Another cut from my book, From Geek to Peak:

One last assertion before we get to the good stuff.

With any luck, there are five million of you reading this book. In which case, please forward all mail to Aruba, where I’ve retired in style. Even if there aren’t five million of you reading this book, there are probably at least that many reading some kind of book on starting a freelance business, and countless others already out there doing their thing without the benefit of a high-value, wisdom-packed book such as this.

Do a Google search for freelancers in your specialty, and you’ll run across hundreds (if not thousands) toiling away in your city or region. Competition is out there, and all you are is fresh meat.

You know what? That’s okay! You want competition. If nobody’s doing X, then that should be a huge signal to you that there are problems with bringing X to the market. Either the buyers aren’t interested, or the sellers can’t figure out how to deliver X profitably.

The key, though, is to be able to carve out a little niche for yourself. You want to stand out, become memorable, be that guy or gal who is known for something. Why? Because having a unique brand position saves you a ton of time and money, and because you’ll end up getting a ton of referrals from all those other guys who are supposedly the competition.

Listen, if you’re reading this as someone with a technical background, you’ve probably not been exposed to the world of branding. If you have, you’ve probably cocked a skeptical eyebrow at the entire industry that has sprung up around the concept of branding.

Everywhere you look, there seem to be guys running around doing brand research, brand evangelism, brand stewardship, and yada-yada-yada. They give presentations, lead workshops, and run surveys. It’s okay to feel a bit weird about it, and to feel like you’ll never ever fully conquer what you need to know about branding. Relax–you only need to read two books on branding to get it. The rest aren’t worth a damn.

Those two books are The Brand Gap and Zag, both by Marty Neumeier. They’re both presented as white board discussions in print, with lots of visuals and hard-hitting bullets. To make a long story short, and to cut things down to what you need to know, branding is not just your logo or trademark, its a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or other offering.

That’s it in a nutshell. A brand is an instinct, a warm fuzzy, a bad fuzzy, whatever. Companies can try to buy their way toward a brand position, but they usually find a way to screw it up. Nationwide Insurance spent millions and millions to tell folks that  Nationwide is on your side.

Katrina hit, and Nationwide started rejecting claims left and right. Cue lots of media coverage of folks who have lost everything (including loved ones) trying to get a check out of Nationwide. Not gonna happen.

So, is Nationwide really on your side? Their slick, expensive ads and logos say so, but no, not really. Their brand reputation on the street says something else entirely.

Let me just say right here and now that you won’t have the time, energy, or money to develop a brand the way the Madison Avenue gurus think it should be developed. Instead, you’re going to build a brand the old-fashioned way, with hard work. You’re going to make certain promises, then you’re going to deliver on those promises, over and over and over again. You’re going to build up your expertise and become known as the go-to guy for X.

Now your job is to define X, and make X doable. You may not be able to become the worldwide expert on JavaScript, but you could become the best JavaScript coder in Boise, Idaho. You may not be the best technical writer in Austin, TX, but you might be the go-to guy for writing technical case studies. Or the best technical writer on network security.

Get the idea? Focus makes things easier.

Here’s something else that makes things easier: zagging when others zig. Marty Neumeier talks about this in his book Zag. You will find soon enough that most companies participate gleefully in Me-Too Marketing. They look at what all their competitors are doing and then do the exact same thing. Those guys have a trade show booth/white paper/podcast, well we better do those things too!

Time to zag. Stand out. Do something unexpected. Our brains are hardwired to notice something that’s different, something that’s moving. In a sea of Nordic blondes, the brunette or redhead stands out. A single red dot on a page full of grey dots jumps out, draws the eye.

You’ll learn how to stand out in this book. For right now, remember the golden rule of differentiation: the more competition you have, the more focus you’ll need in order to stay competitive.

Now it’s time to get practical and work on that focus.

   

Here are a few links that won’t be a complete waste of time:

• Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy: Part One: Search Engines Want to be Real Boys - Search Engine Guide Blog - First in a series by the inimitable Jennifer Laylock. I love how she provides a chronology of search engine evolution and her Pinnochio metaphor (ie, that search engines seek to mimic human behavior).
• Common Sense Algorithm Chasing - Search Engine Guide Blog - This is an oldie but goodie. I wish I had a dime for every person who has asked me about search engine algorithms and how to beat them. People: stop the algo-chasing. Please. Create good content. Get folks to link to you. Link back. Rinse, repeat. Oh, and have a strategy, mkay?
• bookoutlines / The Ultimate Question - The Ultimate Question, ah yes, very very important. Ask your customers: How likely are you to recommend us to your friends and colleagues? Go ahead, then calculate your NPS (Net Promoter Score). Cry at the results (it will likely be a very soberingly low score) then work your ass off to make it better. Here's a book outline.

Here are a few links that won’t be a complete waste of time:

• bookoutlines / Predictably Irrational - Some real interesting lessons here for entrepreneurs, most notably the fallacy of supply and demand (the black pearl story is instructive) and price relativity.
• Search Engine Optimization Tips - A nice summary of Bill Hartzer's "24 Things You Should be Doing to Optimize Your Sites" series from earlier in 2008.
• The Secret of How to Sell Anything — Copyblogger - OK, this is it. This post is all you need to become an overnight success in sales. Are you ready for it? You better be ready! Okay, go read it.

Just got back from a Jeffrey Gitomer event. It’s always a pleasure to listen to that man. He’s outrageous, he’s funny, and he gets results. During his talk, Jeffery said that he built his email list to 250,000+. Here are some ideas for building up your list.

1. Create something of value. If you have an ezine or e-letter (or whatever you want to label it) with valuable content that will help your customers make more money, grow their businesses, avoid problems, or be more productive, then that right there is your first step. GREAT CONTENT will attract subscribers.
2. Stop boring us! Don’t just create an ezine–or teleseminar series like everyone else. Stand out! Give us your opinion, your thoughts, a little bit of you! Be yourself. Be human. Just standing up and shouting, “I can’t believe you’re doing it that way” and then telling us a better way of doing it will get you noticed!
3. Make it easy to invite more people to join in the fun. Take a look at the new fields we added to our event registration form. It’s an easy way to allow you to invite three other friends to our events when you register. It’s not that people don’t want to tell their friends about your content or your stuff, it’s that they’re too busy to really stop! Help them help you!
4. Publish a press release to tout your new event or ezine. Jen Blackert does this to enormous effect. She can double or triple her list in a few weeks or months with this tactic.
5. Repackage your information. If you’ve done a teleseminar series, offer it as a subscriber-only podcast series on iTunes. Or package them as a set of Audio CDs and sell them on your site. Or create blog entries about each 15 minute segment and publish them that way. Just remember: drive them to a signup page!
6. Create an email course. Just be sure to send them a new installment every few days, and keep the content quality high. Don’t just give them fluff and crap. Give them value.
7. Create and publish articles about your ezine or event on other sites. You can easily enter the game of “article marketing” with zero or no costs and just a little bit of elbow grease. In fact, I guarantee that you probably have a lot of content just lying around that you can repurpose into articles for this very purpose. As long as you drive traffic to a signup page, you’re good!
8. Don’t overthink the signup page. Think simple. Nice big headline with a benefit. A paragraph or two to explain why they should sign up. Then a simple form, with the least amount of info required, like their name and email address.
9. One more thing: send them a welcome message right away! Start the relationship on the right foot. Send them a little note thanking them for signing up. Tell them how to unsubscribe if it wasn’t them that actually subscribed. Then give them links to some of your introductory content so they get a feel for what you’re about.

   

Yet another cut from my book, From Geek to Peak:

I knew a guy once, a freelance database wunderkind. Guy was smart. Way smarter than I’ll ever be, by miles and miles. Get him inside a database problem, and he was a total samurai. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do in MySQL, PostGreSQL, Oracle, Informix, DB2, you name it. He’d forgotten more about databases than you or I will ever know. He was poised to make a bazillion dollars as a lone-gun consultant.

The problem was, he could never make a decision. He’d agonize over every single step in his business. He’d literally get analysis paralysis. Should he start a blog centered around his true love, tweaking databases? Well, let’s take his buddy Tom out to lunch thirteen times in as many months to discuss it, noodle it, push the idea around. And in between, research the topic until his brain burned at night with visions of what could be. Watch as other lesser talents created their own blogs and downloadable white papers and gave talks at conferences and write articles and books.

Listen up folks, I’m going to say this about a million times in this book (and even if I don’t, I say it about a million times a day to others, it seems). It’s okay to make a decision in business, especially if you agree beforehand that it’s okay to change your mind once you get better information.

If you decide to do a teleseminar series, find out what you need to know and then DO IT. Just do that first one. You’ll learn a lot once you do, and given that new set of data, you’ll either continue doing it, or not. The best part? You’ll get real data from your audience and the market instead of subsisting on the paltry dregs of your own half-baked thoughts, delusions, and daydreams.

Sometimes, the world of freelancing is like driving an old-fashioned car without power steering. Have you ever tried to turn the wheels on a big, heavy, vintage 1950s vehicle (made with heavy steel) that didn’t have power steering? When you’re sitting on the side of the curb, trying to pull out into traffic, it takes a heck of a lot of effort to turn the wheel, but once you get going, it’s pretty easy.

Same thing goes with your freelance business. All you need is a bit of momentum and then driving the business becomes a bit easier.

For those of you who are bound to misunderstand me, let me take a second to be clear. I’m not telling you to drive your business off a cliff. I’m just telling you to stop sitting on the curb, trying to decide which way to go. Just pull into traffic and make some decisions. All you have to know is that you’re going back home, or going to the grocery store. Metaphorically speaking, if you have some goals for your business (we’re getting to that part here in a jiffy) and have some values to guide you, you’re not going to make catastrophic decisions.

Here’s another point. So what if you make a bad decision? You’re not ExxonMobil, or Apple, or Nike. You’re not going to spill a million barrels of oil into some unsuspecting Alaskan harbor. You’re not going to piss off a bunch of customers by cutting the cost of your phone two months after release. No enterprising reporter is going to uncover your sweat shops in Indonesia.

You’re just you. A freelancer. A lone-gun technical consultant. Believe me, hardly anyone will notice if you do make a mistake, and even if you do make a mistake that someone picks up on, it won’t be anything major. Trust me.

(This game is a bit of a balance, you see. You’ve got to have enough ego that you would try consulting, but enough realism to realize that you’re really not that important–yet.)

    

Here are a few links that won’t be a complete waste of time:

• 5 Things That Become Easier When You Wake Up Early | Work Life Balance | Time Management Tips | Wake Up Early - Dave Navarros gives us a painfully easy lifehack that adds hours to your day and allows you to face the day's challenges on YOUR terms: wake up earlier. Doh. I've been doing it for a year now and its energizing.
• Moleskine Notebooks: The Ultimate Guide (and how to rank your addiction) | Put Things Off - Nick Cernis, who writes a wonderful productivity blog at putthingsoff.com, tells us why Moleskine notebooks are such a big deal.
• Tell Us Your Most Outrageously Creative Money-Saving or Business Growth Tip | Small Business Trends - Some insightful and creative approaches to both cost-cutting and sales….enjoy.
• Dilbert - Why Systems Analysts Go Crazy - Yeah this is funny. And true. But mostly…true.

Delbert McClinton has a great song on his latest album called “I like to two-step too” in which he pretty much sums up his love of country and rock & roll….that no matter how much he likes to jam out, he loves the two step. It nicely summarizes the eclectic mix of country, rock, gospel, and blues you’ll hear on any of his albums.

So let’s talk about direct response marketing programs. Sometimes you hear people say, “Do a one-step program.” Other times you hear, “Do a two-step program.”

Well, they can both be equally effective (or ineffective), so when should you go with which?

Here are some rules of thumb.

Go with a multi-step program if:

1. Your profit margin is big enough on your product that you can afford a multi-step program OR

2. Your multi-step program involves very cheap media choices (ie., an email campaign to a landing page followed by postcards or more emails to those who register) OR

3. You have a loosely defined group of prospects that need to be further culled out with future steps (for example, a Google Adwords campaign to help identify the prospect and then an email campaign to those who register).

Use a single-step program if:

1. Your offer is very easy to understand and doesn’t require lots of convincing OR

2. Your offer has a low profit margin to you and you need not bother with lots of steps (ie, sell right from the ad or email).

Here are a few links that won’t be a complete waste of time:

• Improve your jQuery - 25 excellent tips - Okay, all of you who really really really hate Javascript (I can’t be the only one) but who need to work with it, and have fallen in love with jQuery because it makes your love-hate relationship functional, here are 25 must-have tips.
• CommandShift3 - All-time best - And here’s the all-time best designs as voted by the community (er, that would be you and me). For a laugh, visit the “worst ever” link.
• CommandShift3 - It’s like Hot or Not for web design - Okay, you’ve played Am I Hot or Not (yes you have, dammit, don’t even try to deny it!)…..well, here’s commandshift3.com, giving you the same concept but with web site designs.
• jQuery Cheat Sheet (PNG file) - What every kid needs for christmas this year — a printable jQuery cheat sheet! With loverly color coding.

    

Here are a few links that won’t be a complete waste of time:

• GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery - Some interesting UI designs here, just in case you’re developing some software or a web site.
• Layout Gala: a collection of 40 CSS layouts based on the same markup and ready for download! - Just in case you’re just as lazy as I am, here are a bunch of CSS layouts that someone else has already figured out. Enjoy.
• gridr buildrrr - For those of you (and yeah, me too) who are too lazy to set up your own grid layouts for web layouts…well, just click the bookmark. 

   

Here are a few links that won’t be a complete waste of time:

• Make Money Blogging - An excellent list for adding income streams to your blog or site.
• Online Business School - Why We’re Broke and How To Fix It | IttyBiz - Just stop what you’re doing right now and read this. I’ll give it a little tease:Take a Hummer full of average self-made millionaires. Strand them in the desert. Strip them of their money. Take away everything they own. Rob them of their connections, their networks, their families.Ten to one they’re millionaires again in less than five years.Can you be a millionaire in five years?