I always encourage bloggers that want to take themselves seriously to get their own hosting, and manage their own site.  The most common pushback I get is the price of hosting.  You can get your blog hosted for free.  It is pretty easy.

First some perspective.

Let’s say you really do have your blog hosted for free right now on a site like Blogger or Wordpress.com.  That’s great.  If you are happy, god bless.  If you want to step up you game a little, you are going to have to move on to a self hosted solution.

What are we talking about price wise?  Roughly $80 – $120 per year.  You can pretty easily get your hosting done for about $7.95 per month.  That’s really cheap.  Granted, that is much more expensive than free…I will give you that.  However, it is a small price to pay for the potential increase in revenue and content flexibility that is then afforded to you.

How to get your hosting for free?

There are two easy ways, but first consider our goal.  We need to come up with $7.95 in revenue every month to offset the cost of hosting.  That is not a lot of money.

Method #1: Google Adsense

Adsense is probably the easiest, most turn-key way to start making advertising revenue on your website.  If you’ve never used it before, it is simple.  Just add the Google ad units to your page template and start getting paid.  You will get a few cents every time someone clicks an ad on your website.

Let’s break it out even further.  You need to generate $0.27.  When you think about it, that is not that hard at all.

You’re first couple of months, you might only make a dollar or two.  By the last month or two, you will probably be making around $12+.  So on average for the year, you should be right on target.

The big guys are going to turn their noses up at this idea and say that you should get into affiliate marketing, etc.  Sure, there are a variety of other networks you can get involved with and eventually make more money.  There is no question about that.

However, this is just the quickest way to get started.

Method #2: Refer a Friend

I don’t think I have ever found a single hosting company that does not run their own affiliate marketing program.  Basically, this is a program that allows you to sign up as a “partner” with the hosting company.  For every referral or sale that can be attributed to you, they will pay you a commission.

In the traditional sense, you would do this through banners, buttons, text links, CPC campaigns, etc.

But you can do this on a much smaller level.  Just put your host’s affiliate link on your about page.  Then when you talk to your friends, recommend your host.  Tell them to just go to your About page and click the link to find out about your hosting plan.

If they end up buying a plan with your host, you will get paid.

The best part is the commission itself.  Most hosts pay between $50 – $100+ per referral!  With just one or two friend referrals, you could have your entire year of hosting paid off.

If you are the kind of person in the group that others look to for recommendations, this might be a great opportunity for you.

You can’t lose either way you go.

The best part is the revenue is limitless.  The goal here is to completely offset your hosting costs, but why does it have to start there?  You could actually end up making way more than your hosting ends up costing.

Welcome to the world of digital advertising.

That’s right. Don’t.

Bear with me on the following journey.  I promise, there is an important lesson to be learned that will make you money.

I happen to find myself at a variety of business networking events in New York City through out the year.  I tend to go there because I have to go.  I’m usually dragged there by co-workers.

Hey, if there’s an open bar, why not.

Inevitably, someone ends up trying to force a conversation on me about their business.  Most of the time, I could really care less.

Can you tell I am not in sales?

Well, since I’m not in sales, I end up telling these guys what I do, and start asking some questions about their websites (or lack thereof) because I really don’t want to them give me their hard sell anymore.

Here these guys are, more excited to talk about their business, what they do, and why I should be just as excited about it as them.  They can go on and on for hours about every mind numbing detail about their industry.

Finally one day, I cut a guy off and asked why none of this information was on his website.

Here’s a guy that knows everything you would ever want to know about (in this case) supply chain management.  A nice enough guy, of course.  But here he is chatting my ear off about the subject.  I’m a web developer and content producer.  I am never going to need his services.

Which brings up the point of this little rant.

This guy is a wealth of professional knowledge.  As he told me many times, he has 17 years of experience.  Yet when you look at his website, you would never know it.

Finally, I had a come to Jesus moment with him.  I explained how much business he was potentially losing because he was wasting his time chatting one on one with me rather than sitting at home writing about it.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking face to face networking at all.

However, I am sick and tired of running into these guys all over town that really know their stuff, but don’t realize how to properly channel it.

I explained to him how he should start a blog on his company website and write one new post per day about supply chain management subjects.

Personally, I would never read it.  You would probably never read it either.

But, there are people out there that would read it, and be very glad to be reading it.  That is the point.

Your customers are out there actively searching the Internet for information about your specialty.  Get in front of them by giving them the expert information they are looking for, and give it to them for free.

Before you know it, the person reading your stuff is going to think you are god’s gift to supply chain management.  Guess who this guy is going to call when he’s ready to get someone hired as a consultant?  You big boy.

Talk to the right people!  They are desperate to find you.

So that is my point.  Most professions are fairly specialized, such as this one.  Most people will not care one bit about what you do.  However, there is a group of people out there that are extremely interested in what you do.  They are searching specifically for the knowledge you possess.  They are out there searching right this very second.

Let’s put it this way.  You could spend your time traveling around to supply chain management conferences and networking events.  First of all, how many of those could there be?  And how much is it going to cost you to get there?  How much is the cost of admission.

Or, you could actively seek out your audience online.  Not only can you supplement your website with great info, but you will actually start generating unique traffic through search engines.  Those other people as obsessed with supply chain management as you are will find you.

I guess the point is to spend less time talking to lots of people and focus on talking to the people who want to know what you know.

Trust me, it does not matter how specialized, bizarre, boring, abstract, complicated, geeky, lame, or insane your profession is.  Everyone is an expert at something, and there are others of you out there.   Even more importantly, there are people out there that need your help in the form of products and service.

Talk to them.

[Photo Credit]

What’s the most common problem that growing blogs always run into?  Their Wordpress site needs to be cached in order to handle the growing influx of traffic.

The lifespan of the common blogger goes something like this.

1. Blogger starts blog at Wordpress.com, Blogger, or Typepad.
2. Blogger realizes they want more flexibility and ability to generate a little revenue.
3. Blogger moves their site over to a self hosted Wordpress.org setup on a cheap blog host.
4. Blogger’s traffic continues to grow.
5. BOOM.  Site begins to fail because their shared PHP server and database are overwhelmed.

That’s where most bloggers start scratching their head.  They start to do some research about all the errors they are getting.  Of course, their lame hosts have no good answers and just tell them to upgrade their hosting plans.

Not knowing any better, most agree and get sold into a more costly plan only to find themselves in the same position a few months later.

In most cases, you are probably a year or more away from needing to upgrade your hosting plan.  Even then, it might not be necessary.

What is causing these problems with my blog?

Your site needs to be cached.

Back in the day, this would have taken you hours and hours of coding, some coin, and some aspirin.  Not anymore.

If you are not running WP Supercache on your Wordpress blog today, you are nuts.  For the technical and traffic level of most bloggers on the Internet today, this one, simple, easy to use plugin will solve so many of your problems.

WP Super Cache: This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The reason your site is loading slower, and you are getting resource over use notices from your host is due to the volume of unnecessary queries being run by your blog.  The more traffic you generate, the more queries and processes are run.

It makes sense when you think about it.

Your blog text (and a lot more) resides inside a database.  In order to get that text out of the database and into a readable form, your server runs a query for your post and displays it to the user via PHP.  Logic would then tell you that each time a user comes to your site, that query is run and the text is displayed.

Over. Over. Over. And over again.

But hey.  Why does that query need to be run over and over when it is always showing the same thing?  Nothing has changed since 3 seconds ago when the last user came to your site.  Why run a unique query?

That’s where caching comes in.

As described above, once the query is run the first time, it gets saved as a plain HTML file (in essence) and served to all future users using nothing but plain old Apache.  Once the query has been run once, there’s no need to run it again.  Just serve the same results to the next visitor.

Therefore, your database and PHP engine are not overworked.

The result is less stress on your CPU or shared CPU, and a faster loading blog for the user.

Next time you do a post, that cache is erased and regenerated with your NEW post.

That is really basic description of how caching works, but you can see how it really makes sense.  Luckily, we have the free WP SuperCache plugin to handle all of the work for us.  It takes just 30 seconds to install and have running on your blog.

Immediately, you will notice your slow site loading faster, and those pesky server overage errors should stop.

If you do in fact have the next Perez Hilton, TechCrunch, or Daily Kos on your hands, you may eventually need to upgrade your hosting.  However, even then, you will still be using this plugin. In the mean time, you’ll be good where you’re at.

Making your own custom Wordpress shortcode is actually very easy to do.  All you need to do is add a little bit of code to your site to generate a new Wordpress shortcode.

Everyone loves the convenience of shortcodes such as the built in Wordpress gallery shortcode.  All you do is put [shortcodehere] into your post, and the gallery shows up

You may have used some plugins that implement their own custom shortcodes as well.  For example, if you want a poll in your post, your plugin may just tell you to throw something like this in your post:

[poll id=43]

That tells your blog to go get poll number 43 and place it into the post with all the proper formatting.

What if you wanted to make your own custom shortcode?

Easy enough.  For the sake of this example, lets say that you wanted to put a 300×250 square banner ad in the body of your post.  You don’t always need this ad unit, so you would like to have the ability to just place it in the occasional post or page quickly and easily without having to remember all of the code.

When all is said and done, all you want to do is add [square_ad] to your post, and your custom shortcode will handle the rest.

Here’s what you do.

STEP 1:

Locate your functions.php file in your themes folder.  If you do not have a functions.php file, just go ahead and make one.

STEP 2:

Paste this code into your functions.php file:

function post_ad() { 

return '<center>YOUR AD SERVER CODE GOES HERE</center>';

 }

add_shortcode('square_ad', 'post_ad');

Right there on line 3, you can see where I have labeled where to drop you ad code. So just take your Google Adsense code or other third party serving code ane place it in there.

Review the code parts.

function post_ad() {

In this first line of code, we are naming the function itself. This is not necessarily the name of the short code, but a way to reference the function. The post_ad part is the name. Call it whatever you want.

return 'YOUR AD SERVER CODE GOES HERE';

This is the important part. This is your third party ad code. However, it could be anything.

It could be a 3rd party script, a photo, or any other HTML that you want displayed.

If you do not want your item centered, no problem. Just remove the center tag parts.

Lastly, there is this bit of code.

add_shortcode('square_ad', 'post_ad');

The ’square_ad’ part is where you actually get to come up with the shortcode to use. In this case, we would write [square_ad] anywhere on the page that we want this to show up.

The post_ad part is referencing back to the name of the function from a couple steps prior. This name should match the name of the function.

Finishing up.

Step 3:

That’s pretty much it! Pop that code into your functions.php file and upload the file. On your next post, you should be able to just add your new shortcode to your post.

That’s it! Give it a test drive to see how it goes. It should work out for you nicely.

For most blogs, comments are the lifeblood of pageviews.  What do pageviews turn into?  Ad impressions.

That’s the business gold behind comments, but there are a lot more benefits including community building, site loyalty, and more.  There are many ways to get more comments on your blog, and they are all very easy.

1) Just ask for them.  Duh.

Did you ever think to just ask?  No seriously.  Most of the time it is just that easy.

Try ending your post with, “What do you think?  Comment below.”  Or how about, “Your thoughts? Let me know below.”

Those are some of the pretty obvious, more formal (cough, cough boring *cough*) ways to write it.  Be more casual and conversational when soliciting for comments.  How about, “I can’t possibly be the only one that thinks this is crazy, right? Please tell me I’m not the only sane one.”

You are phrasing it like a rhetorical question, but it actually makes the reader want to respond to you.

2) Ask a lot of questions.

Throw some specific questions our there to your readers asking them for information.  People love to tell you what they know.  Hell, that’s probably how blogging was invented in the first place.  So ask some sincere questions.

You know that post about that horrible restaurant experience you just wrote?  First of all, you had better bet that people are going to start finding your post in Google very soon.  Writing about restaurants, especially local restaurants that may not get any mainstream press, tend to do well as search terms in Google.

Back to the point…that restaurant review/horror story you just posted.  Ask you readers if anyone else has eaten there and experienced the same thing.  Ask if you readers have any suggestions for a similar but better restaurant in the area.

Readers love to be brought into the conversation.  One way blogs are no fun for anyone.

3) Make it easy.

Nothing is more frustrating to me than having to create an account, decode a secret word, and provide a DNA sample in order to post a quick comment.  Make the process as easy as you can.

Most people would be more likely to post a comment on your site if it is quick and easy.

If you are going to make me create another account, another username, and remember another password, then nevermind thanks.  It isn’t worth it to me.  Our brains are filled up enough with usernames, passwords, and other assorted logins as it is.

Spam blocking isn’t an excuse anymore.  Publishers used to make users create an account in order to verify that they were in fact a real person as opposed to a comment spam bot.  Plus, if there was an habitual offender, it makes it easier to block them.

Technology has improved making that a pretty silly excuse.

The Wordpress Akismet plugin has drastically improved over the past couple of years.  Give it a try.  For the most part, you should be pretty happy.  If you must use a captcha type plugin, go easy.  Use a good one.  Don’t skim out. Personally, I think reCAPTCHA is the best one.  It is clear, large, and FREE.

4) Don’t hold comments for moderation.

If you can possibly avoid it, do not hold posts for moderation.  Ideally, just setup your comment system to flag certain phrases or inappropriate words.  Those comments can be held for review.

Everything else, let it go.  Don’t keep those other comments in “Comment Prison” until you have enough free time to screen.

If a user is taking the time to leave you a great comment, it can be a pretty big bummer to find out that the comment may not show up on the site until the next day.  The Internet is all about instant gratification.

When a user posts a comment, they want to see it up on your site instantly.  They want the rest of the world to see what they have to say.  Even better, they want other users to respond to them.

If the user feels like they have to wait around and see if the comment makes the cut, that’s the last time they will likely even attempt to post a comment on your site.  That user is essentially gone forever.

I know, sometimes it is unavoidable.  Get comfortable with the idea of an f-bomb squeaking in there once in a while and you’ll be ok.  It’s not the end of the world.

5) Respond, respond, respond.

It is your job to post comments too!  It is critically important that the user sees you actively responding to user comments both in future posts and in the current post.  Nothing says you care in the blogging world like responding directly to your readers.

Even if you are not a celebrity, responding to a user comment makes the user feel pretty special.

All of a sudden, you can start to look like the approachable hero just looking for people to chat it up with (in the comments of your site).

Again, if someone took the time to write you a comment, you can certainly take 30 seconds to respond.

So there you have the Top 5 Ways to Get Comments on your blog.  Get out there and give it a try.  The stuff actually works.

If you are sick of hearing about social networking, join the club.  However, there is real value in the traffic that it can generate for your site.  Does that mean you need to add social networking buttons to your blog or website?

Probably.

But don’t go crazy.

You should care about the traffic that can be generated by social networking sites to your blog.

The value of having the little buttons or chicklets on your blog or website is going to be tough to measure.  Sure, there are some free service like Share This that allow you to track the number of clicks the social networking buttons get. That’s all great to know.

At the end of the day, what you really need to know is how much traffic back to your site is generated thanks to these buttons.  It is much harder to track the entire traffic path.

Someone clicks an “Add to Facebook” button on your site. A link to your blog post is generated in that person’s Facebook profile. Cool. However, how do you know how many people subsequently click that link because they saw it in that person’s profile? How do you track those clicks separately from another person’s profile link? How do you track those clicks separately from your Facebook fan page?

Do I need to be that specific about tracking my social networking traffic?

You should care to a certain extent because if something all of a sudden really starts to work well, you want to know exactly what it was so you can repeat it over and over again.  This will help you spend your time most effectively.

To take it a step further, you should be concerned with tracking all your inbound links.  If you are not checking and analyzing your website statistics on a daily basis, you are doing yourself a disservice.  There are a lot of great tools out there to help you track and digest these stats in real-time.  Part 6 of our free blogging course goes into much more detail on stats tracking services.

Do I need to have social networking buttons on my blog or website?

Getting back to the point, it is probably a good idea.  Don’t obsess about it though.

Find an attractive, non-obtrusive way to integrate the buttons into your homepage and individual blog posts.  Make sure they do not overwhelm the design, and try not to have them look tacky.  Remember, these are just there as a reminder for people.  They already know they have a Facebook account.  And they know they can post links to it.  So this is just a little reminder that will save them a step or two.

Instead, save that sweat and stress.  Refocus it on creating unique solicitations for people to post the link to their Facebook or Twitter accounts.  That’s time much better spent.

Come up with an incentive or contest for people to post a link to your page.

Want to collect user photos?  Have them submit them to you as an @reply to you via Twitter.  That usually generates a good amount of traffic because it shows up publicly to everyone following that user as well.

Have a “Facebook Fans Only” contest.  The only users eligible are people who are Fans of your site on Facebook.

In other words, putting just a little more thought into social networks on a post-by-post basis will be far more beneficial than worrying about the placement of your share buttons.

Does your blog load slowly?  C’mon.  Be honest…we’re all friends here.

If you are not the tech savvy type, I’d be willing to bet your site loads slower than it should.  Most amateur bloggers (and some professional ones) are not very good developers.  Here’s where I would normally make the case for hiring a firm like BlogCraving to handle these things for you, but this time I will spare you.

Let’s just jump right to the point and find out if your site is a load hog.

The speed test

Head on over to tools.pingdom.com.  This site will tell you definitively how fast your site loads.  All you have to do is put in your website’s URL and run the test.  It will show you the load time for every single element on your site.

Then, just scroll down to the very bottom of the report to see the total load time for your site. 

How did you score?

Don’t be shy.  Was it a big number?  If you are like a lot of blogs out there, you are probably right around 8 to 15 seconds.  It may not seem like much, but that is dog slow.  And if you are over that, yikes.

Ideally, you want to be under 5 seconds.  That shows a snappy site that people will be likely to enjoy (from a technical experience perspective).

Sites that load quickly have proven to receive much higher pageviews than slow sites.  That’s because users are more likely to click around on a site that loads fast.  Most users will not go on to page 3 or the 4th photo in your gallery if each page takes over 10 seconds to load.  It just become less and less enjoyable with each click no matter how good the content.

What do you do?

The answer to this question is an entire series of posts that we will get into in the coming days.  In the mean time, I’ll give you some tips.

1. Optimize those post images. You should really spend some time learning how to optimize your images for web publishing before you even upload them into Wordpress (or your blog platform).  Lots of heavy images will surely kill your load time.  The Pingdom tool above will help you identify those big images.  Try Photoshop, Picasa, or even free services like SmushIt.
2. Cut back on external scripts and calls. We all know those free little add-on widgets are lots of fun to put on your site.  So are all those snazzy social media buttons.  Unfortunately, they can add a lot of load time because of all the external callouts they make.  The files/scripts themselves might even be a bit “beefy”.   Again, Pingdom will help you identify those problem services.  Once you know what they are, ask yourself how essential they really are and get rid of them.
3. Is it your host? Most basic blogs are hosted on shared hosting.  In other words, you share a single server with a bunch of strangers.  You have no idea who else is on that server with you and what kind of resource they are drawing.  Your host may have certain throttle points in place to scale down resource hogs.  Maybe you’re super hot site is one of the sites drawing too much.  If that’s the case, it may be time to look into alternative hosting solutions (this is a good problem to have because it shows that you are growing).
4. Dude, your theme is lame. It might be time to face the ugly truth that your site’s theme just isn’t that great.  Most free themes are free because they are not that great.  They may have some sloppy coding or CSS in them that do not make them scalable for growing sites.  They’ll serve you well to start, but as you become a bigger deal, your theme may end up holding you back.   If you’ve got some serious load time issues, I highly suggest you run (not walk) to check out the Wordpress Thesis Theme.  It is incredibly fast loading, easy to customize even for non technical types, and has great SEO features. More and more sites are headed to Thesis because of how well it performs.  It comes out of the box pretty plain, but you can quickly make it much more visually appealing.

Over the next few days, we will take a deep dive into some of these optimization techniques as well as discuss things like Cloud Hosting, CDN’s, template optimization, and a lot more.

Many of my clients are celebrity gossip and entertainment bloggers.  The gossip niche has been our bread and butter for many years now.  We stumbled across the category by accident really.  It turns out that in 2006, there were a lot of high traffic gossip sites that needed real technical management in order to keep growing.  Now, the category is huge.

The biggest traffic drivers  for gossip and entertainment sites are photos.  People love to click through photos of celebrities doing everything from walking the red carpet to getting their morning Starbucks.

For your average work at home gossip blogger, getting licensed images legally was always a challenge. Photo agencies like x17Online, Bauer Griffin, Getty Images, etc. can charge thousands of dollars a month for a subscription.  Exclusive photos can cost 10 times that.  For years, that made the entire concept very cost prohibitive.

Sites that were able to generate enough advertising revenue were the only sites able to afford these fees (other than major media sites).

However, in the last year, the game has changed.  There are some affordable options out there.

The Game Has Changed

Photo agencies used to have a monopoly on the paparazzi style photo market.  That’s not the case anymore.  Virtually everyone in LA and New York has a camera with them 24/7.  It’s called a cellphone.

Cellphone cameras are getting pretty amazing these days.  Add that to the growing popularity of pocket sized video and still cameras, and you’ve got yourself a game changer.

Many of these same photo agencies now solicit the general public to submit photos of celebrity sightings.  The agencies will pay top dollar for these images because they are often one-of-a-kind images.  Typically, someone just whips out their cellphone and snaps a shot of that new starlet bumping a line of blow in the ladies room.

Because of the now much broader source pool, the game has changed.

Tip 1: Troll the social web

Where’s the first place these glorious cellphone images end up?  Social media websites.

If you’re looking for a unique image to go with you post about the latest celebrity dirt, start by poking around on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc.  It can take a moderate amount of digging, but what you’ll find can be awesome.

Most of the time, all you have to do is sent the person a quick direct message asking if you can use their photo on your site.  The person usually is totally pumped that their picture is going to be on a “real website.”  Just give them a little link love back.

Caution.  Make sure that the photo was actually taken by them.  Sometimes people will just take a photo from another website and upload it to their profile.  Bad news bears for you.

One of the best places to look are the photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa.

Flickr actually lets you do more advanced searches too.  You can do a filter to only show you Creative Commons images.  Images under CC are usually free from licensing restrictions.  Each one will have its own usage guidelines, but you can almost always use them.

Tip 2:  Try GumGum

Who?  GumGum?

Yeah.  GumGum is a service that allows publishers of almost any size access to professional grade image libraries.  You’ve probably seen their service in action and don’t even know it.

You’ve probably seen sites that have these little, floating text box ads over their images.  Those are GumGum ads.  Actually, those are GumGum photos too.

If your site has enough traffic, GumGum will broker a deal with agencies like Bauer Griffin or Fame on your behalf.  You’ll then have unlimited access to those image libraries for publishing on your site.  GumGum has you place a small script on your site that then overlays a small ad on all of the images you use from those libraries.

How much does it cost?  Nothing.  It is free as long as your site meets certain traffic criteria. GumGum keeps the ad revenue, and you get to use the images.

If your site is on the smaller side, they offer a different plan where you only pay based on how often the photo is viewed.

Collective Bargaining

This is a rarely used tactic, but I have seen it used.

It can be expensive for a single site to purchase an image license on its own from a photo agency.  However, the per site rate gets drastically lower when more sites are included in the agreement.

I have seen examples where individual bloggers got together to negotiate a group contract.  They essentially formed a blog network covered under a blanket agreement.  This brought the monthly fee from around $1,200 per site down to about $800.

Obviously, this method is best suited for more established sites, but it is certainly worth looking into.

I hate New Year’s resolutions. The whole ideas is just silly to me.  However, the first of the year for whatever reason feels like a blank slate.  There is a new sense of possibility that only seems to come around this time of year.

I’ve decided to capitalize on it by setting a new mission: consistency.

To do anything well, you need to do it consistently.  In my case, I run/manage about 26 sites year round in addition to one-off client projects.  Being so busy makes it hard to write on any of my sites consistently.  I’ll get a random post off from time to time, but doing it daily gets tough.

For 2010, I’m going to give it my best effort to write here on BlogCraving.com as regularly as possible.  It isn’t that there’s nothing to write about, it’s just a matter of sitting down and doing it.  Building and maintaining an audience only happens when a site consistently publishes new content.  It can be as little as one new post a day as long as it is done on a regular basis.

I’m also going to make a solid effort to comment on my favorite sites more often.  Being active on other websites is one of the best ways to get your self out there and known in the business.  Posting great comments on a regular basis will get you noticed.

When building your online business (or any business really), you’ll quickly realize that you can’t do it all yourself.  You are simply going to have to hire some help.

It does not mean you have to go out and start hiring full time employees.  However, you’ll probably need a few contract or project guru’s to help you along the way.

One of the biggest mistakes is second guessing yourself.  Once you’ve found someone you know is good for your business, stick with them.  At some point, you may hit a few bumps in the road with them, but 99% of the time, you can work them out.  See what I mean by watching Sue and Steve’s video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ8f6WQqvak[/youtube]

Here’s some more tips to make the process easier.

1. Ask a buddy

Word of mouth is king these days, and so is networking.  If you are not already, get out there and make friends in the business.  Hopefully you already have a few.

Ask them if they’ve used any good people. 

Let’s say you were friends of Sue and Steve’s and you too were in the market for a new copywriter.  They probably got dozens and dozens of applicants.  However, only a small handful were a right fit for their project.  That does NOT mean that the others were bad writers.  It just means their expertise did not fit with Sue and Steve’s.  They may be able to recommend one of the applicants they found in their search that would be a better fit for your business type.

Other friends might be able to recommend people they’ve actually hired in the past.  One thing is for sure, people love to support people that do great work.  When I have people that have done excellent work for me, I love handing out their contact information every chance I get.  It’s the best way of repaying someone for a job well done, and it costs me nothing.

2. It is not going to happen overnight.

Be patient my friend.  Once you post your gig on Craigslist, Elance, Guru, and Mechanical Turk, take a couple days off.  Go grab a sandwich.  Play with your kids.  Relax.

The tendency is to start checking your inbox like an obsessive compulsive lunatic.  As the first three quotes trickle in, you start scouring every word over and over again.

That is pointless amigo.  You are better off waiting a couple of days to get a good pool of candidates together before making a decision.  If you go to fast, you may miss out on someone that is a much better fit. Plus, you can use this time to come up with a more detailed list of deliverables and action items.  Us freelancers love that stuff.

3.  What do you actually need? Write it down.

Sounds like an obvious question, but I cannot even begin to tell you how many clients I have that had no idea what they actually needed done.

Just because you are the insane genius with the million dollar business idea does not mean that everyone else will understand what you are talking about.  Take some time to really flush out what work you need done.  Write it all down in detail.

You will often find that you need a few different kinds of help.  Perhaps you’ll need a few people rather than just one.

For example, designers and coders are not often the same people.

Once you’ve flushed out this element of your project on paper, you might see that what you need to accomplish is very technically detailed.  However, having an amazingly simple graphical user interface is key to this project’s success.

Hmmm.  Now what?

You might need to hire a coder and a separate graphic designer.  Better yet, you might need to hire a project manager (almost like a general contractor) to manage the design and coding on your behalf.

Plus, this part of the planning will help you better understand your future business.

4.  Ask for work samples.  As many as you need.

Don’t just let a potential freelancer sweet talk you with how great they are and how they’ve done tons of projects like yours before.  If they really have done projects like yours before, you may want to make sure you’ve evaluated your competition before going forward.

Make your freelancer show you work they’ve done in the past.  Don’t just let them email you a sample with no explanation.  Get them to tell you in detail what exactly they did with the project and how much hands-on work they actually did.  You may find that the guy has worked on this great site, but all he did was make the background color blue.  The rest was done by someone else.

Get all the details so you are comfortable with their level of expertise.

5.  Do not ignore the high price tags.  Everything is negotiable.

I’ve seen a lot of people automatically jump to the price page when evaluating RFP’s and quotes.  Once they see a huge number they are not comfortable paying, they move on to the next quote.

Wait a minute.  Sometimes you get what you pay for…remember that.

If you get a quote from someone that you think you might really be interested in, call them anyway.  Go through the entire interview process with them to make sure that they really are a match.  If so, then start talking price.

Don’t be afraid to really interview the “expensive” coders hard.  That’s why they get such high rates.

If you are sold on them, start negotiating.  If the freelancer has spent a good amount of time talking with you already, chances are they will be willing to negotiate the rate with you.

Sometimes freelancers will quote a number that they just hope to get when in reality they will do the job for much less.

Don’t let sticker shock scare you away from good people.