Diana Marinova

Freelance Mentor & Marketing Consultant

Freelance 101 Coaching Contest – Want In?

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It turns out a lot of novice freelancers read my blog but my tips are mostly somewhat advanced. While I help freelancers who have achieved some freelance success and need to take their practice to the next level, many of you struggle with the first steps. So I’ve decided to mix things up a bit and start blogging on Freelance 101 topics.

To make sure I do help novice freelancers indeed, I’d like to ask you – what are your struggles? Leave me a comment with your immediate problem as a starting freelancer and I’ll be sure to include it in my blog editorial calendar.

And if you think you cannot possibly share your problem in a brief comment or a blog post won’t be enough help, I have a contest for you. 😉

Don’t Let Your Email Get the Best of You

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Recently I came back from a long trip abroad and I realized I have hundreds of starred emails to attend to. Those were readers’ questions, inquiries from prospective clients, comments on my blog or group discussions I take part in, and so on.

See, when I get an email, I usually check it out and do one of three things. It takes time to look through a prospect’s website and send them a proposal based on their initial email.

How Working with Difficult Freelance Clients Is like Shooting a Handgun

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A couple of weeks ago I went to a shooting range and held a gun for the first time in my life. I not only held it, I turned out to be pretty good at shooting a target – at least with small-caliber handguns at a close range. That’s my target on the photo 😉

Nevertheless, learning how to shoot a gun in an indoor shooting range reminded me a lot of the times when I had to work with difficult clients. Here are the three rules which could help you score better at the shooting range and when dealing with difficult freelance clients.

How to Calculate Your Freelance Rates

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A big portion of my organic search traffic comes as a result of queries relating to freelance rates. I plan to write specific posts to address readers’ questions about how much freelancers of certain professions charge (e.g. social media marketers, marketing consultants, email marketers, etc.) but in the meantime, I’d like to draw your attention to a freelance pricing guide that already is available on this blog. It consists of four parts and I am sure it will address most, if not all of your questions.

Make no mistake – this post will not tell you how much you should charge. It’ll do you one better 😉 It will guide you through the process of deciding what your hourly rate should be, how to calculate your rates on a project basis, and even how to decide whether to charge by the hour or by the project.

Work Freelance or Keep Your Day Job? How to Decide…

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Many of my blog readers email with all sorts of questions – to name a few: ‘where do I begin’, ‘what should I do’, ‘can I make more money as a freelancer than at my day job’, ‘how hard is it to be a freelancer’, and so on, and so forth.

Obviously, they are hesitant to make the transition from their day job to a full-time freelance practice, and that’s understandable. However, the answers to these questions depend pretty much on the individual situation of each person. So I thought I’d give you a methodical approach to finding the answers on your own before you make the leap from 9-to-5 employment to being a freelancer.

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