As freelancers, we all know how difficult it can be to keep clients on track. From shifting visions to missed deadlines to massive scope creep – it can feel like an uphill battle to keep things on deadline and within the original contract you signed. Fortunately, with strong client communication you can avoid many of this issues. As a long-time project manager and freelance developer, I’ll dive into the foundations of good client communication including: setting expectations, using deadlines and timelines effectively, buffering for client schedules, measuring out next steps, and handling conflict.
The Dating Game: Understanding Price Anchoring
At some point in our lives all of us are consumers, customers, or clients. Pricing affects all of our buying decisions in a similar manner. As a freelance professional, how do you decide what your prices should be? There is a particular psychology that is applied when we make decisions and pricing is no different from dating. The results are different, but the process is the same.
Best Practices on Providing Free Support for your Plugin or Theme
If you are a WordPress plugin or theme author, you probably have mixed feelings about the WordPress Support Forums. For many, they are a necessary evil of the WordPress product developer experience. While they are limited, the advantages they offer far outweigh the disadvantages when tackled well.
I’ve been providing support on the WP.org support forums for over 5 years for a wide variety of plugins. I’ll share my experiences and provide insight and tools that will make you a believer both in free support and in the value the .org support forums can provide to you and your business.
Attendees will gain a deeper knowledge of all the resources the WP.org Support Forums offer. They will also learn of new tools at their disposal to offer more effective technical support for their users on the .org forums.
You Can’t Charge for Value if You Don’t Understand Your Cost
In the WordPress Community, we talk about value — quite a lot. And that’s awesome. We should charge for our value. The problem comes when we don’t understand our cost — both in financial, physical, and branding terms.
Having spent over ten years in construction accounting, “job costing” is in my vocabulary and the front of my mind. But as a marketer, I also understand that WordPress has a branding problem. In order to elevate our personal brands and the brand of WordPress, it’s important that we go beyond value and take a look at cost.
In this talk, I’ll discuss job costing, sample time tracking, and just how to reverse engineer your pricing to not only meet your expenses, but live the life you want.
How to Make WordPress Your Favorite Marketing Tool
1% Better: How little changes add up to a better, stronger business
“Compounding is the greatest mathematical discovery of all time.” — Albert Einstein
In this talk for freelancers and small business owners, I’ll talk about how committing to regular, tiny changes in your business can lead to big rewards and improvements over time. For the past four months, an accountability partner and I have been completing weekly challenges for our small businesses – and we’re both surprised at how big a difference these little habits and changes have made to our businesses and our lives – we both feel better, more in control, smarter, stronger, and just more generally amazing. In this talk, I’ll share our approach, how we come up with the challenges, and invite folks to join us!
GDPR Compliance. What is it & how does it affect you?
GDPR is fundamentally changing the way we do business online. With GDPR now in effect for nearly 4 months, what does this mean for your site? Is the GDPR law geographically limited? Sam brings his 20 years of cybersecurity experience to discuss how you can protect your client data, what to do in the event of a data breach, and how you can prevent one. We’ll answer your questions and more including how your plugin choices can affect GDPR compliance.