School is coming to an end for another year, and many students will be participating in internships for the summer. An internship can be a real win-win situation—the hirer (you) gets low cost or even free help while the intern gains valuable work experience.

I did a number of internships in my college days. I’ve also managed interns in my professional days. When I worked for a small, post production company in Boston, we had an intern in our office every day of the week. They helped us with tasks such as blacking out tapes, burning DVDs and videotapes for our clients, assisted in shooting projects, and brought a great, young energy into the office.

What did they get out of it? They got to use state-of-the-art professional shooting and editing equipment for free. Many of these students couldn’t even get their hands on stuff this awesome at their colleges. Plus, they were encouraged to create their own projects when the equipment was free, which happened often since we were such a small shop.

In graduate school I was an intern at both PRWeek and Inc.com—two business publications where I learned a tremendous amount. The best part of going to grad school was that it allowed me to take advantage of some stellar internship opportunities.

I know I have been lucky, especially when I read about interns who are worked to the bone and aren’t learning much. This recent article in The New York Times shares some horror stories.

Many students who are graduating are having a tough time finding work, and thus are turning to unpaid internships in the hopes it will help their resumes. Many are finding that the internships aren’t all they’re cracked up to be—that they’re working 12 hour days doing menial tasks like grabbing lunch and cleaning, which, if the internship is unpaid, is actually against the law. Continue Reading

Remember the good old days before 2008, when freelance writing gigs seemed to just fall out of the trees at you? It’s been a long slog through a tough economy since then, and there’s still no end in sight.

But here’s the thing: you are free to ignore the bad economy and continue to earn a good living.

How do I know? I’ve earned more as a freelance writer each year since 2006. That’s right — straight through the downturn.

While the overall freelance writing market may have shrunk in the crummy economy, if you are that rare freelance writer who is aggressively markets your business, you can still find plenty of work. In the great big world of all freelance writing assignments, there’s enough work left in there for one little ol’ you.

If you know where to look.

How can you use your skills to write your way to a good income despite the lousy economy? Here are my five best strategies: Continue Reading

Once a week, we feature a fantastic freelance-themed comic from the talented N.C. Winters. Why not also take a look at our comic archive? Continue Reading

Imagine a quiet office space. There are only a few people around – not enough to distract you, but enough to ensure that you don’t feel isolated from the world. Mostly they are freelancers, typing away at their computers.

You like the music playing in the background because it is almost like someone copied your own playlist. The coffee is delicious, there’s plenty of food to choose from, the view is not bad at all…And the best part? The rent you pay is the price of the things you eat and drink.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? I’ve just described at least three of my favorite coffee shops. You might think that working in coffee shops is an obvious choice, albeit not a very convenient one. After all, several other FreelanceSwitch writers made pretty good cases about why libraries make better offices than coffee shops or why co-working spaces are the best office alternatives. But what if there aren’t any co-working spaces near where you live? And most libraries don’t really allow you to eat or drink something around their computers.

So what’s a freelancer to do? Sure, most freelancers, including me, run home offices. But working in one place for a long time decreases productivity, creativity and frankly, it gets boring and lonely.

So every time I need a change of scenery, I take my stuff and go to one of my favorite coffee shops. And if you choose correctly, they can make the most fun and positive office substitutes. Whether you don’t feel comfortable in libraries or you don’t live near co-working spaces (or just don’t want to pay $25 or more for them), here is a guide to what to look for in coffee shops so that they provide a satisfactory office experience: Continue Reading

Freelancers have to step outside their comfort zone for a number of reasons. You might be offered a collaborative project with a larger team than you are used to working with, or asked to take on a far bigger project than you would usually, or you want to create a side project, such as writing a book or launching a new enterprise.

Although you are excited about the new opportunity, it can be stressful, even scary, thinking about the implications if something goes wrong, but that shouldn’t put you off taking the plunge.

So what can you do to get a handle on problems that could derail your project, while keeping the risks in perspective?

How will you not let fear get in the way of enjoying your new challenge? How will you plan ahead before you go charging in, full of enthusiasm, only to get tripped up by something unforeseen?

What you need is a bit of basic risk management. Continue Reading

I’ve got a lot going on in my life right now. I’m on deadline for our biggest magazine issue of the year, grades are due for the college class I teach, I’m in two weddings this summer, my husband is interviewing for a new job, we may have to move for husband’s new job, and we’re expecting our first child at the end of July. Oh, and my house is a mess, my lawn needs to be mowed, and I don’t have a free weekend off until the baby arrives.

Does your life sound anything like mine? I bet, for many of you, it does.

Summertime is supposed to be fun, leisurely, carefree. But every time I flip the calendar page on May, my life turns to chaos. There is so much going on during the warm summer months that it’s hard to do it all. And even when you do say no, it’s easy to get stressed out. And boy, am I stressed out right now!

Stress in vast quantities and for long periods of time is not good for our bodies or our minds. That’s why, even though I have so much stuff to do, I’m taking a week off in June for vacation. I have to. If I don’t, I know myself—I’ll get sick.

But what do you do when you can’t take a vacation right away and a day at the spa is just too expensive? Here are some tips on how to relax to keep yourself on track and on task: Continue Reading

If you’re a freelancer or if you sell a product online, you probably use email to find new prospects. Even in the age of Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, email remains an excellent way to generate serious sales online. You’re probably fully leveraging your copywriting skills already to write great emails.

Here are four tips to make cold-calling via email more efficient:

Find Email Adresses with Rapportive

Find the email address of anyone using Rapportive — even that elusive CEO.

Many a time, you’d want to pitch the person occupying the highest position in an organization’s hierarchy. but the problem is you know only his name and not his email address. You might try Googling, but that doesn’t always work. Some websites even ask for money to reveal email addresses of CEOs and the like.

Here’s a quick tip to guess and verify anyone’s email address using Rapportive. Rapportive is like the Gmail People Widget on steroids. Once you type an email address in the ‘To’ field of the compose window, Rapportive immediately fetches information about that person from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, then puts those details in Gmail’s sidebar.

If you find someone by the name Steve Cook but you don’t know his email address, you can guess it by trying these first name + last name combinations: steve@domain.com, cook@domain.com, stevec@domain.com, scook@domain.com, sc@domain.com. Type these in the ‘To’ field, and Rapportive will display appropriate details for only one of these email addresses and for the rest, only a gray avatar will be shown.

You can then conclude that the address for which relevant information was fetched is the right address, and discard the rest. The email you should be pitching to is this email address.

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Let’s say you’re pitching some startup founders from AngelList. You’ll find names of the founders there, but not their email addresses. In that case, you can use Rapportive to verify their email addresses.

Continue Reading

Is one (or more) of your competitors copying your idea? Congratulations! You are not alone.

As the co-owner of a niche publication, I look at copying as the best form of flattery—I have to! If I spent hours upon hours stressing out about having my ideas copied, I’d go crazy. I’d probably throw in the towel. But I don’t.

You will never create a solid career for yourself by worrying about who is stealing your ideas. —cbsnews.com

I watched this great video on how to deal with copycats on Entrepreneur.com. It’s not long—not even three minutes—but there were some great takeaways.

The first thing to realize is that no matter what it is that you do—be it a publisher, software designer, or a marketing professional—you have to come to terms with the fact that you do not own the market. There are hundreds, nay, thousands, of people out there in the world who do what you do. There are very few unique ideas—and when there is one, copycats are right around the corner.

So what do you do? Ignore them, unless you have a ton of money to shell out in legal fees. Ignoring is hard, so when you are ready to be proactive, here are some ideas on how to beat the copycats and strengthen your brand: Continue Reading

In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at an introduction to freelancing and contracts. Ask FreelanceSwitch is a regular column here that allows us to help beginners get a grip on freelancing. If you have a question about freelancing that you want answered, send an email to askfreelanceswitch@gmail.com.

Question 1

Dear Freelance Switch,
I am writing to you to request advice and tips on the following below:

• How does a freelancer set up their business?
• What tools and systems are needed?
• How do you market your freelance business?
• How long do you spend each day on finding customers and how do you find customers?
• How do you stick to your goals and achieve them?
• How to meet deadlines?
• How to be an organized person?

Some of my questions might sound too basic or simple to answer. I have become disabled and I cannot do full office hours. My profession was Microsoft.net Developer.

This is a big block of questions, most of which have been answered over the years on this site. I know searching back through the archives is overwhelming, though, so this seems like a perfect opportunity to pull out some of the best posts on FreelanceSwitch for these questions:

• Setting up your business: A Comprehensive Guide to Starting Your Freelance Career
• Tools and systems: The ROI for Project Management Tools
• Marketing: Build a Better Freelance Business with Strategic Branding
• Finding clients: Go Forth and Sell and How to Leverage Inbound Marketing to Make Clients Claw At Your Door
• Goals: Starting a Freelance Business in 2012: Planning Ahead
  
• Deadlines: Dealing With Procrastination
• Organization: Getting Ready for Next Year–Now

Continue Reading

I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been hearing about some pretty serious social media snafus that have been so bad that people have lost their jobs over them.

Whether your Facebook page is set to private or not, nothing is ever really private on the Internet. It’s not just high school and college kids who have a hard time understanding that—it’s grown ups, too.

If you are like me, you have a personal Facebook page as well as one for your business. I have a LinkedIn page and I tweet using my business handle. Keeping your personal and business lives separate on social media sites can be hard, so here are some ways to make sure you are putting your best foot forward, instead of in your mouth. Continue Reading

A career in Freelance Illustration is much more than drawing pretty pictures. As much as you’d like to spend the entire day sitting in front of Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, you’ll also need to learn about selling yourself, keeping your portfolio fresh and, all the admin work we love to hate. It’s this work we love to hate that will define your success as an illustrator.

There are many different things you may wish to consider when thinking about entering into professional illustration, such as:

• The purpose of your illustration: Illustration itself covers many different areas. While drawing pretty pictures maybe one aspect, you need to be specific in your objectives.

  Are you wanting to illustrate for advertising campaigns? What about book covers? Maybe graphics to accompany news and magazine articles? Maybe graphics for a cocktail menu? How about diagrams for medical journals? And there are also illustrations for packaging? These are just the tip of the iceberg of the many avenues you could go down in finding a niche illustration market.

• The medium of your artwork: Sometimes the purpose of your illustration can depend on what medium your artwork will be rendered in. For instance, is the work going to be displayed on a CD cover? If so, maybe an illustration within Photoshop/raster based work will be fine. However if the work is going to be displayed on a billboard and you’re going to need a high resolution graphic, perhaps looking at vector work in Illustrator is what you need. If you’re unsure of the key differences of these mediums, check out this article on What is Vexel Art?, which goes into what raster and vector art is.

• Client vs Stock: There are several ways you could earn money as a freelance illustrator. The most obvious is via clients who commission you to create a tailored piece of artwork to their specifications. However there is another way you can earn money with illustration and that’s selling your illustrations via stock websites. There is a huge benefit of creating illustration stock and that is that you don’t have to deal direct with clients. So if selling yourself and hunting out clients isn’t your thing, then maybe this route is something you may want to consider.

  To find out more about this check out these articles on How I Make $2,000 Every Year Without Doing Very Much and the follow up article 9 Tips for Creating and Maximizing a Steady Income Stream by Selling Stock.

• Agency Representation: Illustration agencies act as a third party. They market your work through the relevant channels and are great for getting those household name clients. Bigger companies tend to target agencies due to the variety of talent on their books, experience and convenience.

  The benefits of being represented is that they will can handle contracts with clients and can help negotiate larger fees. However, they don’t do this for nothing and they will take a commission percentage from your fees. They may also ask you to cover costs for promoting your works to directories and marketing opportunities. For more, check out the article on Computer Arts: Finding an agent.

Advice from Talented Freelance Illustrators

I’m going to introduce you to five talented Freelance Illustrators. They’ll tell you how they got into freelancing and what advice they can give you on getting started in a career in Freelance Illustration.

Continue Reading

Want to make money on that app you created? You’ll have to spend money and time on marketing your app outside of app stores for success, according to a recent study conducted by App-Promo, a mobile app marketing company.

The First Annual Developer Survey was created to help understand how developers are really doing with their mobile apps.

I don’t know about you, but the amount of apps on the market is overwhelming! It seems everyone has an app these days. Perhaps you have made a business out of developing these apps for clients, or you are a client who is thinking about hiring someone to create an app for you— this post will help shed some light on the industry.

The study found that most developers are developing apps for the Apple iPhone (58%) and the iPad (54.5%). Nearly 49% of them developed apps for Android users. Most of the developers are pricing their apps as free (35.2%) or at $0.99 (30.7%). They are also employing revenue models outside of paid apps, like advertising. Because, really, it’s about making money. Continue Reading