The Freelance Herald

Not every client is created equal. That’s probably the first thing people ever learn when they first embark on freelancing, and it’s something that sticks with you for the rest of your life.

I spoke to a client today who simply could not have been more awkward, or to put it another way, lazy. I shouldn’t have taken the project in the first place, but I had already written for an almost identical project for the same client, and thought it would be quicker than the first time round. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

Despite the fact that I was charging this client the same rate, for the same amount of content, on the same subject matter, suddenly everything had changed. I completed the project over a period of about 3 days. It took me longer than I had expected, but I think that’s because I had pretty much just gotten bored of the subject matter by that point.

I handed in the work this morning, expecting no problems, since the work was of a high quality and exactly what she had asked for. This time around, however, she replied by asking me to “take out the generic sentences”. Obviously, I’m not going to get into the details of the subject matter, but needless to say, this whole project was about as  “generic” as they come.

I never hand in work that I don’t think is of extremely high quality and to the client’s specifications. When I write something that is “generic”, that doesn’t mean that I just throw in some cliches and get it done as quickly as possible. If anything, it takes me longer to write something “generic”, because I have to find original ways of conveying a very similar message numerous times.

So I went and looked back at the project, and started visualizing it without the “generic sentences”. I quickly realised, as I had feared, that this would be impossible, because it would take out about half the content. It’s worth saying that this content wasn’t “fluff”, it’s all well-researched and specific information, but it’s just being conveyed slightly differently over and over again. I guess the problem was that the client couldn’t visualize the articles individually. By this I mean that, on their own, the articles were excellent. Put them on a web page and people will read them. However, if you put them all onto the same web page, it starts to get a bit repetitive, and I think my client got cold feet about this.

I quite politely told my client that taking out the generic content wasn’t really an option. I offered, therefore, to spend more time picking out individual facts and information that hadn’t previously been part of the scope of the project. She was relatively happy about this. I, admittedly, was not.

Spending an extra few hours working on a project that I had already completed is not my idea of fun. It’s also financially crippling, because I wasn’t going to be able to charge this client any more for my extra work.

The next part was even more infuriating. The client asked me to remove very specific words from the content. For example, I had been using “the” before the name of particular places. This is hard to describe without giving details of the project, but here’s a completely random example that is unrelated to the work:

“The Athena Hotel in Paris is one of…”

The content was well over 10,000 words, and I had used this sort of phrasing dozens of times. I therefore had to scour through the content and remove each and every instance of it. Now, this might sound silly, but it strikes to me that my client was just being lazy by this point. It probably only took me 10 minutes to do, but by the time I had replied to my client’s e-mail with the new version, an hour had gone by. Why did my client simply not to do it himself? This just seems bizarre to me, and I think it was a pretty exploitative way of using my services. I had used that type of phrasing many times in previous content for the same client, and to suddenly turn around and order for that to be erased after the content had already been written, is very frustrating. I shouldn’t have been annoyed, but I was. I was not being paid any extra for my time, and my client knew that, yet was happily making me spend hours of my time helping him.

So eventually, after hours of talking and tweaks, the project was finally completed. Was it worth it? Probably not. Did I have any choice once I had started the project? No.

The point here is that I went the extra mile in order to keep my client happy. From our e-mail exchange, my client probably has no idea that I was tearing my hair out and wondering when I could finally end the project.

Making sure your clients are happy, no matter how painful it is sometimes, is absolutely key. There are so many different aspects to this, that I can’t really list them all. It’s enough to say that I could have received bad feedback on Elance, lost future work, and severed ties with a client who had previously been very reasonable.

If you aren’t prepared to go the extra mile, then you might as well get out of the freelancing game right now. It’s not always fun and games, and I’m thankful that situations like the above barely ever happen to me, but when they do, you’ve just go to buckle down.

Awkward clients exist in every industry, it’s just a matter of dealing with them as well as you can. Politeness is absolutely key to this, and so is keeping control of your temper. This is one reason why I prefer e-mail communication; there’s no room for an argument or tensions to get heated through an e-mail exchange.