To a potential client with a very small budget

As a small business consultant, I can tell you honestly that your limited budget would be better spent directly (and daily) updating your Facebook Fan Page. It’s the cheapest, most effective advertising mechanism you can pursue.

Check out how Freelance Folder works their Facebook Page. They provide semi-daily updates on their page that mirror their blog, but they’re not using any auto Facebook blog posting feature to drive the page because it just makes sense to not fight people’s natural desire not to leave Facebook to go to a different website. On your Fan Page, your posts are cut off and that doesn’t encourage Fan participation (also, you haven’t updated the page in two weeks–it really needs to be updated several times a week).

If you’ll notice, Freelance Folder’s Fan Page posts are short and they often ask questions to their fans. When they’ve got a longer post, they do attach a link to it, but generally speaking, their goal is to collect comments (and “likes”), because your Facebook friends get to see when you comment on something in their own front page Facebook stream (which equals viral marketing).

Anyway, $1,000 isn’t going to get you a new WordPress web design (which usually takes 6-8 weeks to complete) or even much quality domestic development work in general. Plus, your site has limited return appeal (not just yours, but all businesses) and email newsletters aren’t worth the time it takes to publish them (nobody reads email newsletters anymore).

To reiterate, run with the Facebook Fan Page, and take it all the way. I bet you can double the amount of your Fans in two weeks if you post thrice a day (each post taking less than a minute of your time). Ask questions, solicit feedback or take pictures/videos of your products, your store, you–it doesn’t matter. This is also a great place to ask for articles from your Fans like you suggested.

So, I wish you luck with your efforts. If you have any other questions, please let me know. Thank you in advance.

I also posted this reply directly on my college’s Facebook Fan Page shortly after I wrote the above email

Marketing Thoughts: The Outside Eckerd Tumblog should probably have its own “Outside Eckerd” Facebook Fan Page. That way the official Eckerd College fanpage could properly focus on college events, news and maybe even athletic wrapups.

You can always cross promote the Tumblog, but again, this fan page should have more general updates and also, post them more often. By doing so, you’ll receive a lot more comments and “likes”, which is a great and inexpensive way to virally market the school (i.e. increase the fan number). I’m starting to understand that this is the unexplained (and most important) goal of creating and administering a Facebook Fan Page.

To note, I received my International Business degree from Eckerd in 2004, so if this advice is poorly received, you can blame my professors at your institution:)

The point is, I’m starting to really grok the power of Facebook Fan Pages, especially when used properly. It’s only been a while since Facebook introduced the Fan Page (moving away from the near-useless Groups it began with). Do you have any additional Fan Page best practices? Feel free to share them in the comments.

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I had a one-on-one telephone session with Ryan Kovach yesterday about not leaving money on the table with clients, and I’m now thinking of calling the business model mentioned below “micro-retainers” since Ryan advocates using much larger retainers ($20,000+/year) to better sustain a web development business.

Anyway, I still advocate these “micro-retainers” for a number of circumstances, such as:

• You’ve just been introduced to the client and you want to test out the working relationship before you agree to anything long term.
• The client is a jerk and you want to do as little work for them as possible (in that case, you may want to think about firing the client outright. Getting rid of a difficult client is tough in the short-term but pays off richly in the long).
• You’re doing work for a friend

The issue is that these micro-retainers aren’t going to generate a lot of cash (which is fine if you’re working for friend) unless the client gives you permission to burn through the hours freely (eventually, you will run out of work to do, though). It’s probably best to at least double your normal hourly rate and round up your tasks to the nearest half hour (within reason, of course). That way, all the little things you do for a client, like project manage and provide quick responses to their emails, get accounted for in the end. It’s also important to note that your availability is worth something to the client (probably a lot, actually).

It’s nice not to have to burn out on a project to make rent, as well as give yourself the ability to count research, communication and other similar extracurricular work towards your clients’ workload, all of which probably accounted more fairly in a monthly/yearly retainer setup.

Now, back to the original post…

Lawyers love retainers, and as a web, print, copy or any other type of freelancer, you should, too. It takes a while to figure out a comfortable project pricing structure (not to mention the main variables that go into pricing, such as the hourly rate and estimated time), so I can understand any hesitation to try something new. But instead of forcing every project into a static, long-term contractual price, a lot of times it’s just easier to at first offer a retainer and see where the project goes from there.

This is an example of an estimate I’ve sent to a client in the past using the Ballpark web app by Metalab (to note, Ballpark is an awesome, affordable and beautiful estimate and invoice creator). This estimate, like almost all estimates, entails a lot of guessing. That’s exactly why it’s called an estimate.

Now, I, like most freelance web developers would have, used this initial estimate as my first, last and only bill to my customer. Of course, I turned the estimate into an invoice first, but hardly ever will the project price change from the beginning of the project to the end. That’s why I’ve always tried to accurately estimate time for web projects, but like Smashing Magazine wrote, underestimation is common because:

• The technologies required by the project have never been used before
• At the time of estimating, there are grey areas or complete unknowns
• The client operates in a specialized industry and the solution needs bespoke features that are not familiar to the supplier
• Splitting the project down into the detail would require as much as work as the requirements gathering phase that is chargeable

As well as:

• The client needs an estimate for their project tomorrow or they will go elsewhere
• Revenue needs for cash flow now trump the effects of not winning the new work now
• No previous project ‘estimated vs. actual’ data analysis has been conducted to draw on
• Estimating time for a project is not fun!

So, 90% of the time, the freelancer is going to get screwed on the estimate. My guess is that 9.9% of the time, the client gets screwed (I use the term loosely—as long as the site is completed within the contractual constraints of the project, the client is generally happy). That leaves 0.1% of all estimates that accurately reflected the correct amount of time it took to accomplish the project. (Of course, any time valuation should to be taken with a grain of salt because what takes an hour today might take 90 minutes or 45 minutes tomorrow depending on all external factors, not the least of which is distraction).

The bigger point here is that clients hate unexpected change, especially a price increase due to underestimation on your part. There are few things more likely to guarantee that you won’t be asked to do second project with a client than raising the cost of your invoice halfway through a project (in fact, most contracts aren’t going to permit this anyway, so again, you’ll likely eat the extra time and costs yourself, anyway).

Using a Retainer to Eliminate Guessing

Herein lies the beauty of the retainer block. You might already be using retainers after the project is complete for tasks like website maintenance or social media marketing (if you’re not, you should—it’s a great way to earn residual income).

I know some developers charge a monthly rate for site upkeep, but again, this is just another inaccurate way to price a project. What happens when the client needs something done, but it falls outside of the normal scope of maintenance? Chances are, the client is going to:

1. Be afraid to ask you and go elsewhere else with the task, or
2. You’re going to end up completing the task on your own time, AKA Scope Creep

Getting into the retainer habit after projects were completed allowed me to see an opportunity I was missing with my potential clients. I get a lot of work requests, especially from local business owners that tell me that they have a limited budget. In the past, I might have ignored these requests because I didn’t have much to gain. I would likely spend an hour giving them free consulting advice, but in the end, they wouldn’t have the budget to move forward with their project and work with me. It would have been a wash for both of us.

Now, once I figure out that the client’s budget isn’t going to garner a full site redevelopment (pretty much anyone talking below $1,000), I immediate push them towards purchasing a retainer block so at least we can address their most pressing website needs. This might not be perfect for every situation (some clients do not have websites at all or their sites might be completely useless), but for the most part, my team and I can accomplish some serious results in five hours of time, including:

• Adjust and simplify the site navigation to be more like what visitors expect when they visit a website
• Improve the home page to not look like a blog
• Clean up the footer and add useful information like a phone number and address
• Add a popover plugin to increase email or social media participation
• Update WordPress or plugin versions

The best part is, most of these tasks only take about 15 minutes for me to do, whereas the client either doesn’t know how to do these or more likely, doesn’t even realize how important they are to his site.

Another good feature of using a retainer is that if I outsource the task to one of my team members, I don’t have to think very hard about how to split up the tab (I hire my team using a retainer system, as well, just in the opposite direction and at a slightly lower rate than what I charge my clients).

At the end of the retainer block, my team and I tally up all the time and tasks we recorded using a time tracker client and submit the time sheet to the client. At that point, the client can re-up for another retainer block or we can choose to go our separate ways (hopefully, with a LinkedIn recommendation in tow, though).

In the end, I’m able to:

• Pick up work that I normally would have lost,
• Get paid accurately and fairly for any work I might do
• And maybe most importantly, I get to try out clients before engaging in a long-term contract with them.

I’m calling this system the Retainer Revolution and I truly think that all businesses will move away from the salary system (where work does not come even close to equaling pay) and into this retainer format for all personnel within the next ten years. I guess we’ll just have to see what the experts have to say about these matters. Stay tuned…

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Breaking out of Blog Themes

We love WordPress at Item-9 Consulting. Although it began as a blogging platform, I would argue that it’s the most versatile, well-supported, user-friendly content management system available today. Need proof?  Here’s a link to 25 beautiful, unique, free WordPress themes, including a section for 1) blogs, 2) galleries (portfolios) and 3) magazines (news).

So you know about blog themes, but what differentiates those from galleries and magazine themes (which have become very popular in the last two years)? Besides alternative layout structures, the non-blog themes rely on prescient images to draw readers in and help them navigate the site. Even though it’s not WordPress, the New York Times website uses the magazine style layout and images perfectly to entice readers to jump to other articles, and subsequently, stay on its site longer (and of course, the longer a reader is on a site, the more likely he will be to click on advertising, thus generating revenue for the site).

Screw Custom Fields

Alright, enough background info. The reason I’m writing this tutorial is to show you the easiest way to automatically pull images into your WordPress site from your posts. A lot of themes use custom fields to handle this task, but I say, why enter information onto a post more than once? How long would WordPress have lasted if you had to enter the post’s title twice? Probably not long, because that would get annoying quickly. Instead of going the custom field route (and using non-WordPress resizing scripts like timthumb.php), I recommend using the Get The Image WordPress Plugin by Justin Tadlock. A quick list of reasons:

• You can still specify a custom field to pull—great for backwards compatibility with whichever technique you’re replacing, or if you are just super-picky about which image gets used.
• If you’re lazy like me, the plugin pulls the first (or second or third, etc.) image you attached to your post.
• If you’re using an image from another post, you can set Get the Image to scan your post and use whichever image it comes across first.
• No image at all in the post? Specify a default image to use in these cases so your layout never breaks.
• You can specify the images’ output size (both/either height and width).
• You can specify which WordPress resized image you want to work with (examples from 2.7 are thumbnail, medium, large and full size).

Sounds great, huh? It definitely is great, but first, there are a few caveats to note:

1. All this automatic image pulling needs to be coded into the loop. That means you need to be comfortable with the guts of WordPress and php or extremely patient in making mistakes and asking for help (Justin does provide support for all his plugins for the low price of $25/year—well worth it, IMHO)
2. The documentation is available but it’s incomplete. That’s inevitable considering the limitless possibilities a user could take with the plugin. Again, invest in the support forums.
3. You’re not currently going to find this built into many themes (excepting Theme Hybrid from Justin), so you’ll have to do the work yourself.

Zap Props Sandbox Site

The Code

Time for a practical example. I’m currently working on a new client’s site using the Foliotastic created by ThemeSnack, which I purchased from ThemeForest. The theme has a great design and great support, but I couldn’t get ThemeSnack’s image pulling solution to work. Just like several users on the ThemeForest wrote, I tried everything, but after several hours of frustration I said, “enough” and did what I knew had to be done—throw in the towel and try a new approach. I’ll skip the melodramatics and show you what I began with:

    ID, "post_image_value", true)) { ?>
        
    
    	

And here’s my changes:

       array('post_image_value'), 'default_size' => 'full', 'default_image' => get_bloginfo( 'template_url' ) . '/graphics/default-image.jpg', 'width' => '620', 'image_scan' => true)); ?>

and according to Justin’s comment below, the code can be further trimmed to one line:

 array('post_image_value'), 'default_size' => 'full', 'image_scan' => true, 'default_image' => get_bloginfo( 'template_url' ) . '/graphics/default-image.jpg', 'width' => '620')); ?>

So Let’s Break it Down

Here’s what the above code does, in order of arguments:

1. “get_the_image” calls the plugin
2. ” ‘custom_key’ => array(‘post_image_value’)” pulls an image with the custom field value of “post_image_value”.
3. If that the custom field is not found, ” ‘default_size’ => ‘full’ ” finds the first attached image and chooses the originally uploaded size.
4. If no attached images or custom fields are found, ” ‘image_scan’ => true” will find any images that may have inserted from the media library.
5. If the plugin can’t find any other images, then ” ‘default_image’ => get_bloginfo( ‘template_url’ ) . ‘/graphics/default-image.jpg’ ” will use an image I uploaded to the theme directory (thanks for this code, Justin;).
6. And finally, ” ‘width’ => ’620′ ” resizes the width of the image to 620px. I could also specify a height here, but that would likely stretch the image. Instead, I use CSS to hide the image’s overflow and limit the height to 290px. You may not see the whole image, but it’s at least proportionate and I think it looks cool, anyway

That wraps up this tutorial. If you have any questions about the Get the Image plugin, I ask you leave them in the comments. If it’s too technical a question, I’ll refer you to Justin’s support forums I mentioned above. You may also want to visit his post describing the plugin in more detail.

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• Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert
• Designing to Sell

The first one is from Smashing Magazine (which we’ll have to include in a future “stuff we love” article) and the second is from Zygote, a marketing blog from Egg Co. (neither entity I had heard of until yesterday).

37 Signals Breakdown from Zygote

The funny thing is that the Zygote article was published a week before the Smashing one. It might be a coincidence, but I have my doubts. Either way, they both have some great information on the [marketing] science of web design, unusual because 99% of design articles focus on the art of building a website. Both articles come together on the AIDA technique. For those who haven’t seen Alec Baldwin’s famous monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross, AIDA is an acronym for:

• Attention – Attract the attention of the customer
• Interest – Raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits
• Desire – Convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs
• Action – Lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

For more information, I highly recommend checking out the aforementioned articles. They finally help close the gap of how to properly plan a website’s development.

Remember the other famous acronym from Glengarry: ABC—ALWAYS BE CLOSING. “Only one thing matters in life. Get them to sign on the line that is dotted!” I’m going to make a bold statement; any other goal for a sales tool, including (and especially) a website, is masturbation.

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