wayne on August 23, 2008
Progress on this web site, so far, has been great. For the past 9 months I have slaved to find a niche (as that is presumably what will help drive traffic to my blog). I thought I had found a good one in providing Blogger.com Help, and for the most part, I have. Lately however, I'm beginning to second guess myself and start to consider how I can open things up more to attract even more readers.
I think once the 'official' help series on blogger that I am currently writing is complete, I will then take on other blogging platforms. Even that still seems pretty limiting. I think what I need to do is just open things up to every blog platform, every web site.
I'm pretty much doing that to some extent already, however all my marketing has evolved around the Blogger platform. That's what I think I need to work on. I've proved to myself that I can do this without spending inordinate amounts of time and perform things rather quickly on systems foreign to me.
The Blogger series has been good to me, like I said. I'm ranked on the first page for several blogger.com related terms, many thanks to Adam for pointing that out to me. Yeah, I wasn't even watching and POOF! magically I have keywords popping up on the first page of Google. I told you I still have much to learn about being social and getting stuff out there. I've been hiding in the corner coding for waaay toooo looong.
Free Professional Web Development Services
Here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about creating a few pages that will express my desire and ability to help anyone with their web site and blog. I could charge for services, but really want I want is recognition on my clients sites in the form of a link back to me and clients helping to spread the word. I might also add in a way for visitors, clients, friends and family to provide a donation to me. The idea being, if I have helped you and you want to say thanks, you can do so with a link back to me from your site, a promotional post, and/or a donation to my piggy bank.
How would I actually charge for services though? I mean, I would love to be able to help people for free, but reality says I would be stretched thin given enough promotion and (hopefully) a large demand for services like this. I already juggle 2 projects and a full time day job to make ends meet, so I need to be cognizant of my time when I make these types of commitments right?
So charging for services could be broken down like this:
- No fee - My favorite, and I'm sure everyone else's too. If I can write a post to satisfy a clients need, why then would I need to charge? I've gained a post that has helped someone (hopefully) and will continue to be there to help anyone else in the future. No reason to charge when I can post it, right? I'm not greedy, at least I try not to be.
- Link Love - Surely this could be something the client does because they are gracious and kind, but when should I ask that this be my compensation? I guess for things that take a little bit of time or involve my time outside of my normal routine, but still only take a few extra minutes of my time.
- Donations - I've been eye-spying a donation widget the past few days and thinking about adding it to my blog here. However, I was also thinking that I could simply pop-up a PayPal donation button as well and perhaps save a few pennies on each donation. I would probably ask that if I need to dig into the guts of your template or site, and mess around in there for any amount of time over 10 minutes, perhaps a donation of $1 on up would be in order.
- Retainer - I've worked a few retainers and quite honestly, it's the best way to go for getting things done. The client would pay in advance for a certain amount of hours of my time per month. If they don't use all the time they purchased, it rolls over to next month. If we are close to going over the hours for the month, I alert the client, and if work is to continue, they simply pay for another month. This causes me to establish the client as a Quickbooks customer and perform several accounting dance moves, but it works out well for both client and myself.
So, for smaller one-off type projects that help fellow bloggers and web site owners, where the work can be done fairly quickly by myself, I wouldn't charge a thing. I might ask for a link back to me though, we'd still be in the 'free' zone. Donations would always be available for people generous enough to consider helping me out financially, but I would hope it is for something I actually earned.
This isn't the end-story to this. I'm building a few pages to properly state all these things and a few more. Until they pop up, what are your thoughts about all this? Would you pay a few dollars donation to get stuff done on your blog or web site that you couldn't do yourself? And if you were able to be instructed how to do it yourself, would you take advantage of that?
