The Unconventional Guide to Freelancing Review and Your Chance To Win A Free Copy.
How Grow Your Business Without Killing Yourself
UPDATE – WE HAVE A WINNER! Congratulations to Taylor from pixeltrek.com. Thanks to everyone who participated and stay tuned for more awesome reviews =)
As part of a series announced last month I mentioned that I would be reviewing several Unconventional Guides from The Art of Non-Conformity. Today kicks off my first Unconventional Guide review of The Unconventional Guide To Freelancing, brought to you by the man behind the Unconventional Guides Chris Guillebeau. As a little bonus today I’m also hosting a small contest for readers where I’ll be giving away a copy of the The Unconventional Guide To Freelancing – a freakin’ $58.00 value. And Yes this contest has the full blessing of Unconventional Guides team.
Here’s How To Win: All you have to do to get a chance to win is leave a comment in the comment section between Today and Thursday July 29. Awesome.
Two quick items – I’ll be very upfront from the beginning I will be posing an affiliate link or two in case someone decides to buy the guide. As in the past I’m always up front about this and have personally tried every single product I’ve promoted on this blog.
Ok that’s it, Now on to the review.
So What’s It All About?
As Chris put it, this Unconventional guide “helps service providers become solution providers. If you want to get serious about building a sustainable business model around the skillset you use to serve clients and customers, this might be a good fit for you.” When I read that I simply had to check it out. I sat down and read the 20,000 word guide, watched the interviews and dove into the dozens of pages of resources to see what this guide was all about.
Freelancing should be a popular subject amongst my readers because the nature of being self-employed and running your own business often revolves around freelancing.
If you’ve my past posts you’ll know I’ve always been a fan of the Unconventional Guides. Out of all the ebooks I’ve picked up over the years these continue to be some of the most well-written, well-researched and best designed books out there. I think the store has gotten up to 8 different guides all written to help the reader come up with a solution to a problem. That’s why we buy instructional books right? To learn something to hopefully solve a problem were having. Fantastic. I already extolled the virtues of previous guides I’ve read, including The Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself, which was an awesome inspiring guide to help steer the aspiring solopreneur in the direction of coming up with alternate forms of income. The Unconventional Guide to Freelancing is unique in a sense, first of all, it was all written by Charlie Gilkey, not Chris Guillebeau. If you don’t know Charlie Gilkey – head on over to Productive Flourishing and click on “New Here?” to learn about a little bit about what he does. In a nutshell he helps the self-employed with holistic business development. So it was natural for a guy him to partner with a guy like Chris Guillebeau – who helps aspiring entrepreneurs build a business on their own.
Who Is This Guide For?
Wikipedia defines a freelancer as “somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term… Fields where freelancing is common include journalism, book publishing, journal publishing, and other forms of writing, editing, copy editing, proofreading, indexing, copywriting, computer programming, web design and graphic design, consulting, tour guiding, and translating. Turns out, that’s a lot of people who this guide could potential be for. Including You.
You are a service professional of some kind — a designer, a bookkeeper, an agent, a consultant, a coach, a something — who wants to take your business to the next level. You understand the fine line between employee and entrepreneur. Since you’re in your own category, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the business aspects of your work.
How can you grow the biz without killing yourself? How can you raise your rates? (And how do you know much to charge in the first place?) Should you worry about competition? These are the kinds of questions we look at in extended detail.
Who It’s Not For
This isn’t a getting started guide to extol the virtues of freelancing. It won’t show you how to open a Paypal account. This is more of a Freelancing 301 guide that seeks to answer questions such as “How can you grow the biz without killing yourself? How can you raise your rates? (And how do you know much to charge in the first place?) Should you worry about competition?.” That kind of stuff.
Here’s The Skinny
The Unconventional Guide to Freelancing is 54 pages and is divided up into 6 Sections covering everything from Getting the Job Done to Landing Clients and Getting Paid. The Guide is sold in 3 Different packages depending how much you want to spend. The $54 Just Getting Started package is comprised of the standard 54 page pdf guide, 3 audio interviews with successful freelance entrepreneurs, and 2 short quick-guides comprising of key lessons to remember and a very detailed list of resources. The $79 Go The Distance package has everything the less expensive package has, plus additional audio interviews plus a very detailed checklist of questions to ask about agreements, contracts and policies. This is the most popular package. And lastly the Back ‘o Chips package which has everything I just listed PLUS three one-hour phone calls where you can get group coaching and ask questions, all for the handsome price of $129.
Which package is right for you? What’s in the guide? What do the audio interviews talk about?
That’s all coming up in Part 2 of my review. In the meantime, get your chance to win a copy of the The Unconventional Guide to Freelancing, then head on over to the Unconventional Guides website to read up more about it.
- How do you win? Just leave comment below. That’s it. Until now and July 29th.
- Don’t forget to leave a valid email address. What should you write? Anything.. you can comment about this post, about freelancing, or just say hello.
- A winner will be selected and chosen on Friday July 30! Awesome.
So stay tuned for Part 2 and be sure to leave a comment for your chance to WIN! Booya.
P.S. – Don’t forget to subscribe to Blog updates for more great stuff! Submit your email below.
Oh I think this is a fantastic read for me – thanks very much for the post Mike. I just checked out their website and “breaking out of 9-5″ seems to be my calling
I have recently been looking into mobile app dev for the iPhone and Android platforms and as such I think these unconventional guides are great reads.
I haven’t yet read this one but I can only imagine its as good as anything that Chris puts out there. It’s awesome that you’re giving a way this, will be spreading the word all day for you brother!
Wilson Usman recently posted..Readers Who Want to Know How to Earn Money Online
Hey Mike!
Thanks for hosting the contest. I’m not eligible to win, but it sounds good to me.
all best,
cg
Hey Chris, thanks for stopping by and for your blessing. Great job with the guide and I hope others will find as much value in it as I did.
Wilson you da man!
For anyone wondering how I pick the winner, its simple: I take all the email address, put them in a spreadsheet from 1-50 or however many the final number is. Then I generate a random number between 1-100 on http://www.random.org/, then take that number which it spits out and whichever row it corresponds to on the spreadsheet that person wins! Sweet.
Hi Mike,
If this guide is anything like Chris’ EBK (which is awesome), then I know it’ll be great. Pretty much like everything Chris puts out there. I am a huge Chris fan-girl.
Thanks for your review.
P.S. I’m delighted to find your site. Looking forward to following you.
As a huge fan of travel and work independance, freelancing to me is totally key! There is nothing like working for yourself and being location independant.
Keep up the good work everyone.
Does it cover specific tactics for finding prospects and landing jobs?
Hey Adam, thanks for comment dude! You hit the nail on that one.
Jeff: It’s less about finding prospects than it is about actually getting a strategy in place to get more of them once you’ve started. For example you won’t find a list ways to get leads (Like craigslist or Elance, if your a designer), what you get is more of kick ass roadmap to get your business thriving
As an EBK fan, I would love to get my hands on this course.
I love the focus on solutions – it just seems to make so much sense and is something I always strive for. Will be interesting to read the approaches and methods in the guide.
Thanks for hosting the contest – I look forward to tomorrow (fingers-crossed)!
-Matt
Matt Mansfield recently posted..Holly Jackson Reveals the Right Writing Tool for Writers
I’m a big fan of Chris’. I don’t buy stuff from people, but I’ve read him long enough that he has earned my trust and I jumped on the Empire Building Kit. I would love to win the freelancing guide, I think too many of us self-employed creatives don’t think of ourselves as solution providers so I’m intrigued.
This sounds fabulous. I am soooo in. Put the word “unconventional” in a title, offer, product, whatever and you’ll see there are more of us than most people think. Bring on the unconventionality. Bring on abundance and freelance and succes and all of it!
jenn
This is my 3rd or 4th ‘unconventional’ product and I can’t get enough of them. I’m hoping to get them all reviewed here eventually, and the response here has been great so I’d like to do another giveaway soon!
I have been following Chris’s work for 6 months now.
I am hoping that when I do WIN (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) that it will really help my business as a photographer/filmmaker and designer.
I am about to embark on to a long term nomadic trip to see if if can work from anywhere.
I have read Karol Gajda’s “How to live Anywhere” and gotten alot out of it!!!
Taylor – that looks an awesome book. Long term nomadic trip is a big dream of mine too. I’d like to try living abroad for a short period, then do it again for longer stretches. Its something I’ve never done, so its up there on the bucket list =)
I would love to read this ebook. I got Art + Money + thought it was excellent. Add my name to the list of Chris Guillebeau fans. (I’m just proud of myself that I can write his last name now without looking).
Hi Mike,
Thanks for picking me as the winner of Unconventional Guide To Freelancing. I am very excited as this content is very important for my next stage of work as I am moving to Mexico to work as a Digital Nomad.