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Ten Commandments of Hiring Freelancers

1. You may not pay less than a living wage. What’s the living wage? Figure out what a professional supporting a family of four in your part of the country needs to make per year. Divide that number by 1,000. That’s the freelancer’s hourly rate. If that number is your budget for the entire project, don’t call them until you can afford them.

Moses and the Ten Commandments

2. Always set — and have — clear expectations. Make sure you know up front what the freelancer is going to do and not do. If you’re hiring a website designer, make sure you know who’s going to provide the written content. If you’re hiring a printer, make sure you know who’s proofreading everything first.

3. You may not ask a freelancer to do project work on spec to see if you like it, and then pay her if you accept it. You wouldn’t do it with your dentist, a plumber, or a mechanic. You hire them based on their past work and their vision. You work with them to make sure they give you what they want. But you pay them for it.

4. You may not refuse to pay a freelancer just because you decide not to use their work. If you decide to go in a different direction, or abandon the project, tough. He did the work, you have to pay him. You wouldn’t do that to an employee whose project you canceled. (Exception: If their work just downright sucks, you can cancel payment, but you cannot salvage their work and use it anyway.)

5. Pay for “feature creep.” If you hire a company to write copy for a marketing brochure, and you want them to lay it out too, be prepared to pay for that. If you’re getting a new logo created, and you decide you want your business cards to have a new look, that’s going to cost extra.

7. You may not compare the work they do to your nephew’s and expect the same fee scale. Don’t say, “but my nephew who just graduated from college can do the same thing for $500.” If he really can, hire your damn nephew. The fact that you’re having this conversation with a professional means you don’t actually think your nephew can do the work. Otherwise, you’d have called him. You’re talking to a professional because you want pro level work, so be prepared to pay pro level prices. Don’t expect a pro to compete with your inexperienced family members.

7. Trust your freelancers’ understanding of their technology. If you’re hiring an SEO specialist, don’t make him follow the SEO rules you learned in 2005. If you’re hiring a web designer, and they say “no Flash,” don’t make them use Flash. In most cases, your freelancers know more about the technology they’re working with than you do (e.g. There is no “clean up button” like you see on Law & Order). If you’re asking for something they say can’t be done, it can’t be done.

8. You may not dismiss what freelancers do as a commodity. Freelancers have devoted years of their life to honing their skill so they excel at it. Writers do nothing but write, designers do nothing but design. They don’t go to weekly staff meetings and committee meetings, and they don’t file TPS reports. If you think this is something that any schlub can do, hire your nephew. You leave your home’s plumbing and electrical work to trained professionals, rather than hiring your nephew, right? Treat your outsourced work with the same seriousness.

9. Always pay on time. You wouldn’t delay paying your employees or withhold their paycheck because you’re worried about cash flow. Don’t delay payment for your freelancers. You — hopefully — pay all of your other bills on time, pay freelancers on time. Believe me, freelancers give drop-everything service to their best clients. Clients who think payment is optional get when-I-have-time service.

10. Always approve the final product. Make sure you read and okay everything. Test it out. Make sure it works. Freelancers will always send you the final product, but that doesn’t mean it’s done. You have to pay careful attention to all the details, because you know more about the subject than anyone else.

Photo credit: Functoruser (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Google AuthorRank: When Personal Branding and Content Marketing Collide

The new AuthorRank search signal from Google (which has not been implemented yet), is an interesting collision between personal branding and content marketing.

As I noted in an article last week, SEOMoz writer, Mike Arnesen, said:

People want to read content written by credible and knowledgeable people and using AuthorRank as a major part of their search algorithm just makes sense.

It’s like Klout for writers.

AuthorRank is an interesting combination of personal branding and content marketing. Where Klout measures your social media influence, AuthorRank will measure your ability to generate a lot of effective and trustworthy content.

As content marketers, we already create that kind of content. It’s good for our clients and our own businesses. Good content marketing gets our companies noticed, which helps them make money.

But now, the writers of those pieces are going to be tied to the quality of that content as well. It means we have to write good copy, and those who don’t, will rank poorly. It means you can’t lend your name and your website to outside paid links. It means you can’t slack off on the writing, but that you have to feed the Google Beast on a regular basis.

In Branding Yourself, Kyle Lacy and I talked about the importance of blogging as it relates to growing your personal brand. This new move by Google represents a merging of personal branding and content marketing.

AuthorRank = AuthorReputation

It means that being a good writer, or at least a passable one, affects more than just your personal brand. In some ways, you can be a good writer and be totally anonymous. But now Google can figure out that you’re a good writer, and you’re someone whose work should appear in their search results.

The best way to improve your AuthorRank? First, make sure you write good stuff, and don’t do any keyword stuffing. Also, don’t put a bunch of ads on your blog or website. That chips away at your page’s TrustRank, which will in turn affect your AuthorRank.

It also means that you need to protect your AuthorReputation (I just made that up). You wouldn’t publish photos of you doing keg stands on Facebook for every hiring manager to see. You also shouldn’t publish articles on low-trust article sites or sites that have run afoul of Google Penguin’s algorithm updates.

It means you need to add one more social network, Google+, to your arsenal and learn how to use it effectively. It means you need to continue to be a good sharer of other people’s work on all of your social networks, so they’re more willing to share yours (remember, Google is also looking at social signals as part of search, which means they’ll probably be looking at your social signals as part of your AuthorRank).

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Speaking for Free Costs Money

I’ve been wrestling with a problem that many entrepreneurs and business owners face: the idea of “working” for free.

My wife, Toni, is a jazz singer who is asked to sing at no charge around the state. My photographer friend, Paul D’Andrea, is often asked to take a couple quick pictures as a favor, because “it’s so easy for him.” Other writer friends are asked to knock out a quick article on something or other “for the exposure.” And I’m often asked to speak for free by small companies and nonprofits.

While none of us are jerky enough to say “NO!” outright, it’s important that the requesters think about what they’re asking for. They’re not just asking for an hour of our time, there’s so much more that goes into it.

When you ask us to to work for free, here’s what it costs us:

  • Preparation time: My wife hours creates a new set list for every show, and rehearses it for 2 – 3 hours beforehand, in addition to her normal practice. Paul has to make sure his equipment is assembled, working, and fully charged. And I spend anywhere from 3 – 6 hours for a 1 hour talk. All of us do this whether we get paid or not.
  • Travel time: Driving to a local event can take 60 – 120 minutes round trip. I’ve driven up to 5 hours away for talks outside Indiana. Toni has driven 2 hours one way for a single show.
  • Gas: Cars do not run on good intentions, they run on gas, which costs $3.35 per gallon right now. It takes anywhere from 2 – 20 gallons to get to where we’re going.
  •  The actual event: Toni typically sings for 2 – 3 hours. Paul’s photo shoot takes at least an hour if it’s an “easy” one. A good writer will write and edit for 3 – 4 hours. I speak for an hour. None of this includes pre-event setup, which takes roughly an hour for any of us.
  • All of that leads to lost work time: We get paid for our jobs. That’s how we feed our families and run our businesses. When you total up everything it took to do that free concert, photo shoot, article, or talk, we spent 4 – 12 hours not doing client work. That’s anywhere from a half day to a day-and-a-half of billables that we didn’t collect from clients.

So what does that work out to be? How much would that be for you? To figure out your regular hourly rate, take your hourly salary (your yearly salary divided by 2,000 hours per year) and multiply it by 4 and 12 (the range of hours).

That’s what it costs for you to work for free.

Based on a $60,000/year salary, that can be $120 – $360 of lost revenue.

Would you take an unpaid day off work to volunteer at a nonprofit? Or to help a friend move? What about taking an unpaid day to attend a conference, and pay your own way to travel there (but receive a free pass)?

If you expect us to work for free, will you also give up half to a day-and-a-half’s wages to show your gratitude and share our plight?

But that doesn’t mean we won’t do it.

Now, having said all that, none of the people I mentioned have become such egotistical jerks that we would never, ever work for free. We will.

Toni will sing for free at certain events, because not singing there can work against her. Paul will take the pictures, and the writers will write the articles, because sometimes the exposure is more important. And there are still groups and events where I’ll speak for free, because I consider it paying my blessings forward.

But it wasn’t until I started looking at what it was costing me in lost wages for that free one hour talk that made re-examine whether I would start charging to speak at events. And every other professional I’ve talked to has wrestled with this problem. Hell, we all still wrestle with it, even after we “turn pro.”

Should we do something beneficial for someone because it’s the good and right thing to do? Or do we say no to some very special people because our top priority is to take care of our families?

Over the past two months, I’ve had to cancel two free engagements because they conflicted with two paid ones, and I had even committed to the free ones first. I felt guilty about it. So guilty that I almost turned the paid ones down. It was Jason Falls who reminded me that my first responsibility was always to my family, and that sometimes I have to make the unpopular, un-fun decision to take care of them, like saying no to people I want to help.

Taking care of family means I have to turn down some important events down. It means Paul can’t load his very expensive camera equipment into his truck for an easy photo shoot. It means Toni won’t load her entire PA system into her car for a free performance. And it means the writers won’t even turn on their computers for some free exposure.

These costs are why I charge for my speaking engagements, or at least ask people to buy copies of my books. That’s not to say that every talk I give will be a paying one, or that I’ll require the organizers to purchase 100 copies of my book.

But hopefully it will help you understand why I — and my family, friends, and colleagues — may say no when you ask us to work for a “quick freebie.” (Hopefully it will also help you understand you need to bring your A-game when you’re going to convince us that working for free is worth it.)

And of course, if we do work for free, a little thank you gift, like a Starbucks or Barnes & Noble gift card is always appreciated.

Photo credit: NoHoDamon (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Stories of Rejection to Soothe the Artist’s Soul

Yesterday, I wrote about how it’s a good idea that some people quit their art after receiving a couple of rejections.

If you really love your art, you won’t let a few haters keep you from it. That’s because it’s a passion, not a daydream. It’s not a whim. It’s not something you do during commercials. It’s what you do instead of everything else, every day.

If you’re easily persuaded to quit, just because someone somewhere didn’t like what you were doing, then quit. Quit now. Quit wasting your time in pursuing something you don’t really love, just because you thought it “sounded neat.” Save the rest us the hassle of climbing over you later.

One of these things could hold a ton of rejection letters.

For the most part, the editors, publishers, and judges are pretty smart. They’re not know-nothing mouth-breathers. They know what their publication or venue needs, and they know you’re not the one to fill the spot they have open.

But occasionally, there are those who, well, pass up a good thing, and will be remembered long after they die as the poor schlub who let [insert blockbuster artist here] slip through their fingers. These are some of the stories we writers tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better after receiving yet another rejection:

  • Stephen King used to hang rejection letters on a railroad spike, because there were so many of them. After he became famous, he found an old, rather nasty rejection letter. He pulled out the original story, which was not very good, and sent it back to the same magazine that had rejected him. They were so excited to get a story from the master of horror, that they made sure it got into the next issue, and emblazoned his name on the cover.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was once rejected with the line, “You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.” The Great Gatsby went on to be published, with that Gatsby character intact, and is now ranked #2 in Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century
  • My favorite book, Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, is #7 on Modern Library’s list. But it was rejected by several publishers, including one particularly facepalming line, “I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. . . Apparently the author intends it to be funny — possibly even satire — but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.”
  • Speaking of Stephen King, his book, Carrie, was rejected with the line, “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” I always love to hear from editors and producers who “know” what the public wants, only to find out they have absolutely no clue.
  • e.e. cummings’ very first work, The Enormous Room, is considered a masterpiece of modern poetry, but it very nearly didn’t see the light of day. cummings had to self-publish the work, because it was rejected by 15 publishers beforehand. But he at least dedicated the book to the 15 publishers who thought that his work wasn’t good enough.
  • J.K. Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury agreed to publish Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone. And they only accepted it because the chairman’s 8-year-old daughter had been given the first chapter to read, and then demanded more. Bloomsbury auctioned the US rights to Scholastic for $105,000, and then Rowling went on to make more money than the Queen of England, over $1 billion. Meanwhile publishers like Penguin, HarperCollins, and TransWorld had all turned the book down because it was 120,000 words long.

In doing my research on this post, I found something interesting, and the biggest, most important lesson out of all of this for us artists: James Joyce, like every other artist, had received many rejections over his career. Dubliners was rejected more than 20 times. But more importantly, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (#3 on the Modern Library list) was only published after he re-wrote it several times.

That’s the key.

Joyce reworked and reworked one of his most famous novels many times before it was finally accepted. While artists like to console themselves with stories about Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, and the idea that our original work is an undiscovered masterpiece, the more common outcome is that we have to take Joyce’s path and rework and redo our original work several times before it meets the acceptance of someone who’s willing to pay for our efforts. We like to think that the people who turn us down are idiots, but with a few exceptions, they know what they’re doing.

The Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowling’s of the world are, quite literally, one in a few million. They’re the outliers.

For every Stephen King, there are tens and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts editors will encounter over their lifetime that are an absolute waste of paper. So if you were rejected by a publisher, call them all the names you want in your own home, but never write back and tell them how stupid they were.

Brush yourself off, rewrite your manuscript again, and find another publisher.

Do as Frank Sinatra said, and live the best revenge through massive success, so that one day, your name and your editor’s name will be put on a list like this.

Photo credit: wizetux (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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If Rejection Makes You Quit, Good.

Back in 1994, when I was first starting my humor writing career, I had been included on a guy’s website that listed funny writers on the Internet. A few months later, when I was checking the site again, he had removed me from his list.

When I emailed him about it, he replied, “Because I don’t think you’re that funny.”

My first reaction was “well, f*** you!” But I didn’t say that. I said it a lot to the computer, and vented to another humor writer about it, but I didn’t tell him what a little twit he was. I swore I would “show that humorless little bastard who’s funny,” vowing to become the funniest newspaper humor columnist this side of Dave Barry.

Then I did something even better. I outlasted the guy. I worked and honed my writing and my humor year after year. The humorless guy killed his page after about 12 months, and was never heard from again.

But it did hurt my feelings. It made me feel like I wasn’t very good at what I loved to do. But the one thing I never did was quit. I never stopped writing humor. (Mostly because I was so full of myself, I believed the guy was an idiot, and that I was better than he thought. So quitting never actually occurred to me.)

But regardless, that’s the pivotal event that every artist faces: the successful ones keep going, the wanna-bes and poseurs quit and go through the motions.
 

Rejection Does Not Mean the End

I hate watching American Idol and X Factor because so many people see their rejection as the end of their career, sobbing that this was their one and only chance at stardom.

How asinine are these people? If they were true artists, trying out for a TV show would be just one rejection of many on the road to success. The true artist would shrug his shoulders and say, “Oh well. I’ve got an audition at Cadillac Ranch I have to get to.” But these morons sob like it’s the end of the world and they give up on a dream that was nothing more than a flight of fancy.

That’s how you can tell the difference between a real artist and a poseur. The real artist does their art every day. The poseur waits for inspiration, which comes every few days, but only if they have time for it.

The poseur has plenty of time to stew over the sting of this new rejection; the real artist barely has time to think about their successes, let alone being passed over by the mouth-breathers who wouldn’t know real talent if it kicked them in the ass. (Not that I’m bitter or anything.)
 

That Which Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger

If you quit your art because someone didn’t like what you did, you weren’t that serious about it in the first place.

There are plenty of people who quit pursuing what they think is their dream after they receive a couple rejections, believing they’re at the top of their game after a few short months, or even a year or two. They get voted off the show, turned down, or otherwise rejected, and they’re done.

In his book, On Writing, Stephen King tells a story about how impaled every rejection letter he received on a nail. It eventually became so full, and the letters weighed so much, he had to replace it with a railroad spike. This is the guy who has published thousands of novels and a kajillion words. And he was rejected so much that he needed an industrial-sized rejection letter holder.

But he never quit. Never, ever. And now he makes millions of dollars scaring the bejeezus out of millions of people.
 

We Need Rejection to Weed Out the Poseurs

If you really love your art, you won’t let a few haters keep you from it. That’s because it’s a passion, not a daydream. It’s not a whim. It’s not something you do during commercials. It’s what you do instead of everything else, every day.

If you’re easily persuaded to quit, just because someone somewhere didn’t like what you were doing, then quit. Quit now. Quit wasting your time in pursuing something you don’t really love, just because you thought it “sounded neat.” Save the rest us the hassle of climbing over you later.

But if you’re serious about it, you can get discouraged, you can get sad, you can think the other person is a big stinky jerkface. We all have those moments. We all think the people who told us “no” are know-nothing mouth-breathers.

The difference between the serious artist and the poseurs is that we don’t quit when we get rejected. We impale the rejection letter on a spike and start on the next project.

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My TEDxFortWayne Talk on Community

I was given the chance to give a talk at the first ever TEDxFortWayne event in May 2012, where I talked about how the Internet has given us a chance to do community better than we’ve ever done before.

It was the first year for the TEDxFortWayne event, and I was very proud to be one of their speakers. (It’s still one of my favorite talks.)

When the Internet first started becoming popular, people worried that it would destroy our sense of community. If anything, it’s actually helped us find a better community of people we like and want to get to know.

What those nay-sayers didn’t know is that this has been a continuing complaint about television, radio, air conditioners, cars, and the loss of front porches on our homes.

Instead, think about those weird and esoteric things we love to do (or our kids love to do). When I was a boy, in 1977, my weird thing was beer can collecting. It was only by accident that I discovered there’s a whole community of people who loved collecting beer cans. Now, thanks to the Internet, you can find websites, a national organization, regional groups, and conventions all over the world devoted to this one interest.

There are marble collectors, anime cosplay fans, people who love vintage baseball, punk rock knitters, wood carvers, first edition book collectors, fan fiction story writers, typewriter collectors, and anything else you can think of. The Internet has given us our tribes and brought us together in a way that front porches and neighborhoods ever could.

Watch the TEDxFortWayne video to see why the Internet may be giving us a better community than we’ve ever had before.