If you work in the field of website marketing and design, it is inevitable that at some point you ll need a website. Of course; your customers are there, so you go there too. We ve never seen a store front at the mall yet that sells web services. But you d have to admit that it would be amusing if they did.
Yet running your own website while selling your services to run other s websites presents a paradox: If you become successful, you eventually spend all of your time working on your client s websites and none on your own! Like the proverbial mechanic who s too busy to work on his own car, you end up with your own car belching smog and emitting rattles while you keep everybody else s car in tip top shape.
Is this analogy stretched? Far from it. Websites get crusty as they age; new browser rendering bugs come along and aren t dealt with, new Javascript exploits are discovered, and graphics and design style, in the fast moving, robust culture of the web, become stale and out of date in just a few years.
So your own website needs an update, but now you hate to take chunks out of your billable hours to work for yourself for free. This is one of those times when self discipline comes into play; the same kind of self discipline that makes you successful in a freelance, work from home career also helps you hire yourself.
See it from a client s point of view: If you were hiring somebody else to re design your own website, what would you expect? And it would be worth the money to you, right? After all, the work you do for others is worth the money you re paid (at least, we certainly hope so!). So don t see it as working for yourself for free see it as investing in your future website marketing career, while hiring your own skills to further it.
Of course, at some point, you might consider outsourcing. If you have some top dollar clients who are demanding your time to do advanced work, and all you need done on your own site is some grunt work like updating your MySQL database interface, you can be free of guilt in hiring an assistant to help out behind the scenes while you go work the big magic.
And if you freelance for yourself, it s always good to remember that not all of us can wear all the hats all of the time. For instance, promoting and advertising your services might be something that you re just too close to the problem to see the right solution for. Or things like legal requirements or business management skills might be beyond you, no matter what an HTML wizard you are. There has been some theories proposed, by the new intelligence model of what we call multi intelligence, which says that smart one way isn t necessarily smart another way.
This plays into being your own best client as well. A good website marketing or designing consultant knows when to turn down a job, but how better it is when you know that you d be your own worst client and outsource the work appropriately. Perhaps you could find another worker in the field , someone whom you don t directly compete with, to trade services.
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