Thanks to everyone who attended my session on estimating. Lots of great participation.

For those who asked, here are the slides.

Last week I was perusing a forum for freelancers and I saw this:

It's a shame with the 3rd world folks stealing the jobs away with low prices.

This is seriously flawed thinking that will hold you back.

First: they are not STEALING the jobs. They are competing. And yes, there are plenty of price sensitive customers who will gravitate to low cost alternatives. But just because they are using the advantages they have (low cost of living) to compete doesn’t make them thieves. You aren’t OWED this job.

Second: There are other ways to compete. If your big benefit ...

Being an Indy Coder means you don't have unlimited resources. There are only so many hours in the day for working, learning, and marketing. Don't waste hours learning things that you can't or won't leverage other ways.

But learning new things is always useful, right?

No. Not really. Here's an example.

A couple of years ago I invested a LOT of time learning how to interact with a third party enterprise CRM. It was a request from a regular customer, and meant 100s of hours of business for me.

But looking back, it wasn't a very smart decision. Customers of ...

There are two components of any marketing efforts:

• Attracting the right clients
• Repelling the wrong clients

This is obviously a tricky game. You want to make sure you are appealing to the clients you want to work with, but while doing it you want to seem unappealing to the worst clients (or at least those who don’t fit your target market). Here are some ways you can accomplish this:

Use a company policy

As Indy Coders, we tend to think that saying we have a company policy is foolish. But having your own business means deciding on your own policies. ...

As 2012 kicks off, I’ve been spending time thinking about my Indy Coding business objectives for the new year. Of course, one of my goals is financial – I have a new income target I’d like to hit.

Another goal is to diversify my client base. Last year I added a new client who brought me a significant piece of business. I had hoped that this new client would bring me lots of additional work as well, but unfortunately that hasn’t materialized. So I’ll be looking to add a new client this year and/or increase the business from some of ...