The Freelancers' Show

The panelists discuss the pros and cons of freelancing.

The panelists interview Dan Miller of the 48 Days brand.

In this episode, The Freelancers share their personal stories about times when contracts went wrong and how to make things better for all who are involved.

Pat Flynn joins the Freelancers to talk about his claim to fame: Smart Passive Income.

The Freelancers' Interview Erik Fisher of the Beyond the To-Do List Podcast about productivity and social media.

The Freelancers interview Leslie Samuel of the Become A Blogger Blog and The Learning With Leslie Podcast.

A Book Club episode on The Healthy Programmer by Joe Kutner.

The Freelancers discuss the idea of creating a subscription screencast series. They discuss how to choose a topic, length, approach, series, etc.

The Freelancers talk about taking time off for sickness, vacation, holidays, family events, etc. And how to approach clients about time off.

Mandy Moore, the podcast's producer and Chuck's VA, join the Freelancers to talk about how to become a virtual assistant and how freelancers can use virtual assistants in their businesses.

The Freelancers answer questions entered in the UserVoice forum.

Michael Port joins the Freelancers to talk about his book Book Yourself Solid. He gives a ton of valuable advice for building your business and clientele

The freelancers talk about how they went freelance and some of the mistakes, struggles and triumphs they experienced.

Panel Pippin Williamson (twitter github Pippins Plugins) Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:28 - Pippin Williamson Introduction Pippins Plugins Easy Digital Downloads Restrict Content Pro 01:53 - Making Money Making Plugins Product Development Custom Development 02:57 - GPLv2 Licensing ThemeForest Support Disabling Features 11:45 - Building a business around open-source Audience 12:48 - Transitioning from freelance to product work Graduality 072 – Saying NO Doing products during spare time Brian Casel The Bootstrapped Web Podcast 19:10 - Starting with products vs consulting 22:38 - Occasional Consulting 23:41 - Marketing Products Personal Brand Word-of-Mouth Referrals 25:42 - Customer Support 27:17 - Advice for people getting into commercial development Go the extra mile for your first customers 28:01 - Deciding what products to build Building what you need Best Practices 31:30 - Pippin’s Plugins CodeCanyon Easy Digital Downloads 34:26 - Pippin’s Support Team 36:45 - Tools to Run the Business Github WordPress Skype WordPress-GitHub-Plugin-Updater HALL Ronin Twitter Picks 1Keyboard (Curtis) Radium (Curtis) Episode 148 | Online Marketing Trends with Special Guest Clay Collins (Eric) The Online Marketing Makeover Training Course (Chuck) Bloons Tower Defence 5 (Chuck) SearchWP (Pippin) FacetWP (Pippin) Next Week Our Stories Transcript [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] [You're fantastic at coding, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance, will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients, and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include: 9 interviews with freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today at nextlevelfreelance.com!] [This episode is sponsored by Planscope. Planscope is a project management and collaboration net built for freelancers in the way they work with clients. It makes it easy to price out new estimates and once you’re underway and help answer the question, these get done on time and under budget. I’ve been using Planscope to do my estimates and manage my projects and I really, really like it. It makes it really easy to keep things in order, and understand when things will get done. You can go check it out at Planscope.io.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 79 of The Freelancers' Show! This week on our panel, we have Curtis McHale. CURTIS: Hello! CHUCK: Eric Davis. ERIC: Hi! CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. We also have a special guest, and that is Pippin Williamson. PIPPIN: Hi everybody! CHUCK: Since you haven’t been on the show before, do you want to introduce yourself? PIPPIN: Sure! As he said, my name is Pippin Williamson. I’m a WordPress plugin developer. I spend my days writing plugins, supporting plugins, and generally running a business around commercial plugins. I have a couple of large plugins out there. One called “Easy Digital Downloads” and another one called “Restrict Content Pro” that I’ve considered my main ones. That’s pretty much what I do day-to-day. CHUCK: I’m a little curious, generally, when you’re making money writing plugins for WordPress, are you writing the kind that people pay for and then they download the code and stick it in the WordPress installation? Or, are you doing custom development for people? Or, both? How does that work?

Panel Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Reuven Lerner (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:30 - Panelist Training & Coaching Experience 02:40 - Traveling for In-Person Training 05:52 - Rates 08:35 - Teaching College Courses 10:43 - Online Training Recorded Videos Live Sessions Forums/Discussion Groups GoToMeeting Skype tmux Pair Programming 17:15 - The Value of Training Expense vs Investment 19:54 - Structuring Exercises Canvas Working in Pairs 27:58 - Screencasting The Freelancers’ Show 071 – Recording Video 29:32 - In-Person Training vs Online Training Non-Verbal Communication Asking Questions 34:53 - Teaching Preparation 38:51 - Charging What You’re Worth Picks Joshua Clanton: A Drip of JavaScript (Reuven) Sensei (Curtis) Curtis McHale: Don't be an Idiot: Learn to run a viable business (Curtis) Zite (Eric) Civilization IV (Chuck) Discourse (Chuck) Book Club Book Yourself Solid with Michael Port! He will join us for an episode to discuss the book on September 24th. The episode will air on October 3rd. Next Week Freelancers Show: WordPress Plugins with Pippin Williamson Transcript CHUCK: [Stretching] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] [You're fantastic at coding, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance, will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients, and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include: 9 interviews with freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today at nextlevelfreelance.com!] [This episode is sponsored by Planscope. Planscope is a project management and collaboration net built for freelancers in the way they work with clients. It makes it easy to price out new estimates and wants you on their way and help answer the question just to get done on time and under budget. I’ve been using Planscope to do my estimates and manage my projects and I really, really like it. It makes it really easy to keep things in order, and understand when things will get done. You can go check it out at Planscope.io.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 78 of The Freelancers' Show! This week on our panel, we have Curtis McHale. CURTIS: Hello! CHUCK: Eric Davis. ERIC: Hi! CHUCK: Reuven Lerner. REUVEN: Hi there! CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. This week, we’re going to be talking about “Training and Coaching”.  Just to start this off, how many of you guys have done much training or coaching? CURTIS: I do run a blog that does coaching or training all the time for WordPress stuff, and then I do it with clients as well. REUVEN: I do a ton of training. Probably 2-4 days a week is a good estimate where I go to companies and I train them in person. And then I’ve done a fair amount of coaching as well where I go to companies and I sort of move around and sit with their people and do pair programming and look over their shoulder. CHUCK: I’ve done a fair bit. I haven’t done like on-site, stand up in front of people kind of training except maybe at users groups. But I’ve done a bunch of coaching. I’ve had several people come to me, “Can you sit down and help solve this problem?” Or, “Can you sit down and basically teach me these things that I don’t understand?” and I just get on and kind of pair program with them over the internet to do the coaching. CURTIS: I’ve done stuff at local user groups as well where they’re teaching really basic stuff. Or,