photo credit: smi23le on Flickr

We’ve talked before on FreelanceSwitch about ways to find new clients. In last year’s Freelancer’s Survey, a growing portion of freelancers indicated they’re finding more clients using social media. There’s a lot of choices to choose from: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. LinkedIn has always struck me as unusual that it specializes only in business and professional social connections. Combined with last year’s survey numbers, that got me curious: how many useful connections have you made on LinkedIn? Is LinkedIn a good resource for freelancers?

A few interesting statistics to get our discussion started!

• LinkedIn boasts 120 million members world wide. 950,00 members use the word “freelance” in their job title.
• Over 8.3 million LinkedIn members list themselves as “owner” of their current business.
• 482,000 list themselves as self-employed.
• 57,782 members list themselves as a contractor.

Do you find LinkedIn a good social media tool for freelancers? If so, do you have any good tips or success stories? Continue Reading

Credit: Steve Garfield on Flickr

Twitter is a great social media resource for any business, freelancing included. It can help you brand yourself, build a network of like-minded users, promote your work, and share news about your business. As the social media manager for three print publications, I spend a fair amount of time on Twitter each day. And I’ve learned a thing or two about Twitter etiquette.

Twitter offers you 140 characters to share information, but there’s much more to it. No matter if you are new to the Twittersphere or you already have a Twitter handle, here are five things that can kill you on Twitter.

Continue Reading

As Twitter continues to grow at an incredible pace each day, the importance of the platform grows with it. Developing a strong social media presence and growing your network of followers demands being active on Twitter. Fortunately, there exist many tools out there that assist us in making our life easier and more efficient on Twitter.

Here are ten tools that will increase your efficiency, while allowing you to retain your genuine personality when tweeting.

1. Buffer – Never Flood Your Followers Again

Buffer

Full Disclosure: I work on Buffer.

Buffer is an App that allows you to tweet more of the great content you come across each day, without overwhelming your followers. Via one of the browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) you can “Buffer” any article as a Tweet that you come across. Instead of being posted immediately, all these tweets will be tweeted well spaced out over the day.

Best bit: To understand more about what your followers like, you will receive analytics about clicks, retweets and reach for every Tweet Buffered.

Continue Reading

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a skeptical person when it comes to the value of most forms of social networking. While there always seems to be stories of a friend of a friend who is landing clients with Facebook, I’ve yet to see most social networks as little more than a way to connect with your peers or a way to waste a huge amount of time.

Part of my problem is that I have never really invested in creating a strong social presence or spent the time on learning how connection points like Facebook can be run to deliver value to potential clients. So before I write off Facebook completely I figured I should learn a little more about it. For this reason I was looking forward to Rockable Presses’ most recent book Successful Facebook Marketing.
Continue Reading

Editor’s Note: Skellie is the director for the Envato Tuts+ network and drives the social media promotion for nine brands with over 100,000 Facebook fans. This article is an excerpt from her newest book, Successful Facebook Marketing, sold by Rockable Press.

Your goals with Facebook should not only be to get more Likes and more traffic. One of the first things people learn at Business School is that it costs much more time, energy, and often money to add a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. Keeping your fans loyal and happy is just as important, if not more important, than finding new fans. For this reason, it’s important to use your Facebook Page to build more loyalty among your existing fans, and to gain a better understanding of them.

As I mentioned earlier, comments are one of the most useful ways fans can interact with your Facebook posts. Every time a fan leaves a comment it is shared on their profile and in their friends’ News Feeds. While you’re building brand loyalty and interacting directly with your audience, you’re also creating pathways for new fans to find your Page. For this reason, content that encourages discussion will be one of the best possible additions to your Facebook Page. Continue Reading

If you have more than one freelance specialty, one strategy is to dedicate a separate site (blog) to each specialty, develop strong targeted brands, and grow them independently across multiple social media. With this strategy comes the question of how can we manage all our sites, keep up with our branding efforts and handle our social media accounts (such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin) all at once?

There are pros and cons to having different social media accounts for multiple websites. It’s important to choose a social media promotion plan that fits your business structure and future goals best.

Though I’ve been writing for a long time, I started publishing when I discovered blogging is a wonderful way to share my interests, and build a portfolio along the way. However, it is also a demanding activity that requires one to be their own blogger, editor, web designer, marketer, SEO specialist, and social media manager. While I mostly enjoy these tasks, it is becoming harder to stick to my own deadlines while I am managing multiple sites. After all, I have an entertainment blog, a writing blog, and several others. Numerous blogs mean that all these tasks are multiplied.

Continue Reading

It’s rare that you’ll see a well-rested, socially adjusted, and emotionally fulfilled individual publish rants to a blog or Twitter page. But if you take sleep, confidence, and satisfaction from the happiest of people you’ll quickly see sniveling, snapping beasts emerge.

They’re not evil. Just fatigued. Unfortunately, “I was tired” won’t fix the damage caused by unsightly outbursts. You can avoid many of their mistakes by putting the following into practice: Continue Reading

You began with a glorious hallucination of what social media was going to do for your business, social life, and even writing ability. You tweeted, facebooked, and smothered Linked-in contacts with glowing recommendations. You commented on all the top blogs in your niche and dutifully updated your own blog on-schedule. You may have even dropped a few hundred dollars to listen to others tell you how to tweet, facebook, and smother.

Then you woke up. You may have read about a freelance writer moving to a tropical island, seen Dell Outlet’s sales report, or heard a podcast from some kids paying for college by selling iPhone apps. No matter the trigger, it suddenly hits you that you seem to be the only one not making big money from this social media “thing.” All the happy conversations, serendipitous connections, and lessons learned seem tarnished and heavy in your hand. You’re exhausted and have so little to show for all your labor! Continue Reading

What Is The Last Thing You Do Before You Launch A Website?

One thing that can be said about human beings is that we are, by and large, creatures of habit. We establish routines, consciously and subconsciously, that help us accomplish tasks or move us more quickly or comfortably through our day. Habits are formed in the design and development community just as they are in nearly every other professional and personal environment, and they serve any number of purposes. In design and development circles, one established habit is seen with the launch of a website or project.

7 Personality Types of Clients Today

Designers and developers form two parts of the design trinity: the client completes it. You can have the technology to build something and the design to make it magnificent, but if someone doesn’t fund the project, it usually falls flat.

No one has the time to do such a thing for fun. Designers and developers need clients to build their portfolio, sustain their lifestyle and grow and learn. Continue Reading

Social media is an excellent way to market yourself as a freelancer. It can also be, in my opinion, entirely overrated and often misused. Every day I see professionals tweeting and updating Facebook with spammy posts and self-important chatter that makes my skin crawl. I also see inspiring social champions who inform, empower and serve their audience.

Here’s a quick rundown of mistakes you want to avoid at all costs when using social media channels for finding work (whether in your marketing/branding or in your personal life), along with a few pointers to kick start your social marketing strategy. Continue Reading

I used to have an accountant who was fond of asking the following question: Is it making you money?

That question had a way of stopping me in my tracks. It forced me to think about what I was doing with my time. And what I needed to be doing.

I’m reminded of Helga the Accountant’s question whenever I read or hear the latest buzz about social networking. I can’t help thinking that all the time spent on Facebooking, Twittering, Linking In, etc., might be better spent on other things that might actually lead to sales.

Continue Reading

You know you want to tackle that new standard for CSS you’ve been hearing about. Or, you know that you should understand how overrides enhance Joomla! extensions and templates. You’ve heard the term “MVC” or maybe “SDK” but you have no clue what they mean. Maybe you want to learn a new style of writing so you can build that personal blog. But excuses pile up, for instance: you don’t have the resources, or your current work load doesn’t give you the time, or the best excuse — you lack the brain power. And really, if a client isn’t paying for it how can you legitimize the time?

Yet, to stay current and competitive in our cutthroat freelance environment, you must keep learning the “bleeding edge” of your chosen profession, be it design, web development, programming, or writing, or something else. The challenge is to continually keep learning while working. Otherwise, with the tools of our trades changing so rapidly we can quickly get outmoded. So, how can we at least stay on “speaking terms” with new techniques and technology?

Continue Reading