As you may have noticed if you’ve been keeping your eye on any Envato website over the last few days, this week it’s our third birthday!

Over the next three days we’ll be giving away three giveaway packs here at FreelanceSwitch. It’s really easy to enter — leave a comment on the post of the day for Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, and we’ll pick our favorite, most value-packed comment from each post. Do your best to provide really great advice for other freelancers on the post’s topic and you’ll be ahead of the game!

Each post that qualifies as part of the competition will have the following sentence at the bottom of the article: “This post is part of our Birthday Giveaway competition — leave an excellent comment for a chance to win!” This announcement post is not, by the way, part of the competition.

These three lucky commenters will receive the following:

• A 12 month subscription to the Job Board
• A copy of Collis and Cyan Ta’eed’s “How to be a Rockstar Freelancer“
• A copy of Pixelmator
• A copy of Billings
• A copy of ForkLift
• A one year “Shuttle Bus” subscription from Freshbooks

The day and life of a freelancer can get pretty hectic. It seems all too often we forget that we hold more than the title “boss”. We forget how best to manage our expenses and disposable income. We remember to tweet what we should be doing and forget to ever do it. We forget how to deal with clients and how to make new ones. And, sadly, we forget why we choose to do it our way rather than someone else’s.

These 12 tricks may not seem to have much to do with each other, but they all lead to the fruition of one goal: optimizing your workflow so you can focus on why you became a freelancer, instead of letting freelancing take over you.

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Behind the scenes at Envato we’re currently toiling away at a brand new site in our Secret Project Compound. We can’t go into specifics right now, except to say that we’re looking for writers! We’ll be featuring content on:

• Productivity
• Office life
• Management and leadership
• Using tools like PowerPoint and Excel effectively

If you know a thing or two about these topics, get in touch with me at joel@envato.com with a few examples of your work and a bit of personal background. Don’t be shy!

We’re recruiting worldwide, but I am hoping some of you in Melbourne, Australia will apply. It makes my job as editor a little bit easier. Don’t be put off applying if you’re in another country, though — a good writer is a good writer!

What we got here is… failure to communicate.

“Cool-Hand Luke” — 1967

Firing a client is an emotionally anguishing action, but one that sometimes is the best strategy in a situation where you can’t see eye-to-eye on the scope of a project and its requirements. How you get to this situation is often a confusing mess of poor contract writing on your part, poor communication of requirements on the client’s part, and a muddle of clarifications, expectations, and sometimes a total lack of understanding by the client of underlying technologies and the possibility that you acted without full understanding of their project needs; all of which leads to their disappointment and your frustration.

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It was back in 2006 that Envato first launched with our very first site FlashDen. That means next week we’ll be turning 3 years old! Since web years are much like dog years, by my count that makes us pretty darn old. Given how we’ve grown, we’ve decided that this year it’s time we really kicked our celebrations up a notch. Next week for 3 days we’re going to have a massive sequence of birthday events, read on to find out what’s happening …

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Change is on my mind. This week has been my first week as a full-time web worker. I feel like I have been initiated into a club, and have a new sense of freedom. My home is my office, my work hours are flexible, and I can wear what I want. I like those changes!

I also find myself thinking about the changes I need to make for my new work situation to be as effective as possible. This week I am away from home, and I have been thinking about major and minor adjustments I will need to make in my work space and lifestyle. My home office has been quite effective on a part-time basis, but will it cut it when I will be there all day (or all night), when I need to concentrate when the kids get home from school, and when I am under pressure to get a task finished?

Here are five issues I need to deal with when I am working from home next week:

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HOW Magazine and our friends at Marketing Mentor, a creative industry consulting firm, are presenting a business conference for self-employed professionals in the creative field this month. It’s called the Creative Freelancer Conference and will run from August 26 – 28, 2009 at the Omni San Diego Hotel.

This event is aimed at graphic designers, copywriters, illustrators and photographers, as well as interactive, interior and industrial design professionals who are operating on their own. If you’re interested in panels, roundtables and workshops on the following topics, you should definitely consider attending:

• marketing and positioning,
• growing a freelance business,
• taking advantage of social media,
• money-saving tax solutions,
• crafting proposals and contracts,
• maintaining a work/life balance

Online registration is now available at CreativeFreelancerConference.com.

30 Fresh and Inspirational Portfolios With a Twist: Running out of inspiration for your own freelance business portfolio site? Here are some unusual—yet interesting and appealing—portfolio designs others have come up with.

The 10 Rock Solid Elements of Effective Online Marketing: This is an in-depth report by Brian Clark of Copyblogger. It’s free and discusses online marketing that works.

15 Useful Twitter Tools For Web Workers: This Freelance Folder articles provides a compilation of Twitter tools that have capabilities useful for web workers in particular. Since Twitter is the only source of social interaction for some freelancers (I kid, but only barely!) having a dedicated app installed could be useful.

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There are certain types of clients I just flat out won’t work with. For these categories of projects, it’s not a question of whether the client will be easy to work with or whether they’ll pay on time. Instead, it’s a question of what I feel comfortable working on — which projects seem ethical to me. If something feels wrong to me, I’m willing to walk away from the money.

Deciding which projects are ethical to take on, though, can be very subjective. What seems perfectly okay to one freelancer is a big problem for another. Most freelancers don’t have a list of projects they consider unethical, or anything like that. I used to fall into that category, but after an uncomfortable situation where I wound up working for a client who used some pretty unethical techniques (by my standards), I’ve come to believe that it’s very important for freelancers to have an idea of what they will and won’t work on going in.

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The thirty-sixth episode of Freelance Radio, the official FreelanceSwitch podcast, is now available! This episode, the panel (John Brougher, Dickie Adams, Kristen Fischer and Von Glitschka) talks about getting from “maybe” to “yes.” Subscriptions to the podcast are available via iTunes and an archive of all podcasts will appear in the podcast section. We hope you enjoy it!
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