Keeping Trade Secrets, Well, Secret

The Internet is awash with people telling us how to make money online, how to be a better writer, how to get more jobs through Guru.com, and other important tidbits of information. Although I am the first person to tell you NOT to believe everything you read on the web, there is often a nugget or two of actual value in these blog posts and articles (especially if you’re reading them here on Freelance Parent!). After all, a blog like ours is designed to be transparent – we share what’s going on in our freelance business, what works, what doesn’t, our successes, and all the missteps we make along the way.

That being said, I’d like to let you in on a little secret…you don’t know all our secrets. That’s right. There are some business practices that Lorna and I keep to ourselves – and have no intention of ever divulging.

The reason I bring this up is because we just hired a virtual assistant to help us with some of our weekly administrative tasks. (Yay us!) In order to allow her to do her job properly, we will have to share one of these well-guarded trade secrets. Oh, it’s not the one-word answer to finding high-paying jobs or an instant code for access to Elance’s back door; these things are the Holy Grail of the freelancing world, and we gave up searching for them after our first attempt at the last crusade. Really, it’s just a neat little trick we discovered for landing clients who might be on the fence about hiring us. If we shared it, it would diminish its effectiveness, so we keep it to ourselves and reap a few benefits.

Now, I’m really excited about our VA, and I have no qualms about giving her this little secret of ours to further our business, but it did make me start to think about the other secrets being clutched to virtual bosoms around the freelancing community.

In reality, trade secrets are nothing new. Coca-Cola has one. The Colonel has one. They’ve been around for as long as healthy competition has been driving big business, and most of us aren’t really affected by them. Because, really, how many of us aspire to re-create the taste of Coke and open up a beverage conglomerate?

However, when you start to look at these kinds of secrets on a different type of scale – say on the scale of hundreds of freelancers vying for a single job and only one landing it – these secrets actually take on a pretty big meaning. They can even mean the difference between success and struggle.

While I’m certainly not asking anyone to divulge what they might guard as their own trade secret of freelancing, I am curious if this is more common than it first appears. Do you share all the tricks you’ve learned to boost your business, or are there just some things you nourish as your own?