Category Archives: featured

TweetMyJobs Changes the Game

November 3, 2009 Joe Wallace

Freelance job sites like eLance and other for-a-fee providers, quake in your boots. TweetMyJobs has just changed your landscape probably forever with what its marketing hype calls “the largest Twitter job board in the world”. Pretty bold stuff for a company that didn’t exist this time last year, but that’s how things move in the Twitter world–it wasn’t three years ago Twitter wasn’t even a player in the game, now they rule a massive chunk of the online market.

I used TweetMyJobs for the first time yesterday to see what the fuss was about, and I can tell you that the for-pay sites are in trouble. Subscriber-based job sites have reached the end of their usefulness thanks to TweetMyJobs, and unless this fails to catch on with the folks posting the jobs themselves, FREElance is about to be FREE once again. Continue reading TweetMyJobs Changes the Game →

advice, featured

5 Steps to Guide an E-Mail Interview

October 26, 2009 Joe Wallace 3 Comments

E-mail interviews are, for many, something to be avoided at all costs. The answers frequently return with nothing but self-serving crap that nobody wants to read.

How do you avoid getting such responses? Sometimes it’s inevitable no matter what you do, but an interviewer can at least try to pass on some guidelines to keep them from going totally mad when fielding the answers:

Continue reading 5 Steps to Guide an E-Mail Interview →

advice, featured

What I Learned About Freelance Marketing from Flashback Weekend

October 23, 2009 Joe Wallace

October means the harvest, Halloween season, and best of all there are a massive load of horror movie conventions all over the country celebrating the scariest time of the year. I’m attending Chicago’s legendary Flashback Weekend this weekend (Oct 23-25 ’09) to promote my vinyl collector/DJ blog Turntabling.net, and wouldn’t you know it, I found a way to tie it in to Freelance-Zone.

I like to take lessons on the freelance game wherever I find ’em, and this morning while Googling directions to the event (at the Wyndham Hotel in Rosemont) I noticed that the official site for Flashback didn’t have the hours listed in a prominent place. In fact, I wasted several minutes searching for the hours (I finally located them buried deep on the schedule page–it’s too early in the morning for such a bug-hunt).

Here’s a lesson in marketing freelancers can learn:

Continue reading What I Learned About Freelance Marketing from Flashback Weekend →

advice, featured, freelance jobs

How to Deal With Unreasonable Freelance Clients

August 25, 2009 Joe Wallace 3 Comments

An interesting article at FreelanceFolder by Laura Spencer got me thinking about how to avoid getting stuck with what Spencer calls a “vampire client”. Spencer’s advice was sound, but how do you avoid getting to the stage where you need to take her advice at all?

What the article defines as a vampire client is someone who keeps demanding revisions and is seemingly unable to be pleased–and all that after demanding a reduction in your usual fee. Sounds unreasonable to us!

The first thing you can do to protect yourself from an unreasonable client is to build in some parameters into your work agreement. What’s that? You don’t have a work agreement with your clients? Change that immediately.

In your agreement, build in a standard fee (which you can change to offer discounts for your valuable clients). Don’t accept less than your standard fee without a good reason, but when you do, be sure you add some additional consideration for yourself into the deal. That consideration could come as a more forgiving (and convenient for you) deadline or other concessions. Continue reading How to Deal With Unreasonable Freelance Clients →

editorial, featured

What You Might Not Know About Self Employment Taxes

August 25, 2009 Joe Wallace 1 Comment

by Joe Wallace

It’s nowhere near April 15th, so why am I writing about tax issues for freelancers now? Because if you track your figures all through the year, you’ll know when you might need to take a deduction or how much to contribute to your SEP IRA by the end of the contribution period to avoid a nasty surprise on your income taxes for next year.

Didn’t know you could do that? Then you probably don’t know about these little issues, either…lucky for you we’re watching your financial back, eh? Don’t take any of this as advice from US, this information comes directly from the IRS official site:

Self-employment taxes break down like this: self-employed people pay 15.3% until your income pushes you into a higher bracket. The rate is in two parts–you pay 12.4% for social security plus 2.9% for Medicare.

Did you know you can deduct half your self-employment tax for the purpose of figuring your adjusted gross income? But you can ONLY take that deduction from your income tax, not your Self Employed tax. Are you confused yet?

Who pays Self Employment tax? Anybody who earns more than $400 from self employment activities. Also, any church employee who earned more than $108.28 must also pay SE tax.
Continue reading What You Might Not Know About Self Employment Taxes →

Freelance-Zone.com