Nerve wrecking.

That’s what it means. And I don’t mean the actual travelling. Its the before leaving for the trip that’s nerve wrecking. From planning & scheduling to informing to trying to do everything yourself. It’s just mind boggling, stressing and frustrating!

It’s not supposed to be so stressful. I get it. It’s just not that easy to do y’know? A couple of weeks before I left, I read an extremely well timed guest post by Alex Fayle on Men with Pens in which he gave some excellent advice on planning a freelance vacation. 

Half of it was about dealing with ongoing projects and hiring someone to take care of your email etc. I didn’t have the time to sort it all out so I decided to finish up all my ongoing assignments. I also emailed all the people who needed to know that I was going on a break. 

Till here, it was all hunky dory. 

Then I took a pill of stupid and decided to take on my blog and schedule three week’s worth of posts for The Base instead of getting guest posters to contribute. I’d realized there was too little time and I had to do everything myself. 

Even that would have been fine because I did manage to set up the scheduled posts. But then my trip got extended by a week and it didn’t occur to me that I’d need to schedule more posts.

Yeah, math was never  my strong point. The result was my blog being neglected for an entire week.

As is obvious, I forgot to repeat to myself: I am not the centre of the universe. Had I asked for it, people would have helped me. We have twitter nowadays for god’s sake!

I’ll be travelling again later this year and for longer than a couple of weeks. I’m already working out the details even though I’m months away from it. 

Ever had trouble like this while on a break? What’s your worst vacation story as a freelancer? Come on. Make me feel better.

Ever since I did my 5 part series on twitter, I’ve been getting a lot of search results related to it. Most of the search words were answered, but its understandable that people don’t have the time to go through an entire post for a piece of information that isn’t highlighted.

Here’s a list of questions that have landed people on The Base.

How to Create Twitter Hashtags?

Creating hashtags is easy. All you have to do is follow @hashtags from your twitter account and then add a # symbol before the word you want to create a hash about. 

I recently tweeted about a competition I won over at WahmBizBuilder. I tweeted something along the lines of  ”I won the Seth Godin Book content from @wahmbizbuilder! ” Now if I wanted to create a hashtag for the word ‘contest’, I’d writer it as #contest.

I hope this make it clear. For more information, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki for hashtags.

What Does RT Stand For?

RT is short for Re-Tweet. Retweeting means repeating someone else’s tweet for more exposure or simply because you like it.

If you’re twittering from the web, add ‘RT’ before your tweet, then copy and paste the tweet of your choice.

Does replying to twitter help you be seen?

It most definitely does! Replying to other users on twitter helps you engage in conversations and network. Not only are you ‘being seen’ by other people, but you’re also building your personal brand.

Just be friendly and mind your manners when interacting with other twitter-ers and you’ll see your follower numbers increase.

What is twitter and how do you use it?

Twitter is a social networking web service that lets you communicate with people. There’s a catch though. You have to communicate your message in 140 characters or less.  It may say that it’s meant for friends, family and co-workers to communicate, but that’s not how most of its users use twitter.

Twitter is used to network with people with similar interest as yours. If you’re a writer, you’ll start following writers and interact with them. Not only will you get to know some pretty amazing people this way, you’ll find plenty of opportunities to build relationships.

We spend more hours talking about writer’s block than we spend going through it. So I won’t be talking about it. I’ll be giving you three simple tools that help me get over my mental block.

One Word

One Word combines the two things that are guaranteed to make a writer’s fingers flying. A prompt and a time limit. The first time I clicked on ‘Go’, I was overwhelmed by the word and the ticking clock! My fingers started moving when there were only 20 seconds left.

Then I got mad and hit ‘Go’ again. Since then, I haven’t looked back. Every time I feel I can’t write, I head over to One Word. 

Try it. Only takes 60 seconds of your time. What have you got to lose?

Whine

You heard me. Whine to your heart’s content. You’ll be typing so feverishly you’d wish you could type faster to keep pace with your thoughts. 

Complain about your cat, your noisy neighbours or your dysfunctional muse. Just type it. Write curse words if they’re in your head. Just open your text editor and WHINE! 

I can guarantee that it will clear your head and your fingers won’t feel so locked and stiff anymore. 

Use Twitter Search

So you’ve whined and done 15 words at one word and yet you still don’t ‘feel’ it. The problem with you now isn’t a writer’s block. It’s a lack of topic. Twitter Search can easily take care of that issue. 

Scan your twitter feed to see what people are talking about. Find a topic you have an opinion on and send a replying tweet. Not only will you be gathering points for an article or blog post, you’ll be networking.

Also check the top trends in twitter search along with keeping an eye on the hashtags of the topic you’re interested in.

I’ve used twitter search for reasearch and differing opinions for an article I was stuck on and it helped tremendously! Not only did I find various views, but also prominent people I could quote in the article and stats to back up my views. 

Doesn’t get better than that now does it?

Guest posting is a great way to gain exposure for yourself and your blog. It’s also stamp of approval from the blogger on who’s blog you’re posting. The readers of that blog trust you by proxy. You don’t have to work hard on proving your mettle.

If you’re already successful, guest posting is a great way to reach out to new audiences and establish your expertise.

This week, we’re going round up guests post on popular blogs.

- Write to Done is Leo Babauta’s (of Zen Habits fame) writing based blog. Marco Saric of How To Make My Blog wrote a guest post ‘How to Make Your Site go Viral on Twitter‘. That’s a pretty huge pat on the back. Leo has a huge following and if not many, Marco most definitely managed to gain some loyal readers through this post. Not to mention, he added a feather in his blogging cap. 

- Chris Brogan’s blog has over 21 thousand subscribers. Theses are just the RSS subscribers. On an estimate, add a few thousand more email and newsletter subscribers and that’s a staggering number to reach out to through a guest post. Jason Alba’s guest post “Handling Negative Comments on Your Blog Post“. The post received 52 comments and 6 track-backs. That is some serious exposure!

- A quick look at Shanon Paul’s Very Official Blog revealed that on an average, her posts receive 7-8 17 comments. That’s an decent awesome level of participation if you ask me. But it’s far from the big leagues. Her guest post “Six Very Official Ways to Improve Your Writing” for Pro Blogger was great exposure. 

Shannon’s been busy establishing a solid reputation for herself instead of concentrating on building a blog following. She’s been successful in it to a great extent as she got a mention by Chris Brogan in 8 Marketing Bloggers to Watch in 2009.

- Daily Blog Tips is one of Daniel Scocco’s babies. Daniel was one of the unfortunate bloggers who’s website got hacked. The incident raised a lot of security questions among bloggers. Mr I from Blogging With Success decided to expand on Daniel’s post about website security by listing 5 Plugins to keep WordPress Safe.

- Jonathan Muller’s guest post “How To Become a Better Blogger” for Yan Susanto’s Thou Shall Blog was very well received. Even though Jonathan’s blog hasn’t been updated since early February, it still has a lot of useful information for you to go through.

Getting emails from prospects is routine for freelancers. It means your marketing is working and people are interested in working with you. Not all prospects turn into clients, but all of them require an email exchange (at least).

How you reply to an email from a prospect often plays an important part in the reply you get. We’ve already covered what to do if you don’t get a response, now it’s time to find out how to write replies to work queries from prospects that will yield a response.

Whether you get the job or not is irrelevant at this point. Your main aim is to get them to reply to you. In my experience that’s half the battle won.

Even if they don’t hire you, you still would have learned from the exchange. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how to deal with prospective clients, you’ll be able to figure out if you’re making any mistakes in client dealings and if there’s something more you could do next time.

Reply immediately

First contact should be made immediately after you’ve gotten a work query. It’s important because you won’t be the only freelancer they’ve emailed. They don’t have the time to wait and they want results fast.

Send in a reply before they have a chance to consider someone else.

In most cases, it doesn’t matter how qualified you are for the job. It’s the early birds that get the worm (read job).

Set the tone for negotiations

If they’ve asked you for rates, don’t hedge. State them clearly. This is your one time shot to get the job and evading a direct query is not the way to go. So state your rates and stop panicking because there’s a way to neutralize the situation if you feel you’ve quoted too high.

Right after quoting your rates, let them know that these rates are open for negotiations. You can write something along the lines of ‘…these are my standard rates and usually vary depending on the project and amount of work.’

Let them know you’re waiting

It may not make much difference, but letting them know that you’re looking forward to their response might compel them to reply back with an answer. There are no guarantees of course.

Recommend someone else

It doesn’t always work out. The stats actually favour the nays than the ayes. We’re freelancers though and our superpower is handling rejection.

If the job doesn’t work out for whatever reason, don’t forget to recommend another freelancer. Not only is recommending someone good manners, it’s another way to surprise the client pleasantly. If you’re not getting the job, make sure they remember you.

Thank them

‘Thank you’ is an extremely strong expression. Whether it works out or not, thank them for their time and consideration. It ends things on just the right note. For all you know, they just may choose you the next time.

To be frank, the entire email reply is an exercise in subtlety. Unless you’re uber successful (which you’re not) and can do without their business (which you can’t), you have to use every trick up your sleeve to get them to engage in a negotiation.

Have I missed something? How do you reply to emails from prospective clients?