 Hello everyone, and if I was the pastor of your church, I'd say, come forward. You don't have to sit in the back views. At the church of WordPress, everyone is welcome. So now I'm going to shift topics. How many of you are familiar with the 36 Mafia? A couple. 36 Mafia. For sure. They actually won the Academy Awards Song a couple of years back for the song with the title. It's hard out here for a pen. The only job harder is being a... Hustle and flow. Hustle and flow. The only job that's harder is being a freelancer. We got to go chase the work. We got to do the work, do the work, do the client relationships. And sometimes it's a struggle. Doesn't have to. The next speaker is Kyle Lappery. He's going to talk about a freelancer's got to suffer. Open Kyle. Thank you. Finally. Honestly, every time I talk at a word camp, I'm nervous for like the first, I would say the hour right before I'm talking. I'm getting this pit in my stomach and I'm freaking out. And then the moment I get to this point, I'm like, what happened to all that nervousness, you know? It's the weirdest thing. I've spoken so far at... This is my fourth second time here in Raleigh. And I actually did one similar to this in Wilmington a couple years ago. So there will be some similarities to that. But this is the freelancer's guide to survival and WordPress. My slides are actually on Twitter. They're on SlideShare, so you can check them out there. And I shared them on Twitter with the hashtag WC Raleigh. There's my Twitter handle at Labrity Creative. If you're wanting to check it out, what I'm going to go over today, all this fun freelancing stuff. And we're going to get into that now. Who here is a freelancer? Awesome. Nice. Full-time freelancers? Or kind of part-time, full-time? Okay. I've been doing the freelance thing since 2015. And a lot of this is kind of... It's really just my own, I guess, experience as a freelancer. Sort of failures, successes, and constant learning still from everyday stuff as a freelancer. You never stop learning. You'll learn something new every day. Somebody's going to come at you with something. So it's always a good learning experience. I'm from Pittsburgh. I'm an Air Force veteran. I came to Apex North Carolina in 2012. This, like I said, is my fourth time speaking. My sixth word camp. And right now, I freelance for my own business, Laverty Creative. I have another website that's more veteran-focused. And that's mainly because when I got out of the military, I was really not sure where I was going to go, what I was going to do. I sort of wish I had a good resource with all of the tools and tips and tricks and stuff that I know now. So I created that in order to make that happen for people. Soon to be husband, I get married on May 19th. Thank you. That feels good. Thank you. I mean, you know, just the, it'll be a fun experience. We're basically already married, but now we'll make it legal, I guess. Got five kids. Yeah, yeah. It's a handful, yeah, absolutely. And you can find me on my website, LavertyCreative.com. If you go to my slideshow, you should be able to click all the links and get to all those Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. What is a freelancer? It is a self-employed person providing a service or services, in this case here in WordPress, but not necessarily always in WordPress. I'm open to all things as a freelancer, though. I primarily work in WordPress. Sorry, can you hear me? Sorry. Hello. It's not working anymore. Technical difficulties. Not bad. Testing, testing, testing. Oh. Got you. Tell some jokes. Yeah. I don't have too many of those. At least none that I can say here. That's my problem. So I'm impressed by the fact that you've got five kids. Tell us about the kids. So I have three... That's how that happens, right? Yeah. I don't need one. Lots of practice, yeah. I have one kid I could barely keep up. Well, I could barely keep up at that many as well, so five is more than enough. Can you hear me again? Yeah. Perfect. So as a freelancer in WordPress, you can be any number of things, designer, developer, writer, maintainer of WordPress sites, digital marketer, SEO specialist, or all of the above. I'm kind of all of the above. I would definitely not consider myself an SEO specialist, though. And I'm kind of an okay writer, but, you know, don't judge me on that. Where do you get started? I never knew where to get started at first. I'm self-taught, actually. When I, like I said, when I got out of the military, you know, I did some stuff before making my way back here to North Carolina, and I was going for a computer science degree initially. That was my initial track, and I thought I should have a website for myself, and that's kind of where it all started for me with WordPress. But the main thing for freelancing, where to get started, is get a plan, develop a process, and then proceed with that. Whenever I started planning, I looked around to see what others were doing. There's a lot of fellow freelancers out there that have already done it, that have great content, great websites, stuff that you can not necessarily, I mean, you're not going to copy anything, of course, but if you're trying to find where to get started, it's a good place to look and see what others are doing. Write down your goals. This is something I didn't do at the beginning. I felt that my goal was just to be a freelancer, and I was like, yes, freelance. And here I was as a freelancer. What do I do now? Never had any goals to begin with. I didn't start out that way, and I wish I would have. And it's important to write down goals so you can reach one at a time, even if it's just a little bit at a time. It's good to write those down and get to them. It's good to choose your niche, niche, niche, niche, potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Choose your area. And I wouldn't necessarily say you have to choose, but it's good to kind of start out that way. But you can stay open. For instance, for me, I was dealing with somebody earlier in the week, it wasn't even a WordPress site. It was some page builder website on likewebs.com. They called me about an error. And I don't know if anybody's familiar with webs.com, but it's just your typical template set up site builder type thing, sort of like a go daddy site builder. He had an error, and I was open to it, and now he's talking about potentially getting a WordPress website. You can operate in a specific area, but I would definitely say to stay open so that you can potentially bring on those people as a WordPress client in the future. And with developing a plan, determine your rate. I'm not going to say what your rate should be. It depends on how you value your time. This is definitely something at the beginning where I was a little too low on my rate. And probably just because I was starting out, I thought I should charge a little less so I can get people on, but that's not necessarily the case. Because you might not really be getting the clients that you want in that case. And you're going to be taking up a lot of your time doing things that you felt like you should be, feel like you should definitely be paid more for. So determining your rate is very important. What is the value on your time, essentially? I actually use a tool, and I didn't put it up here, but it's thenewschool.com slash how much? I think it's basically just a pricing thing. Once you've determined your rate, you can click on what type of project it is, enter the hours that you intend to work and your hourly rate, and then you go through a set of questions and eventually it gets you to some numbers for what you should charge. And it gives you some leeway. It gives you the low end, which is basically just hours times your rate, and then it gives you the higher end, which you can kind of determine it from there. It's the new school, and new is actually new.com. Sorry about that. Yeah, sorry. I think slash how much? Define your process, and this is a good thing, just for the purposes of documenting things when you're starting up, define a process for yourself, and stick to it, but have some flexibility on that. Dealing with any client, and never going to be the same between people, so you're not... Everybody's different, and everybody's going to need to be talked to, dealt with, handled differently. I mean, everybody wants different things and expects different things, so be flexible with your process, but definitely have something in place for you to stick to. And then proceed. Register your business. Create your website if you haven't already. Get your buddies, so that people can see your work, and promote. Promote everything. Get on social media, blog, all that stuff. You got to promote. Failure is the key to success, and I know this, because I failed a bunch of times. Unfortunately, however, I am here today talking a talk on how to freelance for WordPress. Though I wouldn't say that that's a successful thing, because maybe I'm not successful on it. But I'm doing okay. Failure leads to success, and in order to succeed, one must fail. Not necessarily. I mean, you could have some success immediately, but you're always going to have failures along the way. It's definitely the key to success, and it's okay to fail. I know this. Like I said, I failed a bunch of times. But you have to accept it. You have to move on. You have to learn from it. And every failure, at least what I've done up until this point, when I have failed, I've written it down so that I can remember it in the future, and always remember to not go back to that point. And I feel like that, that's a good thing to do if you're not doing it already. Learning the hard way. I learned the hard way. It can be tough, but sometimes that's how you have to learn to be a freelancer is the hard way. Like I said before, no, every client is different, and sometimes you're going to get fired by a client, or you'll feel that you failed them, and maybe that they should move on to somebody else because you haven't done what you were supposed to do as their developer or designer. So learning the hard way. Make sure you do learn from it. Pick up the pieces from there and make the necessary changes. Sometimes that's one thing that people don't do is to make the necessary changes after they failed, or they don't necessarily realize where they failed so they don't make those changes. You have to definitely, definitely see what it is that you're doing, and if you're like me, write it down and make the necessary changes so that it doesn't happen in the future. Where people fail, that would really suck to drop your ice cream cone on the pavement like that. I don't know how anybody else would feel about that, but that would be awful. Common area is a failure. Take it in and try not to make these mistakes. So whenever I first became a freelancer, I actually became a freelancer, full-time freelancer way too soon. And going full-time too soon, you'll quickly find out that you don't have enough money to do the stuff that you need to be doing, like paying your bills. And that's definitely affecting your well-being. You don't want to do that. Give it time, save up some money, find enough clients to make it to where you can be comfortable when you go full-time, and then you can build from there. We heard this quote earlier. If you build it, they will come. This is true, but not right away. You can't just put your website up there and everybody's going to be like, oh look, they could develop my website. That's definitely not how it works. It takes time, but you'll get there. Idea overload. This is definitely one that I had. I thought, man, let me buy up all these domains that I think I have ideas for. And now all these domains are just sitting there with nothing on them and I'm not sure where to go with anything. Idea overload is truly an unfortunate thing. It is where you can fail. Don't get your mind in too many places because then you won't be focused on the place that you need to be focused. Taking on too much at once, taking on too much work at one time can definitely lead to some serious failure. It'll leave you in a position where you're not able to communicate with other clients, because you can't put out what they want on time. So, don't take on too much at once and just understand what your schedule should be so that you're not overdoing it and you're not having to work 18 hours a day and just crushing yourself with constant work. And one of the major areas here is customer service. I've actually failed at this one a lot because like I said, everybody's different so dealing with them is a different thing. And it's important to be responsive, communicate. In the beginning, communication was definitely not one of my stronger areas. Customer service would have definitely not been a strong area as well and it goes together. So, definitely make sure that you are trying your best to provide the best customer service you can to your clients, potential clients. Be responsive and you will not fail in that area. How to succeed? What can you do to succeed? Success comes down to you. You got to have the right mindset. I was pretty lazy and unmotivated whenever I first became a freelancer. I would still consider myself pretty lazy and unmotivated to be honest with you, but I'm way better at managing my time and work now than I was before. And having the right mindset to get it all done is important. You can be easily distracted, especially as a freelancer, more than likely you're working at home. There's all kinds of stuff going on around you. My two little ones, two and four years old are around me all the time, making noise, playing around. So, here I am taking client calls with kids yelling in the background and but you got to do it. That's how it's working for me and I make sure that I get my work done as best I can. I have set hours for myself and whatever you need to do to make it happen, but you got to have the right mindset. Regardless, you know, I guess the position you're in definitely have the right mindset. Set expectations for yourself. I didn't set expectations for myself at the beginning. This kind of goes with goals as well, but write down your expectations. Maybe you have expectations that are in regards to how much you want to be able to make in a given month or per day. If you want to get to that point, you can kind of put that on the goals list too, but write them down, set expectations and it'll help you achieve what you're trying to achieve. Don't expect things right away if you build it, they will come, right? But not right away. Don't expect things to happen right away when you put your website up. Well, good job. Congratulations! Definitely got to keep going from there though. You got to work at it. Don't expect things to happen right away. People aren't just going to come calling. Engage with people. Attend meetups. Attend conferences. You're here at WordCamp. Talk to as many people as you can. You might find a potential client. I've found several at numerous WordCamps. I have not been to the local meetup yet, I would imagine that you could definitely find people there as well. You might even run into people where they could do some work for you if you get to that point. It's great to have stuff like this that you can come to, network, engage and potentially find clients. Or to find freelance work. I definitely did not know where to find freelance work at first. Where are they? Finding clients. Where are they? I had no idea. I was like, man, do I have to make cold calls? That would be awful. I don't want to talk to people like that. They're probably going to yell at me and hang up. My fiance, she deals with that every day. She's a physician recruiter. She calls doctors and they yell at her and they're like, I don't want you to call me ever again. Hang up. Swearing at her and then she gets the ones that are like, yeah, this sounds like a good idea. I can work with you. Where to find clients? Google it. Google is your friend. It always, well, maybe not always, but for now it will be. Google it. Craigslist ad. Believe it or not, I get a majority of my clients from Craigslist ads now because you have to pay for ads now in Craigslist. It's $5 for 30 days. I paid $5 put up an ad on Craigslist and over the course of the next week I got 20 phone calls from people about website stuff that they needed done. And just $5, that's it. That's pretty awesome. Before I had my Craigslist ads up and there was just a ton of duplicates and I got a call once a month, if that. Craigslist even before I guess would have been okay, but now there's some more potential there since it's paid. Local Chamber of Commerce I was I'm not still a member currently, but I was a member of my local Apex Chamber of Commerce. You can put your business cards in there. There's all kinds of ad and mail or opportunities for your local electric bill, your utility bill. All kinds of networking events that they have. Just stuff where you could potentially find people that want to work with you. Twitter is a great place to find potential clients if you're searching for the right terms. WordPress gigs WordPress jobs, those are a couple that I've searched on on Twitter. Or things like hate WordPress because somebody is angry at it maybe some swear words followed by WordPress because somebody is really mad at it they probably need help. You could be there to change that around for them. People are definitely tweeting about errors on their WordPress site and all that. Facebook groups, this is a good one. There's a lot of good local Facebook groups here. There's the North Carolina small business bulletin local small businesses and the Triangle. There's a bunch of Facebook groups you could go in and post on potentially find people that need a website. People are posting ads on there all the time for their own businesses and you could potentially reach out through Messenger and find a new client. Sending out flyers I've not actually done this before but I've seen friends of mine do it and it's worked for them. If you're a designer, have somebody that's a designer that could help you out with setting up or designing a flyer for you and sending that out somehow whatever works. Host a workshop, this is actually something that I haven't done before but I've had a bunch of people that I know do this they've hosted free workshops at different places and a lot of people end up showing up and then these people potentially turn into clients. Regardless of what it is you do host a SEO workshop or a copywriting workshop how to do something in WordPress anything and you'd be surprised there's going to be some people that are interested post that on social media that you're hosting your workshop everywhere that you can to get people to show up and there's some real good potential there. And lastly of course cold calls and emails if you want to get yelled at I don't necessarily want to say go ahead and make cold calls but you could definitely do some emails at least you're going to alleviate some of the yelling that way and in doing this I would say to be consistent and keep it up so don't just email somebody once and think oh they're definitely going to get back to me if you keep emailing that person you're going to be in their mind eventually and they're going to be like alright well maybe I do need some websites from this person they've annoyed me this much at this point sometimes that's the way people think I had somebody tell me that I emailed them a bunch of times and they were like I just wanted to talk to you at this point and you were really getting on my nerves so I figured I'd talk to you now they're a client of mine I don't get on their nerves anymore you don't mention LinkedIn have you used that as a... yeah absolutely LinkedIn I mean there's groups on there as well that you could definitely post in I should have put that up here but that was one of the guys I work with he did a free SEO workshop he said actually that on LinkedIn and a bunch of people responded so that's definitely another spot where you could find potential clients when you say send out flyers yes so yes you could take those flyers directly to businesses yourself you could mail them out if you especially if you're a local member if you're a member of your local chamber or you can even look them up in their directory even if you're not a member and then you can mail them out yeah what you do stuff like that yeah Vista prints a good one you could design your own and upload the design to a postcard and send it out definitely make sure if you are using them make sure you have everything placed correctly for sure so this is yeah good question you could if there's a a local small business that you could potentially talk to like a like a coffee shop or something along those lines even something like the Raleigh beer garden you could talk to them and see if you're able to host some sort of workshop because for them I mean that brings a little bit of business their way and in most cases they'd be happy to have such an event at their place that's another good one, yeah library and here's kind of my continued portion of the finding clients here's some links these are some good twitter searches for wordpress jobs jobs.wordpress WP hired I actually created a site that it's basically just an RSS feed of a bunch of different jobs and development design and all kinds of stuff all remote for the most part there's some that might not be but it's just kind of all in one place obviously word camps like I mentioned before local meetups and other meetups even that aren't wordpress related whatsoever you could definitely find some potential clients digital creative leads it's a website but it pulls in a bunch of different jobs from different job sites including the two that are actually at the top speaking in that same area actually the in apex every year they have festivals during the summer the pig fest the peak fest and they have businesses set up at all of those usually and you can go around and hand out business cards of people and talk to them and potentially find clients there as well a lot of people at the peak fest definitely have Etsy stores already and maybe they're looking to make a move over so financing tools these are some things that I use or have used some good tools to kind of be your own everything you can do it all by yourself you can register your business using legal zoom which is what I did it's really easy proposals and contracts and invoicing I use and co it's a service by Fiber it's free they basically you can create a contract and proposal you can set it up so there's a payment upon signing and they automatically generate that invoice and then you can generate an invoice at the end that will send out the rest of the payment it's really great and you don't have to pay to sign up wave is another good accounting accounting platform that's also I can't say free they you know credit card charges you're always going to get I think it's like 2.9% plus 30 cents or something like that shake law is another one for contracts there's they have a premium one but they also have a free service where you could just create contracts on it task management again I use use and co I also I use those three really I use evernote and debuggle debuggle is really just specific task management and co you can create tasks related to all your projects if you're tracking everything in there so it's sort of an all in one and evernote everybody's like oh whatever notes just you keep notes in there honestly you can do so much with evernote it's really it's really way more you can save all kinds of stuff in there and and track it with notebooks and tags and it's definitely a great app to use and taxes I actually spoke about this earlier painless 1099 I love so much because I don't have a tax person I do my own taxes with an LLC you know you can claim that that's your claim that on your personal income tax with painless 1099 it takes out you route your money that you get paid by the client through this and it puts taxes into a savings account which it determines when you sign up or you could set your own rate for you know what you think you should be saving I set mine right now at 20 something percent to take out each time just in case you know you could set it higher just in case it's really a good service and I would definitely recommend it if you're doing your own taxes no that party of do yourself but you'll have all the money there at the end and you know say you're you don't want to do it anymore I mean you just transfer all the money out or you have access to it at all times what they use they use a bank that they kind of routed all through called Lincoln savings bank they have a routing number and an account number for you that you use and it automatically goes there before they push out whatever's left to your account yeah it's pretty awesome not just surviving but thriving thriving that's what that's what it's all about continued success thriving as a freelancer in business keep going and going the energizer bunny going and going and going ask clients for a review or a testimonial a lot of times they are happy to give out one to you especially if you've provided really good service to them going back to what stuff I said earlier that's why customer service is so key so you can get good reviews from your clients content creation this is extremely important blog you have a blog use it post as much as you possibly can about all kinds of stuff people you know whatever it is that you're doing whether it's design development SEO you know create a tutorial just post it post how to do this and you know anything anything when it comes to WordPress freelancing create tutorials create an e-book e-books are great too make them free so that your clients can potential clients can get on there and get an e-book and then hopefully they're signing up for your email list when they're trying to get that e-book and then you can eventually turn them into a client speak at conferences what I'm doing right now definitely a way to continued success hopefully laverycreative.com you can go and give me a contact shameless plug website on the bottom of your what? what's that? put your logo on the bottom put the logo on it yeah but I'd be tweaking the shit out of you if I knew your name but I forgot already that was a good point let's go back my name's Kyle Aberty there's my logo at laverycreative you know I saw a thing about don't put your logo across all your slides whenever I got an email about being a speaker which is why I actually refrained from it but now I wish I would have done it so thank you for calling me out on that yeah see that's what I was thinking I guess what would the penalty have been you don't get to speak again I don't know give current clients a referral bonus this is a good one too you know incentivize it's a good way to potentially gain more clients as well go ahead any one of those yeah those are all good possibilities definitely yeah maybe like a discount on something that they could use or discounted hourly rate maybe there you do maintenance for them and charge them a monthly you can give them a free month or something along those lines stuff like that do you recommend doing any kind of pro bono work for the sake of marketing and getting yourself out there or is that throwing good money after that I mean it's very dependent yeah that's kind of I would I'm not going to recommend that you do it one way or the other that's it can be a good thing I would say but definitely don't get caught in a place where you do too much of that be very selective in that area yes so let's see there was this website that I went to catch a fire maybe they have a lot of basically all pro bono projects and it's a lot of non-profits that aren't trying to dole out all kinds of cash to have a website you can pick up projects and create a wordpress website for them I would say if you're doing that it'd be good to already have another job going on while you're creating a pro bono website but I mean if you're able to do it and if that's something you're open to just to put in your portfolio to show people what you can do then by all means keep doing what you've been doing everything that I've said prior to this continue to do it to thrive and survive other than the failure slide don't do any of those things leave that part out do the rest avoid the things in the failure slide sustainability how to maintain it all it's a balancing act this is really important obviously this morning at our keynote that was a very good talk about kind of your overall health and just you know keep your sanity take breaks she takes naps that's great you need to unplug for a period of time and get everything off your mind it can be crazy as a freelancer especially if you're taking on a bunch of work you know try not to do that as much as you can try to set a schedule for yourself set specific hours if you need help get help there's you know no reason not to get help if you need it and it's just very important a lot of people work themselves to the bone as a freelancer constantly you know taking emails and calls all night so much about small things that they could just wait to the next day you can you can give it some time don't overload yourself don't sweat the small stuff which by the way is a book a really good book don't sweat the small stuff it's all small stuff I actually have it in my bag it's a solid book if you have my slides you can click the link that's not a referral link or anything like that by the way so I don't get anything but I just thought it was a good little plug because don't sweat the small stuff definitely I mean keep your sanity it's your mental health as a freelancer is very important what to do now where do we go from here make it happen continue everything apply everything from here hope for the best learn along the way everything that I said you know you can apply it you don't have to apply it you can learn yourself no matter what it's going to be a learning experience regardless and you're going to run into things that some people might not have run into before you'll run into things that people have and you can look up ways to figure it out or figure it out for yourself but apply it all hopefully you have some success yes sir yes it is vague intentionally because there's so many things you could search for to find different jobs and gigs that you're looking for um I mean you could type in wordpress followed by jobs gigs or careers and find a whole multitude of things so you could look up front end developer gigs jobs stuff like that it's sort of intentionally vague I don't really have anything specifically that you should be searching but it's just one potential way to sift through things and potentially find clients even if it's contracting for another design agency which I do a lot of that's most of my work right now is not even my own clients necessary I mean they are my clients I guess you could say but contracting for them is you know their developer designer whatever so there's all kinds of stuff you could find just through Google without being too specific go ahead troubleshooting um there definitely is if you go to wordpress.org and go to the plugins um go to plugins from wordpress.org and search for whatever plugin it is that you're having a problem with you really have a support link on there where somebody may or may not reply that is a plugin developer of that particular plugin just depends on what it is it could be somebody that also uses a plugin I don't that replies it has an answer but you could go there um the wordpress stack exchange though I don't know I don't think you can do third party questions on there for plugins and themes but yes there is that's right I have the triangle wordpress has a slack channel yeah serverfalts.com let's see here actually I'll show you at the happiness bar that would be a better way to go about this yeah no worries um well the guy that I talked to that had the webs.com problem was one I think that was in small business ads where I posted that but you could get any multitude of things it really just depends on the title of your ad is important what you provide that way you'll get those specific things but you might potentially get something completely out of the ordinary my ad didn't say anything about webs.com but that's what I got but I was open to it and I helped him out so I would just say continue to stick to your guns you know definitely keep I mean unless you're unless you're trying to charge something through the roof or something like that but you know I don't even know what would be I mean it's really all on how you value your time I would just continue to stick with it and you know dig your feet in and keep it going I mean I wouldn't I'm not going to recommend against them there's you know there's a lot of situations in some of those where maybe people are definitely undercharging a ton so that could cut you out but at the same time if you build a good you know if you build a good portfolio on there potential definitely it's a good you have to like pay for more chances to submit proposals stuff like that honestly I've never used any of those so I couldn't really tell you one way or the other with Fiverr or you know the Freelancer stuff like that but when I was I spoke at WordCamp Wilmington on a similar topic it was becoming a WordPress Freelancer and one of the people in there she is a designer and she got a lot of really good business from one of those sites I can't remember which one exactly but she just went through the process of taking you know whatever tests that they had on there and you know was able to show that had a couple of clients that came to her through the proposals that she submitted and then they eventually just turned into regular regular clients and she wasn't charging something completely low either you know she was she had a good you know she stuck to her guns on her rate instead of lowering it significantly to try and get business and she ended up doing well I mean I was working as a developer for about two years before I decided to take freelancing full-time and at this point I was entirely self-taught and I felt pretty confident that I could go off and do my own thing and I would say right out the gate I definitely wasn't charging enough obviously but I would say about four or so months then I realized that I should definitely be charging a lot more than I was without question yes definitely yeah right up front it's really dependent on I guess your business model you know I've worked with companies where they've charged a monthly price and for websites stuff like that and I can't remember what that was exactly but they charged monthly and clients were okay with that because they didn't have to shell out a bunch of money right right off the bat or you know um but yeah yeah yeah then yeah and contracts at that point would be really important as well so 100% yeah that's definitely one of the keys for sure to be in a freelancer is recurring income no doubt providing some sort of support slash maintenance plan for wordpress websites you know even as simple as keeping things up to date fixing any issues that come about and having backups and security and stuff like that you know people will definitely pay just for those things so on a monthly basis well that that's going to be for you to decide I would say but there are plenty that you're going to want to avoid I'm sure um I can't I can't pinpoint anyone yeah it's kind of tough if they're I would say if they're starting off trying to get your rate lower you know you might want to raise a red flag then um if right out the gate they're calling you a million times a day or sending you emails wanting this that and the other depending on how that situation is unfolding that could potentially be a red flag as well yeah yeah definitely yeah extremes are what you want a red flag yeah that's a that's a fun situation um you know content's always an issue but uh Alisa who was in here before she said that she gets the content you know upfront and puts it all in and designs around that so yeah well no matter what you should you should definitely have a you should have an upfront payment no matter what but yeah yeah well you know the contract is done yeah I mean you should definitely there shouldn't um yeah depending on the situation but definitely you shouldn't be putting yourself in a situation where it's like you know money back you know they paid for they paid for what you provided thus far and you know if they want out at that point then that's unfortunate but you know it's a loss for them I do not actually completely organic for me I don't I don't pay anything or anything like that I don't have an S yeah real quick I think we have like a real quick minute go ahead not necessarily I do both I charge hourly and I charge per project it's just dependent on what it is for stuff like a full-blown custom website I'm definitely gonna charge a project rate flat project rate and they'll pay an advantage up front and then at the end before shipping their website and then for hourly stuff it's well yeah you should define you know milestones within your projects so that way they have something to go by and they can get you stuff I think that's all we got so thank you