Linkswitch: Why is Food Critical to Freelance Success?
Every other week we roundup some of the highest quality articles and resources that benefit freelancers. Today is a special edition of Linkswitch for Blog Action Day 2011. We’re taking some time out to consider this year’s topic, which is food.
Lack of access to food in some countries causes devastating famines; however, it’s the opposite end of the pendulum that many freelancer’s need to be wary of. Stress eating can devastate your health and lead to all kinds of problems. Yes these problems can negatively impact your mental energy, stamina, and the success of your freelance projects.
It’s important to learn to eat well, create long lasting healthy eating habits, while enjoying every bite. It’s also helpful to keep your budget in mind when planning your meals. The better we plan our grocery shopping, cooking, and eating habits, the more we can keep us hungry freelancers moving, without falling off balance. Let’s take a look at some helpful articles and resources that will improve your food consumption habits.
Linkswitch #89, Web Presence, Pricing War, Writing Problems
Take Control of Your Web Presence with Ten Top Tips
Social media is a brilliant way to build your brand, which in turn grows your client base. But it can suck hours out of your busy day. And time is the one resource that we freelancers crave. With a simple routine, you’ll soon put those hours back in your day. The secret lies in preparation, combined with sensible scheduling – and a loud alarm clock. By implementing ten simple tips, you can manage your web presence without it managing you.
6 Lead Generation Strategies for Local Businesses
Small businesses advertising in their own local market often operate under the “big local lie.” It’s common to see small business owners who have tricked themselves into believing that they don’t need to advertise at all and can rely solely on referrals for lead generation and repeat sales.
How To Change Your WordPress Publishing Workflow For The Better
Running a blog has never been easier. Running a blog well is still a difficult task. Working with a team of people on a blog increases the challenge, so anything that makes that challenge a bit easier should be given a chance to show you its wares. I want to introduce you to two WordPress plugins which I now could not do without, and I’m certain have improved my writing workflow over the past few years. I’ll start with Pre-Publish Reminders and then move on to Edit Flow.
Linkswitch #88, Note Taking, Long-Term Clients, Super Fans
Top 10 Note Taking Apps for Freelancers
A typical freelancer is an idea generating engine. New ideas spring up all the time. Suddenly, you may realize you have a perfect solution to a problem or get inspiration on the go. To record your precious ideas there are handy note taking apps. These tools usually contain features like notes and web clippings. They instantly save content with small text overview. Thus, note making software helps to organize thoughts and boost freelancing productivity. Let’s look at the top 10 notebook apps that can help bring order to your creative world. Many of these are open source, multi-platform, or cloud based apps.
Long-Term Considerations for Freelance Designers
Working as a freelance designer is appealing to a lot of people because of the flexibility and independence. Freelancing also can provide designers in a wide variety of situations with a way to earn a living, and in some cases the experience that is gained becomes just as valuable as the income. However, freelancing for the long-term presents some unique challenges that should be considered from the start.
9 Facebook Marketing Strategies to Build Super Fans
Are you looking to attract high-quality and loyal fans to your Facebook page? Without quality fans, your Facebook marketing efforts can fizzle out quickly. Keep reading to discover nine ways you can build loyal fans who’ll love your business.
Linkswitch #87, Use LinkedIn, Difficult Clients, Marketing Mix
5 Reasons for Freelancers to Use LinkedIn
Many of the freelancers I know stay active on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +, but they ignore one of the most powerful professional networks out there: LinkedIn. Maybe it’s because they think LinkedIn is for job-seekers. Maybe it’s because they like procrastinating by reading celebrity gossip or watching the viral video du jour on other social networks. Maybe it’s because they don’t know how to leverage their LinkedIn profile to land new clients (believe me, they can and you can too!). Whatever the reason, freelancers who aren’t on LinkedIn are missing out on opportunities to network, share useful content, and otherwise grow their business. Here are five reasons why you should use it.
Dealing With Difficult Clients
Clients come in all stripes. But difficult clients come in archetypes: The Naysayer, The Answer Man, The Linebacker, The Xenophobe. If you can recognize them, you’ll be better equipped to create a rewarding, lasting, and headache-free client relationship.
5 Tips to Improve Your Marketing Mix
It’s not about one marketing piece, it’s about the whole thing. To be effective, your business needs a presence both offline and online. It needs to use print and digital marketing tools. It needs both advertising (paid) and publicity (free). It’s the marketing mix that gets and keeps your company message “out there” in front of your target audience.
Linkswitch #86, Conference Pricing, Secret Formula, Inner Calling
International Freelancers Day — It’s About Time!
International Freelancers Day (IFD) is a global initiative to celebrate independent workers, their entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous impact they have on economic growth. The celebration will center on a free online conference of the same name. This fully online event is the biggest-ever free (yes, it really is free!) Web conference exclusively for solo professionals. It features 4+ hours of educational video presentations delivered by 17 high-caliber speakers in the areas of freelancing, self-employment, solopreneurship, marketing, social media and personal development.
Is Conference Pricing Out of Control?
You’ve surely experienced the letdown of registering for a conference, only to find that it costs $1,000 (or more) to attend (not including travel expenses). Isn’t that a bit extreme for two days worth of training? Then again, is that the only way the conference organizers can cover the high costs of planning such an event? Let’s see…
How to be a Leader: Practical Advice for the 99.9% of Us Who Aren’t Steve Jobs
I think it’s a given that we cannot be effective leaders if we first don’t understand how to submit to authority and follow leaders who are placed over us. Submitting to authority is an unpopular concept these days. But unpopular or not, it’s a reality we all live with. The true test comes when we tell our boss or client, “This is what I think we should do. Can we move forward?” and they say, “No.” When a client says that, it’s a lost sale. But when your boss tells you that … it’s a different matter entirely.
Linkswitch #85, Strategic Synergy, Dark Art, Creative Potential
Spark Your Freelance Business with Strategic Synergy
Are you trapped selling buckets of time? Bouncing from one freelance project to the next? There is a better way – develop a synergistic approach to your freelance business. At times we all need to take the work that comes before us to generate income, yet we should develop a personal strategy to minimize this. I propose that we do so by building synergy among a range of products and services. This approach maximizes your time, utilizes your energy, and when done well builds long term income.
The Dark Art of Pricing
We found our first job. After a couple years we wanted a change of pace and found a new one. Things were good. Life was easy. Mornings were spent perusing cute overload before the coffee kicked in. We designed without ever having to really deal with clients, invoicing, negotiating—all the icky businessy stuff that bums everyone out. Our left-brain atrophied.
Vision Without Obstruction: What We Learn From Steve Jobs
In recent days, everyone has taken the news of Steve Jobs’ resignation and illness in different ways. For me, it has conjured up admiration and curiosity. More than anything else, I have always respected Jobs’ clarity. True, the man has always shunned the status quo, but I believe his rebel ways were only a consequence of his efforts to stay true to an original vision. Jobs didn’t “think different” just for the sake of it, he just refused to conform to traditional expectations and limitations.
Linkswitch #84, Effective Portfolio, Selfish to Succeed, 25 Hours Days
Freelance Help, 100+ Tips on Creating an Effective Online Portfolio
We all have to start somewhere with displaying our work. Whether you’re building your portfolio for the first time, or looking to improve your existing portfolio, some professional tips can save you loads of time and get you building in the right direction – upwards. Often the difference between a successful portfolio and one that falls flat is implementing some simple strategies, while not overdoing it, or loosing a targeted focus. Take a close look at 12 advice-filled articles for freelancers that will help you create an effective online portfolio, and assist you in making it the best it can be.
The 7 Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing
So in the past few weeks, we’ve told you it’s a bad idea to be a digital sharecropper, building your business entirely on someone else’s land (like Facebook, Tumblr, or any other third party you don’t control). So you may be asking yourself — OK, what should I be doing with social media marketing?
Are You Selfish Enough to Succeed?
When you’re trying to change your life or pursue a dream, what you don’t do is often as important as what you do. We’re all given the same 24 hours each day. It’s easy to feel like there’s not enough time to do what you really want to be doing. After all the “have to do’s” there’s barely any time left for the “want to do’s.” But how many of those things that you take for granted as being requirements each day actually don’t have to be done at all?
Linkswitch #83, Partnership Guide, Traffic Conversion, Risk Genius
The Ultimate Partnership Guide for Freelancers
There are some compelling reasons to find a partner: a complimentary skill-set, and an extra pair of eyes and hands, not to mention that it isn’t nearly as much fun to work alone. On the other hand, there are some fairly compelling reasons NOT to find a partner: they get half of your business, you won’t always see eye to eye, and let’s face it, things can get messy.
7 Free Tools By Google To Increase Your Traffic And Conversion
Google is an amazing company. If you were to ask me my favorite company in terms of products, it would be Google. The interesting thing is that Google is a tech company, and most of its products are free. Some products offered by Google are so amazing and useful that other companies charge for products that deliver the same result. In this post I will highlight all products by Google that are designed specifically for Webmasters or Online Entrepreneurs.
10 Steps to the Perfect Client Meeting
You’ve scheduled your very first client meeting and now you’re nervous. Will the meeting go well? Of course, there’s no way to know for sure if your meeting will succeed, but there are some steps you can take to stack the odds in your favor. In this post, I share ten (fairly) easy steps to help you prepare for the perfect client (or prospective client) meeting.
Linkswitch #82, Reputation Monitoring, Free Fonts, Your Brand
7 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Freelance Reputation
Honest freelancers keep their word to get work done on time. They value their reputation and their strong work ethic pays dividends. An enthusiastic customer recommendation about a freelancer’s performance can bring a number of new offers and better income. It’s important to have several positive reviews in your profile. However, an experienced employer goes beyond these words and digs into more information about you. To keep tabs on your reputation online here are some simple, free tools that get the job done.
Nobody’s Perfect: Why We All Need A Margin For Error
A jam-packed day feels extremely efficient until it all unravels. The fatal flaw of productivity is the presumption that we can plan ahead without budgeting for the unexpected. It turns out that flexibility is a competitive advantage.
Straightforward SEO for Webdesigners
Dreaded by many Webdesigners, SEO often seems like a headache better left to coders or marketing analysts, but there’s no reason for standing around on the sidelines. In this quick tutorial we’ll build a simple HTML template whilst laying down some best practices which can influence your site’s SEO right from the word go.
Linkswitch #81, Raising Rates, Creative Careers, Multimedia Savvy
3 Ways to Raise Your Rates and Crush Your Freelancing Fears
Are you getting paid what you’re worth as a freelancer? You might think so, but it’s more likely that you — like many freelancers — are charging much less than what your clients are willing to pay. This is especially true if you do excellent work (and I’m guessing that you do). The primary reason freelancers are undercharging is simple — we’re scared to do it. We worry that the work that we are doing isn’t good enough or that we aren’t experienced enough to charge more. We worry that if we raise our rates, then all of our clients will run away.
The Keys to your creative career
Being in the creative field is often times a challenge; for designers, developers, copywriters, photographers and anything in-between. If you are just starting out in the creative field, maybe you’re mid-career and you are not sure where your career will go OR maybe, you have a huge decision to make on what type of job you should take next in your field? This article is here for you.
How to Benefit from Others Wisdom
It’s been a while, progress is hard to slow down and right now life is whipping around at high speeds both personally and for my business adventures. I can’t help thinking about all the wisdom I continue to pick as I dip into my ebooks, real books, RSS feeds and the like. I want to share with you how I benefit from others wisdom consistently. This will be simple and sweet.
Linkswitch #80, Writing Work, Recycling Code, More Exposure
The Health Benefits of Having Pets in Your Home Office
Those of us with a cat or dog know that our pets are like a member of the family. And, like the important members of your family, you just feel better with them around. My chihuahua is never far from me when I’m on my laptop. As I’m writing this post, he laying on my outstretched legs. In the U.S., three out of every five homes have a pet. And these pets are more than just camaraderie—pets have been shown to have health benefits for humans.
3 Places to Look for Freelance Writing Work
There are so many different job boards, websites, Facebook and Yahoo! groups and other places to look for freelance writing jobs online that it can be a little overwhelming for the beginner or for someone who hasn’t needed to look for work for a while but is now looking to take on more projects (I’m in that second boat, for sure!). So here’s a quick roundup of a few places I like to look for jobs on a regular basis that have consistently been helpful for me.
Why Can’t I Finish?
They can only hide it from me for so long: Sometimes it takes a day, a week, or maybe a month—but eventually it comes out. The Fear of Finishing. Here’s a guide to diagnosing and treating what I’ve found to be four of the most common barriers to completion.
Linkswitch #79, More Refereals, Brand Myths, Mutimedia Savvy
12 Brilliant Articles on How to Get More Referrals
So if referral business is the Holy Grail for freelancers, why do so few freelancer know how to get more referrals? How do you ask for referrals? When do you ask for them? Are there actions you can take to make it easier to get them? I’ve searched the Internet high and low and discovered 12 brilliant articles that answer those questions and much more. Browse the selection below and start learning how to get more referrals.
Influencers
Please stop worrying about your Klout score, or your stock price on Empire Avenue and on all kinds of other measures that don’t have much to do with anything related to your real world. This is akin to still being in the Matrix, but thinking you have free will. Worrying about whether or not you’re an influencer by someone else’s measures is like having a toy steering wheel and thinking you’re driving the car.
Should You Really Call Yourself a Consultant?
These days, it’s cool to be a consultant. Everyone’s becoming one. Hey, it’s the easy path to fast cash, right? You write a sales page, you promote your new service, and you become an expert. Simple. And most likely, you rock. Your fans and friends tell you that all the time, so it must be true. And they’re great too, and you tell the world all the time about your fantastic consulting clients. It’s a nice way to market your services and get other people wanting to sign up, but it’s true! You love them!
