Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers from the freelance community.

Each week, we’ll feature a selection of the best job opportunities posted for the week. This week, we’re featuring jobs in Web Design, Payment App Development, Facebook App Development and more!

To apply for any of these jobs, simply pick up a FreelanceSwitch membership for an affordable $7 a month. See something you like? Join now!

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What is your goal at a networking event?

Are you looking to land new clients, make industry specific connections, or just mingle with fellow freelancers?

As you prepare to attend a networking mixer, choose a specific goal, such as writing web copy for nonprofits. Networking expert Kelly Jan says: “Save time by ensuring that you’re going to an event that either has people that need your services, or people who sell to those people.” Continue Reading

Every five weeks or so, our team finishes up another issue of our magazine. The last week of production is always the most stressful. We send our issues to our printer on a Tuesday, and then we all sit back and collectively sigh with relief.

Those Tuesdays always feel like Fridays to me due to my adrenaline rush. By Wednesday, I am exhausted…but I still have the rest of the week to do…something! These three days, and sometimes the week after, are the slowest days in our production cycle, and while I really don’t feel like doing a whole heck of a lot…I have to keep pushing forward.

Here are some ideas I found online on how to stay productive when there isn’t a whole lot on your plate: Continue Reading

The difference between disarray and efficiency can be compared to having a Mac truck tread on your forehead or having yourself a weekly afternoon massage.

Okay, so maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but you get the picture. Most small business owners have been there at some point or another. And some muddle around in a sort of chaotic-like business environment for the majority of their years as business owners. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. You can have a balanced, successful, and growing business.

You can choose to transform that awesome vision into the reality of a living, breathing, growing, “smooth like butter” business. The following tips should help you get started creating a strategic alignment for your freelance business. In other words, you will learn how to streamline your business into something that is manageable and relatively pain free.

In The Beginning There Was… A Map!

So, what strategies can be implemented to streamline your freelance business and make it run most adequately? Efficiency in your business begins with a framework, a guide — a MAP.

You need to map out where you are and where you want to go, and connect those two essential areas with the smoothest, quickest routes. Here are six tips on creating a map for a smooth, well-run small business.

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There very well may come a time in your freelance career where you need to hire a freelance contractor to help you out on a project. Perhaps your expertise doesn’t quite match what your client needs, or you are so busy you need someone else to help you reach your deadline. No matter the reason, you need to think carefully about who you hire to help you out.

Check References

Asking for a resume and checking references is an important thing to do whether you know the freelance contractor or not. I would do this before hiring anyone—especially friends or people you know well outside of a business relationship.

“If this person can’t name a few people they’ve worked with who can say good things about them, it’s not someone I should gamble on financially,” says Nicole Ouellette of Breaking Even Communications.

Know that when you do call people about the freelance contractor in question, they aren’t always allowed by law to tell you everything about that person. One good question to ask is, “Would you hire this person again?” If they say no, that’s a huge red flag. Continue Reading

To many designers, “revisions” can be a dirty word.

I think the reason for this is the fact that these three little syllables can have so many radically different meanings from project to project. It’s unpredictable. Revisions are normal, even expected in virtually every project. The trick is to be smart and proactive from the very beginning of each project in order to streamline and get the most out of the revision process. Because if you don’t properly plan, you can end up on a never-ending logo revision merry-go-round. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have the stomach for that.

While it is rare to nail what the client is going for in round one, it’s gratifying to be able to get it right by round two or three. There are several things you can do to stack those odds in your favor from the very beginning. Continue Reading

I recently wrote a blog post sharing the news that The Times-Picayune out of New Orleans, Louisiana, will cease to produce a daily newspaper. Instead, the company will be printing three days a week and ramping up their online news gathering for their website. New Orleans will be the largest city in the U.S. without a daily newspaper.

There’s been a big shake-up at a couple of other national newspapers as well.

The Denver Post has decided to do away with its copy desk, spreading the copy-editing duties throughout the newsroom. The pros to this model? Stories can be published to the web faster because they don’t need to be read and edited by so many people. The cons? Stories have a greater chance of being printed with errors. Continue Reading

I’ve been spending a lot of time working out of coworking spaces lately. I’m a big fan of having a place I can just drop into and work from, especially if I’m going to be away from my home office anyhow.

I’ve noticed a trend: many coworking spaces are launched by freelancers. Often, there’s a freelancer who wants to work anywhere but in her own home, so she gets a couple of other people together and rents a space. I’ve seen both incredibly successful versions of this model and some dismal failures.

Coworking Spaces are Businesses, Too

There’s a common complaint among the freelancers who also operate coworking spaces: “I didn’t realize it was going to be so much work!” It’s not an uncommon thought for a freelancer in general — considering many of us start out as some sort of creative professional without as much business training as we’d like. Opening a coworking space is just as much a business as freelancing, even if you operate as a non-profit.

Opening a coworking space is just as much a business as freelancing, even if you operate as a non-profit.

There are considerations far beyond a freelance business, too: rent, physical location and insurance all play major roles. It’s these details that can trip up someone not used to renting out office space. They take time to sort out and time is a precious commodity for many freelancers.

Unless we’re getting paid for our time, it can be tough to dedicate so much effort to building a coworking space, rather than spending those same hours on client work.

But there are payoffs to taking the lead on creating a coworking space. Continue Reading

Part guesswork, part experience, part number crunching – how ever you look at it, determining your price is a difficult task. Here are nine factors to take into consideration when pricing your services:

1. Your Costs

If your rate doesn’t include enough just to break-even, you’re heading for trouble. The best thing to do is sum up all your costs and divide by the number of hours you think you can bill a year. Whatever you do, DON’T think you can bill every hour. You must account for sick days, holidays, hours working on the business, hours with no work and so on.

Also make sure you factor in all the hidden costs of your business like insurance, invoices that never get paid for one reason or another, and everyone’s favourite – taxes.

2. Your Profit

Somewhat related to your costs, you should always consider how much money you are trying to make above breaking even. This is business after all.

3. Market Demand

If what you do is in high demand, then you should be aiming to make your services more expensive. Conversely if there’s hardly any work around, you’ll need to cheapen up if you hope to compete.

Signs that demand is high include too much work coming in, other freelancers being overloaded and people telling you they’ve been struggling to find someone to do the job. Signs that demand is low include finding yourself competing to win jobs, a shortage of work and fellow freelancers reentering the workforce. Continue Reading

If you do any work in the realm of journalism, you have probably heard, over and over again, that print is dying. Well, recently, part of it actually did.

This fall, New Orleans will be the largest U.S. city without a daily newspaper. The Times-Picayune, with a weekday circulation of 134,000 and Sunday circulation of 155,000, will be published only on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.

The Times-Picayune, which has published since 1837, was bought by the Newhouse family in 1962 and later merged with the afternoon daily. Up to now, the paper has avoided some of the deeper cuts in the industry, in part because the newspaper played such a critical role in the coverage of Katrina and its aftermath. —NYTimes

Poynter.org points out that before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and its population, the paper had a weekday circulation of 257,000 and 285,000 on Sundays.

“I think this is a big blow,” said Poynter business analyst Rick Edmonds. “Yes, it’s happened in a few places, but Saginaw and New Orleans are not the same thing. You’re talking about a major-league city.” —Poynter.org

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Last week I had a brilliant idea: I would teach my 3-year-old son to use the digital camera! Then he would learn a valuable skill! And become a famous photographer!

As you can tell, I was pretty excited.

So I showed T-Rex how to hold the camera, and look through the viewfinder at what he wanted to take a picture of, and press the button. I wrapped the carry cord around his wrist so he wouldn’t drop the camera and let him loose, first inside and then outside. Continue Reading

It’s that time of year when thousands upon thousands of twentysomethings don caps and gowns of every sort of color and graduate from colleges and universities around the world. They have a spring in their step and stars in their eyes. Or at least they will until they have to find a job.

I had the luck of graduating twice, earning my bachelor’s degree and master’s degree during two recessions. The first was the dotcom bubble, the second was the start of the current recession in 2006. I have impeccable timing!

But I ended up landing on my feet—it just took a little longer than I had expected. I always worked, whether it was waiting tables at a restaurant outside of Fenway Park in Boston (where, admittedly, I made boatloads of money in tips) or working my way up from a receptionist to becoming the sole marketing person at a mid-sized staffing agency. I bided my time, worked hard, and kept my eyes open for other great opportunities.

When I felt uninspired, I started freelance writing, which led me to enrolling in NYU’s journalism school for my graduate degree. Graduating in another economic slump, I didn’t wait so long to start freelancing, and eventually landed an editing job at a great magazine.

In the early 2000′s blogs didn’t exist in my world. There was no social media to speak of. Finding a job was completely different. So what’s a new journalism grad to do? Continue Reading