Last week, we ran a competition with Carbonmade. Your job was to give your best portfolio tips. The three selected by FreelanceSwitch would win.

A week later, the competition is closed and the winners have been chosen. Congratulations to Anne, Clay and Jonathan! Here’s what they had to say: Continue Reading

Your portfolio is one of the most important promotional tools you have, no matter what kind of freelance work you do. It’s one of the the first things that a client will look at before choosing you for the job. You’ve got to make it good.

Three tips from Carbonmade‘s co-founder and design guy, Dave Gorum, to get the ball rolling:

Quality over quantity.
I understand the desire to have a robust portfolio, bursting at the seams with gold star work. Fact is, the majority of folks can’t pull this off and it’s not something you can fake. A thin portfolio with a few solid pieces never turns me off. Looking through 20 ad banners does.

Show off your potential.
Apart from talent and expertise, potential is the biggest thing I look for. It’s not as tangible as the other two, but you can design your portfolio around it. Highlight your most ambitious pieces. I drool over the prospect of finding and hiring a designer with untapped potential.

Don’t make me ask.
Nothing drives me battier than looking through a portfolio of top shelf work and having no idea what you did on each project. See, I’m lazy, and playing 20 questions seems like a big hassle. Be up front with me and I’m that much closer to hiring you.

It’s your turn to tell us what makes your portfolio a success. Tell us your portfolio tips in the comments, and the best three tip-givers will win a free Carbonmade Whoo! account. Whoo! is Carbonmade’s premium offering, giving you room for up to 50 projects, 500 images and 10 videos in your online portfolio–without the hassle, money and time you’ll need to spend getting your own designed, coded and live.

The rules are as follows:

• Envato and Carbonmade staff are not eligible to compete.
• Entries must be submitted by 9am on Friday the 30th of April, Australian Eastern Standard Time.
• Judging will take place at the end of competition. The winners and their tips will announced on the site.
• Only one comment per user–if you submit more than one, your first comment will be considered your real entry.
• All decisions are final.
• Comments that are taken down for any reason are not eligible to be counted.

We’re very passionate about teaching creative skills here at Tuts+, so over the last year we’ve been planning a new stream of educational content focused on the “Why?” instead of the “How”. Today we’re unveiling the newest addition to the Tuts+ family: Creative Sessions.

Every month we’ll be running a two week ‘Session’ on a creative topic. Our first Session, beginning today, is on Character Illustration, and future Sessions will be on varied topics like interface design, illustrative typography and creative freelancing. Unlike regular Tuts+ content, Sessions content is more theoretical, opinion based and will often cross many disciplines.

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We’re very passionate about teaching creative skills here at Tuts+, so over the last year we’ve been planning a new stream of educational content focused on the "Why?" instead of the "How". Today we’re unveiling the newest addition to the Tuts+ family: Creative Sessions.

Every month we’ll be running a two week ‘Session’ on a creative topic. Our first Session, beginning today, is on Character Illustration, and future Sessions will be on varied topics like interface design, illustrative typography and creative freelancing. Unlike regular Tuts+ content, Sessions content is more theoretical, opinion based and will often cross many disciplines.

Depending on the Session, each specific article will fit into one of our ten educational sites (including FreelanceSwitch and WorkAwesome). So they will be published on the appropriate site, while our central site Sessions.tutsplus.com/Creative will provide the hub for each Session. There you will be able to track each Session, grab the monthly wallpaper, participate in a community project, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow CS on Twitter and give feedback (or praise!) for the Session.

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One of the most difficult parts of freelancing is the tendency of the freelancer to eventually lose joy for the work. You may have come, like me, from a gig that paid well but didn’t fully capitalize on your talents. You decided to start working as a freelancer in order to make money doing what you love. That’s what this is all about, right? Following your passions?

The struggle comes when, as with anything, the shine fades. But you have it extra tough as freelancers because you’re left without any of the protective structure of a formal work environment. This isn’t a salary position. You can’t have a bad day, get nothing done, and make your boss happy by doing twice as much the next day. An off day for you means no billable hours.

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A couple of years ago, FreelanceSwitch brought you How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer by Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, which helped a lot of you find your feet in the world of freelancing. Since then, FreelanceSwitch and Rockable Press have been working together to bring another great guide to your bookshelves: How to Write Great Copy for the Web.

If you’ve ever wanted to get into web copy—whether you’re a freelance writer now or you’re a web designer whose clients always ask you to create the content as well—this book will help you immensely from the very basics up.

“In How to Write Great Copy for the Web, author Donna Spencer will help you start writing content for the web that works! Learn about how writing web copy differs from other forms of writing, and how writing useful, functional and concise copy can both help persuade your readers, and also help with search engine optimization!

Whether it’s for your own site, or for somebody else’s, How to Write Great Copy for the Web will quickly bring you up to speed with some clever strategies that will make you popular with your site’s visitors, or with your clients!”

We’re going to be releasing this book any day now and wanted to make sure you knew about it in advance–and had the opportunity to get a great discount on it. The book will cost $15 for the ebook and $19 for the print copy, but if you’re subscribed to the Rockin’ List you’ll get a coupon to get the ebook for only $10.

The Rockin’ List only sends out mail occasionally when there’s a new release–other than that, you won’t hear from us, and you get a great free report on Personal Branding when you sign up.

Click here to subscribe to the Rockin’ List and make sure you don’t miss out on your discount!

And for the 49,000 cunning entrepreneurs reading this—Rockable provides an affiliate program to help you make some money of your own, by helping us sell books. It’s definitely worth checking out..

Update: Our $5 off for subscribers offer closes in under 48 hours.

Over the weekend and into Monday we unfortunately experienced some pretty severe downtime on all Envato WordPress blogs and here on the FreelanceSwitch Forums. The downtime was due to problems in the data centre of our current hosting company which was out of our control.

It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!

Fellow Envato site GraphicRiver is running a competition for its first birthday, and it’s perfect for aspiring freelancers with over $4,300 in prizes aimed at helping you make a living from what you love doing.

To enter, you need to create a collection of GraphicRiver’s best files in a certain area and submit it for selection:

To be eligible, simply create a collection of files showcasing the BEST files on GraphicRiver—this can be the best business card templates, the best icons for websites, the best Twitter backgrounds, best web elements, best character vectors…the possibilities are endless! Don’t forget to give it an eye-catching image, a snazzy description, and make it viewable to the public.

Here’s what you could win by participating:

• A one year bookkeeping package from Less Accounting
• 6 months ReviewSpace Package
• A one year subscription to the FreelanceSwitch job board
• $100 of marketplace credits
• Rockable Press “Twitter Up Your Business”, “Rockstar Freelancer” and “Rockstar Personal Branding”
• Plus a one year subscription to Tuts+

Read more about the competition at GraphicRiver.

This is the season of giving, whether it is for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, or just to exchange gifts. So, with so many people here self-employed and thus lacking a company to give out those turkey dinners, terrific bonuses, and whatnot; I thought it would be a great idea to provide a list of real and fantasy gifts that would be perfect for the freelancer in your family, even if it is yourself.

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To celebrate the end of 2009 and the Christmas season, we’re giving away prizes on FreelanceSwitch and WorkAwesome. All you have to do to enter is tell us the most important thing you learned about freelancing this year in the comments–but make sure you read the instructions below before you do so!

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It’s been a busy year here at Envato and over on our marketplaces, we’re finishing it off with a bang! I’m pretty excited to fill you in on 2 new marketplaces, 3 new types of things you can buy and sell, and a dramatic improvement to how you can purchase on the sites. Read on to learn more!

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It’s hard to believe it’s almost a new decade, and with 2010 just around the corner it’s time to get celebrating the holiday season. There’s plenty happening around the Envato network of sites, read on to find out about it all!

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