So, monthly check!

How's everyone doing? Successes? New ideas or projects? Frustrations? Plans of action for the end of the year?

I took a week off to go to a Thing out of town, and while I don't regret it (I had a great time with friends, and I hadn't had a vacation type thing in YEARS) it did really take some time to recover from mentally, and I got behind on some gigs. I'm taking away a couple of things from it: one, notifying my clients that I would be away and getting a modified time schedule permission from them was the right move, and two, I have to plan for recovery-time better if I am able to go on vaca ever again!

Successes: I am getting dribs and drabs of work, because I am still catching up from said vaca. BUT, as most of you know, I got a freelance copy editor position at Carina Press, which promises to be a steady stream of work, and also? is the direction I REALLY want to move towards -- working with authors and publishers.

I've gotten positive feedback on the resumes and copywriting I've done for clients since the last check-in, and I'm very happy about that!

Frustrations: I still haven't gotten my contract and all the beginning paperwork, or started a first gig for CPress, even though the editor said she would get them to me this week. She's hugely busy and has been traveling a LOT, so I get it...but I haven't been drumming for other FL jobs hard, so I could have plenty of time to really start working on copyediting for CP, and our money situation is CRITICAL.

We'll get by, and it'll be ok, but with the holidays coming up, in addition to our regular staggering load of regular expenses (and believe me, we aren't just cutting corners, we're cutting off half the whole damned box to get by), but right now, it's stressful.

Also frustrating: even though I am having a little free time, since I've only got a couple of small gigs to work on, I'm not updating/tweaking my website Like I need and want to, or blogging regularly. I am going to be working on that today, though.

Plans: I've been wanting to for a while, and I watched a great webinar this week on utilizing video blogs to enhance your marketing and your presence on the web. So I am going to be playing with Movie Maker and trying to add to skills so that I can add vids to my website. I'm kind of excited about that, since I think people respond really well to attaching a face and a voice to a person, and also, I have tons of skills in public speaking and a decently engaging presence from teaching.

That's where I'm at right now; kind of been in a holding pattern, and ready to break out of it, and get some impetus going.

How's everyone else doing?!

Remember I asked about how much to charge the academic woman? I proposed $30 an hour and she took it. So far she's paid me $210. Not too bad, for a not-actually-a-business.

Awesome, flea! Good for you.

Some of you may be entertained to learn that I just found a roll of border tape in the bottom of a drawer. Is it an antique yet?

It's not so much that it's an antique - it's just still stuck to everything.

In other print layout news, please talk me down from clienticide: I've got one insisting that such and such an image be exactly the height of the first two paragraphs on a web page, and I've explained multiple times now that I can get it to look closer, but the moment they get a visitor with a different installed font stack, or a really weird-sized monitor, or an iPad, or they've resized their browser defaults or... Yeah. We can do closer, but we can't guarantee it, and doing too much to force it would actually be wrong.

Web. Not actually the same as print, nor should it be.

But, but...but you have to suspend the rules for them, right?! Right???

You obviously just need to WORK HARDER at it!

I've been round and round with clients on that one, amych. I have been known to come up with a version the client was happy with, as long as it would work fine, if not exactly the same, on other monitors. If the client sees one that looks different, you can say "I told you so," only diplomatically.

Usually clients who can't be convinced of that also don't know how to resize their browsers. I have sent screen shots with different views of the page.

I once saw a designer's website that said on the home page: "Best viewed over my shoulder on my monitor."

I once saw a designer's website that said on the home page: "Best viewed over my shoulder on my monitor."

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH GOD KILL ME NOW

I haven't done a business update in a while so here goes...

Successes: It's been a bit of a frustrating period (I'll get to that) so it's a little bit hard to talk too much about successes. I did win two really big cases this month - one an appeal and the other a more regular immigration case. Both of those left me feeling very happy and personally satisfied, both for the clients and their families and in my own legal abilities.

Frustrations: I realized a while back that my detention cases (client is in jail awaiting "trial") were huge money losers. Basically, no one ever paid after the case was over. So I switched to requiring all the money up front. Since then, I haven't gotten any cases. The good is that they were hugely stressful and time consuming. The bad is that they were good money makers, even if I didn't get paid everything, and they were very interesting. The sort of downside is that while I had a lot of cases in there, I got a lot of referrals. Now that I only have one guy in there, I'm not getting so many referrals. So I'm trying to rethink how to handle them because I do like them.

My second frustration is that, for the first time since I started this a year ago, i have free time on my hands. That scares me.

Third, this is the first post-divorce month. I am making enough money to pay my bills, but I am working on learning how to manage cash flow. It is a bit anxiety-inducing. I actually took out a very low interest line of credit with the bank, but using it sort of feels like failure, so I hate using it.

Anyway, that was my month in review. I think I'm going to make a second post about advertising in a few.

So...advertising. I don't know if this is relevant to anyone else, but I'd love thoughts.

My business (immigration law) is very targeted to the local Spanish speaking community. I'd be open to changing that, but I suspect that maybe as much as 95% of the local non-US citizen public is Spanish speaking.

One of the unique things about this business is that if X is happy with our service, chances are, he personally knows many other people who could use us. Immigration is a family issue and immigrants tend to be friends with other immigrants.

I advertise in a local, free, Spanish language magazine. I have a quarter page ad and I write a monthly column about immigration-related issues. The ad is $175 a month and has been a hugely successful investment. Maybe as much as 50% of the business comes from that ad.

I recently (August) started advertising on the local Spanish speaking new station. That is just under 10x cost of the print ad. We may have gotten 10x the calls and initial appointments, but I have noticed that the people who come in, after having seen us on TV, tend to have problems I can't fix so I don't end up taking their case. But the advertising has resulted in sort of raising awareness of us in the community. But I'm not really sure how that pays off, exactly.

My inclination is to stop the TV advertising. I just don't see the benefit translating into more clients. But am I missing something wrt the whole community awareness thing?