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.

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.

How to Reverse-Outline Your First Draft

You know that producing an outline is an effective strategy for helping you organize your writing. Whether the content is a novel, an interview, a review, or any other form of prose, preceding the actual writing with some sort of framework — a hierarchical vertical list, a bullet list, an interconnected web of words or phrases — provides a structural scheme.

What We Can’t Live Without: The Web.AppStorm Team’s Favorite Web Apps

The Mac.AppStorm and iPhone.AppStorm teams have recently written interesting roundups of their favorite Mac and iPhone apps, respectively. I thought it’d be great if our team could do the same, so after the break, you’ll discover the apps we’ve used to build our careers and keep ourselves sane in the process.

How to Improve Your Writing Skills by Analyzing Structure

Reading doesn’t just mean curling up with a great book or surfing your favourite blogs on your coffee breaks. It means finding out exactly what other writers do. It means discovering what works – and what falls flat. You can’t just point and say I liked this post but not this one. If you want to improve your skills as a writer, you need to be able to figure out why you liked this or that – and what made it work. So let me show you how to be a better writer, starting with structure.

44 Websites to Find Free Fonts

If you’re a graphic designer who can’t bear to see Helvetica used for one more postcard or Times New Roman on another newsletter, then it’s time to expand your font library. But what to do when you’re a freelancer on a budget? Find free fonts!

Freelancing Doesn’t Mean Working for Free

For the countless individuals who either freelance on the side or do it full-time to support themselves and/or their families, there are many advantages and some disadvantages that go with the territory. Advantages include being able to work for yourself, set your own schedule, and build a portfolio of work that can be used to gain a full-time job (should you so choose).

5 Ways Your Brand and Branding Define You

There is a big difference between your “brand” and your “branding.” Your brand is you: who you are , what you do, what you stand for, your DNA personality. You are a tangible artifact, which you create into a brand–an image that lives in the minds of the people you interact with and who come to know you.

Photoshop Basix

Are you new to Photoshop? Have you been trying to teach yourself the basics of Photoshop but have found the amount of educational material available on the net a bit overwhelming? Photoshop Basix, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor Martin Perhiniak, is a series of 25 short video tutorials, around 5 – 10 minutes in length that will teach you all the fundamentals of working with Photoshop.