After many emails (from you) and lots of cajoling (from me to Collis), we now have forums!

The forums will be the place to ask questions, chat, and interact with the FSw community. We all have a wealth of knowledge to share with one another, and aside from that it will be great to get to know you all!

To kick it all off, we’re running a little competition! Simply answer the question “What’s The Most Important Lesson You’ve Learned About Freelancing?”, and if we like your answer we’ll give you a copy of Tim Ferriss’ fantastic book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. We have 4 copies to give away. You can see the discussion and enter here.

We’re looking forward to seeing you all there!

We are happy to announce we have two new major sponsors, Inserit and Krop.

Inserit is codeless CMS for web designers. It was created because the team at Centric Software wanted a simple and intuitive way to integrate web design and programming. They found that using Inserit they were able increase their productivity and maintain the same high-performance results. After many refinements over the course of their own projects, they know that other web designers will find it mighty handy too!

Inserit is the ideal tool for web designers who hate coding or want to up their productivity. They offer a 30 day free trial so can try it out for free!

I don’t think anyone needs me to introduce Krop. Krop is the place to go for creative and tech jobs. The best of the best advertise on this site, so whether you want to advertise a job, are looking for contract or (gasp!) full-time work, Krop should be your first stop. In fact they’re such an institution we can’t quite figure out why they even need to advertise – but we’re very happy they are!

Our advertisers allow FreelanceSwitch to keep running, so please support them when you can!

One of the most essential skills that a freelancer can have is the ability to say “no”.

Without that skill, you will be overloaded with requests and assignments, and continuously overworked and missing deadlines, the quality of your work will slip, and you will take on assignments that you don’t enjoy and that don’t pay enough for the time you spend on them.

By saying “no”, although you might feel that others will feel offended or hurt (and it’s possible), you are also sending a strong message that you value your time, that you have priorities, and that you also respect the person to whom you’re saying no, as you don’t want to commit to something and then do a lousy job or not do it at all. Continue Reading

By Kristen Fischer

I proudly finished up the manuscript for my second book this week. Of course to do it, I need a few days off. So I asked my beloved employers for some time away, and was met with resistance.

Let me start off my saying that there were no deadlines or commitments involved that I asked to have pushed back…just rotating projects I had my pick of taking, and appointments to set. So when I got emails asking me to “just do this one” when it came to projects, and to “just squeeze me in” when it came to setting consultation appointments, I was shocked.

Do my clients think I’m a pushover? Is that why they wouldn’t let me take a break when I needed it?

I have to say, I think I forged their behavior. I’m always the one picking up a last-minute assignment and tending to clients’ every wish when it comes to work. Naturally when I put up some resistance, they did, too. This isn’t the Kristen I know, they must have said.

But they learned to deal. Assignments got done and client calls got scheduled. Maybe not when my customers wanted it all done, but all that matters is that it got completed.

Have you encountered this? Here are some tips to help you set boundaries with clients so it’s not a bombshell the next time you need off when something comes up.
Continue Reading

Freelancers face a unique set of productivity challenges, often very different from the challenges faced by regular employees.

As such, it’s time we looked at the best productivity tips for us freelancers.

Of course, some of us are both employees and freelancers, so we need to learn to deal with the challenges of both worlds. I’ve scoured some of the best productivity sites (and some that aren’t productivity sites) and came up with a list of some of the must-read tips from those sites that apply to the challenges of freelancers.

Not all of these tips will apply to you — pick and choose those that will work in your situation.

Continue Reading

How little you know about the age you live in if you think that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.
- Ovid

Yes, we’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating for a review such as this: in the realm of freelancing, one of the most important tasks you have is tracking your time accurately and efficiently. But even if you can track the time, if you forget to ask to be paid, or have no way of tracking what you want to be paid for, your goals of becoming a successful freelancer will never come to fruition. Seeing that our goal here is to provide you with the resources you need to be successful, we are reviewing Cashboard, a web-based time tracking, estimating, and invoicing application.
Continue Reading

By Brett Derricott. Brett is the founder and CEO of Agency Fusion, a web development company built especially for agencies and designers. Brett blogs about technology as it relates to design and advertising at agencybyte.com.

They say that all is fair in love and war. I’m confident there are also some who would add that all is fair in business too. Defining what is “ethical” in business is difficult at best, especially such that everyone else will agree, but creating a code of ethics to define what you will and will not do in the name of business is a more manageable task.

Establishing your own code of ethics and adhering to it strictly has at least 5 benefits.

1. Customers Will Respect You
If you plan on being a freelancer for the long haul, establishing long-term relationships with key customers is critical to your success and happiness. Fostering these relationships requires that you make decisions with a long-term perspective rather than a project-specific or short-run perspective.

Being honest and upfront with your customers is an absolute requirement in establishing these types of relationships. There are at least three common subjects that are easier to avoid than to discuss upfront:
Continue Reading

Have you ever wondered how much it costs to advertise here on FSw? Well I’ve just finished work on a small info site for our new advertising arm – Miiingle! Eventually we aim to open the service up to lots of other sites in the creative industries, however for the moment we’re just going to be managing Eden websites – of which there are a growing number.

Anyhow if you’re interested in advertising head over and you can download our brochure with rates and packages. And if you’re not, head over and admire the super orange design, I’m rather proud of it!

A few weeks ago we published a list of 34 places to get design inspiration online and off and it proved to be one of our most popular articles to date. So today we journey back out to the world of design inspiration to bring you many, many more places to get inspiration – 60 to be precise.

Continue Reading

We’d like to welcome our new advertisers, Mozy Pro and Agency Fusion.

Mozy Pro is an online backup system by Berkeley Data Systems. The system only needs to be set up once, and then works automatically, which is great if you’re like me and always forget to backup until your computer freezes. The backup is then encrypted and stored in a remote location. And if you’re a nomad or like to work remotely, you can access it from anywhere. The neat bit is that it will only back up the data that’s new or that you’ve altered – so there’s no need to waste time backing up files over and over again! I personally recommend (from terrible experience) that every freelancer backup in at least two locations, so if you’re not covered yet give Mozy a try.

Brett from Agency Fusion is a writer for FreelanceSwitch, and is a big authority on development. Agency Fusion build websites. So if you’re a web designer who hates to build, or even a graphic designer working with web for the first time, Agency Fusion is the place to go if you’re serious about delivering quality to your clients. All their websites feature Tweak, their own Content Management System – so you or your client can edit copy and photos whenever you need to, which is always handy for those tight deadlines!

We’d like to welcome our new advertisers! Remember, we can’t do what we do without the support of our advertisers, so please support them!

We’ve decided that August is going to be the biggest month yet on FreelanceSwitch. Why? Well we have a few little things like the survey results (now past 2500 respondents) coming out, the new site design which Collis is sending off to have built this week, we’ve joined a blog network (see below), and later today we’re putting up a huge list of inspiration sites to continue on where our 34 Places post left off. Also as you may have heard we’ve been working hard these last couple of months on a FreelanceSwitch book titled “Hired Gun” which *cross fingers* will be out this month too!

So today’s big news though is that I’m happy to announce that FreelanceSwitch has joined the coolest new blog network around, LifeRemix.

We’re rubbing shoulders with quite a few of my favourite sites like: Black Belt Productivity, Behance, Cranking Widgets Blog, Happiness Project, LifeClever,
LifeDev, No Impact Man, Pick the Brain, Success From the Nest, Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek Blog, Unclutterer, WiseBread, Zen Habits.

Actually the neatest thing to come out of this so far is that I discovered Behance, a site that made me rather jealous. If you’re a designer, go check out their super blend of classic, swiss aesthetic and great content.