• why get a freelancer vs employing someone


• where to find freelancers


• how to write the job post (title, desc, skills)


• how to filter them (questions and secret word)


• not being too careful with money (you get what you pay for)


• the benefits of trials


• rewarding your freelancers

Ashley: Hi Diana thanks for coming on the show today. It’s great to talk to you finally.Diana: Hi Ashley it is nice meeting you.

Ashley: And let’s get a quick run-down of your background because you’re a freelancer as well, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, so maybe we’ll just get a quick background of what you have been doing for the last years.

Diana: OK. Well I don’t much like talking about myself so this part will be short. I was born in Bulgaria and 5 years ago I became a freelancer and since then I have been traveling the world a lot. This is a dream of mine, come true. I’m a freelance marketing consultant and basically work with clients on their marketing projects whether it’s a price of content you need to get rid of or they need a website review or they need a marketing plan or just writing some marketing collateral materials. They can hire me for that. Working online has given me the freedom to travel because that is really what I want to do and so far it’s working great. I moved to Spain a few months ago and I am talking to you today from there; Southern Spain.

Ashley: Yeah that’s a really cool thing. I remember because we have been in contact since almost the beginning of when I was online and you were, I think in Sofia at the time right? In Bulgaria? So and then all of a sudden you were like oh I’m going to Spain.

Diana: [Laughs] Yeah that’s the beauty of freelancing. Just pick up your stuff and go wherever you want.

Ashley: Yeah and that’s one of the cool things I guess we’ll touch on today. As well as the freelancer and that’s kind of what I do a little bit as well. I’m more in web design but I could also do that from anywhere in the world and that’s the beauty of online stuff and freelancing is part of that. You could get your work via the Internet. You could give your work back via the internet and you can be anywhere there is a decent internet connection. Now you’re in Spain.

Diana: Yeah and thanks to Skype you can even talk to your clients or freelancers in real time if you need to discuss something in real time. So it’s, the sky is the limit in whatever you want, whenever you want.

Ashley: Yeah, I was actually just talking to a guy yesterday, a new client I got for a website and he is not used to this and he was figuring out a way to connect to me and downloading applications and trying to figure out how he could talk to me. I’m like download Skype man its easy and he went with some other thing I can’t remember what it was, I had to download a new client. But in the end we got connected and we got to screen share and everything. It only took a few minutes. And he was very happy. He was like oh my God I can’t believe I’m working with somebody in Switzerland. Ok. Yeah, that’s the way of the world these days. It makes your life an amazing thing. What I wanted to do today was talk to you because this is something you have a lot of experience in and something I’m growing into on the opposite side of the fence which is why I would like to hire some people in the future and we were just discussing this before we started recording, I’m not exactly sure who or how I need to do this but one of the options I have is to hire a freelancer, which is what you do. so I guess the first question we can help people answer is if they want to hire somebody and if they want to go down this path of even having someone just for a task or just for so many hours a week or whatever, what kind of things or how would you go about making the distinction of hiring a freelancer which is the kind of work that you offer. When would you hire a freelancer and when would you be looking for someone more permanent or a virtual assistant?

Diana: Right this is a very important question actually. Not many clients ask themselves that question before they start looking for a freelancer. Of course, it pretty much depends on what type of work you need help with but in my experience, I have seen the best relationships between clients and freelancers come out of, for instance, if you needed help with your daily work like uploading blog posts or maybe sorting out your email or going through your reader or finding blog posts which you want to read or which can wait until your free time on the weekend for instance. That is something that can be outsourced to a virtual assistant. This is a very popular profession, today, among freelancers; of course, it requires special skills. In terms of programming skills or marketing skills. Or just to be organized. To be good with time management, maybe that’s why virtual assistants are so much on the rise. That is maybe the most searched, most looked for the profession today, after writers. Writers will always be on the top I think. So apart from virtual assistants which is almost always better outsourced than having someone in-house, other than that I think the main distinction you need to do is whether you need someone for a long term or short term. Whether you have a quick job or your have a large-scale project. Which is better handled in-house. You need to decide how much control you want to have over the day’s activities which are concerning the work. How much control you want to have of the day activities. Because if you want daily reports or you want to have to pre approve everything, every step of the way, maybe it’s better than to hire an employee because as a freelancer. A good freelancer who is a freelancer not because he doesn’t have anything else to do but because he has made a choice to be a freelancer. Chances are that freelancer will not like to be micromanaged. So if you want to have 100% control over everything, go with an employee, don’t go with a freelancer. Rather than that I think that everything can be outsourced to a freelancer. Even for instance in my, from my experience, I have been hired for small jobs like writing a press release but I have also been hired to manage a marketing team of ten people. It was one project which was very interesting because the whole company was totally neutra