white papers featured.

8. Manifesto!: Extract themes and learning from your previous work, and summarize into prediction pieces, opinion posts and year-in-review spots. Link back to the original posts.

9. Newsletters: Showcase relevant posts within your recurring newsletter, with a focus on digging deep into your archive to get new eyes on old content.

10. Shareable bits: Gather interesting factoids and points from older work, and tweet it out (or share via Facebook and LinkedIn) with a link. This is a great way to break a longer post down into pieces that are perfect for social sharing.

Posted On November 7, 2019 By Natalie Issa In Digital Marketing / No Comments

Optimizing Conversions: How To Get Maximum Impact With Minimal Effort

Assuming you’ve already spent some time optimizing your retention so that you’re not wasting money converting customers with low lifetime values, it’s time to get to work on your conversions.

Now, when it comes to conversion optimization, there are countless strategies an organization can implement, begging the question: Which ones should be prioritized?

To answer this question, you need to identify the strategies that will yield the highest returns. You’re probably thinking, “how can I find the strategy that will yield the highest returns before I actually try it?”

The key is simply finding the main problem area in your conversion process, or what we’re going to call your Area of Greatest Friction (AGF). Just as a bottleneck will slow down an entire operational process, your AGF will dramatically slow and hurt your conversions.

Once you’re able to identify your AGF, even a slight improvement at this step will result in much higher returns.

Finding Your AGF

If you were to visually map out every step in your conversion process, you could see how many people make it to each step and how many people drop off at each step. This is what funnel analysis does.

In the funnel analysis above, we can see that 81.3% of people made it from step 1 to step 2, 39.7% of people made it from step 1 to step 3, and so on. We can also see the percentage of people who made it between steps. For example, we see that 48.8% of people made it from step 2 to step 3 and 3.3% of people made it from step 3 to step 4.

Mapping out our conversion process in this way makes it quite easy for us to identify our AGF, which is simply the step with the largest drop off. In this example, we can see that our AGF is at step 4, “Confirm”, where only 3.3% of people make it from the previous step.

The Cause

Next, you have to understand why there is so much friction at this step. In many cases it will be obvious to you for one reason or another, such as:

The step requires greater effort than the others (e.g. setting up or implementing something technical)
The step requires some type of commitment from the user (e.g. adding a credit card or sharing very personal information)
The step involves obviously confusing UX (e.g. a lack of feedback, non-obvious button)
The step introduces other variables that may be problematic (e.g. sending an email confirmation that can end up in spam folders, be sent to unattended email accounts, etc.)

Other times, the cause of the drop off won’t be as apparent and will require additional analysis. At this point, you will want to set up a sub-funnel to analyze just that step which is your AGF.

For example, say your AGF is your “add shipping details” step. You will want to create a funnel that looks at every minute step required for your users to add shipping details, from button clicks to fields they must complete.

This sub-funnel allows you to take a closer look at your AGF and diagnose the cause of the friction. In the “add shipping details” example, we might find that our shipping options are unclear or that customers are taken aback by high shipping costs, causing them to abandon at that point.

Another way you might find out what is causing your AGF is by comparing how different segments move through your funnel. You may discover that each segment behaves quite differently, particularly if you have customer segments with distinct characteristics.

In the above examples, we were simply looking at averages. However, in some cases, the averages will actually hide more than they will expose, making segmentation critical. For example, say we have two segments that each perform poorly at a different stage of the funnel. If we simply average the performance of both segments, we will end up with metrics indicating that there are no issues at either of these two stages.

You will need to have a good understanding of your customer base in order to know which segment characteristics might affect conversion performance. For example, a B2B company with both small and large accounts may want to segment by company size (smaller companies will likely stumble at different steps than larger enterprises), while a social network might want to segment by student age group.

Fixing Your AGF

If you’ve made it to this step, congratulations! You’ve already completed the hardest part. Now that you know what is causing your AGF, you have a clear compass directing you to your top solutions. Here are just a couple examples of organizations that successfully identified their AGFs and implemented solutions that improved their conversions.

TOPS Products

RR Donnely’s TOPS Products was experiencing an underperforming product launch, despite significant marketing investment and highly positive feedback from focus groups. With some analysis, they were able to identify their AGF: a confusing product search that was preventing customers from finding the new product. As soon as they resolved this issue, their first orders started rolling in.

Woopra, Inc.

At the company where I work, we found our AGF was at the step where customers were required to add a JavaScript tracking code to their website or application. The cause of friction was quite obvious to us – although adding the tracking code requires only 5 minutes, many users who sign up do not have the energy or the ability, to add the tracking code in that moment. The first solution we implemented was quite simple. We triggered an email to be sent to users who signed up but failed to add the code within 3 days. The email offers assistance and also directs them to documentation to help them add the tracking code. After just one week, this simple email campaign improved our conversion rates by 20%.

Ultimately what both of these organizations have in common is their ability to maximize their return on investment in conversion optimization by first identifying their AGF. By focusing their efforts, they were able to achieve maximum impact with minimal effort.

Posted On June 7, 2019 By Natalie Issa In Digital Marketing / No Comments

Why Retaining Customers Is More Important Than Attracting New Ones

Customer retention is the unsung hero of the successful business. Its flashier sister, customer acquisition, usually steals the spotlight, but retention is what ultimately builds the foundation of a company that is positioned for growth. After all, it’s much easier to fill a bucket than a sieve.

So Why Exactly Is Retention Important?

1. It’s More Cost Efficient

It’s always more cost effective to re-market to existing customers rather than attract, educate, and convert new ones. The fact that these customers have already demonstrated an interest in your offerings and are engaged with your brand gives you an advantage that you’d be mistaken not to capitalize on. The rule of thumb is that it is 5 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones.

2. It Improves Lifetime Value

At the end of the day, what really matters isn’t how much a customer pays you today, but what their entire lifetime value is. For example, a customer may pay me $1,000 today and then disappear, while another one pays me $200/month for 5 years. Which one do you think is more valuable to my company?

It’s important to spend time optimizing retention before you spend on conversion. Otherwise, you will invest in converting customers and then lose a good portion of them, meaning they will have low lifetime values. Don’t waste your (or your investors’) money winning new customers who will have a low lifetime value.

3. It Builds Your Brand

In addition to cost savings, retaining customers means there will be more customers who have been using your product for longer and are therefore deeply engaged with your brand.

Building brand loyalty among existing customers really means you’re building a fanbase. And fans will evangelize for you in a very organic way, which ultimately brings you new customers. Keep your customers happy and engaged, and you’ll both benefit.

How To Improve Retention

So now you’re convinced and ready to tackle that pesky churn. But as with most things in life, improving customer retention is much easier said than done.

I wish I could give you a single, golden rule to improve retention. But the truth is, it absolutely varies case by case. What I can tell you is that the only way to find out what you need to do is to first measure and analyze. Ninety percent of your work is identifying the problem. Once you know the issues, implementing the solution is relatively easy.

Measuring retention in the most basic way looks something like this:

In this retention report, we see that of all the customers who initially came to the website, 32.7% returned 1 week later, 23.8% returned 2 weeks later, and so on.

Now this is a good start, but frankly, it doesn’t tell you all that much. The problem with this report is that it doesn’t measure the retention of similar customer groups. That is, it doesn’t compare apples to apples.

It would be more insightful for me to look at a report that showed me for how long customers continue to use the product after they sign up.

This report will filter out all those people who visit the website and never sign up, enabling me to focus on understanding the retention of that segment of customers who actually tried the product. It also allows me to measure not just how long this segment continued to return, but for how long they actually continued to use the product, which is ultimately what I care about.

But wait, there’s more.

Where I will really start getting insight is when I look at my cohorts. Cohorts show you the retention for groups of customers who began using the product at the same time.

I can clearly see that the group of users who started using the product during the 31st week are churning at a faster rate than those who signed up before them. While previous weeks saw 30%-32% of customers returning 1 week later, the 31st week only shows about 20% of customers returning 1 week later. Perhaps I pushed a product update at that time. My guess is that the update wasn’t received well and caused customers to abandon the product.

Now I’ve finally found my problem and I’m ready to hypothesize the solution, test, and measure all over again.

Posted On June 6, 2019 By Natalie Issa In Digital Marketing / No Comments

3 Deadly Mistakes Freelancers Often Make

Freelancing is a great way for anyone to work independently or make some extra money and for employers to hire talent at an affordable price and in a flexible way. However, freelancing isn’t a hobby; it is a full-time job in which you cannot succeed unless you abide by a certain set of rules.

Using freelancing marketplaces like freelancer.com, elance.com or odesk.com is a first step in making your freelancing work more professional and will be very helpful in getting your projects. However, even when using such platforms, I have seen many freelancers struggle to get projects by making some major mistakes.

This article is about three deadly mistakes freelancers often make that could easily be avoided.

Not looking pro

It is all about perception not reality! You could be the best designer, the best coder, the best SEO… if your customers cannot see that in a way or another, for them you just are not.

There are many ways to convey a positive image. Some past showcase work and positive feedback (portfolio, testimonials…), others spend a lot of time writing compelling proposals… However, many fail when it comes to producing enterprise-grade invoices in particular and admin papers in general.

YES, INVOICES! I have seen many freelancers unable to provide a decent invoice and others that couldn’t tell me how much they charged for the last project we worked on together!

The solution is simple, use tools! There are so many free and paid tools out there that can help you look more professional and make your job easier. Just imagine you are at one of your customers’ office and he asks you if he can have an invoice in order to pay you. With a cloud-based invoicing system, all you need is a computer with Internet access, and you’re done, give him the invoice and cash in the check!

Here are my favourite invoicing/billing tools:

INVOICERA, The popular one

Invoicera is probably the most widely used. It has always been reliable and handy. If you want to make online invoicing a straightforward and uncomplicated process, this is one of the best tools out there; they even have a free plan.

MAVENLINK, The comprehensive tool,

If you are ready to pay for a pro tool and get some support, this is your most comprehensive choice. Mavenlink lets you collaborate, share files, invoice, track time, and make or receive payment in a custom-branded project management solution.

HARVEST, The easy one

HARVEST is extremely easy to use and can simplify your timesheets with time tracking and fast online invoicing.

Not charging enough

Price is a major parameter in a project manager’s choice, but the quality is also a primary concern. As humans, we have been educated into thinking that quality and price are related, and that’s not always untrue.

In fact, for many people, the price is an indicator of how good your work will be. So being too aggressive on your prices and making sacrifices might have a negative effect on how good you are perceived to be.

In conclusion, my advice is to try and strike a balance between:

The cost of the job (time and resources)
The price the employer can pay (budget)
The price the employer things he has to pay for a good quality work

Over-trusting your employers

Trust is part of life, and many employers need to see you trust them, and they can trust you before they can give you the project.

So you have to inspire trust and manage the customer interactions very carefully. Some people will quickly try and take you to a feeling driven relation because that’s how they do it. In fact, as a freelancer, you will certainly have to work with people from different countries, regions, cultures…

This is why I would strongly advise you to use tools like escrow to make sure you get paid and if not, can file a complaint or a dispute.

As you might already know, most freelancing platforms offer such services, but that doesn’t mean you should entirely rely on them and not filter out your partners carefully.

Of course, once the customer is a recurring one, you might want to be more flexible to speed things up and help make working together easier.

Posted On August 6, 2018 By Randy Poulsen In Digital Marketing, How To Market Online, Other Thoughts / No Comments