Steal These Freelance Business Ideas

http://casjam.com/steal-these-freelance-business-ideas/

by casjam • 13 years ago

107 47 13 years ago

krogsgard2• 13 years ago

I love the metrics idea. A lot of people collect data, not many are doing anything with it. An easy way to turn collected data in to actionable items would be awesome.

brianbreslin2• 13 years ago

I would definitely pay someone to handle this and do reporting for me on this.

krmmalik2• 13 years ago

This is something that I've been doing for clients for the last two years. I could do this job for you. It's something I really enjoy, and I'm familiar with a fair few analytics packages, GA, Mixpanel, Re-invigorate and so on. I also think I can pick new ones up pretty fast as the principles are more important than the technology.

Is there some way I can get in touch with you to discuss this further?

nedwin• 13 years ago

Thanks for the shout out Brian :)

nvr2192• 13 years ago

"A podcast is a very effective channel for building an audience and building exposure for your company. "

I'll be honest. I never use podcasts. Is it really an effective channel for building an audience?

MichaelApproved• 13 years ago

When it works, it's better than email. But that's only when it works.

It's really had to handle the mechanics of subscribing someone and you can forget about strong analytics because you don't control the subscription process. After a customer hits your ITunes subscribe link, you're done. There's little you can figure out in terms of whether or not they subscribed.

casjam7• 13 years ago

True, it's hard to track subscribers, etc. But like others have said, those subscribers are much more tuned in than say casual readers of your blog articles. Much higher level of trust with a podcast audience imo.

mijustin• 13 years ago

TWIT.TV gets over 300,000 downloads per episode: Source: http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/how-make-twit-yourself-and-buil...

SparksZilla• 13 years ago

Podcasts are definitely underutilized and I've been hearing more and more about them again lately.

hexonexxon2• 13 years ago

Everybody I work with is seriously into podcasts lately, especially rogan.

krogsgard2• 13 years ago

Depends on the type of audience, I think.

Most podcasts will probably never get a huge audience. But the audience you do get is a motivated, probably very specific one. That's a valuable audience.

casjam7• 13 years ago

Yup. For the handful of podcasts that I subscribe to, I try and listen to EVERY new episode. I can't say the same for every blog I subscribe to.

baseh• 13 years ago

I agree. It depends on what type of podcast (genre) as well and how interesting it is(obviously). I subscribe to Joe Rogan's comedy podcast and ended purchasing stuff from his sponsors / his albums.

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

It depends on the market, and varies a lot. This requires a lot of testing. I recommend you look into newsletter first. They are much easier to work with, measurable, and cheap to produce.

casjam7• 13 years ago

I really like this idea too. A curated content newsletter a la http://www.nextdraft.com is a concept that is still under-utilized.

casjam7• 13 years ago

Yes they are very effective (when the content is good).

The podcast listener-host relationship is much more intimate than the blog reader-writer relationship. They connect with the personality. Better medium to build trust than writing articles.

nvr2192• 13 years ago

Thank you (and thanks to everyone else who responded). I always considered podcasting as a way to keep existing users engaged rather than attracting new users. I have learned something from this thread. :)

jonemo2• 13 years ago

I only recently warmed up to Podcasts, actually wrote a blog post with short "reviews" of my subscription list this weekend: http://neubertify.tumblr.com/post/41503145301/podcasts

I think of all online publishing media, podcasts are the hardest to execute well, harder than blogs, and harder than video. This might not be true for everyone, but while I can tolerate shitty writing and shitty video editing, I just can't stand bad audio production. Bad speaking, weird accents, breathing sounds, "uhm", each of those steal divert my attention from the content.

If you decide to start a podcast, please get some professional production help. One podcast I found that is not produced by NPR but still doing a good job (as well as being relevant to the HN crowd) is "This Developer's Life" (http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com).

Fuzzwah• 13 years ago

"weird accents", really?

Where are you from and what do you think is "normal". I'm an Australian (currently living in America) who has traveled a lot, I have a lot of friends from all over the world. I've never considered any one of them to have a "weird accent".

Can you give me examples of podcasts which you've found difficult to listen to due to "weird accents"?

casjam7• 13 years ago

Totally agree. Getting good at podcasting takes a lot of practice. It's a lot harder than it may seem.

Writing the topics and talking points — and sticking to them — is also a tricky task. In my first podcast series, we tended to ramble off-topic making for some pretty boring segments.

PaulMest5• 13 years ago

I do a video podcast that gets about 30,000-60,000 views/week. I have not fully leveraged it, but it has been useful for a few things:

* It has helped me connect with people in the press

* I occasionally get free passes to conferences and events

* It helps me land speaking gigs

* I can generally drive 300-1000 visits to a site, if it is relevant to the audience

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

This is presumably the PingShow in your profile?

30,000 views of a video sounds huge - can I ask how you grew it ? What was the off the bat number - ie was being part of a big channel just land big numbers ? Did you link from a popular article? Interested for the obvious reasons - and will have a watch when off iOS !

esonderegger• 13 years ago

For those of you that hire video producers, how do you go about selecting who you work with?

Since I'm coming from a career as an audio and video engineer into the startup world, this would seem like an obvious area to do some freelancing, but it also seems like a chicken and egg problem with finding work and having demos/references.

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

A portfolio is a must. Then I just interview you to see if we have work chemistry. Afterwards I just leave you alone to do your job.

I'm actually searching for a good audio freelancer. Get in touch if you are interested.

casjam7• 13 years ago

A portfolio is a great first step. Doesn't have to be many projects. Just a few really impressive ones.

The good news is there are plenty of startups in need of videos. Offer to do a couple on the cheap to start your portfolio. Then start charging market rates.

olefoo• 13 years ago

Full Service Blogger sounds ever so slightly shady; like someone who would write pay-for-play stories and not care about the reputation they'd be burning.

I realize that's not the intent here, but it seems like that would be a natural equilibrium state for commercial writers.

unreal37• 13 years ago

I disagree. I think a case could be made for "brand ambassador" - blogging and social media management. While startup X is busy focusing on their core business, for $1,000 a month they could outsource some non-core functions like communicating with customers and writing interesting blog posts. They need someone to write three quality posts a week for them.

If you could pick up 10 clients for this, you're making $10,000 a month from home.

Big companies do this. Go to any large multi-national - take P&G for instance. Do you think the tweets for Tide detergent are done by P&G? Or do they have a social media marketing agency that works with them to ensure their customers and fans get responses? Of course, they work with an agency.

Why wouldn't a small company have an agency too? Priced right for them. Makes sense.

casjam7• 13 years ago

I think you're describing the majority of freelance blog writers you'll find on places like Elance, etc. these days.

What I meant was the blogger should deliver not only articles but all the other (very important) tasks for running an effective blog: editorial calendar, topic development, blogger outreach, etc. A premium blogging service, if you will.

gabemart• 13 years ago

As someone with a little experience and some modest success in this area, a good full-service blogger would be expensive. Not only because it requires a cluster of skills that are only tangentially related to each other and so are relatively rare to find together, but because a person who possesses these skills can build a good income for themselves will little investment aside from their own time. The opportunity cost of such a person selling their time is massive because they're exchanging long-run passive income for short-term work-for-hire income.

I'm hesitant to estimate how much such a service would reasonably cost without thinking about it some more, but I am very curious as to how much a startup in a position to benefit from this kind of outsourcing thinks they could reasonably pay.

shawndrost• 13 years ago

I'd pay for any of these; email is in profile.

marcamillion• 13 years ago

I love this post....thought they would be 'lame' ideas, but I love them.

I run 5KMVP and am interested in doing the metrics idea.

If you are interested in having your startup data crunched and you sent the key metrics on a weekly basis - reach out to me: marc+metrics @ 5kmvp.com

PaulMest5• 13 years ago

I do a lot of metric analysis for other companies. It's actually one of the ways that my company starts engagements and eventually leads to selling other services. We start by analyzing what data is already collected.

I love looking at data and now that I've seen dozens of Google Analytics properties and a handful of MixPanel/Flurry/Apsalar/misc. It's really easy for me to dive in and provide actionable recommendations.

Unfortunately, most sites don't have goals with conversion rates or Webmaster Tools (to see SEO) or have their eCommerce transactions hooked up. So it's a bit of a pain to try to teach a new business how to set that up. We're happy to do it for a small fee, but it takes time to get the clearance or work with the engineering team. Then it's a matter of waiting to collect that data (if we're talking startups or smaller businesses). Also, it seems to be a low margin business because many businesses already don't value their existing data so they aren't going to pay much to have someone collect even more data they won't look at.

However, when the data is collected, you can start making easier pitches. If we can increase your total revenue by X% we get Y% of it in the first year. If we don't, you don't pay us.

I'm happy to provide an initial consultation for free to anybody on Hacker News. If you find value in it, we can discuss on-going work.

Contact info is in my profile.

heliodor• 13 years ago

Getting a cut of the revenue increase would be great, but how do you prove how much influence you've had on the revenue increase/decrease as compared to other steps the company took to change their fortunes? Are there any methods that can be used to tease apart each cause and effect?

PaulMest5• 13 years ago

Generally the businesses that we have pursued this path are ones who neglect to treat their online selling motions like a product.

For example, we are working with a client who makes "99%" of their money from physical retail. Their focus is on opening new physical locations and their eCommerce side is an after-thought. Their offline business is booming, but their online visits and conversion rates have been flat for 6+ months. My team will be taking over their site.

There is certainly a bit of faith that any change to visits will be from our SEO, though we can specifically target long-tail terms and build reports to show that they previously received X visits a month on these highly convertible terms now they receive 5X. However, with conversion rate optimization, the split-testing makes it pretty clear which changes performs better.

When the business gets an increase in highly convertible traffic after a flatline and additional $50,000-$500,000 in online revenue, they are very happy.

This type of contract only works with businesses that bring in millions. For smaller businesses or startups generating $50k-$100k/year, there are generally smaller budgets or not enough traffic to make split-testing possible in short-term engagements. So we'll do fixed bid consultations and short-term contracts for $1k-$20k and possibly do a follow up 3+ months down the line. Or we will use the split-testing and CRO service as a feeder to build trust in my team and then try to cross-sell our other service (build a custom mobile app, web app, or immersive advertisement).

brianbreslin2• 13 years ago

Paul, I would definitely pay for this kind of setup/consultation. Even reporting. I'll shoot you an email.

PaulMest5• 13 years ago

Sounds good. Looking forward to helping out!

adamrights• 13 years ago

good convo, data, metrics

hexonexxon2• 13 years ago

thegrugq had a good idea. he recommended somebody should start a biz in making online disposable social media identities. this is easy to do but takes time. time is money so this could be a viable service though and with an easy python script could pump out identities automatically after amassing all your fake pictures.

you would pay them with bitcoins to create a whole online persona for you on facebook, twitter, linkedin ect that you would use as a backup in order to fool competitors, hackers, and govt authorities trying to track you down.

for instance your anonymous identity that publishes a democracy blog about china gives very subtle hints to this new fake online persona you've created, so when chinese authorities think they've found you they are in reality chasing nothing. kind of like when hackers sit together in a channel and if you log an entire month's worth, they start dropping personal information either purposely or accidentally by slipping up their opsec 'hey bro i went to that school too'.

only this time it leads to a maze of confusion instead to your front door like Jeremy Hammond.

could bundle this with other anonmity service like running a .onion newsgroup server for alt.binaries.messages retrieval

hisyam• 13 years ago

How about video interview producer? I would pay for someone to make weekly interview videos with my clients.

krmmalik2• 13 years ago

If anyone here is looking for a "Startup Data/Metrics Analyst" as per the blog post, please get in touch. I've done this for companies here in the UK for the last two years, and I'm looking to expand this part of my work further. Happy to discuss working arrangements and deals, and am open to offers.

Please see my business card if you'd like to learn more about me: http://krmmalik.com/me

snayan• 13 years ago

The metric analysis freelancer idea really spoke to me. Anyone with experience in this field have any suggestions for how one might break into this type of work? I'm always drawn to blog posts and the like that deal with metrics analysis but lack much real world experience. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Steal These Freelance Business Ideas

Related Stories