As a freelancer, there will be times in your career where time is a lot easier to come by than cash. That means that trading some of your working time for something you need directly — rather than taking the long way around and trying to earn the money first — can make sense. Bartering some of your work for what you need can be a useful way to get it.

Bartering services can be especially useful when you’re just starting your freelancing career: if you need some help with a particular part of your marketing materials, approaching another freelancer and simply offering to trade can get the job done.

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In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at portfolios and blog content. 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.

Question 1

I’m currently working outside the field of programming. I was attending college when the recession hit and I had to drop out because of financial concerns. I was pretty good at programming in high school and I was in the top of my class in college. My main focus was application programming, things like Java with Swing, Qt with Python or C++ and I even managed to make a pretty decent 2D game engine in OpenGL/C++. I know it’s a long shot but do you think I might have a chance of getting some work as a freelancer with just this simple resume (no college degree, just some apps as a portfolio)? And if I do, should I consider web programming?

For many freelance projects, your portfolio will be far more important than any resume. A few clients may ask to see a resume, but it’s extremely rare and (more often than not) a sign that the client in question hasn’t worked with a lot of freelancers.

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Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

As freelancers, our focus is almost always exclusively on getting paying work and getting it done. After all, it’s difficult to pay our bills or buy food with anything other than money. So investing time into a project that isn’t guaranteed to pan out doesn’t always seem to be the best investment of our time.

But there are some contests and challenges that can be worth a great deal to a freelancer if you win — provided you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into ahead of time.

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In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at moving from full-time to freelance. 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.

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Cody McKibben isn’t your ordinary freelancer. After he quit his job in 2007 to begin freelancing, McKibben took off from Northern California and headed for Asia. McKibben currently lives in Thailand and has built up a successful freelance business while exploring Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Bali.

McKibben is also one of the co-founders of Digital Nomad Academy, which provides resources and information about how to create a business and lifestyle that allows you to travel and work — not a bad proposition for many freelancers.

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Freelancers wind up working everywhere: I’ve done my work at coffee shops, coworking spaces and even truck stops in in the middle of nowhere. But there are some big differences between using a general public space and an area built from the ground up for working.

Coworking spaces are becoming more common, especially in big cities. As a rule, they’re worth considering when you’re in need of a place to work. But working from a coworking space isn’t quite the same as working from a coffee shop, if you’re in the habit of moving your laptop to wherever your favorite barista is working this week.

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Site: Corbettbarr.com

As creative freelancers many of us have the unique working situation were we can pick up move about, relocate, travel and work from just about anywhere — well at least if you set yourself up for that flexibility. Corbett Barr blogs extensively on this subject of location independence, and in this interview discusses how he has grown his blog ThinkTraffic into a full time business as well. There are some great insights in this interview for those of you looking to add an additional revenue stream to your freelance income through blogging, or for those of you interested in the freedom of working from anywhere.

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In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at getting ahead as a student and transitioning from student to freelancer. 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.

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Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

I’ve exchanged business cards with plenty of freelancers. There’s one thing that strikes me over and over again, though: a freelancer may have an incredibly well designed business card that lists a link to some random portfolio site that the freelancer in question has set up a profile on.

It’s an easy way to get a website up: fill out a short form, upload a couple of images and you’re ready to go. But listing such portfolio sites on your business card, or as the main point of contact for seeing your work, can be dangerous to your freelancing career. Instead, it’s important to purchase your own domain name and use that.

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Site: Shoeboxed

In this interview learn from Taylor Mingos about cloud based apps that can help your freelance business. Shoeboxed is the company he runs, which can save you time by scanning and organizing your business receipts for you. It integrates with Freshbooks and other affordable, open standards online apps as well. Taylor discusses quite a bit about launching a startup, filling a niche market’s needs, and expanding abroad. So for those of you looking to expand beyond freelancing and launch your own business, this interview will be especially interesting.

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Credit: by Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at several questions from the same freelancer who is working with a tough employer. 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.

I am a web developer (who sometimes gets lumped in as a web designer, as I can kind of fly front-ends) and I have been working for a very small (me + the owner) graphic design company. I have been having a number of issues with him, due probably to a combination of me being new to freelance contracting on a mid-to-long term basis (I have contracted on ad-hoc work before). I would also suggest the problem is due to his inexperience at moving away from design and becoming a project/business manager and having had little experience working with freelancers.

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Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

As freelancers, we tend to want to keep the number of tools we’re using to a minimum. We’ll set up some sort of accounting tool, maybe something to help us handle project management and not much more. But there are reasons that finding a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that you’re comfortable using is worth the added hassle.

• The more you know about your clients and (prospective clients), the better. Good CRM tools help you collect and maintain information about the people you’re working with. Many of the newer tools even go out and pull in information from social media about given people in your CRM database. You can use that information to better tailor your services: perhaps a recent tweet from a customer has given you ideas on how better to design a website for him. Similarly, a well-timed birthday wish can show your client you care about more than his checkbook.

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