How to Respond to Job Postings Faster than the Competition (Without Canned Responses)
Ever wanted to know how some freelancers jump on those job postings before everyone else, and still manage to get the gig? It’s not with canned responses, I can assure you. These don’t go over well when it comes to pitching for a job. But there are techniques one can use to get their name in the hat early in the piece.
Some have questioned the point of jumping on a job quickly. Let me tell you, as someone who has advertised for and applied for many, it counts. I know a whole slew of people who employ freelancers who stop reading applications after the first 50 or 100 come in, and that can be anywhere from twenty minutes after posting the job, to twenty hours later.
How to Measure and Evaluate Yourself and Your Work
One of the problems with becoming a freelancer is that there’s no longer anybody watching your work, your progress, your ability and efficiency. Sure, there are clients bugging you about their projects, but who’s really evaluating your little operation?
I’m sure many freelancers are more than happy to be rid of the annual review, but it’s easy to get sloppy and miss opportunities when you’re not looking at your work, measuring your progress, and implementing changes.
Let’s take a look at a few metrics that are useful for spotting trends and problem areas, and how to track them.
How Much Time Should You Spend Working Each Day?
Recently on FreelanceSwitch, I talked about attaining a good work-life balance. In that article, one of the methods for attaining a better balance was making a clear-cut decision about when you’ll work and how many hours you spend working each day, and sticking to those hours. We throw work-life balance off by creeping past those hours to get “just that bit more” done.
How to Spot a Dud Client and Get Out While You Can
I know how to spot a dud client. I spent far longer (read: years) working with one of them than I should’ve, before I wised up and realized that any money you receive from them is not worth it and likely to incur a loss — since that money will likely end up working you ten times harder than it’s worth, strip you of motivation, and is time better spent marketing your business to help you earn cash from more professional clients.
5 Techniques for Guarding the Sanctity of the Home Office
Undeniably, one of the most difficult things about working at home is keeping people from perpetually distracting you during the workday, simply because you’re right there and they have nothing better to do. Or want you to take the trash out right then and there (hey, it has happened to me!).
To get anything done, you’ve really got to guard the home office and its status as a distraction-free zone. You’ve got to guard it so fiercely, you might even call it guarding the sanctity of the office. Here are five methods I use for keeping distractions at bay.
Ubiquitous Capture: How to Keep Your Cashflow During a Creative Block
Most freelancers—I’d say at least 80%—work in a creative field. And most freelancers—I’d say at least 100% (even those whose jobs aren’t really “creative”)—eventually run into some kind of creative block, whether it comes from burnout, or just getting bored of doing the same kind of work day after day.
Usually, this doesn’t mean that the designer or writer in question is no longer capable of doing their job: it just means they are having a damn near impossible time coming up with new, exciting ideas to feed their clients with.
If these blocks meant the inability to turn an idea into a product, most freelancers would be out of business once a year (or so, or less). But fortunately, that’s usually not the case, and so big disasters can be prevented with a little foresight and a little discipline.
How to Manage Your Work-Life Balance and Reduce Stress
Work-life balance is a problem for many people. Not just freelancers, either—anyone who works in a job that involves some kind of thinking is tempted to take work home with them. I suppose that maintaining a good balance is one of the benefits to menial shift work.
But freelancers have it worst. Without an employer, our income is more dependent on performance than any corporate employee’s income. And for the vast majority of us, there’s no real distinction between our home life and our work life, because our work life happens at home.
Here’s the thing that we lose sight of: becoming a workaholic does not improve your bottom-line or productivity.
How to Score a Job With a Web Magazine
I was recently involved with a web magazine that used the Freelance Switch job board to advertise for a few positions. The quality of applicants was fantastic, compared with those some other sources referred.
The positions were ideal for freelancers who wanted some of their work to be regular, without having a ‘job’ and losing the benefits of a freelance career. They involved doing some writing and self-editing two or three times a week, taking up maybe an hour at a time.
We got far more submissions than we had jobs to fill, of course, and I spent most of the week going through applications and sorting the best from the rest.
It wasn’t a particularly fun experience—writing and editing is what I do best—but I did learn a lot about why some freelancers aren’t getting the jobs they apply for. Here are some tips on landing them—a list based on the things that applicants at our magazine impressed us with and annoyed us with. Consider this practical feedback!
The Five Most Common Mistakes of Male Freelancers
A few days ago, Marie Baca wrote a wonderful and well-intentioned post called The Five Most Common Mistakes of Female Freelancers that turned out to be somewhat controversial in the comments.
So, why don’t we even the imbalance up a bit with the five most common mistakes that male freelancers make?
1. Your desk is not your home
“You men,” my wife once said, as I slaved over some copy late at night, “are so prone to workaholism.”
There’s no denying that women do this too, but for every workaholic female I’ve met, there have been five guys burning the midnight oil. Women are better at this thing called “having rational boundaries.”
That groove in your chair? That’s not meant to be there. Just because you work from home does not mean you have to check your email within five minutes of waking up, or stick around until midnight because your clients in other countries are only just waking up. Email exists for a reason. Continue Reading
