Ebook Re-Brand
If you go to buy my ebook, you may notice something’s different. I spent today re-branding the book because I was notified ‘nerd school’ is trademarked. Oh yay… I suppose I should have stuck with Nerd Party in the first place – lesson learned!
Anyway…same book, still awesome, still available to help you kick your blog in the pants! Get it here >>>
* If you’ve already bought and read the ebook I’d love for you to write a review – there’s a tab at the bottom of the product page for you to leave your thoughts. Thanks!! *
Add a Comment / Posted in ebook
Meet my May sponsors
MELINDA’S MUSINGS: blog / Twitter
I’m a designer, dreamer, and adventure-seeker. I design children’s clothing by day, blog at night, and travel on the weekends! On Melinda’s Musings I share my inspirations, travel stories, and love of yoga and books. I’m constantly inspired by fellow bloggers and designers, so if you stop by my blog please share a link to your site, I’d love to check it out!
JUST LOVELY: blog / Twitter / shop
I am an accessories designer and owner of JustLovelyThings, co-founder of a pretty shop called Fawn & Flora and I work for Passionfruit (you know that rad blog ad company!). I am extremely passionate about supporting independent, small business & the handmade community. I live in Oregon and am married to my bestest friend Brandon and our huge dog. I hope you have fun visiting while I share all the things I find, love and am passionate about!
Also stop by and say Hi to Marilyn at Pulp Sushi and Shell over at Kitty And Buck
If you’d like to sponsor Silly Grrl you’re welcome to grab a spot anytime during the month. Spaces start at just $5 and you’ll be pleased to know my traffic went from 29,000 page views in April to whats looking like 35,000 this month. Pretty awesome if I do say so myself :)
Add a Comment / Posted in sponsors
Freelance Questions: Raising prices and learning to code
Ashley said, “I want to quit my day job and support my family entirely with my freelancing. We have a TON of savings…I am currently earning about half of what we need from my freelancing…but I’m also only freelancing part-time. I want to take the leap, but I’m also thinking I should re-price my website and blog designs accordingly before I do so, which means I could lose clients. I track my time and know my hourly rate…but sometimes a website takes 6 hours and sometimes it’s 26! I want to offer package pricing, but that makes it hard, you know?”
Thanks for your question Ashley! First, you should definitely raise your prices to your post-escape rate before leaving your job. You’re right, you may lose some clients, so you want to have an idea of how many will stick around once you’re freelancing full-time. The ones looking for a quick, cheap design will probably fade out and you’ll be left with less clients, but higher-paying projects.
As far as pricing goes, I know my hourly rate and I know how long it takes to build different parts of a site. So I charge base-rate, which covers the site mock-up and revisions (to which there is a limit) and then I add on for pages, dropdown menus, galleries, ecommerce. If you look at my portfolio you’ll see I don’t list any rates. This is because every site ends up taking a different amount of time depending on the size and how picky the client is.
Here’s an example: Say the hourly rate is $50. It takes me about 6 hours to do a mock-up with three rounds of revisions, 1 hour to style a drop-down menu, and the site has 4 pages (1 hour each). That comes out to 11 hours, which would be $550.
Don’t be afraid to charge what you’re worth. There’s nothing more annoying then getting to the end of the project and realizing you paid yourself $30/hour intsead of $50 because you dropped your price and the client wanted a bunch of extras.
Samantha said, “First, how did you learn your mad web skills? Have you found that it’s fairly easy to find work as a freelancer (do most people just find you via your website)? Do you think your location matters at all when it comes to freelance work? How do you keep your freelance projects organized? I think your blog is great, and it’s really inspiring to see how you’ve gone freelance and made it work.”
Thanks for your questions Samantha (I know there were a couple more, I’m holding those for next time :)
I learned my mad web skills by making a really ugly sites on gURL pages and Angelfire when I was about 13. I would see sites with different features and look at their page source and research how to recreated what they’d done. Now I hone my skills by looking up information Stack Overflow, w3Schools and CSS-Tricks.
I’ve been working as a freelancer for about two years and my blog has been online for over five, so when I started offering design services the audience was already there. Now I don’t have to do any marketing at all – clients come to me. Because of this, most of my clients are online, so I can work from anywhere and location isn’t a factor. Though even my local clients communicate via email the majority of the time.
To keep my freelance projects organized I use two things – Google Calendar and Weave. I use Google calendar for scheduling – I set the event to show all day and make each project a different color. Then I use Weave to track tasks, hours and income.
If you have a design, blogging, freelance, coding, or aerial-related question, feel free to submit it here and I might just answer it in an upcoming post!
5 Comments / Posted in freelance
Now available! Nerd Party: Clever Coding & Design Tips for Busy Bloggers
It’s here, it’s here! After a year of kinda working, kinda procrastinating and two months of working my buns off it’s finally time to launch this thing!
This book is for those of you who are looking to wade a little deeper into the coding waters. It includes tips on choosing the right template, instruction on how to use plugins and Google’s Keyword Tool, how to build a better blog design through information from your analytics, and tutorials of course!
There are TEN brand new tutorials – a few easier ones for those of you just getting started, some in the middle and a couple advanced tutorials for those of you looking for a challenge. The tutorials are based in Blogger and self-hosted WordPress, but those of you using other platforms may be able to apply the code to your site as well.
Through this book I hope to help you define your style as a blogger, share your message, your business or passion, and create a design that encourages your readers to stick around and participate.
OK…CLICK HERE TO BUY IT NOW!
2 Comments / Posted in design, ebook
Stopping the “I’m Sorries” and the “I Can’ts”
My students, kicking so much ass
Our first aerial session is coming to an end and with summer classes starting in a few weeks we’re looking to implement a few new policies…No saying I can’t before even attempting a trick and no saying Sorry for not having the strength, flexibility or guts to be able to do something.
About 90 percent of the time when a student tells me, ‘Oh man, I don’t know if I can do that…” they nail the trick on the first go. I know they can do it right from the start. I have no doubt that they’ll hoist their ass into the air, their hands will be strong enough and their abs will turn them in just the right way, but they never believe me.
They look up at the apparatus, reposition their hands over and over, start to pull up and stall. They’re telling themselves they’re going to fail before they’ve even seen what their body can do.
And if they aren’t able to do a trick it’s completely OK. But over and over when a student isn’t able to hold themselves up or complete a trick, they come down and say sorry. And I tell them – I don’t care if you never ever ever complete the trick, I care that you got up there and did your best and there’s no reason to say sorry.
If you came to our aerial class Irina and I would both tell you the same thing – when we first started training there were things we could not do at all. I couldn’t haul my ass onto the trapeze without assistance for months and she couldn’t climb to save her life. But we still showed up week after grueling week, continued to work at it for those tiny moments of improvement, and didn’t apologize when we were downright awful. We were learning, and if you’re learning something new you’re allowed to be unapologetically terrible at it too.
We need to learn to move with confidence and give things a shot, give OURSELVES a shot, without allowing those discouraging voices to enter out thoughts. Just go for it. Stop apologizing for not being able to do something and be proud of yourself that you showed up and gave it a shot.
Are you a Sorry-er? Do you start with “I don’t think I can do that” or to you try new things with confidence?
Also…my ebook comes out tomorrow!! Holy moly! Anyone else as excited as I am??
17 Comments / Posted in life
Blog Love
The teeny-tiny aquarium was my favorite part of the museum & planetarium
This weekend has been a nice release after a crazy, crazy work week finishing the book. It’s now very apparent that I’m truly insane because I decided to reformat the entire thing at 11PM on Wednesday night. Yes, INSANE. But, I finished it in time, got the new site online and the pre-launch went off without a hitch.
Friday night I celebrated with a lady date to the planetarium and chicken fingers + fries at a diner. Planning to schedule a much needed massage asap too.
If you’re on my mailing list and didn’t receive the email with the shop link Friday morning you might want to check your spam folder :) Thank you to all who have already purchased the book. See the notifications pop up on my phone all day made me super happy.
Also, if you haven’t commented on my ‘getting you know you‘ post, you should! I’ve come to the conclusion that I have the best readers and now I feel like I’m writing to my super cool friends from all over the world. Thanks guys!
How to clean your closet and make a little cash >>>
Did you get the app that lets you boycott Koch, Monsanto & more by scanning your shopping cart? >>>
7 things you need to stop telling yourself (via Rock Steady Strategy) >>>
Pruning the bush (a business post) >>>
Charging value based fees >>>
Who wants to go here and makeout? >>>
I definitely need this (attn wine drinkers) >>>
A genius way to organize tights >>>
Love Angie’s BAMF series >>>
Mom takes photos of daughter as real heroes, no Disney allowed >>>
From the archives: A post from 2009 when I was feeling stuck at my job and trying to figure out how to make a change >>>
5 Comments / Posted in blog love
