I think having a personal brand website is a great idea since it is separate from your web design business.  They have totally different audiences so should have different websites.  I also think it is a great way to present all the efforts, personal and business.

The website is well structured.  I think a minor tweak would be the main navigation perhaps.  To fit the home page layout, I would have the menu go Home, Blue Drop, Actor, Tools, About.

 Nathan Minns  I kicked the tires on your website in different browsers, looked good, no faults found. 

Overall pretty straight forward design tells a quick and to the point story of who you are and what you do. Yes, I think it is a good overview of both of your paths.

I found it helpful to create two twitter accounts, one for professional use and one for personal use.  The personal one is where I can check out politics etc, on my professional one, which is relatively new, I am having fun following the people/orgs in the screenshot

 Nathan Minns  I fell off of Twitter for awhile because it became too toxic. But as I said on another post in this forum, social media is a necessary evil of being a freelancer. On Twitter, much more than other forms of social media, best way to find people is to search on hashtags,

 Roxanne g  Absolutely! I have a few accounts based on themes of topics I write about. I have very niche related websites where opinions on unrelated topics can actually hurt your following.  

I found that people are more passionate about sports teams than they are politics or religion. If you tweet about your favorite sports team and someone doesn't like it, they start trash talking. I'm amazed by people using their "professional" twitter account to bash a city because they don't like a sports team.

Oh wow, Loom isn't free anymore? I recently upgraded to their Pro version anyway, but that's a bummer if there's no longer a free tier!

I use it for a ton of stuff; most of it related to asynchronously communicating with a remote team. Walkthroughs, explanations of processes, updates on projects, etc.

As you've seen, I also use it to add a personal touch to email responses from time to time.

Well, Loom is free, but only for 5 minute videos. I already upgraded to record client trainings, but I wanted to gather other ideas to see what else I can do with it!

I switched to CloupApp when they had a lifetime deal on App Sumo. At the time, they were pretty comparable.

How do I use it? I use it whenever I need to explain something with a visual component.

Video for clients showing them how to XYZ. That's the biggest case for them. 

But I also use it for 

The Trello video I posted yesterday is a CloudApp video.

Why do you ask? Trying to decide if you should pay for it?

If you don't need anything else, don't fix what ain't broke.

I'm amazed at the intellect and level of knowledge some writers here have. I learn so much (even though it's a tad intimidating). And compared to other social media platforms, the writing is a breath of fresh air. One day, I'll be able to keep up with you. Now, let me go practice.😀 

I do too & I have the same issue with it. I have two very generic meetings simply called 30-minute meetings and 60-minute meeting where I let the client run the show and set pretty much all of the meeting particulars. Then I have more specialized meetings. For instance, I have: 

In all of my emails, contacts with recruiters, LI, and other places on the web I default to the 30-minute meeting where the customer specifies his need.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the #1 issue on the tech side of web development. There are only about 1.3 million effective solutions for any given problem. And the best solution is - well, it depends. ;)

Thank you! Josh Robbs ,  Alex Bell ! 

All in one WP Migration is a LIFE CHANGER. 

Now...I just need to figure out how to tranfer a domain...

Nathan Minns  Not too hard in and of itself, just need to change the nameservers at where ever the domain is registered.

BUT you'll want to have the website content migrated first so there's no downtime, which means you'll want to update your computer's hosts files to point to the new site on Bluehost before the domain is fully transferred.

And hopefully they don't have any Cloudflare/CDN/caching set up; that can be fine but it can make things more complicated/break :)

Thank you for sharing this!

I charge project fees, in part because the value-based pricing model has never quite resonated with me. As a writer, I'm fortunate because the AWAI publishes a price survey every year that includes about 75 types of content. I use that as a guideline and modify based on my gut instinct and knowledge of my clients and their expectations of the content.

Like  Josh Robbs , in my ideal world, I sell a content marketing strategy session and use that to develop a comprehensive plan. The strategy session is also a project fee, but that fee is based on an estimate of hours.

Nothing wrong with charging in the low thousands if that's the type of time you're putting into it, and it's commensurate with the value the client is receiving!

I prefer to bill on a project basis. And throwing math and science out the window, the first question I ask myself is, "What would make me excited to take this project on and work on it?"

Sometimes I don't like a project much. I'll price it higher so that I can get excited about it, or I won't do it.

But in any case, I don't want to ever dread doing the project because it's not fun and I don't feel like I'm earning enough from it.

So, I start there and then dig deeper into my expected "input" of time and effort, and often I multiply that by the value I typically put on my own hours. I sent an email recently to our challenge group – I made a little spreadsheet to do an estimate of hours on the high end, low end, and average as a way of estimating.

In a perfect scenario, I sell a roadmapping session/workshop and use that to really develop a plan and measure value. Then I do the value pricing magic.

Typically, I do an hourly estimate based on the required functions. Then I add 25% for project management. Then I add 85% because it's a fixed scope project and I'm eating all of the risks.

Lately, I've bidding like that, but adding in more bells and whistles. What ends up happening is that gets me the real, disappointingly low budget and then I drop the bells and whistles and everyone is happy-ish.

Hey  Nathan Minns , my virtual assistant helps me with recurring tasks – scheduling some of my content, helping me do some research and outreach to podcasts...

If there's an aspect of your prospecting that is recurring that you could basically script and hand off, then I think it could work.

But if you're landing clients because of networking, that's tough to "outsource" because it most likely worked because those people felt that they knew you and trusted you. You can't really outsource that.

It may actually be more useful/profitable (if you find yourself good at networking and landing clients) that you hire help to outsource the delivery of the work, and you spend your time selling it.

I've never worked with a VA, but I hope to do so in the future! From the research I've done here and there, I know that some VAs take on more business development roles than others, so it might depend on who you hire. 

I'm looking forward to hearing from others with more direct experience!

This is a really great (and common) question. It really depends on how you want to view your business.

I think it's easier to sell services on behalf of yourself when you own, "I'm the one doing this work, here's some of my past work, here's what people say about working with me."

If you don't aspire to create a larger team, I think this is a good route. 

There seems to be a bit of a ceiling though. Larger, more established companies are going to feel more comfortable hiring a reputable company rather than a freelancer in a lot of cases. Being a solo act, you're allowing the client to make some assumptions about the overall size and maybe even "legitimacy" of your operation.

But on the other side of the token, smaller businesses and individuals would probably rather work with a PERSON than a company.

So, to wrap it all up...

Those would be my biggest questions in making the decision. 

Just to add one more perspective to the mix, I decided to go with a company name and "we" instead of "I" mostly because I needed to separate myself from my business and see my business as a separate entity. 

I am not always good at setting boundaries or advocating for myself. I'm much better at setting boundaries for my business and advocating for my business. So this little mental trick is helpful!

It's funny how we all have ideas and experiences to share, that help us understand things from different perspectives. Let me give a different perspective on this topic than some of the others here.

Freelancing has it's place, and I love this community here. But I would feel better if I were dealing with a member of a team, rather than an individual free agent mercenary.  Even if the team is a group of freelancers who work together, having more than one person working on a project has advantages.

Here's why, I've seem so many great ideas and great projects come to a unexpected end because they were the work of one person.  That person put their heart and soul into a project, but something changed in their life.  Maybe they got a great job offer, maybe they had a child, maybe they had a family member with a medical issue, or even a medical issue themselves.  And now that one person needs to move on, and the project dies. 

But that's not always the sad ending to the story.  If you create a collective of like minded individuals, even if it is a group of freelancers that work together as a team, I really think you can have the best of both worlds.

I've seen both sides of this issue illustrated with open source software communities. I've seen very cool open source projects die because the original creator has something change in their life, and they need to move on.  
On the other hand I've seen projects where one person has an idea and builds something, others contribute and collaborate.  Now when the creator of the project needs to move on, the project doesn't die.

Just something to think about.