My Entrepreneurial Life as a VBA Freelancer So you’ve been pondering the possibility of becoming a freelance Developer. You are tired of the cubicle jungle, unhappy with the compensation, that boss, the same old work or the crazy hours. Maybe like me, you are just ready for a new adventure. That’s what made me quit, build a website and figuratively “hang out a shingle”. Since then I’ve coded sitting at my outdoor table on the back deck with hummingbirds buzzing around enjoying the great outdoors. My Entrepreneurial Life as a Consultant, can be pretty sweet. I’ve learned a significant amount since I’ve started and I’m happy to share what Ive learned.
I have a confession to make, even though my former employer required employees to disclose all outside employment, I didn’t. Years ago, I built a website and secured some moonlighting work. I didn’t leave it up for long – I guess I was worried I’d be discovered and lose my job. In building that first website, I did learn HTML and Javascript and they are still helpful today. Unfortunately, much has changed in the internet over the past few years and getting ‘found’ can be quite difficult -more about that later. In retrospect, I am sorry I didn’t keep the website up. Websites grow, evolve and get better with time. It may take a year or two to build and develop that killer website. Your search history is said to play into the algorithm that dictates what page you appear in a Google search.
Ok, now the bad news about Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Let’s do a search in Google on VBA freelance programming. The first page is loaded with paid for advertisements for the big guys of the freelancer industry
1. Toptal
2. Upwork
3. Freelancer
4. Guru
Those same heavyweights appear several times. You will need to go a couple pages in before you see any organic pages. That is, pages like mine that are not paid for advertisements. Now let’s go to the website https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ and type in “VBA Coding Help” make sure you are at the Overview section at the left.
The results:
Search Volume (Month) 30
Seo Difficulty 27 (Easy)
Paid Difficulty 24 (Easy)
Cost Per click $3.96
That $3.96 cost per click is described as how much you would pay google to get high in the search results. I can’t help but wonder what their conversion ratio must be to support $3.96. That is exactly how many jobs they actually get per 10 clicks. In any event, you’ll appreciate companies are paying ‘real money’ to get high on the page ranking. The gatekeepers (Google) have made it difficult, but not impossible to get found.The answer is to garner traffic through a number of funnels. That, of course, includes social media, a blog, free products and tutorials on advanced coding.
I’ll get into strategies I use to increase traffic in Part III.
If you would like to say hello and Buy me a cup of coffee please follow the link.
