Every successful company aligns its working strategies towards the same corporate objectives: profitability, liquidity, growth, and customer loyalty. This applies not only to Fortune 500 businesses, but also to small enterprises. In particular, top RAC sellers (be it a team of coders, or a self employed programmer) base their work on these premises.

A seller-buyer's agreement on RentACoder is no different to a standard service purchase agreement. Buyers look for competitive sellers, and sellers compete to obtain high added value customers. Your job as a seller should be to follow the same principles that make a company successful:

* Profitability: the efficiency of a company or industry at generating earnings.

* Liquidity: companies have to pay bills to staff and suppliers, it is the basic ability of a company to carry on. Liquidity is about increasing and/or optimizing a company's cash flow.

* Growth: ability to obtain competitive advantage by increasing revenue and/or downsizing cost.

* Customer loyalty: the degree to which customers are predisposed to stay with one company and resist competitive offers.

Now, how do these four objectives apply to your RAC performance? First of all, you should always try to secure your company's liquidity. Not only because liquidity is your ability to stay in business, but also because it lets you subcontract other RAC coders when the need arises.

To increase your liquidity, you will need to focus on your profitability. You won't only become more profitable when you increase your revenues, but also when you downsize your cost, that is, the amount of hours spent to generate a specific income. As a coder, you can achieve this optimization by building your new jobs on previously built elements, as much as possible. The more work you reutilize, the lesser hours you will need to complete a project.

Maintain a set of returning customers by focusing on their loyalty to your work. Take into consideration that most projects offered in RentACoder come from returning customers, so seize that market by reaching your customers' goals on time, and even exceeding their expectations.

Finally, you should always let growth be one of your main objectives. Try to constantly improve your RAC ranking, giving your coder account a higher status, and thus being able to bid on bigger projects.

OUR OWN EXPERIENCE
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Even though we signed up for a RAC account over two years ago, we only started using it actively about 11 months ago. Since then, we managed to reach the top 130 coder list, with over 62 jobs completed, and an average rating of 10. We did so by closely following these principles, and applying them to our day to day activity in RentACoder.

Since we also learned from other seller articles at RAC, we've decided to share with the community our own custom advice: coder to coder. These tips will help you put the above mentioned corporate objectives into practice. Don't expect to become a top coder overnight.  But if you consciously apply these concepts to your work, the path to higher rankings will become easier.

* Only bid for jobs that you are sure you can complete in time. Clear out any doubts you may have by asking the buyer questions, giving your own set of recommendations on how to possibly make the job a better experience, and only bidding a price when you and the buyer have specified the complete scope of the project. It is better to get these things out in the open at the beginning, rather than risking a potential arbitration.

* When doing a job in RAC, document everything. Your interactions with the buyer should always be logged through RAC's portal, especially when you communicate with your buyer through other channels. Even if you think that both of you (buyer and seller) have an excellent understanding, protect yourself by following RentACoder rules, and being ready for an arbitration, if one ever arises.

* Take care of your customer. Communicate as much as you can what you are doing, and answer every question the buyer may have. Responsiveness is closely tied to a customer's perception of good service. Don't only communicate progress, but also any deviations from original planning. It is almost inevitable that some projects may exceed their originally set deadline, but if you give your buyer a heads up long before the deadline, most of buyers are understanding enough to give you an extension without risking a bad rating.

* Always push for the extra mile. Concentrate on the quality of service you provide to your customers. Sometimes, small things like adding almost insignificant features to a project proves the buyer your commitment to your work, and earns you their higher estimation. But don't do it expecting a bonus! Do it because you believe in it, or don't do it at all.

* Stay responsive even if the project was completed. You should pursue new customers, but most importantly, you should try to gain your already existing customer's loyalty. If you stay in touch after a project has finished, and after doing a great job, you will become the first seller in mind your customers will have when offering new jobs.

* Keep a record of all your RAC customers, documenting different projects you did for them, and several things you found on the way. Knowing your customers will be key to better serving them. You need to understand their understanding of value. Knowing how your customers experience value and then delivering on those terms is critical to building strong customer loyalty.

* Pursue your growth. The more projects you complete on RAC, and the higher your ranking is within RAC coder's list, the better positioned you are to search for bigger projects. Don't settle for what you know, try always to improve your skills by learning new technologies, new concepts, and become able to bid on jobs you couldn't initially obtain.