Two challenges of working any freelance job are determining rates and communicating payment expectations to clients. Some freelancers are uncomfortable with money issues; others are unsure how much their skills are worth. Additionally, if you are a freelancer, it’s important to be aware of what your clients prefer. If your clients are confident you truly understand their needs, they will choose you every time they require a service. Finding the right pricing strategy is especially hard for new graduates of technology colleges. With a little forethought, those entering the field can find fast success.

Fixed Rate

A fixed rate is the most common and preferred method of charging. A recent non-scientific survey showed that both clients and designers prefer a fixed rate by an overwhelming margin. The fixed rate has a number of advantages over hourly rates or daily rates:

• Clients know exactly how much they are expected to pay.
• The price is easier to break down for upfront partial payments.
• You probably can estimate how long a project will take to complete and can price accordingly.
• Invoicing is easier.

Partial Upfront Payment

Clients are happy with making a partial payment when they hire you for the job and paying the remainder upon delivery. This is an especially good system to use when the client is new. When you are doing repeat business for the same client, you may feel comfortable receiving full payment on delivery, but this arrangement is a good way to protect your own interests.

Payment Timeliness

Laws may vary according to region, but you should expect to be paid within one month of delivering the invoice. Most clients will pay quickly, but it seems there’s always someone who needs to be tracked down. Make your expectations clear up front, and state explicitly in your contract when you expect to be paid.

Accounting

A number of excellent billing software programs are available should you choose to go that route. If you are great at record keeping, you may decide to simply track billing manually. Either way is perfectly acceptable, and people are evenly split on their preferences. Whichever way you choose, however, make sure that up-to-date and accurate billing is a priority. Your business depends on it.

Late Fee

What about late fees? If you are planning to use these as incentives for your clients to pay on time, it is crucial that you are consistent about them and that they are mentioned up front. Arbitrarily deciding to tack on late fees could put you in a legal bind.

Discount

You may also wish to reward clients who pay their bills promptly or who pay by a preferred method. For example, a client paying cash within the first 10 days of receiving the bill might receive a 5 to 10 percent discount. Like late fees, though, it’s important to keep this reward consistent and be up front about it.

The most important thing to remember is that your work is valuable. Your graphic design skill is a commodity, and one that people will pay good money for. Don’t sell yourself short. If you don’t take your billing procedures seriously, neither will your clients.

Obviously, you guys already know that I make money online and from my blogs through advertisements. From time to time, I get direct advertisers contacting me about placing banner or text link ads on my blogs with a fee we have agreed on. And just yesterday, I got another email which raised suspicions that it could all just be a scam. It’s from a representative of a certain Jino Agency who claims the ad is for Lacoste. Her name’s Killian Blanchard. Here’s a screenshot of the email:

It made me suspicious because, first off, it’s for our food blog. Why would Lacoste be interested in placing an advertisement on a blog that’s completely unrelated to fashion? I continued on to see what will happen, already wary that it’s another one of those phishing scams. They said they have different ad banner sizes and would like to know the rates we offer for each.

By this time, I already checked their site – www.jinoagency.com.  I’m a web designer so I know that their site was pretty easy to come up with.

The site’s language is in French so I had no idea what the contents were. I was hoping to see a list of accounts or brands they handle, but found none. I was hoping to translate their site to English using Chrome’s integrated translate feature, but it wasn’t an option.

So, I ended up using Yahoo! Babel Fish which worked like a charm. The translation may not be perfect, but it’s obvious that their contents don’t sound like they come from an actual PR or advertising company.

I continued on to send them my rates to see if they would accept it. The thing is, I gave them very high ad monthly rates (scroll down for the screenshot of how much they’re willing to pay for a month!). Surprisingly, they liked my prices. So, they continued on sending me instructions on how to publish the advertisement.

As it turns out, I need to login to their site with the info they provided and then install a plugin on our blog. The only time I installed a plugin was for a reputable third party ad network and I only have it up and running on THIS blog. I’m just not comfortable installing any script or plugin on any of my high traffic blogs, most especially our food blog.

What I did next was to search Google for any post about them. I only found one link, but it was filled with all the necessary information that would conclude it was indeed a scam – Devious Scam Aimed at Bloggers.

The author and a couple of the comment posters on this certain blog post were very suspicious too of this ad placement. Having been very careful with putting malicious scripts on my blogs, I always make sure to check the code of any plug-in I install on my WordPress blogs and I do my research first. This time, I guess it more than paid off. And I know how important it is for me to share this to everyone just in case they got the same email and were hoping to earn a decent amount of money from these scammers.

Apparently, based on the comments, they won’t pay you afterwards. The codes may seem harmless now, but malicious plugins can give access to your WordPress blog or site to unauthorized people. So, you have to be VERY careful with what plugins you install.

Here’s a screenshot of the site they asked me to log into:

And the instructions on how to install the plugin:

Did they contact you too? If yes, please share your experience. And please, be careful. There are a lot of online scammers out there now and they get more creative everytime.

I’ll be posting more about dealing with direct advertisers here next time. Stay tuned!

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UPDATE: A fellow blogger mentioned about Mana Agency, a company one of the comment posters on the blog post I mentioned earlier revealing this as a scam too. Well, look at their website… doesn’t it look so fricking familiar?