Certain types of clients want to see references, sometimes very early in the process of deciding who to hire for a particular project.

By preference, these references are probably past clients of yours who can speak to your abilities in handling whatever type of project you’re currently trying to land. But do you know, off the top of your head, what your clients will say when someone calls and asks about you?

This isn’t something to guess about — you need to actually know, because if it’s anything less than a positive review, your reference may hinder your ability to land future work. Continue Reading

I’ve written about the freelancing lessons you can learn from your canine, but if you share your office space with a cat, don’t dismiss her as simply snoozing on the sofa. She actually knows a thing or two about survival in the freelance world.  Here are five lessons your cat can teach you. Continue Reading

If you’ve ever been interested in doing business with government agencies, you’ve probably heard that they’d rather deal with companies. In other words, freelancers need not apply.

However, reality marches on. Writing in the February 1, 2012 Huffington Post, University of Minnesota College of Design Dean Thomas Fisher said, “To understand how the next economy differs from the one we have known, consider just one statistic: analysts following small businesses see the number of ‘contingent’ workers – the self-employed, free-lancers, or ‘accidental entrepreneurs’ laid off from full-time positions – growing to 40 to 45 percent of the workforce by 2020 and becoming a majority by 2030.”

So, in the United States, our numbers are growing. A similar trend is appearing in many other countries.

If you’re a freelancer of more than modest talent, you might find yourself being approached by government agencies. Or by those who are already doing business with the government. This is what happened to my friend, Jim Hewitt, a software developer. Continue Reading

It’s a a critical component to a successful freelance career to have a website to detail your services and showcase your portfolio.

With the wide variety of high quality WordPress themes available there is no reason why you can’t have an excellent portfolio for your work – even if you haven’t had prior web development experience. Yes, you can do this yourself.

In this tutorial, we’re going to take a premium WordPress theme and work through each step in the customization process to develop a website for your freelance portfolio. Continue Reading

I’ve been hard at work over the past months penning my upcoming book, When Talent Isn’t Enough: Business Basics for the Creatively Inclined. Writing is every bit as educational as being taught–I’ve learned so many strategies and heard so many lesson-holding stories. Armed with all of this information, my next few posts will relate to what I cover in the book due out in early 2013.

A lot of the creative professionals featured in the book spoke about the usual hardships: organizing and understanding accounting, generating leads and forging positive client relations.

When it came time to discuss networking, opinions were mixed. Some creatives say that networking is key because it drives referrals for their business. Others contend that it’s a waste of time and money and they use other methods to get the word out.

Funny, the exact same thing happened when we honed in on legal matters–some use lawyers and some go it on their own. Cold calling? Some love it and others loathe it. (Same went for taxes, but I don’t think anyone reported enjoying that process!) Continue Reading

I have worked with plenty of freelance consultants over the last couple decades, and it is fair to say that perhaps the majority of them started out working for someone else.

For example, most of the training consultants I work with (my target market) served as training staff in medium to larger companies before going out on their own. They drew on the skills they developed and the knowledge they acquired working for someone else to develop products and services for their own freelance businesses.

That often meant that their consulting work was more or less a reincarnation of their previous work. Oh, certainly, running their own business was very different in many ways, but they tended to work with the same kinds of people or businesses, to do the same kinds of work, as they did before going solo.

Often, after a few years in business, they became dissatisfied with their new lives. Consulting just wasn’t as much fun as they expected. The smartest of these figured out what was wrong, and made adjustments, and now they are reaping the full benefit of having the courage and ability to set up their own consulting businesses. (Others, unfortunately, either grind along and live an unsatisfying business life, or give up on running their own businesses.)

What was wrong, usually, was that they took the easy path, doing what they knew in environments they were familiar with, and then measured their success only by their income. But even if you are making a good income, it is hard to keep doing work that doesn’t make you feel good.

And it doesn’t make you feel good because:

• you are working with people you don’t like,
• performing tasks you don’t enjoy,
• or under conditions that make you grumpy.

Looking explicitly at these factors and their contribution to your satisfaction with the consulting life is the first step in going after the kinds of projects and clients that you will enjoy. Continue Reading

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a pretty standard means of passing information along. As freelancers, we have many opportunities to send and receive PDFs, but as a traditionally read-only medium, it can be a bit difficult to manage edits.

This tutorial will walk you through a few of the core features of PDFpen from Smile Software that many freelancers might find most useful, including how to make changes to the text of a PDF and how to add a signature.

Part 1: Working With Text

Since invoices are such a big part of freelancing, let’s begin by make some changes to a recent invoice that I drew up.

Editing and Correcting Text

The first thing I notice after creating my invoice is that some of the wording in my greeting at the bottom is not quite the way I want it. We traditionally think of PDFs as read-only files. But it is possible to make edits to a PDF, and PDFpen makes that easy to do. In order to change the greeting at the bottom, chose the text-select tool from the toolbar and highlight the text in the PDF as you would in any other document.

Continue Reading

Do you struggle being able to take time off? Have you NOT taken a vacation in the past year?

Do you worry you’ll lose revenue if you take time off? Do you take less time off being self-employed than when you had a “real” job?

Guess what? Every freelancer and self-employed business person struggles with this; yet, it is possible to take time off AND earn more. Continue Reading

I recently completed my 25th year of running my own consulting business. I started out by developing training materials for large corporations, but now I spend most of my time creating marketing content, and doing a bit of coaching, for other independent training consultants.

I’d like to think I have learned a thing or two over those 25 years of freelancing. Here are 25 lessons gleaned from a quarter-century of independent consulting:

1. The power of technology to help one waste time is at least as great, if not greater, than its power to make one more efficient and productive.
2. The biggest factor in play when I avoid marketing and selling activities is my imagination. I can dream up more dramatic and devastating rejections, failures, and embarrassments than anything that is going to happen in the real world.
3. Afternoon naps are among the best “fringe benefits” of running my own business, rather than working in a cubicle.
4. Staying “top of mind” with someone who already knows who I am is infinitely easier than getting someone to notice me and my services in the first place. (It is also considerably more lucrative.)

Continue Reading

Kids running around screaming behind you. Music blaring in the background of their screams. A spouse looking for dinner to be ready on time – just like your clients’ looking for their copy.

The life of a freelancer is chaotic. There’s no arguing that. We’re at the mercy of our clients and often our families. We’re responsible for turning out great copy on time to customers in spite of the whirlwind that spins around us daily.

But most of us can’t run away to an office or coffee shop everyday – it’s just not practical.

And the more work you try to get done, the louder the cacophony gets in your ear.

So what? Are you stuck like this? Creating mediocre copy because you can’t focus? That’s no way to expect your business to thrive. Continue Reading

According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy. —American comedian Jerry Seinfeld

So, which person are you? Would you rather be the one in the casket or the one delivering the eulogy? If you’re like a lot of freelancers, the supine position assumed by the deceased is your preference.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You’re like everyone else when it comes to presentation skills. You weren’t born with them. None of us were.

The good news is that you can improve your presentation skills.

What’s in it for you?

Where will improved presentation skills get you? Let’s imagine that you’ve been invited to a potential client’s office. The project being discussed could be quite the addition to your portfolio. A real career-maker. And you’re not the only freelancer being considered.

What got those people onto the speakers list? Their expertise. What keeps getting them invited back to conferences, year after year? Their presentation skills.

Next, let’s think about the potential client, who has invited her company’s top management to sit in. Who do you think the company is going to contract with? The freelancer who stutters and stammers through the meeting, or the one who stands confidently in front of the group, makes a well-rehearsed presentation, and gracefully handles all questions? My money’s on Freelancer Number Two.

Or picture this scenario: You’re at a conference. As you peruse the speakers list, you notice a lot of people who do the same work you do. You use your tablet to view their portfolios and conclude that they’re no brighter or talented than you are. But they’re up in front of the room, addressing hundreds of people. Cue up that green monster named Jealousy.

What got those people onto the speakers list? Their expertise. What keeps getting them invited back to conferences, year after year? Their presentation skills.

If you had those skills, maybe you could become one of those industry leaders who speaks at conferences. And get bigger, juicier projects than the ones you’re working on now. Think of it this way: become a better speaker, make more money. There are loads of useful resources that will help in this article. Continue Reading

It’s a given today that freelancers working in cafes or from their homes will spend long stretches of their days sitting at a table or desk while working on a laptop computer.

Sitting all day on a laptop can actually present more health challenges than the typical office job, since a laptop can add extra strain to wrists and the neck. In addition, you can work on a laptop anywhere, leading to a variety of potentially harmful long term consequences.

The New York Times lists the following challenges for sedentary freelance work: “It strains the back and causes the muscles to become slack. It slows the processes that metabolize calories, increasing the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.” Lifehacker goes into a bit more detail: “Within five days of changing to a sedentary lifestyle, your body increases plasma triglycerides (fatty molecules), LDL cholesterol (aka bad cholesterol), and insulin resistance.”

While there are many challenges that freelancers face, there are a variety of strategies that can be put into practice immediately in order to improve their health and productivity. Continue Reading