Determining what to charge for your services can be very a difficult decision. “It will forever dominate your destiny”, as Yoda once said to Luke in Star Wars. In my experience, you do not want to start your hourly rate too low, because once you land a few larger clients you will have great difficulty migrating them to a higher hourly rate (that is, if you decide to charge hourly). What you charge hourly should reflect what the market would bear. So in other words, you should try to charge as much as clients are willing to pay …..

Sharing things you have learned is one of the best (and free) ways to gain more business. Clients will come to respect your opinion if you become recognized in your field for a particular area of Web development. For instance, I co-authored a book on Flash usability called Flash 99% Good: A Guide to Macromedia Flash Usability. The book generated a lot of positive PR. Macromedia (now Adobe) featured the book on their site, and the related book site won numerous national design awards …

One of the biggest struggles I have found being a freelancer is keeping in contact with my clients. Sometimes my clients will go five months before they do another project with me. Over time I have learned I need to keep my name and e-mail address in front of them constantly, so they think of me first when they have a new project they are considering. But how do you do this without bugging the hell out of them? These are busy people, so sending them jokes and ? ˜hi how are you doing?’ …

In December 2002, Randy Cohen of the New York Times answered a reader’s ethical question regarding a friend who had used Google to do some background checking on a man she had been on a date with. When she learned that the man, a doctor, had been involved in several malpractice suits, she had a much lower opinion of the man, which presumably affected the relationship.

No matter how great your work is, you can lose a client and damage your reputation if you don’t make a practice of good customer service.   Your client wants to know that the money they’re spending on you is worth it.   They’ll even pay more money for you than your competitors if they value the relationship.   So the key is to endear yourself to your clients by giving them the highest quality service possible.   Here are some basic points on maintaining good customer relationships that can set you apart from the pack:

The following is an interview with Kirill Brusilovsky the founder of the popular site crossmind.net This interview originally appeard in the “Web Designers Success Guide” published several years ago. This information is still useful so I post it here now.

So how do you go about getting a small base of paying clients? The way I started was by simply using my network of friends and associates. I heard it once said that philosophy is common sense dressed up in a 3-piece suite. And it is true even for a one-man-show freelance business. E-mail your friends, family, associates and acquaintances and tell them you are looking for freelance work.

In the spirit of the “Preloader Gallery” we recently featured, I thought it would be nice to share a list of resources for Flash developers to aid their search for high quality preloader source code and ideas. Most of the resources are “artist” friendly, so tweener-types will be fine with these resources …

One of the most important parts of your advertising arsenal is your Web site. Your Web site is the place where you display your product to potential customers. Your product is design and interactive media, and it is important that these potential customers can view a wide range of projects. Often interactive designers will post what they feel is their best work to their Web site. While this is a good idea, I have learned that it is better to have a wide range of styles and types of projects posted online.

Pretty Loaded is an amazing gallery of Flash preloaders. This is a great place to get ideas for your own preloaders. But that being said really you shouldn’t see these bad boys that much these days if you are building your Flash right. Loading things in parts is the way, the truth and the light. But to play devils advocate loaders are a great way of building some excitement into a Flash piece and a great way to brand a project.