Web Designer’s Guide To Copywriting Profits

If a web design agency wants to increase their sales, there’s one way that’s easier and quicker than the rest: sell copywriting services.

When you sell copywriting to your clients, their websites will achieve more sales and better results.

In addition, your projects will run more smoothly and efficiently.

Busting the Top 3 Guest Blogging Myths

What’s smarter? Putting all your eggs into your own blog basket or placing a few real fine blog posts on another person’s blog? If you’ve pondered these thoughts, keep reading…

Guest blogging has been around for a long time, but it’s an especially hot topic now. With the concept becoming even hotter daily, it’s quite natural that myths emerge. Continue Reading

credit: milesdeelite on Flickr

Being a freelance web designer certainly has its perks. You get to make your own hours, set your own rates, and control your own professional destiny. I’d add that designing for the web, like any freelance field, is a craft that most of us are truly passionate about. There’s something about the merging of beautiful design and cutting edge technology that keeps our creative juices flowing and keeps us endlessly engaged in our work.

But as any freelancer or small business owner knows, sketching diagrams, arranging pixels and constructing code make up only a small part of this profession. At the beginning and the end of the day, it’s still a business, which brings it’s own inherent challenges. At the top of the list is something we all must deal with every day: managing client expectations.

In this article, I intend to cover several aspects of working with clients as a freelance web designer (but these tips apply to any freelance profession, really). These are all based on my own experiences and lessons learned the hard way.

The tips I offer here will benefit not only the health and stability of your business, but your own personal health and well-being as well. Stress is a killer. When you’re running your own business, stress often goes unnoticed to outsiders as and sometimes yourself. By effectively managing your client relationships, you’re also keeping your own stress level in check. When you’re feeling good, you do good work and prosper. It’s as simple as that. So let’s get into it. Continue Reading

credit: hito.fr on Flickr

Photography blogs can be great ways to funnel new visitors and potential clients to your photography work. I’ve been photoblogging for almost three years. Here are seven things that I’ve learned: Continue Reading

Working with clients is a tough job but someone has to do it, and most of the time it’s us! While the concept of giving your clients exactly what they ask for seems a daunting task, I’ve come to accept that there are certain invaluable truths which freelancers need to underpin. It’s an unfortunate fact of nature that we will all suffer at the wrath of a bad client at some stage, but using the following five essential rules, you can build a client relationship that makes the most of your abilities. Continue Reading

credit: whateva87 @ Flickr

This is the second article in my series of resources for the traveling freelancer.  You can find the first one here.

Finding Friends & a Place to Live through Hospitality Exchange

When traveling extensively a person starts to feel a bit alone and her wallet starts to get lean quickly.  Measures must be taken to alleviate these negative side effects when living out a dream!  An option for the adventurous traveling freelancer is a hospitality exchange, which is good every once in a while but will interfere with your work if you do it often.  Through sites like Hospitality Club and CouchSurfing travelers can stay with local members for cultural exchange and free accommodation in most cases.

A good experience can end in guest and host becoming friends, while in a bad experience host or guest might steal from the other. For obvious reasons, it is really important to be conscious about safety.  I have been a couchsurfer for more than three years, and I have made several good “couchsurfing friends” through hosting and surfing.  I also have been stood up by guests and made to feel uncomfortable by male hosts.  There are many positive and negative aspects of using couchsurfing, most of which can be applied to similar sites: Continue Reading

The response to our recent competition for photos submitted to our FreelanceSwitch photo pool on Flickr was huge–we received over 1,500 submissions! Due to the high number of fantastic photos, I called in FreelanceSwitch’s resident forums moderators, Eliffio and Amber, to help pick the winners. Check out all the submissions in the gallery. Without further ado…on to the winners! Continue Reading

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Sick of being cooped up in the home office (or bedroom as the case may be?) DesksNear.Me is a new service that helps you find the nearest co-working locations to your home.

Co-working locations are offices specifically set up so that freelancers can work in an office-like space around other likeminded people. While many freelancers get out of their day jobs so they can work from home, just as many of us aren’t capable of getting any work done unless we’re out of the house. Those Seinfeld re-runs can be awfully tempting.

DesksNear.Me will try to discern your location and help you quickly find a location, or you can use the search function if your location can’t be determined, or you’re planning a workspace for a working holiday. Once you select a place from a map, you’ll see a page with availability and other relevant information. For instance, here’s the page for the OpenHub, a place a much younger Envato called its office for some time.

If you run a co-working space, you can add it to the DesksNear.Me directory for free–just fill out a few questions about your location, number of desks, booking preferences and provide a general description. For now it’s free to list all types of co-working space but in the future those who charge for a desk may need to pay a listing fee.

DesksNear.Me was developed for the Rails Rumble and came in at 6th place. Congratulations to developers Keith, Warren, Bodaniel and Alex! Some of you may know Alex as a marketplace user and the developer of the Sales Summit iPhone app for tracking your marketplace sales.

Check out DesksNear.Me.

Balancing Work Priorities as an Entrepreneur

We sometimes view entrepreneurs as those born with creative genius or great business acumen, that are able to somehow magically transform their business idea into a successful and profitable venture.

How to Deal With Nightmare Clients

Regardless of how smoothly your business may operate, no one is completely immune to criticism and controversy. With BP’s disastrous oil spill continuing to dominate the headlines almost three months after it took place, it’s becoming alarmingly clear that even the world’s most powerful and formerly respected brands can take a hit online. Continue Reading

In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, Travis King and Thursday Bram look at how to impress and when to register your business.

Ask FreelanceSwitch is a regular column here that allows us to help beginners get a grip on freelancing. If you have a question about freelancing that you want answered, send an email to askfreelanceswitch@gmail.com.

Let’s make it happen.
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Credit: Ryantron.@Flickr

I’ve been working with an online virtual assistant for almost a year now. My current virtual assistant is a whiz at getting repetitive tasks off my desk and letting me focus on the creative work my clients pay me the big bucks for. If you’ve got a growing freelance practice, a virtual assistant may be able to help you handle the work load. These tasks are all relatively easy for virtual assistants to take on, letting you focus on landing and completing projects that pay. Continue Reading

You’ve no doubt heard that expression, “Don’t burn your bridges.” And, yes, it is a good idea to stay on good terms with former employers. After all, they could become clients.

Well, I’m here to tell you that burning bridges does not deal a fatal blow to one’s freelance career. Here are two stories from the Martha File: Continue Reading