You’ve probably heard about the benefits of mastermind groups. Simply put, they’re groups of people who come together to help each other grow their businesses to greater levels of success.

Some are very informal – they get together for lunch and brainstorming once a month. Others are quite formal, with applications before acceptance, hefty dues, and accountability requirements.

Being part of a mastermind group exposes you to ideas that you never would have thought of on your own.

There’s a good reason why such groups exist. Being part of a mastermind group exposes you to ideas that you never would have thought of on your own. And you’ll have a built-in support crew to turn to when things get rough. Better yet, your knowledge and experience can be useful to others. Continue Reading

Rockable Press has just released a new book: Getting to Know SEO. In this book, content analyst and SEO expert Andre Kibbe gives you a solid grasp of what SEO is all about, and how it can help you generate steady and sustainable traffic to your site or product. Continue Reading

True confession: I recently went on an e-mail killing spree.

The objects of my ire were all of those not-so-crucial e-mails that I’d saved under my Gmail account. And I took a certain pleasure in squashing many of them with my Delete key. Ahhh. Nothing like a leaner, meaner Gmail account.

Unfortunately, you can only get so far by killing superfluous e-mails. That’s because a lot of the e-mail in our lives is truly useful. It just needs better management.

Enter Boomerang, a handy add-on for Gmail, Google Apps, and Microsoft Outlook users. It will allow you to:

• Schedule email in Gmail or Outlook
• Track responses to emails
• Schedule recurring email
• Put messages back in your inbox when you really need to deal with them. This is the boomerang function for which the software is named.

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Are you a graphic designer or copywriter with a disappearing proposal problem?

You know the drill: You find an interested prospect who requests a proposal. You write a masterful proposal – one of your best ever! Then you send it to the prospect and wait for an answer. Which never comes.

It’s as if your proposal has disappeared into a black hole. What did you do wrong?

The answer isn’t as simple as you might like it to be. Proposals fail for a variety of reasons. Which can make reading Marketing Mentor’s Proposal Bundles feel like a painful, but ultimately beneficial, experience. Continue Reading

You may be committing a portfolio sin without even knowing it.

And what might that sin be? Well, it’s as simple as that stuff that’s keep your portfolio work samples in place. It’s…

…plastic.

In the eyes of art directors, photo editors, and other buyers of creative work, plastic-sleeved portfolios are a serious no-no. So, if you’ve been sending one of those things out into the world, stop and repent.

Your atonement is spelled out – in excruciatingly great detail – in a book called No Plastic Sleeves. It will show you how to build a portfolio that might just get you hired. You can also check out additional material on the No Plastic Sleeves Blog.

Authors Larry Volk and Danielle Currier are both art professors, and their academic perspective does tend to predominate. Many of the book’s portfolio examples come from art students entering the job market, but don’t let that stop you, the experienced freelancer, from delving in. Continue Reading

With so many different types of programs and apps on helping you and your team keep track of hours spent on projects, it can be confusing. Most focus on what I call “self-reporting”– which relies on the person wanting to keep track and having to actually click a button to start recording time.

But how do we even know this is accurate? There are so many things online and on computers that distract us, how do we know that when we spent 5 hours on a client’s project today, that those were truly 5 hours of solid productivity devoted to that one project?

iJobo works to solve that, along with many other features. It is designed to monitor a users computer in the background, doing things like taking screenshots and recording their keystrokes. Continue Reading

Engagement From Scratch! is a classic tale of learning from other peoples’ mistakes. Thirty professional bloggers prove that hindsight really is 20/20. And you can benefit from their advice thanks to Danny Iny.

I was pretty pumped that I was asked by FreelanceSwitch to preview this book. I had previously written a review for this site on Danny Iny’s online marketing course through his business, Firepole Marketing. I thought Iny’s product was really interesting and provided a lot of great tools, so I was interested to delve into Engagement From Scratch!

The premise is simple. Iny asked 30 bloggers from the very big (Brian Clark of copyblogger.com and Guy Kawasaki) to the up-and-coming (Onibalusi Bamidele from youngprepro.com) what they would do if they had to build a following all over again.

The overarching themes these bloggers shared were pretty straightforward, and nothing you probably don’t already know, such as:

• Be yourself.
• Comment on other blogs thoughtfully.
• Create great content.
• Know who your audience is.
• Find or create your niche.
• It’s not the size of your audience that matters, it’s how engaged they are.
• Write guest posts for other bloggers and have them write for you.

As I read through each essay, I’d nod my head, take some notes for this blog post, and read on. And I listened. I finally listened. Continue Reading

Among creative freelancers, Steve Pressfield is well-known for a book called The War Of Art. A nice title to wave in the face of someone who thinks that we enjoy an easy life.

Now he’s back with another tough-talking title: Do the Work. With the subtitle “Overcome Resistance and get out of your own way,” you can pretty well guess that this book isn’t about what’s out there. Nope. It’s about you and how you resist doing the things you need (or want) to do. Continue Reading

Bike-tography: Combining Bicycling with Photography

Back in July, I wrote a review of Publish Your Photography Book by Darius Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson.

I finished that review by saying, “If you’d rather shun the commercial publishing route and travel the do-it-yourself road, be prepared for quite the learning experience. Because you’re not just in charge of producing the book. You’re also in charge of promoting it.”

This is the story of what happens when you actually travel the do-it-yourself road. I’m here to tell you that yes, it is quite the learning experience. Continue Reading

Editors Note: This contest has closed. Congratulations to the winners Holly, Mark Smith, and Brent. We’ll be contacting you shortly to distribute your prize. Big thanks to everyone who entered.

If you’ve ever needed to build a website on a quick deadline, then you know how difficult it is to make one from scratch. If you’re anything like me and don’t keep your web design skills sharp, or you don’t have a web design background at all, then you’ll be scrambling for help.

Fortunately, there are systems that take much of the workload off your hands. Every content management system (CMS) has a different feel. Some features work great for a particular audience, while those same features aren’t the right fit for other users.

If you’re a developer, then you might work with Ruby on Rails, WordPress, or custom roll your own CMS, but for those of us that are less code savvy Squarespace offers a solution that allows us to create a website without having to fiddle with CSS or databases. You can get your website launched in a hurry with Squarespace, with professional results, and a quality design. For those with web design chops, you can customize Squarespace quite a bit. Let’s take a closer look.

Jump down to the bottom of this post for the Squarespace giveaway. One of three winners will grab a full year of their Business class service for free (a $432 value for each winner).

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A recent Freelance Freedom episode shows our hero driving around town, criticizing the design of business signs. It gets to the point where the wife has to put on music in order to silence him.

Our irritated freelancer has a lot in common with the people profiled in Stephen Key‘s new book, One Simple Idea. Although one might think of Key as an inventor, he’d rather use the term “product developer.”

Why? Because of the negative connotation that the word “inventor” has. Key notes that many people think of inventors as “hermit[s] with thick glasses, wild hair, and a pocket protector stuffed with pens.”

Ouch. That’s rough.

But since this is a book about licensing your ideas, it would be a good idea to make a good impression on the companies you’re pitching.

Now, you may have heard about what Key calls “the conventional method of bringing an idea to market.” It involves creating prototypes, getting patents, and building a company. Not the sort of thing that you became a freelancer in order to do.

Not to worry. You don’t have to.

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I work for a magazine publishing company with a very small staff. We use email marketing to let our advertisers know what is coming up in future issues, enticing them to advertise. There is no way our sales team can personally call and visit each and every one of their hundreds of clients, so email marketing is extremely important to us.

When I first started at this company, they tried to put me in charge of our Constant Contact account. I know it’s supposed to be easy, but it wasn’t. I was extremely overwhelmed by my choices (400 templates? Really?) and I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time just learning how to use the program. I nearly had a mental breakdown.

Thankfully they reassigned that task to the art director, who, in her infinite wisdom of PhotoShop and InDesign, created the most beautiful template of our very own to use each month.

I’m not a stupid person. But Constant Contact got the best of me!

There had to be an easier way to send out mass emails from a third party account. I finally found MailerLite, and my email marketing stress melted away like a chocolate bar left out in the sun.

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