Traveling Freelancer #3: Work for Room and Board
Credit: *sean on Flickr
This is the third article in a series on resources for the traveling freelancer. You may find the first article here and the second here.
This article is about exchanging work for room and board on the road, which is good for those who want to take it easy with their work or even for writers looking for new material. There are farm owners, hostel and hotel owners, and home owners who are part of global networks offering room and board to “volunteer” workers (there are also country-specific sites and Australia and New Zealand seem to be very popular destinations). Arrangements vary widely and the volunteer must do good research to find the right agreement and host. Continue Reading
Resources for Traveling Freelancers #2: Free Accommodation
credit: whateva87 @ Flickr
This is the second article in my series of resources for the traveling freelancer. You can find the first one here.
Finding Friends & a Place to Live through Hospitality Exchange
When traveling extensively a person starts to feel a bit alone and her wallet starts to get lean quickly. Measures must be taken to alleviate these negative side effects when living out a dream! An option for the adventurous traveling freelancer is a hospitality exchange, which is good every once in a while but will interfere with your work if you do it often. Through sites like Hospitality Club and CouchSurfing travelers can stay with local members for cultural exchange and free accommodation in most cases.
A good experience can end in guest and host becoming friends, while in a bad experience host or guest might steal from the other. For obvious reasons, it is really important to be conscious about safety. I have been a couchsurfer for more than three years, and I have made several good “couchsurfing friends” through hosting and surfing. I also have been stood up by guests and made to feel uncomfortable by male hosts. There are many positive and negative aspects of using couchsurfing, most of which can be applied to similar sites: Continue Reading
Interview With Jonathan Fields, Career Renegade
Jonathan Fields has compiled a laundry list of occupations over the years ranging from lawyer to yoga instructor, and has found a great niche in his most recent profession: Author. Jonathan’s book Career Renegade is a must-read for any freelancer. Freelancers so often get caught up in the battle of trying to survive that we forget what it means to truly do what we love. Jonathan’s book helps bring focus back to our goals, back to what we really want to do with our life, and how to make a decent living doing it too.
We were able to catch up with Jonathan for an interview in which he shares some insights into his book, and how freelancer’s can benefit from being a Career Renegade.
How to Win Any Job on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com
As an employer with over 30 staff at Interspire, most of the time when I need something done I can call on a staff member in the office and they will take care of it for me. However, sometimes I need the skills of an experienced freelancer for one-off jobs, such as writing a user guide or putting together a product overview video in Flash. In these situations I turn to freelancers on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com.
After posting a job ad, the responses start to come in within a few hours. 95% of the time the candidates have no idea how to reply to the job ad and will either send over:
Review: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
My web design sucks!
If you’re like me you’ve probably said that to yourself at least once in your career. When you browse through sites like cssBeauty and FaveUp, you are wowed by the beautiful designs, and you can’t help but ask yourself “What am I missing?”
I know some freelancers who come from a development background assume that programmers just can’t design. Others have decided to go back to school to take a course in design. But to be honest, when you are already well invested in your career, it’s often not practical or even reasonable to head back to school.
Start Out Right: Avoid These 3 New Freelancer Blunders
Starting out as a freelancer can be an exhilarating ride, but those first few miles can be littered with frustrating potholes if you don’t know what to watch out for. If you’re just about to make the plunge into freelancing – or you’re trying to make your existing freelance life run more smoothly – take a moment to read these “rules of the road.” They may save you from the late nights and nail-biting stress that await you just around the curve.
Blog Action Day: How Freelancers Are Saving the World
While we talk a lot about how to better our working conditions and pay at FSw, there is a much bigger world out there than what we see every day. Poverty is an issue that 99.9% of the good people who read FSw don’t have to worry about. But we should be thinking about it, and we can make a difference with our unique skills. And there’s no better time to talk about how we can help those less fortunate than us than with our unique freelancing skills than on Blog Action Day.
There’s always the option of donating money to those less fortunate, but as freelancers we offer a lot of skills that are sometimes more valuable than money. We have very specialized talents that can be much more beneficial than a few dollars.
Free MiniBook – Rockstar Personal Branding by Skellie – At the New Rockable Press Site
Branding is one of those super important, long term tasks that every freelancer needs to pay attention to. How you present yourself and how you are perceived can make a lot of difference to both how much work you get and how you charge for that work.
Thanks to former FreelanceSwitch editor Skellie, you can now get a free 20 page eBook on Personal Branding at our new Rockable Press website simply by signing up to the Rockin’ Mailing List. As well as the MiniBook which you’ll receive immediately, we’ll send occasional updates and discounts on new Rockable books.
The new site is a home for our almost 1 year old FreelanceSwitch book – How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer – as well as the Freelance Statistics Report and a couple of upcoming Rockable titles – WordPress Designer and Blogger. Continue Reading
How To Go From Being a Freelancer to a Business Owner
“I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.” – John D. Rockefeller.
Most freelancers I’ve talked to have aspirations to start their own businesses. And build up a team of talent so good that they can dominate their entire niche. There are a lot of benefits of moving ahead from simply being a freelancer. But there are quite a few risks involved too.
Essential Websites and Resources for Photographers
Time wasn’t too long ago when the term “photographer’s portfolio” referred to a leather case filled with prints of your very best work.
Those cases are still around, and they’re a worthwhile investment if you’re planning to show your work to local art directors and editors. But, like any other creative field, photography has gone global. You may be based in Houston while you work with clients in Dusseldorf or Singapore.
So, some sort of Internet presence is essential. This article will survey three options for displaying your photography.
