The Freelancers Scoresheet

Over the Christmas break I wrote a one-page marketing plan for my business. On it I decided what my goals for the 2010 Game of Freelancing were going to be and how I wanted to go about achieving them.

Just as every game needs a system to keep track of the score and figure out who’s winning, I’ve built a Weekly Scoresheet to keep track of my performance as a freelancer and give me a kick up the ass when the other team is beating me.

The most important factor in me building a freelancer’s Scoresheet is that I’m lousy at keeping score, so I (a) decided to track only the metrics I consider vital to my business, and (b) built a system to track this information within my WordPress Admin panel.

In my marketing plan I set out exactly what improvements I feel are necessary for each metric I’ll be tracking, giving me something to work towards.

1. My Blog

I notice an increase in sales leads when I post articles on my blog. I figure that a good measure of the number of people actively taking part in a community is to set up tracking for RSS subscribers and website visitors, so I set up 5 metrics:

• Feedburner average visitors. I could have chosen Feedburner’s actual subscriber number, but that feature always seems to be broken, so I chose an average subscriber count in the hope of smoothing out the bumps.
• Feedburner reach. Reach is the number of people who opened a feed in their feed reader, and took action (like clicking through to your site, or on a link in your article). Reach is important because it shows your much influence you have over your readers.
• Google Analytics Visitors. The number of people visiting my blog on a weekly basis is important because I can use this information to calculate what percentage of visitors send sales inquiries, giving me an idea of how much income I can safely predict. Granted, this data isn’t always going to give me accurate information, but it’s better than nothing.
• Google Analytics Pageviews. I included this metric to see how well I’m doing at keeping people’s interest. If people are clicking through to 3 or 4 articles on my site, I’m obviously doing something right.
• Google Analytics Bounce rate. I don’t really understand the technicalities behind bounce rate, but I do know mine is too high. I figure that if the quality of my content is high enough, fewer visitors will simply move on without taking part.

2. Twitter

Twitter also plays a major role in my marketing strategy and I believe most of the people who follow me have the power to make or break my business.

• Twitter Followers. The obvious metric for Twitter is the number of followers I have. I don’t go trawling for new followers, but I do hope more people follow me based on what I say on Twitter.
• Twitter re-tweets. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to track this yet but I’m sure someone will tell me the blindingly obvious methods available. Tracking the number of people who re-tweet an update shows how worthwhile my Twitter updates are. No re-tweets = no worthwhile content = sort your shit out Dave!

3. Money

Money is kind of important to me. It makes life a lot easier when you have enough to pay the bills. I’m not an accountant though, so I track only 2 metrics in Paypal (I use Paypal for all my payments).

• Paypal Balance. This is a simple weekly summary of money in (what I’ve earned) vs. money out (usually what I’ve blown on crappy ebooks). It tells me how I’ve done and whether or not I need to sell my kids to pay the rent.

4. Sales Leads

Finally, I track sales leads on my own website. You may think I blog, Tweet and stumble my way around the Interwebs for fun, but there’s a point to all of this: I’m here to build relationships with people who need what I have to offer.

• thinkdave.com inquiry form submissions. My contact page has a simple form that emails me details of people who want to ask me questions, complain that my promised Thesis skin release is late, hurl abuse or sell me something.
  I use the Gravity Forms plugin for WordPress to do this and can take a quick look at my WordPress admin panel each week to see how many people have used my contact page to get in touch.
• thinkdave.com RFQ form submissions. I also have a form on my PSD to Thesis page for new prospects to send me an inquiry about their Thesis coding projects. These projects are my lifeblood so it’s important to measure the number of leads I’m generating and take corrective measures if the numbers are too low.

Building the Scoresheet using WordPress and Gravity Forms

I have a really short attention span so I need a system that doesn’t require too much mental input on my part. I wanted to have my Scoresheet data saved online somewhere, and I usually end up working in my WordPress admin area at least once a week. So I decided to use Gravity Forms again (See how useful this plugin is? You should buy it) to build my Scoresheet. I simply built a new Form, added my ten fields and placed the form on a WordPress Page nobody would think to look for.

Time from start to finish; 3 minutes. I also noindexed the Page using Thesis’ built in function just to make sure nobody lands on it. If it does get found and I do get a few rogue entries it’s no crisis. I’ll just trash them.

The Scoresheet serves 3 purposes:

1. I can see at a glance how my business is doing as soon as I log into WordPress.
2. I can use Gravity Forms Export function to send a bunch of weekly Scoresheets to an Excel spreadsheet where I can play around with the data to my heart’s content.
3. Bonus: I also set up a notification function within Gravity Forms that sends me an email with each report’s data, which prints nicely just in case I ever need to destroy a tree and fill a file.

Thoughts

• Yes, I could have done this in an Excel/Google Docs spreadsheet, but where’s the fun in that?
• This way I’ve got my data in a database and I can access it whenever I’m online. I probably won’t but you never know.
• I can’t think of a quicker way to record data. From end to end this is a 1 minute job, once a week.

So what do you think? Is this a waste of time? Am I measuring the right metrics? How would you/did you build a Weekly Scoresheet for your freelance business. Let me know in the comments.

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