Random Thoughts of Mike Bunton

I had someone send me a private message the other day asking about how I got some work via an online webmaster forum.

He was having difficulty acquiring work and wanted to know what else he might be able to do to stand out from the crowd.

Here are some suggestions that I gave to him:

- Have online references preferably through the forum where you are trying to acquire work

- Have an online presence on the forum that you are trying to aquire work on - by all means, I would never hire anyone through a forum that only had 1 or 2 posts. Now if they have 100 posts, you can find out a little more about them and their style.

- If the site has a ‘contest’ area, enter a few contests if you are a designer, that way people can see the graphical style that you have.

- Don’t tell people how old you are if you are under 20, unless they ask. Many will ask, some won’t care.

- Offer your AOLIM, MSN, Yahoo, whatever to give them multiple ways to contact you, possibly your phone number as well.

- Once you are done with a job, ask to use them as a reference.

- Dont price yourself too low either, you end up hurting yourself more than just not getting the work in the first place.

- Tell them what time zone you are in when applying for a job via PM/email.

- Have an online portfolio set up (or send them info on sites you have developed if you don’t have a portfolio).

- Always be honest.

- Try your best to be one of the first to send a PM to the person looking to hire - that means that you will need to be consistently watching the forum for new posts.

If you are new, don’t get discouraged when starting out. Follow some or all of these steps and build your online ‘rep’ and I think you should start seeing some return for your effort.

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