Today – October 15th – is the very first annual Blog Action Day. As the international dateline passes over the world, over fifteen thousand bloggers will be waking up to prepare and post about the environment on their blogs.

As you know Leo, Collis and I have been organizing this day for two months now and it’s turning into a huge success thanks to the participation and action of so many wonderful bloggers from around the world. The day has attracted the support of the United Nations Environmental Programme, the European Union Commissioner for the Environment, huge blogs like Google’s Official Blog, LifeHacker and so many more. It’s very exciting and the day is just beginning.

Today on FreelanceSwitch in honour of the day I’ll be posting a big article on an keeping you and your clients environmentally friendly, N.C. has a special Blog Action Day episode of Freelance Freedom, and if you are interested to hear the story behind the day, Collis has posted up a long post about it over at NorthxEast.

Today we will also be donating any money this site makes to environmental charities. For today I will put a Paypal link at the base of each Blog Action Day post. If you click on the link you will be led to Paypal where you can quickly and easily donate US$3. Any contribution will be passed on to an environmental charity. We have almost 11,000 unique visitors every day, so if each one of us donated just $3 we could raise $33,000 to help these charities do their amazing work! I’ll be donating today’s proceeds to Greenpeace and The National Wildlife Federation.

So a Happy Blog Action Day to you all, enjoy the posts and let’s go out there and make a difference!

Donate Here – Click to Donate with PayPal

It’s no secret that lots of us FreelanceSwitchers love Moo MiniCards. I think Moo may love us right back, because they gave us the first scoop on their new product. Later this week Moo is adding Postcards to their product range, and to celebrate they’re offering two sets to FreelanceSwitch readers!

With that in mind I thought I’d cover an old-school but effective tool for new leads – the postcard promotion. Continue Reading

This week’s photo is by Jacob Pritchard.
Location: New York City, USA

In this weeks Linkswitch I’ll be covering some of the best finds I’ve come across for those of you that want to broaden your business savvy!

Do you have to make a presentation or pitch and need to know the basics? Paul Enderson from Reflections will help you cover all your bases.

If you’re looking for some passive income and have some wisdom to share then you might want to consider writing an eBook.

Designers and developers often seem to speak different languages to one another. This article gives some great tips on how to communicate effectively and hopefully make your project work.

There’s a great article on Go Media’s blog about Driving Web Traffic For Beginners. We all think that after working so hard on a site that the masses will just appear out of thin air, but the truth is that you’ve got to be a bit savvy. You could write a book about this, but this article will teach you the basics.

Shane’s done it again, with this fantastic article: A Freelancer’s Guide to Sales: Using Which-Craft.
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But we’re running behind! For those of you who’ve been wondering what’s happening, the survey is on it’s way. So far it’s taken about 60 hours to put together, with another 20 hours to go, so let’s just say it’s been a bit more labour intensive than we expected!

It will definitely be ready in the next month (hopefully two weeks), and as soon as it’s done we’ll be emailing it to everyone who took the survey and supplied their email address.

Just to keep you interested, here are some interesting tidbits we’ve learned so far:
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This week’s photo is by John Marmaras.
Location: Sydney, Australia

Sorry I haven’t done a linkswitch in a while – all that redesigning and podcasting has left me with little time to scour the web for gems! I’ve decided to theme these Linkswitches from now on – and this week is design week.

We’re also excited to announce that from now on each Linkswitch will feature a photograph by a FreelanceSwitch reader. Whether you’re a professional, a student or an amateur enthusiast, we want to profile your work! If you’d like a submit a photo for consideration, you can do so by filling in this form.

So without further ado, on to the Linkswitch!

The foxy Mr Prescott Perez-Fox comments on a logo designed by a six year old for what appears to be a large company. I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry on behalf of the web designers who had to make that work.

If you’re not a designer and want some business cards for your freelance business, then YoungGoGetter.com has the competition for you! They are offering one lucky entrant 5000 double-sided, full-color business cards printed by Orange32, along with free design direction, shipping, and some other goodies. To enter, all you have to do is write a post on your blog about anything to do with business cards. Absolutely anything. Travis is an uber-designer so this is a great opportunity to get expert design for free!

I love Typography! This blog has the most useful post ever for any designer – Identify that font. Check it out and dance for joy.

The Sir Freelancelot tee will keep you looking good, and annoy your office-working friends! Unfortunately they only have men’s sizes, otherwise I’d be snapping one up myself. Thanks to Cheryl for the tip

These magazine illusions are very cool!
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Happily Shane Pearlman, from the new blog ShaneandPeter.com is here to help. Over the next few weeks he will shed light on all these nasty issues that can stop us from truly living the freelance dream. Next week, Shane will share a series of tips with us – bite size morsels of wisdom if you will, to help us with the business of freelancing. There will be a new one each day starting Monday, so make sure you tune in if you want to know how to be a freelance business dynamo!

Time for a roundup of useful links from across this beast we call the world wide web:

Is some nasty piece of work stealing your online content? SEOMoz will help you seek retribution!

Photo Business Forum has a great article about subject headings for emails. If you’re like me and title every email “Hello!” then this may help!

Liquidcity at GoSquared has 50 Ways To Become A Better Designer. Even a seasoned designer can find ways to up their game in here.

Brett at Agency Byte helps us learn about Proactive Account Management (ie. anticipating your clients needs and guiding them to what you think is the ideal solution). Perfect for those of us who market ourselves as suppliers of superior service to clients.

If you have a useful link or article that you think FreelanceSwitch readers would be interested in, Send It In!

Copper is an online project management and collaboration tool. It’s ideal for freelancers who want to liaise with contractors or partners, or even for hands-on projects with clients.

What’s fantastic about Copper is that you can collaborate with whoever else is on your team to create and revise project plans (perfect for big jobs), keep track of milestones, and share files, contacts and events. And most importantly, unlike other project management tools you don’t need a weekend workshop to show others how to use it. It’s nice and intuitive, so even your technology challenged client can use it.

Copper has a free trial so you can try before you buy, and if you want to get a feel of the company you should check out their blog, Elementale. Unlike most company blogs (most of which have little more than press releases), this blog is actually a great, varied read. Check out Food For Thought, which relates food technology to business and Speeding Up Your Thang, which covers Ben’s ability to write 180 emails a day – impressive.

Have a read of the blog and you’ll also see that these guys have a great sense of humour – so you can be assured that if you do need to contact support for whatever reason, their reply will be witty and entertaining.

So as I always say, if you like FSw and you want us to keep on keeping on, support Copper so they can keep on supporting us!

Time for a roundup of useful links from across this beast we call the world wide web:

Brett from Agency Byte helps us Define Project Boundaries (and Keep Our Clients Within Them). Hooray for that!

The awesome Darius at ColourLovers tells us the NBA Finals Most Valuable Colors. If you’re a sportsfan and love colour, check this out!

Zen Habits tells us why Slow Makes Sense. If you’re guilty of cramming too much into your day, then read this and slow down!

If you have a useful link or article that you think FreelanceSwitch readers would be interested in, Send It In!

Time for a roundup of useful links from across this beast we call the world wide web:

Leo also posts over at Ririan Project, and he has 20 Sure-Fire Ways to Come Up With Great Ideas that will get you past that creative block.

Blogology helps us bloggersWrite A Great Article. Simple tips that are particularly handy if you’re just starting out.

NextBigLeap tells us about The Reality Of Working For Yourself.

Our man Collis also moonlights at his and Leo’s blog NorthxEast.com. They have a great article with 9 Blog Ideas to Help you Profit with Amazon. If you have a blog and are after that alluring passive income then read this!

If you have a useful link or article that you think FreelanceSwitch readers would be interested in, Send It In!

We here at FreelanceSwitch have decided that reading is overrated. Why read when you could listen to us talking about freelancing?

We’re in the process of setting up some podcasts for your listening pleasure, but we need your help! If there are any topics you’d like to hear us cover please let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to cover it.

And then stay tuned for the FSw podcasts, coming soon!

NB. We will be producing podcasts bi-weekly as another resource on FSw – they will not be replacing articles on the site. There will be extensive notes on each one for those of you who prefer to read than listen. Apologies to all of you who I managed to stress out! Never fear – articles are not going anywhere

Thanks to all that entered the FreelanceSwitch Global Freelancer Survey!! The survey is now closed, with almost 5000 people taking part.

We’ve already learned some amazing things about our readers, which will help us cater our content to you. The results will be collated and will be sent to all participants on October 5th 2007. We think the results will help all of us get a greater insight into our industries and the freelancing community as a whole.

We’ve just emailed the winner, so if your name happens to be Adrian and you’re from Sydney (we swear it was a coincidence!) check your email right now! Thank you to all that took part, and stay tuned for the results in your inbox!