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Comment by jwondrusch | Hacker News Reader

It may be unpopular to refer anyone to WordPress, but I made a 5-6 figure income as a freelance developer working with WordPress clients. WordPress is often a good fit for non-tech, small-medium size businesses that do not have an in-house tech department. Many of them will keep coming back as they see the potential that you offer them. If you know PHP, WordPress is easy to pick up. The backwards compatibility emphasis can be frustrating, but if you're working with a client and have server access/control, this becomes a non-factor compared to when you're trying to sell plugins and themes.

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My first jobs are all about Wordpress! :)

I agree we all you say, with wordpress it was easy to find my first job and my first clients keep coming for small features. My worry is about how to move forward.

In my pass day job I build a ecommerce hosting platform with wordpress and it was exciting at the beginning later I didn't like the repetitive tasks and the making the same themes over and over is annoying, my past employer forbidden me to talk directly to the customers and I know they want more good looking websites and they feel they were overcharged, so I decide to go freelance. And right now I'm not finding this unhappy clients.

This sounds like solid advice. I've done freelance work with Wordpress for one of my clients and it showed potential. Any tips on pitching WordPress to those who are not sure what it can do for them? This client, in particular, I was working with was interested in setting up an online store using WooCommerce.

FWIW, I am a developer with strong Linux/unix admin knowledge, and plenty of PHP experience.

As someone who frequently hires Wordpress freelancers, I offer this:

Don't 'sell' the client on using Wordpress relative to other frameworks. They don't need to know the complete power and limitations of the WP ecosystem; that's your job (in their eyes). Just say 'yes.'

>Can I add products later? Yes. >Can I add pages? Yes. >Can I add coupons? Yes. >Does it have SEO? Yes.

It's easy work for someone like you with sysadmin and PHP skills. Your client will love how quickly you can diagnose whatever problems they're having.

Thanks! I think a lot about this, and start changing my profile, at first I was mention the tech skills in my profile I change it to more functional speech.

And I promise I will be less technical when doing proposals. Thanks for your comment I really think a lot about this.

I'm a full-time wordpress developer. Wordpress is diverse enough to be a solid platform for e-commerce, CRM, CMS, and a lot of other social-styled websites. In other words, it's not just for blogs. It's popular enough that it's an easy sell, and there's a ton of work around it.

WordPress is a 10k piece of software that is completely free. You start from there, and explain how and why OSS works, and what work they would be paying for.

If they can understand the "everyone does a little bit" model (an overgeneralization), and understand the value proposition of WordPress, there's not really a lot to sell. Almost everyone can afford a WordPress installation and WordPress can scale to fit almost everyone's needs. Just don't abuse it.

Find out their business problems and talk to them about those. People don't care about the technology (ok, most of them) but they do care about their problems.

Don't even mention wordpress.

More here: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/get-started/

Yes, my early jobs when I was in school was about sysadmin and later learn PHP and Python. at first I sell my profile as a sysadmin expert and reading the comments I feel that was a mistake.

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