Good question. You have to get past that weird feeling. It’s ok to charge people even if they are friends. Now if my mom or my brother asked me to build her a site I’m going to do it for free, but most family and friends should pay.

The main thing is for you to accept that you deserve to be paid and bring up the conversation. I find mentioning price sooner rather than later works.

If your friends and family think you should work for free then you should walk into their place of business and ask for free work from them. I would think if you have a friend who owns a store and you walk in and take something off the shelf he’s going to expect you to pay for it. When he does remind him that he thinks friends shouldn’t charge each other. Hopefully he’ll see why you deserve to be paid too.

The main thing though is really accepting this yourself and just saying no to free work. Sure, for some friends and family you’ll want to work for free or at a discount, but for most you need to be strong and let them know how much the work will cost as soon as possible.

It’ll be hard at first, but I promise it will get easier. Most of your friends and family know they should pay. Most people try to get away with not paying if they can.

I should have mentioned business plans. I did create an informal one for myself. No one but me has ever read it or will, but it did help me a lot in setting the direction for my business.

I have 2 more posts planned on this subject and I think I’ll mention the business plan in the next one for this coming Thursday.

I didn’t include it here, but I did do some free sites early on with my partner in the earlier business. None of those freebies ever led to more work, but they did help me gain the skills I need to later sell my work. And it did give me something to place in my portfolio when I started again.

With that said it usually helps to get an answer in forums if you’ve put in a little effort to answer your own question first. Lots of times the people who don’t want to be bothered are just tired of answering the same question again and again. Most will still help if you mention you searched for an answer before asking the question. Also the more detail you can provide about what you have tried and didn’t work, the better the answers that follow.

When I took the php job, I did know php. I wasn’t completely new to it, but still I wasn’t all that confident in taking the project. Turned out to be a win-win in the end though.

I have one question though… I have actually worked on 8-10 freelance projects now, but all for friends and family. I haven’t charged anything for those projects. It feels weird to charge friends/family, but at the same time, after a certain point of time, it starts to seem like a waste of time to not charge.

What are your suggestions with regard to this?

Thanks in advance! I will definitely try out the forums.

One thing I would state though is make sure you have the right skills for the job before you offer your services on a commercial basis. There are far too many web designers out there who clearly offer a sub-standard service and have limited skills but still offer their services on a commercial basis. This is bad business ethics. If you need experience then offer your services to free to a charity or get involved in building themes and templates for Open Source projects.

In regards to marketing what we are really talking about here is creating a business plan. I would seriously recommend finding some professional advice here and a place where you can find valuable one-to-one help. In a big city like London that is fairly easy, in rural areas, not so.

I also like your story about working for free initially. I think it’s a good idea to maybe get involved with community projects when you’re just starting out – that way, a load of people will get to know you very quickly through just one or two projects.