Ok, so you can’t wait to get started with your new career, but wait a minute!

The market may be ready for you, but you’re not yet ready for the market. If you want to capitalize on the opportunity, the way you present your services is of critical importance. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression – so you have to make the first impression count.

Let’s say you decide to order some Christmas gifts from an online shop. It seems like a great way of saving time, so you look for a likely-sounding store in Yahoo! Gary’s Gift Grotto seems to fit the bill, so you click through.

Unfortunately, the site is so graphically intensive that it takes ages for the home page to load. When it eventually does, you discover that there is no ‘search’ facility to help you find the products you want. You try to browse through the listings, but several times you get a ‘Page not found’ error.

What are you going to do?

Will you persevere, figure out how to place an order and hope that Gary and his pals deliver in time for Christmas? Of course not. You’ll hit the ‘back’ button and move on to someone else.

Behind the scenes, it could be that Gary’s Gift Grotto is a wonderfully-efficient enterprise. They may offer the lowest prices, the largest stock, the fastest delivery times and the best customer service. But it’s all for nothing. The first impression didn’t cut the ice, and another customer bites the dust.

So how do you make a good first impression? The answer to that question lies in preparation. Before you launch into a marketing campaign, you need to think about how you and your service will be perceived by potential customers, and how you can turn that to advantage. If you can convey an image of professionalism and expertise from the first moment of contact, you are half way towards securing a contract.

With that in mind, let’s start with one of your most important marketing tools, and find out.

If a client is seriously interested in using your services, the first thing you will be asked to do is to forward your résumé. And here is the perfect opportunity to blow the prospect’s socks off and leave your competitors floundering.

No doubt you already have a résumé prepared, so now I’d like you to find a copy and examine it closely.

I bet I can tell you how it goes.

It probably offers a factual and orderly summary of every facet of your career to date, plus a list of your qualifications, hobbies, interests and aspirations. The structure is likely to be similar to this:

Is that about right? Great. This is what I want you to do…

Hold the pages with both hands at the top, the first finger and thumb of each hand gripping the paper at the center. Now pull your left hand towards your chest, while simultaneously pushing your right hand away. Continue this movement until you have ripped the pages completely in two. Crumple up the two parts and throw them in the trash…

Traditional résumés make great personal histories, but they’re no use for marketing. If you want to earn real money as a freelancer, you need a profile that really sells!

Imagine a McDonald’s radio ad that went something like this:

“McDonald’s Corporation has been in business since 1953 and now has over 200,000 restaurants worldwide. This fast-food chain is renowned for the consistent quality of its products and an enduring commitment to service.”

Now, would that make you want to rush out and buy a Big Mac?

No, it certainly wouldn’t, you’re more likely to hear something like this.

“Try the new Triple Mega Mac, the biggest, juiciest burger you’ve ever tasted. Buy one today and get one free.”

Benefits, benefits and more benefits. This ad ‘sells the sizzle’, and shows you exactly what you get in return for your money – taste, quantity and value. Any information which doesn’t persuade the customer to buy is ruthlessly cut. Your résumé should be equally effective.

It’s your prime selling tool – your big chance to communicate the benefits of using you, instead of someone else. In fact, a résumé alone isn’t enough. You need a hard-hitting presentation pack.

When you use a presentation pack, sales become much easier to achieve.

Gone are the days when clients will pour over your résumé, ask for more information then dither and hesitated some more.

When you send a pack by email or through the post, providing the prospect with all the information needed to make a decision. More often that not, you will get a call in reply saying:

Great! When can you start?

Usually, they will include:

A one-page personal profile

An up-to-date client list

A selection of relevant testimonials

A few samples of related work

A personalized covering letter.

Each of these is clearly focused, providing concise information that demonstrates why you would be ideal for the project in hand. Together, they provide a complete sales pitch that hammers home a wealth of important benefits.

This is the replacement for your traditional résumé. Remember that your prospective client is not looking for a long-term employee, but for a short-term solution to an immediate requirement. If things go well, it may turn out to be a long-term relationship, but that’s all in the future. Right now, the client wants to know if you can deliver a specific service with a high standard of quality.

And that’s why a conventional résumé just doesn’t work. Take a look back at Joe’s résumé, and consider the obstacles it presents for the prospect.

A – Hidden benefits

Joe’s résumé gets off to a poor start. The client wants to know what Joe can do, but instead Joe forces him to read through all his personal details. Contact details are important, of course, but here they are taking up prime selling space. The client won’t need contact information until he has read the document and decides to pursue things further.

Then we reach Joe’s career objective. Unfortunately, however, the client couldn’t care less what Joe wants to achieve. She’s only interested in her objective, and how you will help her achieve it. Anything else is simply a distraction.

Next we reach education. Having a relevant degree is a major asset, but having the right experience is even more critical. So a paragraph on education is slowing the prospect down, and increasing the chance that she will never get as far as reading about skills and experience.

B – No ‘sizzle’

Then we get to skills and experience, cunningly hidden under the heading Employment History. This heading is not only dull, it is again focused on Joe, and not on the customer.

A heading like Skills and Expertise would be more likely to attract her attention. But if the heading is dull, it’s nothing compared to the job descriptions.

The language is passive, and totally impersonal – not so much as an I to inject a little life and interest. What we have is simply an incredibly boring list of career steps.

C. Irrelevant information

Additional information? Who cares? Unless you can pick up on a point and show its relevance to the job in hand, you are simply wasting the prospects time, and increasing the chance of your résumé reaching the circular file.

D. Poor structure

Finally, we reach ‘Computer Skills’. But as this is the real meat of the issue, why hide this section at the end?

The References section doesn’t belong here, either. If you’ve got good references, these should be included in the pack, so that the prospect has all supporting information to hand. We’ll look at this point again under ‘How to get great testimonials’.

So now we’ve seen what’s wrong with a traditional résumé, let’s see if we can do something better. Let’s build a personal profile page that really sells your skills and expertise.

The basic principles of selling remain the same, regardless of whether you’re selling baked beans or consultancy skills.

So we can take the most successful sales techniques used to market products worldwide, and apply them to your profile. And the most popular and successful approach to writing copy that sells is:

AIDA … which stands for … Attention … Interest … Desire … Action

It’s a simple formula, but still very effective. You aim to capture the prospects attention quickly, then stimulate interest by showing the benefits. You provide enough information to generate a desire for your service, then encourage them to take action by getting in touch.

In the case of your personal profile, you might use the AIDA formula to produce a structure like this:

Write a benefit-driven summary paragraph that captures attention. This will highlight your key strengths, and shows why you are the perfect choice for relevant projects.

Generate interest by listing your key skills and competencies in bullet point format, so that the prospect can immediately see what you have to offer.

Demonstrate the depth of these skills by showing how they have developed during the course of your career, creating a desire to find out more.

Encourage the prospect to take immediate action by providing all necessary contact details at the end of your profile.

I think I’ll give him call, just in case I redesign my corporate database. So what have we done? Well, we have:

Replaced the rather dull word résumé with profile, which suggests a more interesting document

Supported this with a subheading, Freelance Programmer and
Database Consultant, so that the prospect can see exactly what skills are on offer

Stressed the benefits to the client in the summary (deliver quality work your projects remain on schedule)

Written in the first person (I can)

Used active, positive language (deliver, help, gained, offer)

Supported the claims with facts (degree, relevant experience)

Mentioned major clients, to reassure the prospect

Demonstrated appropriate experience through recent projects

Ended with a ‘call to action’ and key contact details.

A strong client list is perhaps one of the most valuable assets you can acquire during your freelance career. A wide selection of clients shows that you have a broad range of experience. And if you can name some well-respected organizations in your list, you will immediately be taken more seriously as a potential freelance.

Of course, if you’re just setting out on your freelance career, you will not have many clients to list. If that’s the case, simply omit this part of your presentation pack for the time being. But as soon as you have some jobs under your belt, create a list and use them to advantage.

You don’t need to list them alphabetically. On the contrary, you’ll want to name your big guns first to make a strong impression as quickly as possible. If you have some impressive clients, a simple list may be all you need. But if you’re still building up, or your customers are individuals or small organizations, you can add further information, such as the kind of work undertaken for each company.

If there is one element that will convince your prospects faster than anything else, it’s a great set of testimonials. After all, it’s easy for you to make claims about yourself that are somewhat exaggerated. A potential client may be impressed by your résumé, but still unsure. But if you back up a strong résumé with rock-solid recommendations from existing clients, you’ve virtually closed the sale.

The trouble is, clients rarely send testimonials. If they think your work is great, you may get a ‘thank you’ call or two, but you are unlikely to get anything in writing. So how do you get a great testimonial? There’s only one way. Ask!

In many cases, a client will be happy to recommend your services. You just need to persuade them to put pen to paper – or finger to keyboard. The best way to do this is to send a letter, outlining your request, and including a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Wording the letter is a delicate matter, as you don’t want to put the client under undue pressure.

On the other hand, if you don’t ask, you don’t get – it’s as simple as that. You might write something like this:

Dear Jessica,

Thanks for asking me to help with your recent projects, and I trust they are all progressing well.

I am currently updating my résumé and portfolio, and would like to include recent testimonials from satisfied clients. If you are happy with the work I have completed for you to date, it would be very helpful if you would consider writing a short testimonial.

Whilst I understand that you are busy, I am sure you appreciate this will help potential clients reach a decision more easily. Your cooperation would be much appreciated, but if you would prefer not to respond for any reason, please just discard this email.

I hope to work with you on many more projects in the future, and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best wishes,

Your Name

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of your expertise is in your samples.

Building up a good portfolio is an essential element in developing your career and how to promote yourself effectively. As time goes on, you will undertake an ever-wider range of projects, allowing you to build up a diverse portfolio. So whatever a client is looking for, there’s a growing chance that you will be able to demonstrate relevant expertise.

Having experience of exactly the right kind of work can be surprisingly important on how you promote yourself. Clients have an unfortunate habit of pigeonholing people and skills. Someone looking for a freelancer to take photographs for an annual report, for example, may demand a photographer with an impressive portfolio in this field. Although any professional photographer may be able to undertake the project with ease, those with no annual reports to show may never be considered.

Although this can be frustrating, it demonstrates the importance of keeping samples from every job you undertake. If you are involved in producing printed materials – magazines, brochures, adverts, etc. – be sure to get hold of a file copy for your records.

In many cases, you will have to go out of your way to get them, but it is important to persevere on how to promote yourself effectively. If you are, say, an interior designer or a landscape gardener, remember to take photos of every project, preferably both before and after.

Once you have a good portfolio, you can then select appropriate items to send to individual prospects, turning each pack you mail out into a personalized presentation.

The cover letter may be the last item you think about, but it will most likely be the first one how to promote yourself that your prospect reads. So you need to ensure that is well written and professional in approach. As in your profile, you need to emphasize the benefits, sell your skills and suggest a call to action.

Make sure the letter is personally addressed to the individual concerned – and triple check that you’ve spelt the name correctly. Names are very personal, and misspelling them is a sure fire way to kill a working relationship before it has even started.

If you have had contact with the prospect, either in person on the phone, try and make reference to something you discussed. This will help to establish that the letter is a personal response, not a standard reply.

A typical letter in response to a telephone inquiry might run as follows:

Dear John,

Thanks your enquiry regarding database consultancy services. As we discussed on the phone, I have considerable experience in this field, and would be free to work on your project from Monday the 15th.

I have undertaken similar work for hi-tech clients in the last two years, including a major project for Hewlett-Packard. The project sounds interesting and challenging, and would allow me to use my formal qualifications and practical experience to good advantage. I am committed to delivering excellent work, often to tight deadlines, and would welcome the opportunity to contribute to your success.

I hope the attached documents will provide all the information you need. But if you would like further information, please let me know. You can call me on 415 123 1234, or send an email to [email protected].

I look forward to hearing from you soon. Best wishes,

Your Name

So now you have all the materials for your presentation pack – profile, client list, testimonials and samples, plus a separate covering letter. If you’re going to send the package by mail, or deliver it personally to a prospect in a meeting, it’s worth investing in good-quality binding.

Again, first impressions count. A bundle of loose papers shoved into a folder won’t impress anyone. A wire-bound presentation with quality report covers shows a professional approach.

Nowadays, however, most business communication happens by email. This is a big advantage, as it means you can get your presentation pack to a prospect within minutes of your first contact. There’s a definite advantage to striking while the iron is hot – so make the most of it.

The simplest and most convenient way how to promote yourself and send your presentation pack is to use the covering letter as your email message, and add the other elements as attachments. But using attachments raises a couple of issues.

Firstly, if you have a number of samples to send, you could end up sending a long list of attachments which could be rather daunting for the prospect. You can resolve this by combining your profile, client list and testimonials into a single file, and keeping your samples to a sensible number. Three samples should be enough for most circumstances.

Secondly, there is the issue of file size. If you’re sending graphics files, presentations or Acrobat documents, downloading them could be a problem for your prospective client. Try to select smaller documents, or warn the prospect in advance. Alternatively, you could post them on the web, so that he can view them online without downloading.

Thirdly, and most significantly, there is the virus issue. Sending attachments is an easy way to accidentally forward a virus, and many people are rightly wary of opening attachments.

Of course, you should install the latest virus detection software on your computer, to minimize the risk of picking up an infection and passing it on. Trashing a prospects hard disk is not a great way to generate business.

Marketing your skills over the web is something we will address in more detail a little later. But as we are talking about presentation, we need to cover the subject briefly here.

After all, creating your own website is the most effective way to showcase your skills. All the elements of your presentation pack can be included on your website, with as many samples as you feel are required. Photos, graphics, presentations and even programs can be uploaded for prospects to browse at their leisure.

Here again, you need to be sure of making a good impression. If customers find your site through a search engine or directory, for example, it will be their first point of contact. If you don’t achieve the right impact, they will hit the back button and try elsewhere.

OK. So you’ve created your presentation pack, you’ve launched your website, and now you’re ready to do business. Now let’s go out and make money.

The concept of productivity may sound rather dull – a boring piece of management- speak if ever there was one. Yet how productive you are in terms of getting things done is critical to your profitability as a person.

We saw in the Profit Formula that the number of hours you bill for being a ‘multiplication’ factor:

Income = (hourly rate x billable hours) – costs
That is, a small improvement in billable hours can have a big impact, because its effect is multiplied by your hourly rate. Yet there are only so many hours in a week, and you don’t really want to spend your evenings and weekends slaving away to increase your income…

So how do you increase your number of billable hours? You must increase your productivity.

Now that doesn’t mean that you have to turn into a work machine, trying to do several things at once, and not giving any one task the attention it deserves.

What it does mean is that you should learn how to get the most from your time, using the hours you have to greater advantage.

And in order to do that, you must learn to value your time.

I wish I knew who wrote this – it really puts the value of time into perspective:

Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400.

It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day.

What would you do? Draw out ALL OF IT, of course! Each of us has such a bank. Its name is TIME.

Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft.

Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against the “tomorrow.” You must live in the present on today’s deposits.

Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and success! The clock is running. Make the most of today. Treasure every moment that you have! And remember that time waits for no one.

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present!

(Author unknown)

We often tend to think of them as a disposable commodity. If a complete stranger asked you to put your hand in your pocket and give him ten dollars, you would very likely give him a few choice words instead. But if you get held up in a traffic jam for ten minutes, you are likely to brush it off as a minor inconvenience.

After all, it didn’t cost you anything except a little time.

Yet time is by far the most valuable commodity we have. We only have a limited amount of it, and if we waste it, it’s gone forever. Remember that when you sell your time by the hour, you are auctioning off your life in bite-size chunks.

Don’t sell yourself short. A common mistake is to calculate how much you could earn per hour at a full-time job, over a 9-5 working week. But freelancing is very different to regular employment. As an employee, you get paid just for turning up. You’re getting paid when you’re chatting at the water cooler, visiting the restroom – and even when you’re sick or on vacation.

As a freelancer, you only get paid for the hours you put in for a particular client. All the time spent on interruptions, administration and personal matters have to be accounted for out of your own pocket.

Let’s say you decide to charge $50 an hour, and expect to work 40 hours a week. At first this looks pretty good – hey, you’re going to make over $100,000 a year. But when you start deducting time spent on vacations and illness, you find your revenue dropping sharply. Then there’s all the time devoted to looking for work, managing your finances, and everything else.

By the time you’ve finished deducting all this time-sucking overheads, you may find that, on average, you are earning nearer $15 an hour. That’s not much more than you could earn part-time in McDonalds.

So improving your productivity can have a real impact on your earnings. In fact, if you can reclaim an extra hour a day in billable time, your earnings (at $50 an hour) would increase by $13,000 over the course of a year.

And to get that extra hour back, you need to learn the secrets of effective time management.

The secrets of effective time management Good time management is not an innate skill.

We all work with varying degrees of inefficiency, struggling to get things done, but continually being distracted by everyday life. How often have you started the day with a single objective in mind, yet somehow reached the end of the day with that objective still out of reach?

It’s a familiar problem, but the good news is that it can be tackled. Effective time management is something that can be learned and developed.

If you’re a creative person, such as a writer or designer, you are more likely than most to have a problem with time management. Creative people tend to have fewer left-brain skills, and so find logical tasks such as time management more difficult.

That doesn’t mean you have an excuse for avoiding time management – it just means you need to work harder at it.

To start with, you need to understand what time management is, and – more importantly – what it’s not…

Time Management is not doing the wrong things quicker. That just gets us nowhere faster. Time Management is doing the right things.

So let’s take a look at the right things you need to do get things done.

Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Finding out which time of day suits you best can have a big impact on your productivity.

One of the big advantages of being a freelancer is that you have greater freedom over your choice of working hours. You are not tied to a 9-5 schedule from Monday to Friday.

So take some time to analyze when your most productive times are. If you work more efficiently in the morning, for example, make sure that those morning hours are free from interruptions, so that you get the most done in the shortest possible time.

One hour of planning can save you ten hours of doing.

That’s a statement that’s worth taking notice of. So rather than rush into your day with only a vague plan of action, take enough time out to plan your schedule for the day.

Prioritize your tasks, so that you ensure that the really important things get done. Be realistic, however. There are only so many hours in a day, and you won’t get more done just because you’ve drawn up a long ‘To Do’ list.

Decide what really needs to be done that day, what realistically can be done in the day, and create a schedule that takes both into account.

When you’re under pressure to get things done, it can be tempting to allow documents to pile up on your desk. The few minutes taken to put things away tidily seems like an unnecessary interruption.

But when your workspace becomes disorganized, your work can become muddled, too. A few minutes hunting for a file here, a few minutes looking for a phone number there – before you know it, a big chunk of your day has been frittered away.

When you come across something that you don’t know how to deal with immediately, it’s easy to put it back into your ‘pending pile’. But the more times you handle each piece of paper, the more of your time is wasted.

Try to get into a habit of dealing with documents as they arrive. When you open your mail, remember the three D’s:

Deal with it

Dump it

Delegate it.

Make sure you apply one of the above to each piece of paper that crosses your desk, each email that arrives in your mailbox, and every item on your action list.

Putting things off until tomorrow doesn’t help – it just gives you an even larger ‘to do’ list to deal with in the morning. The more you put things off, the more impossible the task becomes.

If you don’t allocate a specific time for a task, it’s easy to find that the job takes more time than it reasonably should.

Instead of concentrating on the required project, you may find your thoughts wandering.

Returning that phone call or sharpening your pencils may suddenly seem to be much more important than getting on with your work.

To avoid losing valuable time in this way, learn to budget your time effectively. Allow yourself a sensible time to complete a certain task, and then ensure that you stick to it.

Don’t get lost too much in the detail. It’s better to get on with the job and complete it than to become bogged down with minor problems and issues.

One of the biggest problems of time management is dealing with distractions and interruptions.

You may start the day with a seemingly simple set of objectives, confident that you can complete them all with time to spare.

And then the phone rings. A client needs an urgent amendment to a recent project. You check your email and discover a problem that requires immediate attention, then a delivery arrives and you have to ensure that is dealt with properly.

Before you know it, hours of billable time are slipping away.

While it’s almost impossible to cut out such interruptions altogether, you can minimize the damage. Make it clear that when you are working, you are not to be disrupted by ordinary domestic issues. Avoid checking your email until your priority projects are out of the way. And get an answering machine or voice mail service to screen your calls while you are busy.

Most important of all, learn to say ‘no’. People will just have to learn that during your working hours, you are simply not available to help with matters that can wait until later.

How many times have you set a New Year’s resolution, only to have forgotten all about it by mid-January? Setting career goals is one thing. Achieving them is something else altogether. Yet if you apply the following three simple tips, you will find that it is much easier to attain your goals.

Saying that you want to earn more money, or have a better lifestyle is all very well, but how do you measure your success? Instead of being vaguely ambitious, put specific figures on your goals. If you state that you want to earn $100,000 a year, then you have a specific target to aim for – and you will know exactly when you get there.

The simple act of committing your goals to paper is a major step towards achieving them. Once you have written them down, there is no doubt about what you are committing yourself to – it’s hard to argue with evidence in print.

A goal without a deadline is pretty meaningless. It’s easy to keep postponing a target that has a never-ending shelf life. Give yourself a deadline, and you will find that you work harder to hit it.

Research shows that 75% of American workers regularly complain that they are tired. This isn’t too surprising, as the average worker apparently gets less than seven hours sleep a night. So the vast majority of people start the day firing on just three cylinders. No wonder that poor productivity is such an ongoing issue.

But it gets worse. Some 40% of working people skip breakfast, and 39% miss lunch. And of those that do manage a break for lunch, half allow themselves 15 minutes or less. These are big problems, especially where time management is concerned. If you think that working late nights, burning the candle at both ends and missing meals makes you a hard worker, you really are missing the point.

Productivity depends not just on the hours that you put in, but also on the quality of work that you produce. If you are tired and not eating properly, your productivity will plummet. As your blood-sugar level drops, your body automatically slows you down to conserve energy. Add tiredness on top of this, and you might as well give up all pretense at working. The lights may be on, but there’s probably no-one at home.

That’s the negative side. Now let’s turn things around and look at the positive. Increasing your fitness can have a really dramatic effect on your productivity. You don’t need me to tell you what that entails – regular exercise, getting enough sleep, eating nutritious food and establishing a routine that your body can become familiar with.

Don’t forget to take regular breaks. Your body and mind needs to relax from time to time – you can’t operate for hours continuously like a machine.

We all know that getting in shape is easier said than done. But if you can improve your level of fitness, you will be amazed at the impact this can have on your working life. You will approach each day fresh and with greater enthusiasm. You will find it easier to solve problems, and you will get more done than you ever imagined possible. If there was ever a way to get 25 hours out of each day, fitness is it. Look after your health, and your wealth will take care of itself.

Most of all, try to ensure that you are undertaking work that you enjoy. That way, you can enjoy the journey as well as the destination. Thomas Edison said that he never did a day’s work in his life – it was all fun!

That surely is the best way to get the most from every week of your working life.