If you don't have a large variety of jobs to pick and choose from, you're not doing it right.
I'm going to rant here a moment...
The secret to getting more work than you can handle (and charging $100/hr, which is not difficult)... DONT SUCK.
I swear to god, 95% of people out there suck, your competition.
Send emails to your phone, and answer them right away when you're out and about, even on weekends or when you're out having a drink. If you're busy, just say you got their email and will get back to them when youre in the office. Try to answer < 15 minutes.
The amount of replies I hear that say "wow you are so responsive and get back so fast, I love it" is a lot more than you would expect. These are my repeat clients. These are your people and you should take care of them.
It's SO easy too, and so many people wait days to reply. That doesn't mean you need to always be working either, or that you need to suddenly be at the mercy of your email, it just means be responsive to inquiries. VERY responsive.
As far as working, dont leave loose ends. This usually means fixing up those little nagging issues that they probably won't notice. Leave them with something stellar, and go the extra mile even if it means only 5 minutes of work extra fixing something they never asked you to fix or paid you for. It takes 5 minutes, and makes a tremendous impression on them.
I'm making this statistic up, but based on what I see it's gotta be over 90% of people don't do just a few simple things. They take a while to reply, deliver sub-par product, don't communicate well... it has nothing to do with their actual site or product they're delivering, just how they handle themselves, then they whine about not having work. (flurpitude, I'm not referring to you as whining, just people in general).
PS: it seems counter intuitive (I'm going to get a lot MORE bs work and bs replies), but it actually seems to eliminate them entirely. People respect your time and your skill, and they dont' waste your time with stupid questions or emails. They're also willing to pay top dollar for your services without giving you a hard time or anything.
You might be right about that. I'd like to offer another perspective, though: if you get into the habit of quickly replying to all emails, I think your clients will develop an expectation that you'll always quickly reply to emails, which it's not always possible or desirable to do, at least for me.
Also, if you immediately attend to every email that hits your inbox, that means you probably won't have contiguous chunks of real productivity in your workdays.
I usually wait a good couple hours to reply to any email, even if I'm not particularly busy when I receive the message. This a) sets an expectation for responsiveness that I can live up to, b) allows me to have contiguous chunks of productivity (I often close email entirely, which my clients know), and c) demonstrates to my clients that a certain level of discipline: I'm not jumping on every email, tweet, etc. that comes my way right when I see it (not that I think that's what TallboyOne is suggesting - he's talking about work-related emails).
None of this is meant to be a criticism of anything TallboyOne has said. What works for him might work better for some people than what works for me.
That is indeed true, but the part I left out for brevity is the part about client expectations, which must also be handled. I disagree however that it makes you appear needy. If you ARE needy, you're going to seem needy no matter what you do. I can assure you though the client would rather have you reply sooner than later... just set the expectation that you can drop them at any time (subtly obviously, you wouldn't say that to their face).
Consider the following scenario:
A) Email exchange which takes 2 days, for a fix to a site... you quote $800 and they hesitate
B) An email exchange where you take no more than 2 minutes to reply, even at 11pm. They are happy that you got back to them so quickly, and you quote $2000. They agree.
This happens quite a lot in my experience. To the point where it's extremely noticeable and can't be chalked up to coincidence.
I just mentioned what works. If your goal is to get a huge amount of work for $100-200 an hour, then replying right away will get you significantly there (skill aside). Everyone waits hours to respond, so it's the norm. If you want to stand out, you need to be outside the norm.
As far as being at the mercy of your email, in practice this genuinely doesn't really mean any difference than if I wait. You're still going to write the email, it's just a matter of when. My productivity remains the same. If I'm very deep in a project, chances are I need a break anyway (I'm bad with taking breaks when I need them). If I'm really busy with some other task common sense would be required, obviously there are exceptions.
Sidenote: I don't necessarily do this with well-established clients who I've worked with for years. They already know the scoop. I'm more talking about new people, new leads, new projects where they don't recognize your value yet.
I'm going to rant here a moment...
The secret to getting more work than you can handle (and charging $100/hr, which is not difficult)... DONT SUCK.
I swear to god, 95% of people out there suck, your competition.
Send emails to your phone, and answer them right away when you're out and about, even on weekends or when you're out having a drink. If you're busy, just say you got their email and will get back to them when youre in the office. Try to answer < 15 minutes.
The amount of replies I hear that say "wow you are so responsive and get back so fast, I love it" is a lot more than you would expect. These are my repeat clients. These are your people and you should take care of them.
It's SO easy too, and so many people wait days to reply. That doesn't mean you need to always be working either, or that you need to suddenly be at the mercy of your email, it just means be responsive to inquiries. VERY responsive.
As far as working, dont leave loose ends. This usually means fixing up those little nagging issues that they probably won't notice. Leave them with something stellar, and go the extra mile even if it means only 5 minutes of work extra fixing something they never asked you to fix or paid you for. It takes 5 minutes, and makes a tremendous impression on them.
I'm making this statistic up, but based on what I see it's gotta be over 90% of people don't do just a few simple things. They take a while to reply, deliver sub-par product, don't communicate well... it has nothing to do with their actual site or product they're delivering, just how they handle themselves, then they whine about not having work. (flurpitude, I'm not referring to you as whining, just people in general).
PS: it seems counter intuitive (I'm going to get a lot MORE bs work and bs replies), but it actually seems to eliminate them entirely. People respect your time and your skill, and they dont' waste your time with stupid questions or emails. They're also willing to pay top dollar for your services without giving you a hard time or anything.