It must be a wonderful thing to be one of those chefs in the TV cooking competitions, able to take a stack of surprise ingredients and instantly whip up beautiful, tasty dishes from them.

For most of us, if that’s what we had to do every day, it would just be overwhelming. Particularly when we are first learning to cook, startling creativity is not what we are after.

We just want good results from reasonable effort. After all, those flamboyant chefs spent a long time, years at least, faithfully following recipes until they developed the understanding and the skills they needed to pull off those creative miracles later in their careers. 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

Every other week we roundup some of the highest quality articles and resources that benefit freelancers from across the web. We present these articles here on various helpful topics. This week we have articles on getting started as a freelance marketing, building your creative mind, the power of weak social ties, and more.

The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Successful Freelance Marketer

Freelance marketers have one of the best jobs on the planet. There’s a never-ending stream of exciting new projects to work on and clients to work with, and at the end of the day, your work is about helping business grow, which means a better livelihood for everyone involved. Not to mention that if you’re doing well, the money is really good, too!

How to Create a Cover Photo for Your Facebook Timeline

Got a Facebook Page for your business? Freaking out about creating a good-looking cover photo for your Timeline? You’ve probably noticed that striking visual piece in the Facebook Pages timeline layout — a nearly-screen-width banner image, known as a “Cover.” On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages were converted to the timeline layout with the cover photo.
But you may have noticed that not every cover image is a home run …

4 Ways To Hack Into Your Mind And Become Infinitely More Creative

What if I told you that the biggest threat to your writing is not your lack of passion, your lack of creativity, or your lack of skill? What if I told you that the biggest threat to your writing is… your mind? That’s right. Your mind is the biggest obstacle standing between you and all the work you are trying to accomplish. Our mind is often the one that needs the most convincing that our writing is worthwhile. This is because our mind is hard-wired to protect us from any possible danger. You see, in order to protect us, our mind initially perceives anything it encounters as a threat—including your writing.

Continue Reading

View engaging conference lectures, interesting how to discussions, and high quality freelance advice via video here on FreelanceSwitch.

This week we look at What to do if a Client Hates Your Design (and more!) by spoongraphics. In this video learn what you can do if your client dislikes your design work, what you can try to avoid back pain while working at your computer and whether it’s a good idea to label yourself as a Freelance Designer.. Continue Reading

This blog post by Amber Rice on PRDaily.com tickled my fancy. Maybe it’s because many of my friends have toddlers, or maybe it’s because I’m pregnant—but I think adults can learn a lot from little kids. Below are some of Rice’s suggestions, as well as some of my own.

Be Curious and Ask Questions

What’s this? Why? How come?

Adults can become exasperated with the number of questions that come from kids. Sometimes we even make up answers just to get them to stop! But asking questions isn’t a bad thing for a freelancer—in fact, it’s a very good thing.

If you work in PR, you need to know everything there is to know about your client to represent them in the best way possible. Even if that means you ask them a lot of questions.

As a journalist, asking questions is a huge part of your job. Before I even call people for an interview, I do research to put together a list of the best questions possible. I don’t want to waste their time (or mine) asking questions I can easily find from other sources.

Practice Makes Perfect

Toddlers have to practice everything, from putting on their shoes to learning how to use the potty. They seldom learn a new skill on the first try and need to practice and reminders of how to do something. —PRDaily.com

Freelancers don’t need to practice to tie their shoes, but they do need practice in managing their business—especially with the speed technology is changing. What worked five years ago is probably not going to work the same way today.

Freelancers should try out this new technology—be it a social media site or a new way to invoice their clients—and discern if it’s going to work for them. With anything new, there are going to be bugs to work out and a learning curve. It’s easy to get frustrated with new technology, throw your hands up in the air, and give up. But that isn’t the answer. Neither is throwing a temper tantrum. Continue Reading

If there is one thing I miss about working in the corporate world, it is having teams of people working in the background that I can call on for any type of support my business may need.

Have a legal question? Dial the extension to get someone in legal. Marketing? They are also at the touch of a button. HR question? Their extension was one number away from marketing. IT? Who else literally comes running when your computer network dies and you are on deadline?

But now that I am a freelancer, my entire team consists of me, myself, and I. Which means that I needed to cobble together a team to back me up and—surprise—most of them are freelancers too. Here’s who you need on your back-up team:

1. Lawyer

While you probably don’t need one on retainer, it is a good idea to find a lawyer that you can call on if you need help. The type of lawyer that you will want to meet (and interview, as many provide free initial consultations) could range from one who specializes in copyrights and patents to business law to contract law.

Remember, legal advice is worth what you pay for it, so posting a problem on a website instead of hiring a lawyer to save money and getting free feedback is worth…about what you paid for it. Continue Reading

No one is perfect, and we can all improve upon ourselves to become better businesspeople. I really liked this article by Brad Lebo, one of the principals at Vital Growth.

He lists some challenges that each and every one of us can focus on and conquer in order to be better freelancers. These aren’t all of his tips, but the ones most suited to your needs. Read the entire blog post here.

1. Understand Your Values

Values influence every decision you make and the resulting actions. What you believe is important or valuable will determine how you interact with peers, employees, and customers, as well as determine how you react to lapses in effort, integrity and judgment. —Brad Lebo

Knowing what your values are will help you make decisions. Things pop up all the time that will make you pause and think—a client who wants something you don’t usually offer, for example. Have some firm guidelines set for yourself that you can fall back on. If not, you can hem and haw and make decisions you aren’t comfortable with. And when you lean one way for one person, what will keep you from doing it again for someone else.

I edit a yearly wedding publication that has a very specific niche. We only publish photos from wedding photographers who are located in our state. I have lots of photographers who come to our state to take photos of weddings and want their images to appear in our publication. I don’t budge. There are plenty of other magazines out there for these people. If I make an exception for one person, I have to do it for all of them, and I’m not going to open those floodgates.

Your values can also bolster your reputation. Sure, some people who don’t have the same values might not want to work with you, but there are plenty other people out there who will. And aren’t those the clients you want anyway? Continue Reading

We all know that we need to spend as much time as we can networking with prospective clients. But how much time should you spend networking with other freelancers?

Other Freelancers Aren’t Just Competition

As a freelancer, other freelancers have to seem like competition. But those other freelancers can also be resources. Most of us have had mentors that have helped us get our freelancing careers off the ground. We learn how to be better freelancers from the community, more than anything else. Networking makes it easier to learn how to keep growing your business.

Dealing with your competition as a part of your network can be tough. It’s more than just having a mindset that there’s enough work to go around. If you’ve got a good marketing plan and a clear idea of your client base, that’s not a problem. But you need to go a step beyond that: you have to be personally comfortable making nice with someone who may be pitching the exact same people you are. It takes some practice and plenty of self-confidence. Continue Reading

When I read this article about how Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, leaves work at—gasp! 5:30 pm every day—I was both happy and annoyed.

I am a huge proponent for working smarter—not longer or harder. I can get done in a few hours what takes some people all day. I am lucky that I have the ability to block out everything around me and have a laser focus on the task at hand for a good amount of time. I hear that when I am doing this, I get a crazy look in my eye and I come off as utterly pissed off. I’m not—I’m just on a roll!

I make it a point to leave my office between 5 and 5:30 pm every day. Sometimes I can’t because I have an event to go to or something that must be finished. But, on the whole, I stick to my own personal deadline.

Keeping this schedule helps me in many ways. Here are some of them: Continue Reading

It’s always nice to hear a good success story. That’s what struck me when I read about Andrea Wren. The UK-based freelance journalist successfully made a career out of freelance writing with no previous experience or training. Andrea is proof that as long as you can write well, you can start a thriving writing career at any time.

Q: Give our readers your “story” in a nutshell.

When it came to my higher education I was a late starter, enrolling for my Bachelor’s degree once my son began school. I graduated with a First Class Honors in Applied Human Communication in 1999, working in several jobs before getting recruited as a specialist drug and alcohol worker within a youth offending team in 2000.

I loved this job for a couple of years but after the personal crisis of my son’s father dying in 2002, it became stressful. I ended up having to take time off work with anxiety in May 2004. I was so desperate to change my work-life balance and live on my own terms, it was at this point I decided “I want to be a writer” and follow my childhood dreams.

I began researching exactly how I could make it happen for myself, then started making connections, building a portfolio and contacting editors with ideas. Once I’d returned to work two months later in July, I’d received my first paid freelance writing commission, a travel feature, and was over the moon! Continue Reading

I was engrossed in this blog post about why creative businesses fail written by Jason Aten. I work in a creative field (magazine publishing) with many creative people (writers, photographers, and graphic designers). If you work in the creative industry and are looking to start your own business—listen up!

Jason Aten, the owner of the blog Starting Out Right, is a wedding photographer. He quit his career in marketing and sales management with FedEx to start his own business—something many creative freelancers decide to do.

His photography business took off, and his work has been featured in many national wedding publications. He also spends a lot of time speaking, educating, and writing about the business of photography. Jason knows that, no matter how talented you are, if you don’t have a head for business, you aren’t going to make it far.

A creative business isn’t unlike any other business. You have expenses and revenue. The successful businesses have more revenue than expenses. Anyone that starts a business should love what they do—because they are going to spend an awful lot of time doing it. But just because you are passionate about art, music, photography, etc., doesn’t mean it’s enough to build a business around. Continue Reading

If you are not familiar with Google+ consider reading my previous article –
8 Reasons that Make Google+ Better than Facebook and Twitter – for an introduction.

This article is about the differences between Google+ pages and Google+ profiles. This way you can use each of them to represent and market your freelance business properly.

Broadly speaking a page usually represents an organization, while a profile can represent only a person. For example Darren Rowse is using his name, not his blog’s name as the title of his Google+ id and therefore he is using a Google+ profile. On the other hand, FreelanceSwitch is using its blog’s name as the title of its Google+ id and therefore it is using a Google+ page.

You can follow the FreelanceSwitch Google+ Page for updates on new content we release, as well as to freelance related news from across the web.

In the image above, the small square icon represents the logo of a page. Profiles don’t have this symbol. This is a quick way to recognize whether the id that you are viewing is a page or a profile. To quote Google+ Help Center:

Pages are extremely similar to profiles, but they have some key differences.” – Google Support

We will look at those differences in detail here. Although the Google+ Help Center lists ten differences in the above link, we’ll focus on those that have the greatest impact on freelancers. Continue Reading