Dribbble is a strange site. It’s not just that it calls itself “Twitter for designers” and restricts posts to screenshots of no more than 400 x 300 pixels. It’s not even that the site then manages to arbitrarily impose basketball vocabulary onto its activities, so that posts are called “shots,” members may be “players,” “spectators” or “prospects,” and replies are called “rebounds.” And it’s not even that the site has a selective membership, with Pro accounts only available to players, and playership only available on an invitation basis. It’s that the site is remarkably effective. Designers win valuable feedback, the commendation of their peers and a chance to see what others are doing. And they pick up jobs. Lots of jobs.

Despite having only around 87,000 members of which just 15,000 are active players, Dribbble has established a reputation among designers as the place to be. Invitations are hotly sought after and there’s stiff competition for the views, comments and fans that help designs to win exposure. The site works by allowing players to upload small shots of their work in progress. Uploads are limited to 24 each month and  no more than five per day (to avoid “ball hogging”). Spectators can then follow the designers and projects they find interesting, organize their favorite shots into buckets, become a prospect by indicating that they’d like to be invited to play and, most importantly, they can also scout for talent and contact members about work opportunities.

Players can do all of those things but they can also upload, take part in playoffs by responding to someone else’s shot with one of their own, post comments and indicate that they’re available for hire. They can also pay extra for a Pro account that lets them group shots into projects, change their work availability settings and view stats.

Feedback, Peers and Job Offers

The direct benefit for players is that they get to be part of an elite group of designers who praise and comments on each other’s work. Ricky Linn, for example, is a 20-year-old design student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He’s been a Dribbble player for about a year, joining after a follower of his Tumblr site give him an invitation.

“It’s a great way to stay updated on what other designers are up to and the great projects they’re doing, track visual trends, learn and share techniques with other members, get some useful critical feedback from other designers about your work, and from a student’s standpoint, I get a broad general view of what kind of projects professionals are doing nowadays,” he says. “I wanted to be part of that community and engage with other designers who shared a similar aesthetic with me, and hopefully maybe get some of my design heroes to come check out my work as well.”

But the site’s vibrancy and its collection of talented designers also makes it more valuable to employers and agencies than a traditional website portfolio which might go months without being updated. Ricky Linn notes that he updates his portfolio every four or five months but in between those updates, nothing happens on his site. Posting a quick shot on Dribbble takes just minutes but shows employers that he’s active, busy, approachable and working in a particular style.

Like any social site though, success on Dribbble depends as much on popularity as it does on talent. The site’s home page shows the most popular current designs, exposure that requires picking up plenty of followers as well as posting great shots. And the rewards for that exposure are very real.

Jeremy Sallee is a 29-year-old UI and UX designer from France who has been on Dribbble since May 2011. When he managed to land a design on Dribbble’s “Popular” page, he found that he received between three and five job offers a day for a week. He even owes his current position to being spotted by a business on the site.

“So I would say more than sending me a lot of work, the site has literally changed my life,” he says.

For freelance designers hoping to reap those benefits too — either in the form of a full-time position or the kind of steady freelance work that can make for a stable freelance business — Dribbble offers three challenges:

• Landing an Invitation

Jeremy Sallee received his invitation from someone on DeviantArt in much the same way that Ricky Linn picked his up from a Tumblr visitor. Morgan Knutson, now the leading visual designer for Google+ desktop, obtained his nearly two years ago after spending a week hunting down someone who was willing to send him one.

The best strategy, says  Ricky Linn, is to build yourself up in a different community first, such as DeviantArt, Tumblr or even Twitter, and ask if anyone has an invitation they’re willing to share.

• Gaining Popularity

Ricky Linn found that because he had few followers, the benefits didn’t come immediately after he joined Dribbble. Gaining followers though takes time. It comes from giving feedback, liking the work of others and posting great designs. “Just keep on working, producing pixel perfect work, and have fun!” advises Jeremy Sallee. “The rest will follow.”

• Privacy and Confidentiality

Dribbble encourages designers to upload their current works but those are likely to be covered by confidentiality agreements. You’ll need to get the client’s permission to post, and you’ll also have to strip out any logos or other identifying marks.

“You should never submit something to Dribbble without prior authorization of your client,” says Jeremy Sallee. “If you explain you won’t reveal any logo and important info of the project and it will give them a better idea if the design will be popular or not, they generally agree.”

Meet all those challenges, and you can find yourself playing with Dribbble’s elite team and fielding the kinds of job offers that the site’s top players receive. And that will give you another problem that’s just as strange and welcome as the site itself: having to turn down work you don’t have time to do.

iPad screenshot of OnLive.

An iPad owned by a freelancer has just saved blushes at the BBC. When broadcast lines went down in Dubai, where its Test Match Special radio program is covering a series of five-day cricket matches between England and Pakistan, producer Adam Mountford reached for the iPad of freelance correspondent — and tech-lover — Jonathan Agnew. As a team of engineers battled to reconnect the wires, the BBC’s team of commentators passed the tablet between them, delivering ball-by-ball commentary through the iPad’s Skype app. Few freelance uses of the iPad are that dramatic, but with a little thought and a bit of planning it is possible to overcome the tablet’s limited storage and turn it into any freelancer’s mobile workstation. Here’s how to do it:

1. Fill Your Desk

Clearly, the App Store is the place to start turning your tablet into a desk. There’s no shortage of apps that can help a freelancer. Back in November 2010, AppStorm managed to draw up a list of no less than 90 iPhone apps that a freelancer might want to use. Plenty more have been added since then and many have been updated for the iPad.

The apps you choose will depend on the kind of work you’re planning to do — and also in your taste in apps. Dropbox is irreplaceable but the dozens of note-taking apps available all do roughly the same thing; whether you want to make do with the iPad’s Notes app or buy Noteshelf, which also allows hand-drawn sketches, depends on how you like to work.

In general though, you can divide your freelancer apps into three folders:

a)    JobSeeking Apps

Despite the convenience of being able to search for jobs anywhere, the number of freelance jobseeking apps is relatively few, most cost money and the majority are only optimized for the iPhone. Download all of them and you’ll get duplicate ads but you should load up on:

iFreelancer

iFreelancer draws in ads from Elance, Freelancer, ODesk, Scriptlance and VWorker. It’s free for a month, then $1.99 for a basic package and $4.99 with unlimited push notifications.

Choose the categories on each site and you’ll be able to review gig opportunities across all the main freelance job platforms.

b)    Note-Taking Apps

Search for “notes” in the App Store and you get a list of 1,213 note-taking apps optimized for the iPad. The most essential for freelancers though are:

Evernote

Multiple notebooks, shared folders, smart website pasting and, best of all, automated syncing across platforms means that you can capture all sorts of notes, share some with clients and access the same notes whether you’re on the desktop, your iPad or your iPhone. The basic services are free but $5 per month buys lots additional features that you probably won’t use.

NoteShelf

Evernote is likely to be good enough for collecting ideas but if you like to sketch your thoughts then NoteShelf is a good buy. It costs $4.99 but you also get to lay out your notebooks in a neat iBooks-style bookshelf.

c)     Work Apps

A jobseeking app will let you pitch for gigs when you’re away from your desk and a note app will let you put down your thoughts. But when you’re actually looking to do the work itself, you need something heavier.

For serious productivity, you’ve got two options:

i. Download a standalone app:

Pages

Apple’s own Pages app looks pretty and syncs automatically with iCloud. It will allow you to do some basic formatting and if you’re using iWorks on a Mac, the syncing will be smooth and easy.

If you’re using a PC and Microsoft though, you’ll struggle. Download a Word-formatted document from iCloud and you’ll lose the formatting from Pages. (There’s even a nasty little bug that means documents uploaded from Word disrupt the link between finger position and the cursor: use your finger to place the cursor and editing starts half a line away.) Nor is there a direct way to move Pages documents into a DropBox folder.

There are alternatives. DataViz’s DocumentsToGo plays nicely with Microsoft Office and syncs automatically to a desktop folder but is a bit clunky, and Office 2 HD wins lots of praise but is said to mangle some Word documents exported from Word 2008 for MAC. It also doesn’t recognize the cursor keys on the Apple keyboard.

ii. Use a cloud app.

A couple of new apps have now made it possible to access Office tools as powerful as those on your desktop. OnLive Desktop looks the most impressive. The app provides access to a Web-based desktop running Windows 7, complete with Word 2010, Excel and Powerpoint, as well as Paint, Calculator and Microsoft Surface Collage. In short, you get access to a complete Microsoft Office suite for free provided you use less than 2GB of storage. But the app is known for having connectivity problems and files are stored in an online folder which then have to be downloaded from desktop.onlive.com. Much more convenient is:

CloudOn

CloudOn might not look as nice as OnLive but it has one killer feature: it syncs with DropBox. Instead of having to download documents from a Web browser, deleting the previous version from your desktop, CloudOn uses DropBox as its default file system. It’s so much easier — and free too.

2. Connect Your iPad to Your Computer

Piling productivity apps into your iPad and using a Bluetooth keyboard will all help tablet-using freelancers to find work, take notes and smoothly use their iPads as adjuncts to their main computers. The best solution though is easier still. If you know you’re going to be in a place with a reliable Internet connection:

On a PC, open Control Panel > Hardware & Sound > Power Options > Edit Plan Settings.

Under the Plugged In option next to Put the Computer to Sleep, choose Never.

From the App Store, purchase and install Splashtop on your iPad. (It costs $4.99).

Download the Splashtop’s free desktop streamer.

Sync the app with the streamer and you’ll be able to access all of the tools and files on your main computer wherever you have Internet access, using your iPad as a remote control.

Joy Deangdeelert Cho didn’t set out to be a freelancer. After moving to Philadelphia from New York with her then-boyfriend (now husband) in 2005, the designer began looking for work. Although she won interviews, she failed to find a job that fitted and which could deliver the best aspects of her previous position at a boutique advertising agency. As she continued searching, she began taking on freelance jobs. Those projects continued to pick up until Joy realized that if she put in a little more effort, she wouldn’t need to find a job at all; she could freelance full time. Now the owner of Oh Joy! a successful and growing freelance business, she has designed exclusive stationery for Anthropologie, Chronicle Books and Target. She writes a weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Home & Design section, and she’s the author, with fellow freelancer Meg Mateo Ilasco, of Creative Inc.: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Successful Freelance Business. In a joint email interview, Meg and Joy explained what they saw as the secrets to successful freelancing and what freelancers should be doing to win work.

Surprisingly for freelancers who have been this commercially successful, a theme that runs through Meg and Joy’s advice is the importance of personal work and creativity. While Joy stumbled into freelancing, Meg has worked for herself for most of her adult life. The focus of her business has been on products: wedding invitations, stationery and home accessories, and now a magazine called Anthology.  Most of her freelance work though consists not of tasks completed for clients but self-initiated projects such as books that give her extra freedom as well as some useful revenue.

“For me, freelancing became an outlet for expression outside of my product-based businesses as well as an additional way to earn income,” she says.

Mixing Regular Work with Fresh Jobs

Maintaining that free expression can be harder than it appears for freelancers. Joy notes that while some freelancers base their businesses on one large, regular client, and others take on lots of small projects from a never-ending stream of clients, she likes to have one or two regular suppliers and another three to five occasional clients.

The total number of clients lets her feel that she has enough work but the balance between regular gigs and new challenges also ensures that she doesn’t get bored and that her work stays fresh.

“I think new work is crucial to feeling creative, energized, and excited about your work,” she says. “While reoccurring clients are great, after a while, you’re probably doing more of the same thing for them. But taking on new clients regularly gives you a chance to work on a new brand, new format, and possibly a different style.”

That new work doesn’t just provide a sense of satisfaction though. For Meg Mateo Ilasco, it’s also a vital tool for bringing in more new projects and new challenges. She recommends that freelancers put their newest work on their websites and their blogs, and suggests that they also upload their personal projects as a way of guiding their careers in the direction they want them to go.

“Those projects often resonate with people and can help steer your career. It can help you produce more of the work that you truly want to do.”

In time, she argues,  those personal projects and new work will mean that a freelancer won’t need to go out and look for clients. They’ll start to come in by themselves.

The Nine Qualities of a Successful Freelancer

That may be valuable advice, and not just a good excuse to find time for the projects you’re more likely to enjoy. But for many freelancers, the biggest source of new jobs isn’t the new, exciting and fun work on their websites (which have to be promoted) or their blogs (which have to be written) but the clients themselves. Referrals remain one of the most effective ways in which freelancers build their businesses and generate new income.

Both Meg and Joy agree that current clients are a valuable source of new clients. And winning that work, is much easier, if less enjoyable, than finding the time to finance and complete your own projects. Mostly, says Joy, it comes down to doing a good job and making sure that the client knows you’re available to take on more.

“Sometimes clients may think you’re too busy for more work or they may think you don’t need it. But if they know, they are usually happy to share you with others!”

Fresh jobs, generous clients and personal work aside, Meg and Joy identify nine qualities that all successful freelancers share: a strong business sense; a love of their art; curiosity; confidence and a strong vision; good listening and observations skills; good communication skills; the ability to handle criticism and rejection; a positive attitude and professional demeanor; and good work habits.

Those aren’t impossible qualities to obtain but it’s notable that most are related to business and professionalism rather than to talent and imagination. Creative freelancers might need to show off their personal work and their curiosity but mostly they have to be able to track down clients, work to deadline and understand what the client wants. Get all that right though, and new freelancers might be surprised to find that their search for a new job turns into a rejection of the traditional work world and an embrace of an independent working life.

“While in school, we were always told about the huge ad agencies and design firms, so I had the idea that if I wasn’t at a big company, it wasn’t seen as reputable by my peers,” recalled Joy. “But nowadays, I think that you can be super-successful on your own too.”

French designer Sacha Greif had too much work. It was a problem he had been battling ever since becoming a freelancer four years ago. The Web and mobile apps he created for clients would be seen by users who hired him for their own similar projects. He was also active on Dribbble, a design forum that allows designers to show off their work in progress, and which generated a steady stream of new leads.

“The end result was that I was receiving more project offers than I could possibly take on myself,” he says. “I started looking for a place where I could share those offers with other good designers.”

Unable to find that space he decided to build it himself.

Folyo began as a simple jobs newsletter that Greif would send to selected designers. Between June and September 2011, he registered as many talented designers as he could find, then contacted startups and incubators to suggest that they send him their design needs. A number of companies posted projects and some were able to find freelance help, satisfying both sides.

Greif’s incentive was clear enough. A full schedule book and every billable hour covered might look desirable for any freelancer but when more work is coming in than can possibly go out, pressure builds, deadlines slip, clients feel let down and your reputation starts to sink. And giving a flat (if apologetic) no hurts. When someone has demand that we know how to meet, seeing that job disappear over the horizon feels like a terrible waste that benefits no one: you don’t get the work and the client doesn’t get the work completed.

That first newsletter Greif sent helped to solve his clients’ problems and it brought jobs to a number of fellow freelancers but the list was free and apart from relieving some pressure did little for Greif himself. So after a month of bringing together designers and companies, Greif began work on a Web app that could incorporate a business model and capitalize on his contacts.

Sharing the Work

Folyo now works as a newsletter-based jobs board. Freelance designers upload their profiles. Companies submit their job offers. Greif reviews those offers, weeding out the submissions with low budgets or which fail to provide enough detail about the work. Once approved, the company pays Folyo a $100 submission fee, and once a week, Greif sends the offers out to his list of subscribers. Designers who want to take on the work are then free to show the companies their profiles and the companies make their selection. If a company doesn’t find a suitable designer, Greif refunds their fee.

As a recruitment process, it’s a little clumsy. Companies have to wait up to a week before their jobs are sent out, then wait longer before they receive replies. Of the fifteen to twenty job offers submitted each week, only five or ten make it through the approval process. Nor is there an open bidding process, like that often used by freelance sites, that would drive down the budget, lowering the cost for companies and reducing incomes for designers.

“As a designer myself I created a site I would like to use, not a site that tries to sell me out to companies,” explains Greif. “I also believe this approach turns out to be the best for companies, too, since what they really want if they’re using Folyo is access to the best designers in the world, not getting the cheapest possible price.”

All Designers Are Pre-Selected

The focus on quality helps Folyo to fulfill a demand for pre-selected designers. Folyo now holds about 230 designer profiles, and the newsletter goes out to a further 80 who signed up before the website launched and who haven’t created profiles. Greif receives new applications from about 100 designers every month, but rejects about 60 percent of them. Most of those who make it onto the list were invited by Greif on Twitter or Dribbble. Unsolicited submissions have a rejection rate closer to 90 percent.

Greif looks for two assets in designers he approves: a record of working for real clients, understanding their requirements and recognizing that design is about “more than making things look pretty”; and creativity, or “spark.”

“It means you’re always pushing yourself, and are willing to give the client what they need, and not what they asked for. It means every project you produce is your best work so far, and you care about every little detail,” Grief says.

For a start-up that’s just a few months old, Folyo is doing well by already having a revenue stream. But it’s yet to show a profit. In a blog post submitted at the beginning of the year, Greif revealed that he had spent $2,640 on development (believing that outsourcing was a skill he needed to learn too, he hired a designer to create the site for him). He spent another $640 on StumbleUpon and InfluAds, and had generated total revenues of $1,870 from an average monthly income of $623.

Greif notes that while building a service that allows him to earn from his overflow was easy, making it work is proving much harder. He concedes that if he’d taken investment money or had employees who needed to feed their kids, he’d be obsessing a lot more over conversion rates and business plans. Running Folyo as a side project though, he’s able to look for long-term growth, enjoy the time he spends interacting with other designers and bask in the warm glow of thanks from satisfied advertisers.

But there is a cost, of course. When your inbox is overflowing, spare moments are rare. The $1,870 that Greif had earned by the beginning of the year hasn’t just failed, so far, to cover his investment in the site. The income may also fail to cover the money he loses when he checks designers and reviews submissions instead of filling billable hours. Trying to turn your overflow into a source of revenue may be an enjoyable solution but don’t expect it to pay off fast.

As freelancers, we’re always looking for better ways to work. We want to find channels that deliver clients, processes that ensure we get paid and methods that maximize the amount of time we spend working while minimizing the unbillable hours lost pitching for work and dealing with clients. Advocate-Art started with that goal in mind when a group of illustrators in the UK decided they liked the idea of having an agent to bring in work but didn’t like the loss of control in taking instruction through a middleman. They began as an artists’ co-operative but expanded into an office that handles sales, marketing, legal affairs, accounting, promotions, art management and web hosting. The group even has its own gallery to showcase the works of the 200 artists, illustrators and photographers it now represents.

Work managed by Advocate arrives in two ways. The group accepts commissions which it passes on to the artists for a fee of 30-35 percent. Some of its members rely on that work as their main source of income, while others regard the jobs as just one element of their freelance business. Clients, who tend to be publishers of children’s books, greeting cards and decorative art (pretty much all users of illustration, in fact, except cartoons and graphic novels), often look for artists with clear specialties. Some illustrators only supply floral illustrations or calligraphy for greeting cards or abstract work, for example. But the group’s large numbers also mean that it can act as a project manager putting together teams, sometimes as large as 30, to produce a large work, such as a 300-page children’s book.

The other source of revenue is stock.  Publishers can browse the 100,000 images submitted by artists according to categories divided by usage: book publishing is broken down by age; greeting cards can including wrapping art, bags and seasonal designs; art for products can include photography, posters and designs for jigsaws and other items; ad and design targets design and advertising agencies, and tends to be a bit edgier. Unlike photographic microstock — or even stock — buyers first download spec versions of an image they want to use and are then contacted by the group with a quote and a contract. The quote is made according to usage and varies with the extent of the rights the client needs.

All About the F.A.C.T.S.

That rights managed approach is not the only difference between Advocate and a microstock company, or even an agency. The stock collection is highly selective. The group cherry-picks submissions to ensure quality, beauty and artistic integrity — and so that “clients don’t have to trawl through thousands of  poor-quality images,” explains Felicity French, an illustrator and Advocate-Art’s spokesperson. It’s an approach that works well for an agency that can commission art when a client finds something that has the right style but a subject that’s not quite suitable.

But Advocate also says that it operates according to an ethos of “f.a.c.t.s”: fairness, ability, creativity and trust. It’s a slogan that’s more than a neat acronym.

“Rather than taking control away from the artists, Advocate was set up to operate on a transparent system,” says French, “allowing direct contact between artist and client, and often standing aside after the initial introduction, only acting to assist if called upon.”

That is a big difference to the usual pattern in which clients talk to agencies and artists receive instruction through a third party, usually to prevent the client from snapping up the artist directly. There’s no sign though that that access to clients has led to artists choosing to cut out the middleman — and his fees. On average, Advocate’s 200 artists handle about 400 commissions every month, worth a cumulative $500,000. Ten percent of the commissions come from London but 20 percent come from mainland Europe and 40 percent of business is for US-based companies. With that kind of steady, varied and valuable work, there’s good reason for artists to stick with the group.

There’s Plenty of Work for Freelance Illustrators

And in a positive sign for freelancers — and people who might like to work on a freelance basis — there’s no indication that the level of work is falling off, despite the weak economy.

“It seems we must be recession-proof as this year has been our busiest time in 20 years!” says French. “There is a lot of uncertainty out there at the moment so going freelance can be daunting, but for Advocate artists it seems that now is a great time to be freelance.”

The really good news though is that the group is always looking for new artists. They can submit their work in jpg format to mail@advocate-art.com. The most successful applicants, says French, are artists who have the most synergy with requirements of the group’s clients. She recommends that applicants take the time to look at the website, and the art on it, to see how well their contributions match up.

But it’s perhaps the fact that a large agency can bring in so much work, allowing some artists to rely on them full-time, that’s the best news. Freelance illustration isn’t easy. (Freelance anything isn’t easy.) It takes time to build up a client base, and it takes time too to build up a portfolio of work that demonstrates your talent, defines your niche and displays what you have to offer to clients. Advocate isn’t going to make that easier for everyone. It’s not going to accept every applicant and its ability to pass on jobs will depend on the market’s ability to supply that demand. But it does show that the work is there and that with effort and patience, it is possible to build up a freelance illustration business.

“The difference between winning a job and being passed over can sometimes rest on one sample,” says Felicity French. “Persevere and always keep on creating new work and evolving your style.”

For freelance developers, writers and designers there’s both plenty of work available and plenty of places to find that work. Coders can browse the postings on Project4Hire, VWorker, and Plasis, a development project aggregator. Designers can bid on DesignCrowd, GraphicDesignFreelanceJobs and Krop, among others. And almost anyone can plough through the massive listings on Elance, Guru and Odesk in a search for their next project and next biggest client. But what if you’re not served by any of those sites? What if your freelance specialty still requires you to advertise for business, rely on word of mouth and network to bring in jobs? And what if you’re in the kind of industry which requires having multiple commissions at the same time in order to make the expenses involved in completing even one of them worthwhile?

That was the challenge faced by a group of genealogy specialists in 2008. The freelancers, specialists in Eastern European family research, knew that if they had to make a trip to a distant records depository to search for information, they wanted to research more than one case when they got there.

“It makes the trip cost-effective and more interesting,” explains Elaine Bostwick, a spokesperson for the site.

In 2007, they began creating an online jobs service specifically for freelance genealogists. They began recruiting abroad first, spending a year building up a base of freelancers who would be available for projects, before advertising for US-based genealogists shortly before launch. The site, GenealogyFreelancers.com, opened in 2008. It now has 1,138 freelance specialists available for work in 65 countries and across the United States. On average, it receives between 35 and 50 projects a month.

Sharing the Workload

That’s not a particularly great ratio. Elance has just over 545,000 registered experts and receives about 53,000 jobs a month. GenealogyFreelancers would need to more than double its top rate of job offers to give genealogists the same chance of landing work that developers, designers, writers and others can bank on at the giant job site. But GenealogyFreelancers also provides a “private project corner” that allows genealogists to share jobs, lightening the load for overcommitted freelancers and offering specialties and a geographic reach that they can’t supply themselves. With typical fees ranging from under $100 for a document translation, through $275 for a records search for a single surname, and reaching more than $3,500 for a custom research project, there’s also plenty of income — both large and small — to go around.

Even without an enviable ten-to-one freelancer-to-project ratio though, GenealogyFreelancers works in a very similar way to Elance: clients post projects, specialists bid on the work, and the fee is held in escrow until the project is complete. Specialists are required to indicate the level of their expertise (novice, intermediate, advanced or professional) and any claimed professional accreditations are checked, verified and indicated with icons. A ratings system, too, provides a form of internal referencing and feedback.

Fees for using the site vary and come from the freelancer. Free membership is available but takes a 6 percent commission from earnings; silver membership charges $8 per month but cuts the commission to 3 percent; while gold membership charges $15 per month but waives all commission charges.

The similarities with sites like Elance and Guru aren’t accidental. They derive from the experience of the site’s founders with other freelance services.

“We had all used some type of an auction like site for other services in the past and wondered if we could incorporate the basic premise, yet design it so that it was a service that understood the wants of both the seeker and specialist in genealogy specifically,” said Elaine Bostock. “To be able to choose the project that interests you is an appealing premise for a freelancer, and choosing a specialist who is well versed and geographically appropriate for your family project is appealing to the client.”

No Cut-and-Paste Bids

With fewer projects listed, freelancers on GenealogyFreelancers have to be particularly careful in their bidding. The kind of numbers game seen on Elance that allows some freelance companies to enter cut-and-paste bids on every appropriate project in the hope of winning one in ten won’t work on the genealogy site. Bidders, says Ms Bostock, have to go beyond listing their terms and conditions alongside a quote if they want to win a job. They need to ask questions and reveal specific details of how they plan to manage the task. They need to make clear that they’re both interested in and understand the project’s demands.

Clients, too, need to check the profile of the bidder to make sure that they’re in the right location, and they have to review their experience to see whether they really can provide the answers they’re looking for.

“Genealogy is typically a labor of love for those seeking to build a family tree and the genealogist or researcher that they choose to help with that journey needs to be a comfortable fit,” says Elaine Bostock. “They need to understand the personal feelings that go along with the project.”

Genealogy then is a special kind of freelancing. While designers and developers can happily work from their homes, researching family history has a host of specializations, often demands language skills and requires professionals to take long, expensive trips.

It also often begins with an interest rather than a career plan. Genealogists tend to start by researching their own family backgrounds, realize that they enjoy the work and wonder if others will pay them to do the same thing. They can then go through the process of acquiring broader skills and the kind of professional accreditation that turns a passion into professional work.

And yet the problem of finding work for freelance genealogists has been at least partially solved by a model used to help freelancers in general. The bidding, pitching and ratings that occur online have made it possible for just about any freelancer offering any service to aggregate jobs and win work. You don’t have to be a coder, a designer or a writer to win those jobs — you just have to be a freelancer.

One of the big benefits of freelancing is that you don’t have to go into the office. There’s no office politics, no gossip around the watercooler, and no boss looking over your shoulder. But there’s also no camaraderie, no daily contacts and no friendly chats.  Working from home, day after day, can be a pretty lonely affair, a situation that can have a strong effect on both happiness and productivity. According to Professor Stephen Humphrey of Florida State University, a “socially supportive workplace” contributes to greater job satisfaction, lower feelings of exhaustion, and a reduced likelihood of wanting to quit. People whose work depends on others also perform better and have lower stress. So what can freelancers do to beat the loneliness of working from home without the losing the benefits of freelance freedom?

Some steps are relatively easy. An active social media presence can go some way towards making up for the lack of human contact. Facebook provides a simple way to keep up to date with the gossip you might otherwise miss and an active Twitter stream can provide at least a sense that there are people out there, chatting and thinking about the same things that interest you. But the power of a virtual social life is limited, and using Facebook’s instant messaging service can take too much attention away from a project.

Working in an office part-time might help. If you could combine a regular day job for one or two days a week with freelance work, you might be able to put together the best of both worlds: you’d get a regular injection of company (and one regular source of income) while still retaining your freedom during the rest of the week. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 8.5 million people — about one in sixteen workers — now hold part-time jobs. Not all of those people are working short hours willingly but reduced hours have been a popular way for employers to cut costs during the downturn without losing skilled staff. Keep in touch with your former colleagues, keep an eye on local businesses in your field and let people know that you’d be willing to work eight to sixteen hours a week if they need the help. You might just be able to give your freelance business a new balance.

Even if you don’t want to go into the office at all though, there are still a few more ways you can win the benefits of sociability without saying goodbye to freelance life.

• Build a Joint Project

Freelancers don’t just work alone, we also tend to work independently. The projects we complete might be stand-alone, such as an e-book or a website, or they’ll be inserted later into a product over which we’ve had no influence at all. A logo designer doesn’t need to talk to the company’s copywriter to do her work; the client’s guidelines are enough.

Work on a project as part of a team though, and the interaction comes as a bonus.

Those kinds of projects are rare on freelance job sites but we can create them ourselves. Etsy’s Teams look a lot like groups and forums on other sites but they’re actually platforms for different artists to work together.

Larissa Liberato, for example, makes party favors but has created a team on Etsy to help “all brides find the custom wedding decor of their dreams.” Her dream, she says, would be for the team to work as one to pull off a wedding. “We could recommend brides to our team and have brainstorm sessions with them, show them our items that best match their needs or they can request custom items.”

It’s a step beyond swapping advice and raising issues towards co-operation in serving clients. And for some freelancers, it can be a useful way to work with someone on a paying project.

• Take a Course

Even if we have to work alone, we don’t have to learn alone — and we should always be learning. Whether you’re a designer who needs to keep up to date with the latest software tools, a developer who needs to know a new language, or a writer who can brush up on editing or technical writing skills, there’s always more to know and more ways to broaden your professional services.

Most towns have adult education centers whose courses are often subsidized. (This is one at Santa Barbara City College.) You should be able to find a class there that can boost your business or even just give you a fun education. And if you can’t, you could try teaching. That will give you some income and interaction with both students and teachers.

• Attend a Conference

A class is likely to be regular and relatively cheap. Professional conferences are occasional and can be expensive. The HOW Design Live Creative Freelancer Conference to be held in June 2012 costs $545 (or $595 if you book after March 30^th.) Develop in Brighton, a conference held in the UK earlier this year, was a lot cheaper with special day rates for independent workers of just £50 – £75.

Like a course, a conference can provide an education but more importantly, it delivers contacts that can stay with you throughout the year, helping a freelancer to feel less like a lone worker and more like a team member.

• Co-Working

And between classes and conferences, there’s always co-working. Cafes might give you some conversation with other digital nomads, and you can chat with the waiters and baristas, but for a real sense that you have colleagues, there’s only the shared space of co-working. Rates vary. New Work City, a space in New York, charges $300 a month for full membership, but also provides some access for as little as $25 per month. Creative Density Coworking in Denver offers plans from $75 to $300 but also provides a free day trial.

The site also likes to point out that a survey of its users found that 42 percent saw an increase in income, 88 percent interact better with people and 60 percent said that they were more relaxed at home — even when they weren’t working there.

The Philippines, with its low-cost, English speaking population has always provided competition for US and European freelancers, and Indian companies dominate the bids at job sites like Elance and Odesk. But increasingly Russian firms are winning development work with lower prices and comparative skills that might otherwise have gone to Western programmers.

Sibers is one of those firms. The company, based in Novosibirsk, Russia, started in 1998 as a two-man programming team when Java developer Yury Bannov graduated from university and began working with a classmate on a contract for American firm IWC. They later did work for 3COM, hired more employees and since 2006 have operated as a contract development business under the name HireRussians.

Many of the firm’s clients are start-ups that can range in size from individuals looking for help developing a Facebook or iPhone app to small hi-tech businesses with innovative ideas but limited development budgets.

“They know exactly what features they need to develop, which technical team members they need to hire, and how they will get the developed product to the market,” says Anie Taskaeva, HireRussians’ Head of Marketing and Public Relations. “The most suitable outsourcing model for them implies an iterative development process that assures the highest possible level of flexibility for innovative projects with requirements that are either unclear or likely to change during development.”

Other clients include local project managers who act as middlemen for firms that need software developers, and the owners and CTOs of established businesses who might want a new online store, a back-office system for employees or just professional support and an upgrade to an existing system.

Completed projects have included work on Eye-Fi, a memory card for cameras that uses a built-in wi-fi to send pictures back to a computers, as well as a number of projects based on Asterisk, an open-source VoiP platform.

Half of the company’s clients come from a single source. HireRussians is ranked third on freelance site Elance, which it’s been using for around a decade. Over the last year, it’s picked up 155 clients of whom one in three came back for more, earning the company a total of $1,161,777 — an average of $7,495 per client. (Altogether, the company has been hired by 490 clients on the freelance site, and $4,168,456.)

Those are good-sized jobs that most freelance developers would be happy to accept, and the 10,781 logged hours suggests a reasonable hourly rate of over $100. In fact though, HireRussians hourly fees are $25 for QA or HTML development; $30 for a developer; $35 for a senior developer; and $50 for the technical team leader.

By way of comparison, rates for freelance developers from the US and Western Europe advertising on Elance can reach as high as $120 per hour.

You Get What You Pay For

The usual response among freelancers with bigger bills to pay and higher prices to pay them is that clients get what they pay for. Work with a firm on the other side of the world and the client can’t be certain — until they get the project back — that the quality of the firm’s developers will be high enough or their services reliable enough.

Anie Taskaeva concedes that outsourcing firms like HireRussians do face several obstacles to winning jobs. Intellectual property issues can cause concern, as can confidentiality, different business ethics, a lack of confidence in the company’s technical expertise, and time zone differences. (Novosibirsk is exactly twelve hours ahead of New York.)

She cites the company’s presence in a part of the country known for its scientific pedigree and home to the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science as one reason that clients should trust them. The firm’s experts, she says, have graduated from the area’s most prestigious universities, some have Masters degrees and most are fluent in English. The time difference means that project managers have to keep careful schedules but it also means that developers have a twelve-hour head start. Certifying programmers and supplying references can also help to create trust. Even the climate, she argues, is another reason that firms should feel confident outsourcing to a firm in Siberia.

“It may sound funny, but Siberian weather really is a factor for better productivity. Not only do we find the brain works better when it’s cold, but the long winters also make developers stay inside in front of their computers, instead of going to a beach.”

Russia Versus India

That could prove to be a winning factor when it comes to winning work from HireRussians’ real competition. That’s not single developers working from home offices in California but Indian outsourcing firms in Bangalore and Mumbai. HireRussians might be the third ranked development firm on Elance but the top company is SynapseIndia which has won just under $1.7m worth of work. That’s more than half a million dollars more than the Siberian firm but SynapseIndia needed nearly twice as many jobs to do it at a rate one-third lower than that of HireRussians’.

“We never compete with Indian companies on price,” says Ms Taskaeva. “Rather, we focus on employing highly talented people, our professional experience, and our Customer-Provider mentality instead of price.”

So as Russian outsourcing firms attempt to beat Indian outsourcing firms by emphasizing skill over price, where does that leave Western freelance developers hoping to win just enough jobs to earn a living?

Worried, perhaps, but not lost entirely. As demand for their services increases so is the price of Indian and Russian developers. India has already seen wage inflation that has led some experts to believe that its price advantage over US developers will be gone within five years.

When even firms in Siberia have to compete on quality rather than fees, US-trained developers from recognized schools, with perfect English and in the same time zones as clients should find themselves back on a level playing field. They’ll still be competing against firms on the other side of the world but at least the location of the competition will be as irrelevant as the location of the freelancer. Until then, the winning jobs against foreign competition will remain a battle.

Ashraf Slamang’s blog is dead. The freelance Web designer from South Africa whose posts had included explanations on creating a simple gallery using Flash, XML and ActionScript 2.0, and adding a custom class to a single WordPress post in the loop, came close recently to burying the blog on his site less than a year after its launch and following several months without fresh output.

The reason for his blog’s demise is familiar to any freelancer who has tried to use a regular stream of articles to drag in leads and show them how they think: time.

“My blog has been dormant for months now as I haven’t been finding the time to write,” Ashraf told us. “Or rather, I haven’t been managing my time correctly.”

Ashraf isn’t alone. According to a survey by Technorati, a blog directory, 13 percent of all blogs online are operated by entrepreneurs or individuals writing for a company or organization they own. Eight-four percent of those bloggers write mostly about their own industry, 70 percent do it to gain professional recognition and 68 percent do it to attract new clients.

But they don’t seem to do it very much. The same survey found that 26 percent of all bloggers hadn’t posted in the last year. Forty-six percent hadn’t posted for three months, and 58 percent had gone a month without refreshing their blog.

Four Blog Posts a Day

That may suggest a missed opportunity. There are no figures that indicate the number of clients who hire freelancers after reading their blogs but there’s little doubt that well-written and informative blog posts can reveal a great deal about the freelancer and the quality of his or her services.

For Brennan Letkeman, an industrial designer who has been blogging for four years, writing posts allows service providers to display their approach, their thoughts and their styles in a particularly powerful way.

“It’s a narrative,” says Brennan. “A resume can be written by anybody with any intention, but to consistently write down your thoughts and explore topics shows who you really are and where you’re really coming from.”

Brennan’s blog, though, is updated at a frequency that other freelance bloggers can only envy. He typically posts twice a day but says that as many as four or five posts isn’t unusual if he’s particularly free or if it’s a holiday weekend.

“I try to post at least one thing a day to appease both my readers and myself,” he says. “It’s a discipline to write sometimes, but I think it’s good for you in the end.”

That sounds more like a full-time job. Brennan is now an industrial design student after spending several years as a Web designer, and while his work currently includes designs for objects that range from robot bodies to cattle prods and from chairs to shoes, it’s questionable that he’d have enough free hours to write so much if he were also trying to manage a full-time freelance business.

So what can freelancers do when they’re pressed for time but want the openness and connections that writing a blog can deliver to prospects?

Swapping a Blog for a Microblog

One option is to turn towards microblogging. If writing a 500-word post takes too many billable minutes out of a working day, then a series of quick 140-character posts might be easier, more spontaneous and still provide an insight into your way of working.

That was an approach that Ashraf considered. Commenting on CreativeOverflow.net, a blog for creative workers, he noted that he was thinking of taking off his blog and adding a Twitter feed that would be easier to update and still show that the site is active.

It would also easy to install, but Twitter isn’t a blog and its short posts make for limited insight. When it came to planning a new design, Ashraf decided to resurrect his blog, and make time for extra posts.

“I gave it some thought and now don’t intend to remove my blog completely – 140 characters is a bit hard sometimes,” he explains. “However, in my redesign I have given more prominence to my Twitter feed as that would be updated more often and keep the website somewhat fresh.”

Ashraf’s solution then is to use Twitter to supply his site’s vibrancy and rejig his schedule to include more frequent larger posts. An easier solution might be to follow at least part of Brennan Letkeman’s strategy. His posts might be remarkably frequent but they’re also short — usually less than 300 words — and filled with images. For a designer, that’s no bad thing. A client considering hiring someone to produce a visual or physical spec is going to be more interested in objects he can see or imagine handling than in reviewing the designer’s words. (Which may be just as well: a Mercedes design that Brennan Letkeman imagines as the work of a group off-track corporate designers actually turns out to be a concept design by freelance designer Steel Drake — none of which makes his review comments any less revealing.)

You’ll have to source the images, something that designers can easily do on the press pages of corporate websites. Add a couple of hundred words explaining why the design is great or terrible and you have a blog post — and an insight into the way you think.

It would be great if there were an easy solution to the dilemma that freelancers face when we build websites to promote our services. We know that adding a blog can help to land new clients, and win views. But we also know that every hour not spent doing billable work for clients is time that costs us money. Perhaps the best advice — beyond using Twitter to make up for missing posts and images to make up for missing time — is to write a blog you enjoy.

“It’s a journal of thoughts and there’s a small market for that,” says Brennan of his blog. “But I blog more for myself than anyone. Learn by teaching.”

“Kathy” got it horribly wrong. Hoping to find work as a freelance ghostwriter, she joined LinkedIn and headed straight for the Ghostwriters group. There, she started a thread which read:

“Never worked as a ghost writer before, but interested in an opportunity. Attached is my last article, shows my writing skills and gives info on publishing apps.”

She received two responses from other members of the group. The first began “WARNING:BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION” and pitched a ghostwriting course. The second just pitched the ghostwriter’s own website.

There was little evidence that any of those posts brought in more work or did anything to boost any of those freelancers’ careers.

In fact, the warning attached to the description of the ghostwriting course suggests a discomfort with making the kind of direct pitches on LinkedIn that are more usually saved for job sites. But LinkedIn is a professional careers site. If you can’t do blatant self-promotion on LinkedIn, what can you do on it?

How Do You Work a Network?

The usual answer is a vague mention of networking as though the site hands out cocktails and introductions to giant clients. LinkedIn’s ability to scan email contact lists and suggest second and third degree contacts is supposed to be the site’s biggest strength. By leveraging the network of immediate acquaintances, freelancers should be able to identify firms and prospects that might need their services — and reach them through people they trust.

In practice, there’s little evidence that happens with any regularity. Being told that your connections link you to several million other people makes for some impressively large figures but it does little to identify which prospects might turn into your next biggest client. Even the activity lists, those announcements that someone you might have worked with once is now connected to someone you’ve never heard of, is of little help. They tell what your former colleague is doing now but say little about what you’ll be doing in the future.

Asking for an introduction without understanding the relationship between them or looking unpleasantly mercenary isn’t easy. Come across as desperate and you’ll kill the chance of winning any work, and there’s no way to know whether the target is hiring anyway. It’s no surprise if those secondary connections rarely translate into a new client. Knowing that a network exists isn’t the same as being able to use the connections that link it.

More immediately useful for freelancers are LinkedIn’s groups. Search for “freelance” in the groups directory and you’ll be offered a list of around 2,327 different forums in which freelancers are happily exchanging information. Not all of those groups will be useful or relevant. The biggest freelance-related group by far is Consultants Network with more than 214,000 members. While some of those members are likely to be genuine freelance consultants looking for ideas on pitching their management knowledge or their programming skills, the tendency for laid-off white collar workers to set themselves up as “consultants” while they look for a salaried job might be a better explanation for the group’s high numbers. When those temporary freelancers move back into full-time employment, not all will resign from the group. LinkedIn contains plenty of former freelancers.

Other freelance groups though are both better targeted and packed with useful information. The Designers Talk group, run by the Designers Talk forum, for example, includes a section listing jobs as well as a promotions tab that provides space for the obvious jobseeking that can pollute other discussion streams. Jobs are few but interesting, and currently include ads for a Digital Creative Director for Walmart and a Senior Innovation Developer, Technical Product Marketing for Salesforce. The promotions tab includes blog posts submitted by attention-seeking designers, but also threads that begin: “Hi, I am new to the group, but wanted to share a bit of what I do as a mosaic artist. This is my website…”

That leaves room in the discussions themselves for questions and answers that  are genuinely helpful. A quick browse of the posts published reveals questions about the best way to show Web design specs, recommendations for revenue tracking software, and a discussion of the ethics of moonlighting as a freelancer while working for a design agency. When one designer asked what makes a site look professional, answers ranged from good images through easy navigation to restraint — all good guidelines.

We Join LinkedIn Because We Have To

These are all pointed questions and solid solutions from experienced professionals looking for answers that are hard to find elsewhere. The group might be smaller than the DesignerTalk forums themselves but the organization of LinkedIn, together with its linking of profiles that show who’s doing the talking, make it much more user-friendly. The list of top influencers on the right of the page also reveals whose answers are most worth reading.

Perhaps the most powerful benefit for freelancers on LinkedIn then is as a meeting point for others in the profession, a place to exchange ideas on a platform known for its professional outlook.

But the real reason that those LinkedIn Groups work is that we all feel we have to be there. We know that before a clients hires any freelancer for a big job, one of the first things they’ll do is check out his or her LinkedIn profile. We have to make sure those profiles are kept up to date, free of errors and act as a billboard for our services, complete with links to our websites and portfolios.

And we know too that when others in the profession land new clients, those clients are added to their own network, providing at least one (shadowy) indication of the growth and client bases of other freelancers in the same field. When you’re working alone, it’s the closest you can get to seeing how your growth compares to that of the competition.

It would be great to say then that LinkedIn is a valuable resource for freelancers keen to find new clients. But there’s little evidence that the site’s main asset — its open networks — actually deliver the goods. And while some job offers are occasionally posted in specialized groups, that kind of content usually plays a secondary role to the professional discussions about tools, best practices and suggestions for improvements.

It’s the fact that clients check the site to assess freelancers they’ve already found elsewhere that makes LinkedIn so important, not the opportunities available on the site itself. “Kathy” might have saved herself the bother of writing a plea for a job in the ghostwriting group, and opted instead to ask other group members where she might find those clients outside LinkedIn.

On October 6, 2011, the Obama for America re-election campaign announced a design contest to produce a poster in support of the American Jobs Act. Artists around the country were invited to send in their submissions in return for which three winners would receive a framed print of their own work signed by the president. They wouldn’t get paid as the poster appeared on billboards across the country to support the president’s re-election campaign and neither would the designer of any other submission that the organizers felt they might want to use. There wasn’t even a guarantee that the designers would receive credit.

It’s the kind of crowdsourced appeal for free work that has long irritated professional graphic designers and other freelancers — and, in an open letter to the Obama for America Campaign, it brought a strong rebuke from the Graphic Artists Guild.

“How obvious is this irony: A crowdsourced contest soliciting free work (spec work) from American artists for the purpose of promoting legislation to create jobs,” the Guild complained. “The Obama For America re-election campaign contest… is shameful. American artists should be outraged that our President does not recognize that we are entitled to be paid for our work, as are all Americans.”

The Graphic Artist Guild has been standing up for designers for a while. Formed in 1967 when a group of graphic artists in Detroit came together to improve their pay and conditions in the automobile advertising industry, it now has 1,200 members who include illustrators, cartoonists, animators, digital artists and photographers as well as graphic designers. Full membership is restricted to working artists who earn over half their income from graphic work while associate membership is available for people who earn less than half their income from their designs and for non-artists such as their agents and lawyers.

Collective Bargaining

The Guild is, in effect, a kind of union for freelancers although it also represents designers who earn both 100 percent of their income from their design work and 100 percent of that income from the same employer. The Guild is the collective bargaining unit for the graphic designers employed at Public Television Station Thirteen/WNET in New York City, for example, and negotiates their contracts on their behalf every three or four years.

For freelancers, the Guild’s services include a grievance process that members can use to try to resolve issues that arise when dealing with clients. According to Tricia McKiernan, the guild’s executive director, the most common issues are — not surprisingly — non-payment and infringement.

The Guild’s most useful service though may not be its ability to help freelancers negotiate with employers or solve their disputes with them — services which require the agreement of both sides — but its  Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. Provided with membership but also available from Amazon, the handbook is updated every two years and is now in its 13^th edition. The book uses anonymous surveys sent to both guild members and non-members to gain an idea of the different pricing levels actually being earned for various kinds of artistic work.

Kelly Blue Book for Graphic Design Services

That might make the handbook a kind of Kelly Blue Book for graphic design services, but selling a logo, a Web page or stationery design isn’t quite the same as selling a used car. The price of a car, for one, will be the same regardless of the number of miles the buyer intends to drive in it while usage is often a factor in fixing the price of graphic design work as well as photography.

Although the prices listed in the handbook then can give designers an idea of the amounts that other designers are receiving for similar work (and therefore the amounts that clients are willing to spend), those fees can only be general guides to a final sum. Clients aren’t expected to agree to the prices in the same way that a used car seller is likely to accept a list price as the baseline for negotiations, and the handbook doesn’t take into account benefits that are difficult to measure such as talent, style or experience.

“The book cannot tell you what to price,” warns Tricia McKiernan. “The pricing charts are guidelines only. The cost to design a web page or a web site is a negotiation between the graphic artist and his/her client. Everything is a negotiation between the client and the graphic artist.”

Nonetheless, the handbook is used frequently in Small Claims Court by freelance designers who need to show industry standards as they press a claim against a recalcitrant client.

The handbook isn’t just about pricing though. It’s also a guide to business for people whose studies were focused on CAD or Photoshop rather than on marketing and business growth. And it provides a guide to the ethical challenges that designers now face — including the hunt for free labor.

“There are so many things going on in the world today that affect how a graphic artist makes a living, it’s sometimes hard to choose which one is the worst,” says McKiernan. “Certainly spec work; crowdsourcing, which is another form of spec work; design projects masquerading as contests; rampant digital theft/infringement of work from web sites, etc.”

Freelancing is usually lonely work. Freelance designers are frequently one-man or one-woman shops operating from a home office and negotiating directly with a client with little idea of how much other freelancers are charging or what they can do if the client runs off with their design. When you work like that, forming a one-person union doesn’t seem like the most effective way to solve disputes and smooth negotiations. The Graphic Artists Guild then does look like a valuable solution and it provides an essential service to the design industry, both for its freelancers and its employees. But how easily can the model be copied by other freelancers in other fields?

McKiernan notes that the Graphic Artists Guild relies on the activities of its members and concedes that while it’s possible for members of any profession to form a guild, build a structure and organize the group, it’s not easy to do. Graphic designers, then, should consider themselves lucky — even if the president wants them to work for free.

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Corrections: In the original version of this story, we spelt Ms McKiernan’s name incorrectly and suggested that the handbook is included free with membership; it’s included with membership. We’ve also clarified that most of the Guild’s work is with freelancers. Apologies

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For freelance editor and writer Louise Bolotin, it all ended in tears. Writing on her blog in 2007, she described how after putting in a series of 12-hour days on a handbook, she emailed the production editor to explain that she was going to have to miss the deadline. A slow exchange of emails failed to solve the problem and frustrated, anxious and stressed, Bolotin burst into tears. A calm, diplomatic phone call later, her deadline was extended and some of the “drudgery” was outsourced to someone else.

It’s a feeling that’s familiar to anyone with freelance experience. Among the hundreds of jobs that we negotiate and accept each year, we’ll get some of them wrong. We’ll underestimate  the amount of time the project will take to complete or something more urgent will come up before the work is finished, taking a chunk out of the time allocation that we never seem to be able to put back. Without warning, the deadline is suddenly upon us. Often some extra-long days are enough to solve the problem but occasionally, it’s too late. There’s too much work and too few hours.

At those times it would be great if the deadline wasn’t actually a deadline at all but something more like a soft limit, a recommended time by which to return the work if at all possible. A kind of “best offer” that the client would accept on a “more-or-less” basis.

When you’re up against the clock, there are a few things you can do to turn the wall of a deadline into a cushion that can provide a soft landing.

1. Spill the Beans

The usual advice given to freelancers struggling to meet a deadline is to tell the client as early as possible. That’s sound, sensible and usually impractical. We don’t really want to tell the client we messed up our timekeeping unless it’s absolutely necessary, and if we could always accurately estimate our productivity then we wouldn’t be in trouble in the first place. It doesn’t help that as the deadline approaches, productivity increases: nothing creates focus more than a fast-impending deadline, making us believe that, despite the panic, we can actually get it done.

But there does come a moment when you know it’s not going to happen. That’s the time to spill the beans. Usually an email laying out the problems, apologizing and offering a new, more accurate deadline is enough to solve the problem but, like Louise Bolotin, you might need to make a phone call. Keep the conversation calm and professional. Most clients understand that problems happen in every business. They won’t be happy but they’ll be less sad if you also come with a solution in hand — usually, the softening of the old deadline and the creation of a new one.

As a strategy though, honesty might be the best policy but it does carry risks. When artist Caanan Grall told a publisher that he wasn’t going to be able to meet the Halloween deadline for a monster comic, they ditched the title.

2. Create Your Own — Earlier — Deadline

One strategy requires a bit of willpower. When you receive a deadline, set your own soft limit about ten percent earlier than the time you actually need to return it. If you have a month to complete the work, for example, then instead of aiming to deliver at the end of the last week, aim to deliver at the beginning or the middle of that week.

It’s a good strategy to follow regardless of your timekeeping. If, by some miracle, you do manage to complete the work according to your own soft deadline, you’ll be able to let it sit for a few days before reviewing it and sending it on, reducing the chances that you’ll be asked to make revisions and corrections. And if, as is more likely, you miss that deadline, you’ll still have a few more days to finish things off.

It’s a good habit to get into it but it does require discipline and a willingness to gamble with your competitiveness by offering a time limit that may be longer than necessary. If you are finding that you’re struggling to meet deadlines though, it’s a good way to give yourself a bit of breathing space right from the negotiations.

3. Deliver as You Go

Milestones are always a good way to reduce the risk in any freelance project. For the freelancer, they assure that you don’t lose all of the fee if the client disappears, and for the client, they ensure that the work is being done and at the right quality. But milestones also have the advantage of keeping both sides informed of the progress of the project — and they’re relatively flexible. Miss a milestone and there’s always the feeling that you can make up time by completing the next stage faster. Once it becomes clear though that isn’t happening, the client starts to prepare for the possibility that the final deadline will be missed. He comes to think of that deadline as being the preferred date for completion but has a contingency plan already in place in case it doesn’t happen.

In effect then, milestones have the effect of slowly softening a deadline as you approach it at high speed.

And you don’t have to set too many milestones. Commenting on Graphic Design Blender, a site for designers, website builder Ramona Iftode says that for small jobs, she uses just two milestones: the mock-up design and the coded template. For bigger projects, she inserts more. Milestones can be far more flexible than a single deadline.

In an ideal world, every freelance project would end on time, clients would always pay their bills, projects would always be interesting and well-paid, and the workday would always end at five. Freelance work though takes place in the real world where time estimates aren’t always accurate and urgent items often pop up, overturning even the best-laid plans.

Deadlines look scary and it’s good that they do. It’s the fear they inspire that keeps our fingers on the keyboard long after we’d like them to be wrapped around the remote control. But they’re also not monsters. They can be softened if approached carefully and (don’t tell anyone this) the world doesn’t end if they’re missed. You might lose a client, which is always painful, but unless it happens all the time, you won’t lose a career. As Douglas Adams once said: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Every freelance business has to live with the risk that a client will stiff them on their bills. When you’re delivering something of value to someone you don’t know and trusting them to pay you for that service afterwards, it’s almost inevitable that over a career of freelancing, you will eventually run into the kind of unscrupulous buyer who thinks he can ignore your invoice. So what do you do when you’ve handed over the work but the client won’t hand over the check?

1. Prepare Properly By Screening Clients

Managing deadbeat clients starts with protection, and there are a number of resources that can help you screen potential clients.

Elance’s Review System

Click the client’s name on an Elance,com project description, and you won’t just see their profile. You’ll also see feedback left by other supplier. Before you even bid then, make sure that the reviews don’t include any accounts of late or non-payment.

Business Beware!

Businessbeware.biz may be useful too. Set up by a contractor who realized that a recalcitrant payer had also refused to pay several other contractors, the site names small business customers who are more trouble than they’re worth. There’s a five-buck membership fee and it’s aimed at small businesses rather than freelancers but it’s more professional an more closely monitored than ClientsfromHell.net, a gossipy designer site.

2. Protect Yourself With a Contract

Finding a review of a bad client will allow you to walk away from the problem before it reaches you, but when you do take a job, the contents of the contract will also help to minimize the risk. Those contracts should have a couple of essential ingredients:

Milestones

Insert milestones to break the payment into installments. Provided you take your hands from the keyboard the moment the milestone passes without a payment, you’ll be able to reduce your losses. Clients rarely argue with these, especially when they also include milestones for delivery.

Copyright

You can also ensure that ownership of the copyright for your work remains with you until the final payment has been made. It won’t guarantee you will get paid for it but it does strengthen your hand in any legal action and may prevent the client from using your work until he’s paid for it. It’s a useful addition for designers, writers and other creative industry workers.

3. Send a Reminder

When you send your invoice, include a date by which payment should be made. For regular clients that’s usually before you need to send the next invoice. Once that date passes, send a reminder.

Paypal allows users to do that with just the click of a button. You can find it in your account history but as an option it may be too simple. If you need to remind a client to make payment, it’s possible that they just forgot to make the payment but there’s also a good chance that something has gone wrong. You need to discover what’s causing the hold-up and see if there’s anything you can do to unblock the payment.

Send the reminder but also send the client a polite email, asking if they have any questions.

4. Negotiate Changes and Terms

In most cases, the reminder will be enough to prompt payment. Individuals can forget or may be waiting for a payment to come in before they can send another one out, and the accounting department of small firms may be too busy to reach your invoice at the right moment. A gentle nudge is usually enough at those times to receive your money without damaging your professional relationship.

The problems really begin when it’s not enough.

When the Client Isn’t Happy

Often, the client may not be completely satisfied with the work and want some changes before they pay. That’s not unreasonable as long as the demands are within the parameters of the original job description. If they’ve changed the job description though or they need more work added to it then you should:

• demand at least some payment for the work you’ve already done before you continue working for them;
• make clear that this work fulfills the contract.

That work is a matter for negotiation. The client might not be willing to pay everything but when both sides are acting in good faith it should be possible to reach an agreement that shows the client is willing to pay and proves that you’re willing to continue the work.

When the Client Can’t Pay

A bigger problem occurs when the client can’t afford to pay. Ideally, the client shouldn’t have hired a freelancer without the funds to cover the debt but not all are that scrupulous. Again, you may be able to solve this through negotiation. The two usual options are:

• to spread the payments over a longer period;
• to reduce the payment so that you get at least something even if you don’t receive the whole amount.

You can also look for more creative solutions. Agree to retain part-ownership of the work, for example, and you may be able to agree to share any revenues the work brings in as long as the client supplies the marketing or some other service. That’s going to require more trust than you may be willing to give someone who has already admitted they can’t afford to pay their bills but if it can work, it might just give you more revenues than the value of the original bill.

5. Take Legal Action

If negotiation fails, then there’s nothing left to do but take action. Small claims courts may help to settle the bill for you. The fees are usually fairly low but it takes time and is often more work than the amount due is worth. Sometimes though a letter from a lawyer or debt collection agency threatening legal action is enough to send a deadbeat client running to his checkbook. The National Federation of Independent Business offers a template that small firms can use to scare buyers. It’s written for firms big enough to employ lawyers but you can adapt it for freelancers.

6. Take Them Down

Legal action — or the threat of it — is usually the end of the line but some freelancers have another trick up their sleeve. Web designers, for example, have been known to take down the sites of clients who haven’t paid their bills. That’s not always legal. According to Gaebler.com, a resource for entrepreneurs, designers can take down sites for which clients haven’t paid their hosting fees but not sites hosted by other servers. When a site is taken down, the freelancer also has to take care not to post anything defamatory as an explanation.

7. Write it Off

More usually though, if you’ve taken precautions by setting milestones then the amount due will be low enough to be able to write off the debt without too much pain. That’s often the action taken by clients faced with unpaid invoices, and freelancers will have to take into account that a small percentage of bills will be left unsettled. It’s the same kind of risk that stores take when they leave objects on shelves and invite in a public that may include some shoplifters.

Fortunately, most client are easy to work with, do pay their bills and even pay them on time. The ones that don’t pay tend not to stay in business for long.

Paypal has become the standard payment channel of choice for freelancers as well as online marketers. It’s familiar, trusted and simple enough for freelancers in every field to feel comfortable using. Clients don’t worry that their credit card details will be abused. Freelancers are confident they’ll get their money. And having settled into one payment and invoicing system, asking clients to send their money elsewhere can be difficult.

But there are good reasons for shifting out of Paypal. The fees, for one, are expensive. Paypal charges as much as 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for monthly payments of less than $3,000. For the full amount, that’s $87, a not insignificant sum. (For payments originating outside the US, the fees are as high as 3.9 percent.) And Paypal isn’t as reliable as it looks, at least for freelancers. A class action suit is currently under way against the Ebay-owned company for withholding funds “without justification, reasonable cause or explanation.” Fortunately, there are alternatives.

Amazon WebPay

In the same way that Amazon has made its cloud servers available to other businesses to use, so the company has opened its payment system. The system has the benefit of being trusted: clients are likely to have already given their credit card details to Amazon, so they should feel comfortable sending funds through the site. Freelancers can use their funds to buy Amazon gift cards, if they wish, as well as withdrawing them to bank accounts.

The site provides widgets that business owners can place on their Web pages to accept payments directly. The fees for those business accounts are the same as Paypal’s but there are no fees for personal payments — and, unlike Paypal, no limits on the amounts that personal accounts can accept. If you’re selling online goods through a website then, Amazon WebPay will cost the same as Paypal. But if you’re selling services, the system is a free alternative.

Pros: Free for service providers, trusted by clients.

Disadvantages: Money transfers can only be made in the United States and the site requires a US address to sign up. It’s only good for US-based freelancers.

Dwolla

Dwolla pitches itself as an alternative to the “plastic network” of credit card payments, which it says costs businesses $45 billion every year. Users can add funds to their Dwolla accounts directly from their bank accounts, without using a credit card, then use those funds to make online payments and even purchase in stores using their mobile phones. The service is also integrated with a number of social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, allowing users to send money directly to social media contacts.

Skipping the “plastic network” has enabled the service to offer attractive rates. The only charge is a 25 cent fee per transaction, less than the transaction fee charged by other services which then add a percentage.

The company offers two kinds of accounts: personal and business but there’s little difference between them beyond the ability to accept single payments of up to $10,000 instead of $5,000 and enable “Dwolla Spots,” real world payment systems. To upgrade to a business account, you will need a valid Employer Identification Number.

Pros: With transaction fees of just 25 cents, Dwolla is remarkably cheap.

Disadvantages: Little known by clients who might be reluctant to transfer funds directly from their bank accounts, and currently only available to users in the United States.

Moneybookers

Moneybookers’ transaction fees are comparable to those of Paypal but the site accepts more than 100 payment options and 41 currencies in more than 200 countries and territories. It has a more international feel than Paypal and is popular in countries and regions not supported by Paypal.

But the service also has a host of other charges that can start to add up. Transactions that involve currency conversions cost an additional 2.99 percent. Withdrawal fees are €1.80 for transfers by Visa or bank. And the site even charges a €19.95 monthly gateway fee for business users.

Pros: Multiple currencies make Moneybookers a useful choice for sellers with global markets.

Disadvantages: Additional fees and monthly charges make Moneybookers an expensive option, and that international branding can make it look parochial and less trusted than Paypal.

2Checkout

2Checkout also emphasizes its global connections. The company accepts payments in 24 currencies and through a variety of different channels, including Paypal. Unlike Moneybookers, there are no monthly gateway fees; the site sticks to a single flat rate for transactions. But those transaction fees are high — higher even than Paypal at 5.5 percent plus 45 cents.

Nor is the site really geared up for service providers. While it is possible to place the 2Checkout on a freelancer’s website, the system doesn’t allow for the kind of invoicing and money requests that service providers need to complete at the end of each month to get clients to pay.

Pros: Useful for small or medium-sized Internet businesses with global customers.

Disadvantages: High transaction fees and limited freelancer services.

Square

Square is a credit card reader that integrates with iOS and Android-based mobile devices, allowing anyone to take credit card payments. Created by Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, the service opens the ability to accept plastic to sellers as small as holders of garage sales and market stall owners. The charge is a flat rate of 2.75 percent, which makes it cheaper than Paypal, and company issues the reader itself — a small, square device that plugs into the smartphone or tablet’s earphone socket — for free.

As a piece of technology, it’s very smart and as a way of democratizing payments, it’s very useful. But for freelancers? It’s something you’ll find essential if you meet your clients face-to-face but virtual workers will be left wondering what the fuss is about.

Pros: Very cool, cheaper than Paypal and accepts all major credit cards.

Disadvantages: You need to be able to physically swipe the credit card, making it a non-starter for virtual businesses and freelancers who work across the Web.

An ideal freelance business will have a level base of steady clients that bring in a reliable income, and a regular flow of new projects that offer interesting challenges and the prospect of growth. That foundation though can suffer an occasional earthquake. Clients you’ve worked with for years will up and leave. There’s no compensation and rarely more notice than an email thanking you for your help and telling you not to send in any work next week. What went wrong?

There are five common reasons:

1. They’ve Never Been Happy and Now They’ve Found Someone Else

The hardest part of any freelance/client relationship is the beginning. Every client is unique and every freelancer has a different way of working. The new service provider has to learn the business, understand the client’s needs and show that they’re reliable. Once the bedding-in period is over, even if the client isn’t completely happy, the thought of breaking in a new freelancer can be enough for inertia to set in.

At least until something better comes along. That might be someone who arrives with a recommendation, or it could be a competitor who was hired to complete a different project but has made it known that they’d be happy to take on your work too. Either way, that crack in the foundation finally gives way. The client has an exit, and he takes it.

How to Keep Your Client

You can usually tell when you’re not holding onto a client firmly. Satisfied clients throw extra work your way, pay promptly, rarely ask for revisions and often give praise. The relationship is comfortable and warm. Clients who are only moderately satisfied tend to stay silent and accept work that even you’re not entirely happy with.

When you feel that the client is only just satisfied, you’ve only got two choices: accept that you won’t be holding onto him for long and keep an eye out for a replacement; or face the problem head-on and ask the client where he thinks the work could be improved.

2. The Client is Cutting Back

When hard times hit, companies often like to lay off permanent staff with their fixed costs and replace their labor with freelancers. Sometimes though, it makes more sense to cut the freelance projects and cut loose freelancers who don’t need severance payments. A project that you thought was essential to the company’s wellbeing turns out to be surplus to requirements. You’re out.

How to Keep Your Client

Businesses don’t cut projects that make profits. Try to find ways for the work you’re doing to make money. Content written to attract search traffic, for example, could be made more profitable by introducing ad units or placing affiliate links. Designs could be bundled into products that the client could make available for sale, perhaps with a royalty. You could even agree to lower your costs, perhaps in return for a drop in frequency or a smaller amount of volume. Make your work pay and the client won’t stop swapping dimes for dollars.

3. You’ve Become Complacent

Inertia can affect freelancers too, If you’ve held onto a client for a long time and you’re happy with the arrangement, then keeping things the same should keep the money flowing in. The more challenging work can come from the irregular projects. But the needs of the client might not be static and what was satisfactory once might be insufficient now. When a happy client thinks your work is slipping, he’ll look for someone else.

How to Keep Your Client

Be aware that even work you’ve been doing for a long time needs to be refreshed and updated. You’ll need to stay in touch with advances in your field and ask yourself how they can be integrated into an ongoing project. At least once a year, look for at least one change that will improve your work. You’ll enjoy it more too.

4. The Client Has Outgrown You

Freelancers are often a good choice for small businesses that don’t want the responsibility of full-time employees. But when the company grows and your projects become more complex, the client might start looking for a service provider with a broader set of skills. If the company does really well — in part because of the help you’ve provided — it might even want to bring the work in-house where it can be closely monitored. The services of a small, one-person freelance firm no longer seem sufficient.

How to Keep Your Client

When your clients grow you can grow with them. If a project becomes more complex, learn the extra skills that will enable you to keep the job. This is a chance to build experience with the help of a client who trusts your talent and reliability. If the skills are too specialized to add to your portfolio, look to outsource that part of the job to someone else. Clients don’t really care how the work is done or who does it as long as it arrives on time and up to standard. Growing clients are an opportunity to expand, not contract.

5. The Client Has Stopped Working

Occasionally, the benefits you bring to a client will be so good that he’s able to hang up his mouse and quit working altogether. It doesn’t happen often and it rarely happens solely because of your contribution, but the kinds of clients that hire freelancers can suddenly achieve massive success. That’s great for them, but it’s not so good if it means you lose a source of reliable income.

How to Keep Your Client

No client is going to keep working just to make his freelancers happy, but he won’t mind making his freelancers happy if there’s no cost to him. If the relationship ends happily, ask for references and referrals. Just because he’s stopped working on his business doesn’t mean everyone he knows has stopped working too. And if the client has sold his company, he might still keep his hand in with small projects and non-profit work either of which could need more freelance help.

Start bidding for jobs on freelance sites and you’ll find that the biggest competition comes on jobs with the highest budgets. That’s hardly surprising: the bigger the budget, the higher the overall revenue the work will earn. The offer of several thousand dollars for a few weeks’ work rather than a couple of hundred for a few hours’ is always going to be a bigger draw. But as a strategy for building a freelance business, focusing on the major projects may not be the smartest move. With a little thought, those minor projects — work that’s easier to land as fewer freelancers challenge for them — can lead to major wins, long-term relationships and the kind of accomplishments that make any freelancer proud. There are a number of things that any freelancer can do to build a major client from a small job.

1. Pitch Big

The simplest idea is also the hardest to do successfully. But it can work sometimes. As you’re discussing the requirements of the job, suggest ways in which the client could build on the work to generate bigger results. You’re not presenting a complete proposal so much as opening his eyes to opportunities he might have missed.

So a graphic designer hired to design a single Web page might suggest adding similarly themed pages for each product range and marketing them separately. An app developer hired to create a simple game could pitch ideas for add-ons or design tweaks that would allow it to target different markets.

The challenge is that there’s always a good chance the client would have thought of these ideas before and rejected them because of a lack of budget. In that case, the small project will remain small at least until the client has enough money to buy more. But it’s also possible that the client will be grateful to receive free growth ideas from a professional that he hasn’t considered. And he’ll have all the time you’re working on the small job to consider it.

2. Build Your Experience

If that client won’t take your ideas perhaps another one will. Every project builds experience broadens your portfolio and teaches you something new — even if it’s only about working with a different buyer. When you’re looking for new projects then, and considering the small jobs as well as the big ones, you’ve really got two choices: you can pitch for the familiar, the kinds of work you’ve done a thousand times before and which you should be able to win relatively easily; or you can opt for work in a field you’ve never done before.

Pitch in a new field, and there’s a greater chance you won’t win the job against someone with more relevant experience but as any freelancer who has bid for work knows, pitching is full of surprises. The kind of work for which you’re more than qualified can go to someone else, while projects you pitched on as a Hail Mary can often come flying in.

A small project in a field that’s new to you might not lead to bigger work with that client but it is an opportunity to expand your range and push for bigger projects that you lack the experience to win now.

3. Build Your Own Big Projects

Freelance work contains a giant irony. On the one hand, freelancers work for themselves. We’re our own bosses, free to set our own schedules and able to choose our work. On other hand, we actually have lots of different bosses, our freedom is limited by deadlines, and our ability to choose work is restricted by our need to pay the bills.

When a client of a minor project doesn’t take up your suggestion to turn that small job into major work, there’s nothing to stop you exercising the free choice embedded in freelancing: you can do it yourself.

A graphic designer whose idea to develop the look of a website into a series of themed product pages was rejected by the client, for example, can create those pages, using different products and a different look, and try to market them. He’d be able to take the experience gained by working on that small project, and having offered that experience to the client, use it for his own benefit.

The risk is greater than working for a client, of course. It would require using different skills — marketing as well as design — but the rewards would be bigger and so would the satisfaction, and the degree of freedom. Every job teaches something; you have the choice to turn that lesson into something bigger.

4. Grow with the Client

Building your own large projects on the back of paid small projects may be satisfying but growing with a client is no less satisfying. One of the best things about being a freelancer is watching a client, with your help, go on to greater and greater things. As the client grows so do his needs, feeding you a constantly growing stream of new and more interesting work.

Those sorts of clients aren’t easy to identify and your contribution is always likely to be a minor part of their success. If you’re hired to create an app, it will be your skills that make the app work but it will be the client’s marketing prowess and smart ideas that make the app a success. As that success comes in though, you’ll be a part of it, and the client won’t want to rock the boat by looking for a new service provider when the current one is working out so well.

There’s little you can do to help these kinds of clients grow faster, except perhaps for doing your job to the best of your ability (even though it’s small). But when you’re pitching for small jobs, try to focus on those clients who are at least professional in their job descriptions, communication and attitude. Those are the people most likely to succeed and grow — and take you along with them.

Photography: hartman045

Freelancers might work by themselves, but they’re not alone. They have clients who are waiting for their projects, of course, but they also have competitors keen to steal their current clients and snapping up new ones. Usually those competitors remain unseen; only buyers go regularly from portfolio site to portfolio site assessing work. But freelancers who want to stay on top of their profession and keep their account book full need to make sure that they know what the competition is doing – and who they are.

Finding those competitors isn’t as easy as it sounds. When clients are coming in by word of mouth, there’s no sign of any direct competition and no platform on which alternative providers pitch for the same job. But those platforms do exist and they’re worth looking at to see who else is operating in your field.

Hit the Freelance Sites

Elance, probably the most popular freelance job site, doesn’t allow users to read whole bids placed by other freelancers but it does allow them to click through to see their profiles and portfolios. You might not be able read exactly what that service provider thinks makes them suitable for a specific job but you can see what they’re bringing to the market in general.

Because the profiles look more like resumes than traditional websites, it’s possible to compare your background with the training of other people in your field. You can see how common a particular technical accomplishment, such as familiarity with Joomla, is on Elance. You can see how much experience those competitors have and you can see the number of jobs they’ve won in the last twelve months.

Not all of the information the site provides is useful. The number of repeat customers says more about the number of clients with repeat jobs than the willingness of clients to return to the provider. Skills lists are meaningless when they’re self-rated. And most importantly, Elance doesn’t allow freelancers to display their websites, so it’s impossible to see whether those providers are also competing off the site.

Elance then, provides a useful and personal picture of other freelancers in your field. But those freelancers are only competitors when pitching for jobs on the site itself.

Hunt the Search Engines

For a more general picture of the competition, you need to get off Elance and head for the search engines, the place that leads are most likely to turn when they’re looking for a provider. It’s here that the competition tends to get really intense.

On search engines, competitors show themselves in two places. The most important is the search results themselves – but these are also the least relevant. Winning a top spot in a search for “graphic designers” or “freelance programmers” requires not outstanding design or coding skills but exceptional SEO knowledge. The most powerful competitor – the freelancer with the best skills, the greatest experience and the largest amount of talent – may be buried on page seventeen, too busy servicing his clients to bother keywording his pages or hustling for backlinks. The competition you can see in search results aren’t competing for jobs, they’re competing for placement in the search engines – a battle you can only win with some huge dedication and often with an SEO budget.

A more representative sample of the competition can be found in the ads around the page. The most prominent will often be taken not by direct competitors themselves but by agencies representing them, such as oDesk and Guru. Those sites represent a different kind of competitor and appeal to a different kind of lead: someone who wants freelancers to come to him rather than hunting down and choosing a freelancer himself. But the ads placed by small companies and individual freelancers are more helpful. These are businesses which, like most freelancers, want more work but which trust their talent more than their SEO abilities to win it for them. To compete directly with those service providers, you only need to be willing to risk a monthly advertising budget on AdWords’ keywords tool.

So you can see the whites of your competitors’ eyes on freelance sites like Elance, and you can find them pitching for jobs around the search results on search engines. But what can you learn when you review what those competitors are offering? You should be looking at a number of factors:

1. Pricing

The only way to know for sure what your skills are worth to buyers is to see what other freelancers are charging for the same service. While a good strategy is to pitch your own rates around the average demanded by other freelancers not all sites display prices and not all prices are what freelancers actually receive. Competitors’ pricing information is valuable but treat it as a guideline not a golden rule.

2. Background and Experience

One of the factors that goes into pricing is the experience of the freelancer. Service providers         who have worked for large corporations – copywriters who used to work at Madison Avenue firms, for example – can charge more by offering big firm expertise to buyers with small firm             budgets. As you browse competitors’ sites, pay attention to where they’ve worked and compare the prices of those with big firms in their resumes to those without.

3. Skills

Experience will tell you what your competitors have done but their list of skills – programming languages, design programs, and product range – will tell you what they can do now. If you find that your competitors are pitching jobs that you can’t complete, it might be time to pull out the textbooks and start learning.

4. Marketing

How your competitors pitch their services on their websites is important too. Pay attention to the quality of the copywriting on their site, the site’s design and its ease of use. When leads have to struggle to find a contact page or a portfolio they’re likely to click away. Make sure you’re not losing jobs to competitors with better designed sites.

For freelancers, competition is a strange thing. Many jobs come in through word of mouth, bypassing competition altogether, and when regular clients stick around there’s less need to battle for new buyers. But you should always keep an eye on who your competitors are, what they know and what they’re offering.

Steve Nakamoto is a former tour director. He’s a former Dale Carnegie instructor and a personal development trainer. He’s also an author, an expert on relationships — and a freelance brand. He might not be a brand you’ve heard of and he’s certainly not a brand as big as Coca Cola or Nike but in a market as competitive as that of relationship expertise, Nakamoto has been able to carve out a spot for himself that’s pushed his book into multiple editions and given him the freelance business he wanted.

Nakamoto did that with a metaphor. His book is entitled Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man but that metaphor encapsulates all of the most important elements necessary for turning an idea for a freelance business into a recognizable brand that helps a new firm to stand out from the competition and win loyal customers.

The brand is clear.

Just as John Gray was able to create a brand out of describing men as coming from Mars and Women from Venus, and Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen have created an entire publishing niche by describing anything that makes you feel better as “chicken soup,” so Nakamoto is able to associate himself with the idea that men need to be baited, hooked and landed.

The brand is memorable.

The idea that men are like fish might not be completely original (the saying “there are plenty more fish in the sea” has been around for a while and is unlikely to have been inspired by Nakamoto) but it is both strange and simple enough to stick in the mind. Nakamoto can use the fish theme in his marketing material and keep himself recognizable while buyers feel that the metaphor explains something about men they’ve always found mystifying.

The brand communicates.

Nakamoto’s brand states who he is: a relationship expert with a particular approach towards helping people find life partners. A brand doesn’t have to do more than that on creation. Add good results though, and that brand will quickly fill with the extra ingredient that makes it really effective: trust.

So how does a freelancer begin creating a simple brand that customers can remember and which helps him to stand out in the market?

According to T. Scott Gross, author of Microbranding: Build a Powerful Personal Brand and Beat Your Competition, the brand creation process — including the process used to create an idea like microbranding — has four stages: Truth or Dare; Value Discovery; Conscious Creation; and Cement Yourself. While the details are complex enough to fill a 300-page book, the stages essentially involve understanding what really matters about the business and what you want to do with it; creating the message you want to send to leads and customers; building the image, name and concept that will help you to stand out; and finally, bringing all of those things to the market where they’ll hopefully produce enough loyalty to bring in stable sales.

It’s All About You

While uniqueness is a vital element of a freelance brand, that process isn’t unique to T. Scott Gross’s idea of brand building. Tom Peters, creator of the Reinventing Work series that includes The Brand You 50: Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an “Employee” into a Brand that Shouts Distinction, Commitment and Passion, describes some similar concepts. Number eleven in the fifty-strong branding list, for example, is “Give the World a Clear Picture of Who You Are.” That involves figuring out the nature of your product, how “it” is special (that is, the magic “it” that makes any product special), and how it differs from others’ similar offerings. It’s all very similar to the Truth or Dare stage of T. Scott Gross’s book when business owners figure out the essential elements they’re going to be promoting to their market.

The stage of self-identification is likely to be much harder than it sounds, and harder even than generating an easily identifiable metaphor, logo or design — a stage that can be outsourced to a professional writer or designer. Sometimes though it’s possible to come up with something surprisingly simple. Easyjet, a budget airline, is so well-known for its dirt-cheap plane tickets that it’s able to suffer similar infamy for its poor customer service. Zappos, a retail site, was able to brand itself in a hugely competitive space by doing the opposite: emphasizing personal and attentive customer service in a sector plagued by hierarchical phone menus and Mumbai switchboards. Just doing something that no one else is doing can be enough to give a business a unique niche in its market. Add the visual aspects (the swoosh, the red can or the golden arches) or the central idea (help as chicken soup, men as fish, women as Venutians) and a freelancer will have the two essential ingredients of uniqueness and easy recognition.

Defending Your Brand

It would be great to be able to say that brand building really boils down to those two elements but for freelancers they don’t always. The lack of uniqueness in Steve Nakamoto’s choice of metaphor was always a weak element in his brand. Not only would leads not always associate the idea of fish as men with Nakamoto in the same way that they link simple functionality with Apple products, but it also increased the risk that other people would have a similar idea. Today, the concept of a single as fish in the sea is likely to be more associated with plentyoffish.com, a popular dating site, than with Steve Nakamoto.

There is then an additional stage in freelance branding that isn’t described by either T. Scott Gross or Tom Peters: the constant refinement of the brand so that it remains strong enough to communicate, speak clearly and stand out from the competition. Brand building may be a way of carving out your niche in your market but that’s only the first difficult step. You then have to defend the brand and hold on to that niche.

Image: TZA

When you work for a business, it’s your boss’s job to make sure that you’re productive and squeezing as much as possible out of the nine-to-five. When you work for hire, you have to find the work, do the work, and make sure you’re working smart — and you have to do it all yourself. There are a few things you can do to get the maximum benefits from the minimum effort.

Smarter Time Management

The most important thing you can do is also the hardest: manage your time smartly. Offices are filled with watercoolers around which employees congregate. Smokers can regularly be found standing outside for a quiet puff, and office space is divided by cubicle walls behind which workers can surreptitiously update their Facebook pages. The employees aren’t being productive in those minutes but the breaks are necessary; it’s just not possible to focus for every second of an eight-hour day. The challenge for freelancers is to keep the microbreaks to a minimum and the eyes on the screen as much as possible.

Time management tools might help. Toggl is a time-tracking program that works on both the Web and mobile devices. Tick is an application for freelancers who charge by the hour, and Harvest also prepares invoices and supports teamwork. All of those tools can help freelancers by reminding them that time is money.

In practice though, few freelancers want to feel that they’re clocking in. Time management tools are more likely to be bought by team managers than solo workers who value the fact that they get to manage their day and take breaks without worrying that someone noticed. For freelancers, smarter time management really means looking for the big inefficiencies and creating new routines that maximize work and minimize costly play. Those might include:

• Cutting back on café-working

Leaving the house might be necessary when you work from home, but do you need to do it every day? If the café is a twenty-minute walk away, going twice a week instead of five times will add two more productive hours to the week, an entire day a month. The calculation alone should be enough to make clear the cost of the coffee and motivate you to stay at your desk.

• Changing Your Schedule to Match the Task

Some tasks require deep focus while others, such as digging around on the Internet, can be done while the kids watch television. Use your highest quality work time for only the most important tasks, while squeezing out the drudgery at times when distraction can only help.

• Go Mobile

Productivity apps such as Pages, DocsToGo and DropBox make it possible to work in quick bursts wherever you are. Keep your office in your pocket and you can add hours to the workweek by turning empty time into additional productive time.

Find and Keep Your Leads

Freelancers don’t need massive numbers of clients to make a living out of their skills. They need a small number of regular clients to give their income a baseline, a smaller number of occasional clients to throw interesting big projects their way, and a drip of new leads to keep their business fresh and moving in new directions. Most importantly, if a regular client cuts back, freelancers need to know that they can turn to someone who has expressed an interest in the past, and nudge some work out of them for the future.

One way to do that is to collect the email addresses of as many of your website visitors as possible. These are people who need the services you’re offering but either don’t need them right now or need more persuading than you’ve supplied in your Web copy. TinyLetter is a very simple, free newsletter plugin that lets website owners collect email addresses and send out messages. It allows even the smallest of freelance businesses to build lead lists and create a bank of new clients ready to turn to if their income takes a drop  — or if they want to move into product sales. Email capturing  might not be a replacement for advertising but it does allow freelancers to get more out of their advertising and spend their marketing budget smartly.

Smarter Paperwork

Aside from the moments spent brewing coffee, drinking coffee, writing tweets and checking the news, a freelancer’s workday can be divided into billable hours and unbillable hours. The billable hours consist of all the time that produced work for which you can actually charge. The unbillable stuff? That’s the time spent looking for new clients, answering emails… and doing the paperwork. Freelancing isn’t tax-free. Invoices have to be collected and issued, and recalcitrant payers hunted down. The less time you can spend doing that dull stuff, the more time you’ll have for the more interesting — and more lucrative — billable work.

Again, software, is one option. We’ve already seen that Harvest offers invoicing as well as time management tools. Less Accounting is another useful service and FreelanceSwitch itself uses FreshBooks to bill advertisers. But when you’re only billing a handful of regular clients, dedicated software can feel like overkill. More important is a routine that allows you to just plug in the numbers and hit Send.

Even Paypal can work. The site is best known for its ability to collect cash but its invoicing function can also make asking for the money simple too. Because the site’s cookies remember both email addresses and amounts, as soon as you start typing, the invoice starts writing itself  — a simple solution for freelancers who charge regular amounts to regular clients and are willing to pay Paypal’s commissions.

Others, though, can use templates. The latest version of Microsoft Word offers a range of different invoice templates that include bids and quotes, as well as bills of sale. Once you’ve personalized the template, you should be able to resave it each month as you add in the figures and change the date. Once the billing becomes routine, you should be able to knock out the requests for payments fairly quickly.

Office spaces are designed with productivity in mind. Those five-foot walls are just high enough to avoid anyone talking to you but low enough for the boss to see what you’re up to. It’s easy to imagine that they were built to make workers remember that they’re easily replaceable. Work from home and you get to design your office any way you want. The goal should be to create a space that inspires creativity, raises productivity and makes you want stay there way beyond the end of the work day. Often though, the result is the exact opposite. Get the home office design wrong and you can find yourself with a space that has you walking around the house instead of sitting at the desk. The good news is that getting the design right just requires avoiding a few common mistakes.

Skipping the Personal Stuff

A home office should let you feel at home. Make it yours… with more than bare space, a Dilbert and a dodgy calendar! Photography: glindsay65

One big mistake is to keep the office bare in the hope that the fewer distractions in the environment, the easier it will be to stay focused on the job. It doesn’t always work that way. Cubicle workers try to fill their space with all sorts of gronks, plants and pictures for a reason. It doesn’t just give them something to put in the cardboard box should they ever have to clear out quickly. It makes them feel at home. If they’re comfortable and relaxed, they’re less likely to find themselves wandering to the water cooler or rushing to get done so that they can leave for somewhere more comfortable.

The same is true of the home office. It might be the room that you least want to be in. It might be functional and formal instead of the laid back family atmosphere in the living room but it’s likely to be the place where you spend most of the time. Make it pleasant and you’ll make your work more pleasant too.

How to Personalize Your Office

Even a few pictures can turn a home cubicle into a home office. Photography: mjernisse

Everyone’s idea of personalization is different. Some workers need a forest of pot plants. Others want a menagerie of stuffed animals. Start by looking at the walls and decorate them with pictures that give the room both warmth and personality. Comic prints can work but find a style that suits you and makes you feel that you’re not just in an office… but in your office.

Poor Organization

Conquer your stuff before it conquers you. Photography: FunnyBiz

One of the biggest bugbears in home office design is organization. Corporate offices have endless supplies of filing cabinets, drawers and storage space where you can stuff things away out of sight. They even have administrative staff whose job is to keep all that paperwork accessible and alphabetized.

At home there’s never enough room for all your things and no one to put it all away for you. You’ll need space to organize your research material, shelves for your books, drawers for your stationery, places for your expenses folders and tax papers, and the time to keep it all together.

How to Organize Your Office

Combine organization with design and you’ll create a comfortable space that’s also functional. Photography: DavidSanders

The easiest way to organize an office is to load up on the kind of plastic shelves and transparent drawers that are available for little cost in any office store. They’re functional but they’ll also start to turn your office back from a comfortable place to a purely functional place. And that’s the kind of thing that will soon have you pacing around and wishing you were somewhere else instead of thinking of your workspace as your favorite environment.

A better option is to look for organizational elements that can be worked into the overall design. Sunken shelves can be more attractive ways of stacking books than metal bookshelves. Decorative bowls can keep flash drives, spare cables and paper clips in one place instead of scattered across the desk. Even a white board will cut back on notes scrawled on bits of paper and left to pile up on the desk. And make tidying the place a regular part of your routine.

The Wrong Location

A kitchen isn’t an office… Photography: Garethjmsaunders

Perhaps the biggest challenge for people working at home though isn’t how to design their office but where they’re going to put it. Not everyone has a spare room waiting to be filled with a desk, drawers and a growing business. The most obvious solution is to make use of the table in the kitchen. When all you need to work is your laptop and an Internet connection, it doesn’t really matter whether the monitor is hiding the remains of breakfast or the oven is throwing out a scent of lunch.

Except that it does. Work in a space that’s not dedicated to work and you’ll have to deal with two consequences: the lower productivity caused by the distractions of other kitchen users and an environment that isn’t focused on work; and the contamination of a place that should be for entertainment and recreation with a feeling of labor. Either way, you lose.

How to Find Your Office

… but a closet can be. Photography: typefiend

Offices don’t have to be big. If you don’t have a spare room you can still close off a section of a room and turn that into an office. Walk in closets can make excellent tiny work spaces, as can the space under the stairs, garden sheds or a screened off corner of the bedroom. As long as it feels comfortable and separate from the rest of the house, you’ll feel that you’re going to work and that the space is dedicated to productivity.

Tools and Resources

A few useful tools can help you to plan out your office before you even buy your desk.  IKEA’s Office Planner gives you a 3D plan to test out different designs and even get a costing based on the Swedish firm’s furniture. Alternatively, Google SketchUp, another 3D modeling program, lets you use a wider range of pre-designed furniture models to get an idea of your room’s layout. LifeHacker’s Workplace Show and Tell Group should give you plenty of ideas and Linda Varone’s The Smarter Home Office: 8 simple steps to increase your income, inspiration and comfort is packed with easy to follow suggestions.

Freelancing offers a number of powerful advantages: you can work from home; you get to avoid the commute; you can skip the office gossip. But it also delivers a bunch of disadvantages; you have to work from home; you never leave the house; you have no one to gossip with. Coworking attempts to bring back the fun and camaraderie that come from working in company while still leaving behind the frustrations and obligations that come with working for a company. But is it everything it’s cracked up to be? Is shared office space the solution to all the ills of freelancing?

The practice appears to have started in 2006 when entrepreneur Amit Gupta and his roommate Luke Crawford opened their New York home to freelancing friends, and created Jelly. Since then the practice has spread. Similar “Jellies” have opened in more than 100 cities around the world. The Hub, another co-working network that allows members to use any of their spaces anywhere, is active in twelve cities on four continents. Desk Wanted, a coworking search site, boasts 650 workplaces available for rent, and there are countless independent coworking spaces that provide local solutions for freelancers who want to unchain themselves from their home desks and attach themselves to a workspace somewhere else.

Coworking Will Make You Rich

Members pay a monthly fee (The Hub charges $300 a month for up to 100  hours of use, or $450 for unlimited usage) and receive a free Internet connection, printing and photocopying facilities, the use of meeting rooms, a refreshment area and, most importantly, the company of other freelancers.

According to a new ebook by Angel Kwiatkovski and Beth Buczynski, that company can solve a stream of freelancer problems. Coworking, they argue, can help people

“develop their full potential and become more truly themselves…. Through coworking you can become a more well-rounded, balanced, tolerant, educated, motivated citizen of the world, all while realizing your personal and professional goals.”

Sharing a desk can end isolation, remove the “empty feeling” that working alone brings, and can even “save you from destitution.”

That’s a lot of big claims for a service that delivers little more than space at a big desk. Clearly, coworking can solve a number of problems and produce some very useful benefits. The book contains comments from 30 coworkers who wax lyrical about the lessons they learned by listening to the conversations of people in different fields, the new ideas they were able to generate by asking others for help and, most importantly, the new clients they found by explaining what they do and showing how well they do it.

But much depends on the nature of the space and the stage of career development of the freelancer. A survey conducted by DeskMag, an online coworking magazine, found that more than half of coworkers prefer to share a workspace with fewer than 20 people, and less than 4 percent said that they wanted to work with more than 50 other freelancers. While just over a fifth said that size doesn’t matter, coworkers appear to prefer a workspace that’s small enough to form close relationships with others even at the expense of a wider variety of different backgrounds. Given a choice between lots of opportunities or a handful of new friends, coworkers seem to opt for the new friends most of the time.

After Four Years, the Love Affair Ends

Satisfaction with the space also appears to vary with time. It takes about three months for a coworker to report a high level of satisfaction with a coworking space, a level that continues to rise until the second year. At that point, the advantages become routine and the benefits taken for granted. By the fourth year, although 85 percent of the coworkers surveyed still reported being satisfied with their coworking space, identification has fallen, as have attendance rates. Coworkers are more likely at that point to say that they’ll be leaving within a year.

It’s hard to say though how much of that drop is down to the space and how much is a result of the end of a love affair with freelancing. Many of those who move on from coworking head back to the corporate world where they can enjoy a more reliable income — at least until the next downturn.

And not all coworkers are freelancers. DeskMag’s survey found that only 54 percent described themselves as self-employed. One in five employed others and a similar number were employees, usually in companies with fewer than five workers.

Interestingly, more than half of respondents were aged between 20 and 34, and 35 percent were aged 35-49. The survey, which appears to have been aimed at potential creators of coworking spaces, looked at the locations of the sites’ users but it didn’t examine their home life, a factor which is likely to play an important role in the decision to cowork.

That the majority of coworkers are young may not be surprising. They’re also the people likeliest to live alone or with roommates while those aged above 34 are more likely to be married and have a home life dictated by the needs of a young family. For them, a shared workspace might be able to deliver grown-up conversations but it’s not a replacement for an “empty feeling,” nor will it  bring an end to “isolation” when their lives are filled with school runs, ballet classes and organizing playdates.

DeskMag’s survey found that the most common benefit that coworking brought was “better interactions with others,” as well as an increase in motivation and productivity. Only a minority, a group that fell with age, reported that coworking had enabled them to increase their earnings.

Coworking then can be fun. Its growth around the world suggests that it’s a work style that has appeal to many, and especially to young types who really need to get out of the house more often. But it’s not going to revolutionize a small freelance business and it certainly won’t save you from destitution.

In one episode of Freelance Freedom, a comic strip by N.C. Winters, a freelancer tells a friend that his week of self-employment wasn’t too bad. “I know I complain about clients every now and then, but there really is no better feeling than being your own boss, setting goals and having a successful career that you earned yourself,” he says to his friend. “Yikes,” his friend replies. “When did you drink the Kool-Aid?”

That happy episode appears in Freelance Confidential a survey of freelance work by Amanda Hackworth, editor of Freelance Switch. The same ebook also includes another episode of the same strip in which the freelancer’s wife, left alone again with the baby while her frazzled husband battles deadlines, suggests that her child chooses a career in accountancy rather than freelancing.

Those are two strips that show both sides of the freelance coin. On some days, freelancing can feel like the  best job in the world, a way of working that delivers secure income, flexible hours and challenging work. On other days, often in the same week, it can be a horrible experience made worse by needy clients, tight deadlines and money that never finishes the month.

Money Can Buy Unhappiness

It’s the money that causes the biggest downward drag on freelancer happiness. According to Freelance Switch’s survey, the average gross income for a full-time freelancer in 2010 was just $34,339.50. More than 39 percent of the freelancers surveyed said that they were either “unsatisfied” or “very unsatisfied” with their income level, making pay the most common cause for complaint.

But income varied widely according to both experience level and industry. The median income for a “beginner” illustrator was just $5,000. Half of all “expert” project managers were earning at least $159,850. In general, the more experience a freelancer gained, the higher their income rose.

Other reasons for dissatisfaction fell far behind financial worries. Just over 18 percent were unhappy with their hours and about the same number were worried about their career opportunities.  Only around 13 percent said they were unhappy about the challenge of the work.

A little over half also said that they did not feel secure as a freelancer, a figure that hadn’t changed since the previous survey three years earlier. At the same time, feelings of insecurity among employed staff had roughly doubled from a low of 14 percent. Being closer to changes in the economy seems to give freelancers a greater sense of how those changes affect them — and perhaps a more realistic view of their future prospects.

But while about half of the freelancers surveyed said that they were earning less than they made as an employee, an impressive 93 percent said that they were happier than they had been when they were working for a boss.

So what was the source of that happiness?

Career Goals Count

A number of different things appear to make freelancers happy.

The greatest sense of satisfaction comes from career opportunities. While freelancing is precarious, with little to stop even a large, long-term client from suddenly pulling the rug, freelancers are in control. They can both set their own goals and have the freedom to at least try to achieve them. The work itself is interesting too. More than half the freelancers said that they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the challenge of their projects.

And despite the traditional complaints about tight deadlines, long hours and the difficulties of building a business from scratch, around half the freelancers reported that they had more time for personal projects and worked fewer hours than they did as employees.

The greatest contentment though seemed to come from both freelancers who had spent at least two years in full-time employment (who possess some professional knowledge and understand how good they have it working for themselves) and young freelancers (who are more willing to work long hours for low pay.)

So what does that mean for freelancers caught between the frustrations of bringing in projects and dealing with multiple clients while running their own business, and the pleasures of being their own boss? How can freelancers increase their happiness quota and enjoy their work more?

There are a number of things they can do:

1. Set Career Goals

When one of the biggest advantages of freelancing is the control over your own future, it helps to know what you want that future to look like. And more opportunities are opening up. In 2007, freelancers were divided almost equally between an ambition to stay freelance and a desire to open a small business with employees. Three years later, a quarter said they planned to stay solo, 37.5 percent said that they wanted to open their own business but 30 percent intended to “generate income from other solo work” such as stock licensing and product sales.

Those young freelancers are willing to put up with long hours and low pay because they believe it will take them where they want to go. Ambition can be helpful for all freelancers.

2. Find Challenging Work

Freelancers don’t always have control over the work that comes in, and referrals were usually a more reliable way of finding new projects than marketing. But building your portfolio carefully can help to bring in similar work to the projects you’ve enjoyed in the past. Asking can’t hurt either!

3. Work with Other Freelancers

Interestingly, isolation wasn’t one of the points of dissatisfaction reported by  freelancers, perhaps because Freelance Switch didn’t ask about it. But freelancing is a lonely profession, which may be why so many freelancers are looking to hire employees.

One alternative is to use a co-working space, a shared office in which freelancers work together. It’s also a pretty good way to network and problem solve.

4. Drink the Kool Aid

Contentment is often as much about attitude as the actual conditions that work brings you. Freelancing is always going to have good days and bad. Perhaps the best approach is to expect the bad days, aim for interesting projects with high pay, and look on the bright side of freelancing.

Photography: Axel V

Advertising pays, but it also costs. The days when you could place an ad on AdWords and win a front-page spot for five cents a click are long gone. For freelancers in particular, the Web’s most important advertising channel is now far from a budget option. Target the phrase “freelance Web designer,” for example, and you can expect to pay as much as $3.39 for a click. Writers have it slightly easier: “freelance writer” costs just $1.43 per click but “freelance” anything is $1.50. Publicity though is free, and a write-up in a newspaper — or even a website — delivers benefits that go beyond the name recognition and link that paid advertising brings. It also turns the professional mentioned into an expert, gives them a brand and makes them the first choice when a reader needs the service they’re offering. It’s just a lot harder to win than an advertising slot.

The method is the press release, usually a single page containing a headline, a story idea, a quote and contact information. And usually it fails. Press release distribution agencies like PRWeb don’t release figures that reveal the success rate of their submissions. That’s a good sign that the figures are low but a better indication that most releases miss may be the quality of the unreviewed releases placed on the site. Most of the press releases issued through PRWeb by freelancers appear to be pushing not services or even news about freelancing that can turn the freelancer into an expert, but products, especially ebooks, written by freelancers about freelancing. Those aren’t the sorts of announcements that the media tends to want unless they’re appearing on the advertising pages.

The Media Wants Your News

And the media does want press releases. According to Nick Davies, a former journalist and author of Flat Earth News, an exposé of the media, when the Columbia Journalism Review examined one edition of the Wall Street Journal, the publication found that more than half the news stories in the paper were based entirely on press releases. These, Davies says, “were printed ‘almost verbatim or in paraphrase.’”

Press releases then can work. They can put companies in the news. But they have to be done properly.

Rather than examine the press releases that failed, a better way to understand the stories that the press wants to write about freelancers is to look at the reports that journalists have actually written about them. Very few of these are about freelancing itself. Instead, they tend to focus on events that feature freelancers.

Charity stories are one example. Kris Dreessen, a freelance photographer and writer, won a profile on the Gannett-owned DemocratandChronicle.com that discussed not her writing nor her images but the charitable work she does while traveling: distributing cameras and anti-mosquito screens in South America. The article included the address of her website, sending visitors to her blog. Some of those visitors are likely be the kind of buyers interested in stories and images about exotic locations. They now know that Kris Dreessen likes to visit those areas and is experienced in traveling through them.

That piece of publicity then might not have been about Dressen’s work but the additional exposure could certainly have helped to give her some extra work. Writing a press release that’s about your charitable efforts can be one way of drumming up publicity that benefits both your cause and your business.

Win a Prize, Win Publicity

Personal achievements can be of interest to the press too but only when the glory can enjoyed by the reader as well as the freelancer. When the New Zealand publication The Marlborough Express wrote about an award won by freelance curator Jane Vial, freelance writer Joy Stephens and the  Expressions Arts and Entertainment Centre director Stephanie Cottrill, the headline explained why they were covering the story. The article began:

Blenheim women honoured for museum

A story that starts like that isn’t about two women few people previously heard of winning a prize that even fewer people care about. It’s a story about the town being noticed and honored. The publication is sharing the award with its readers.

Winning a prize then is one good subject for a freelancer’s press release. But you increase your chances of winning publicity with that press release when you expand the prize to include the reader too. You can do that by focusing on location, as The Marlborough Express did by emphasizing the locality of the winners: “Local writer wins big.”  But you can also do it by niche, announcing to other cartoonists that a cartoonist has won the Pulitzer, for example.

Awards though usually depend on judges. That makes them unpredictable. One way to gain control over events like these to set your own challenge then aim to beat it. Freelance jockey Corey Brown, for example, picked up publicity in The Sydney Morning Herald as he prepared for a record-breaking ride.

The principle behind these kinds of stories is the same as those behind announcements of awards. The headline:

Brown spreads the group 1 joy far and wide

again emphasizes not the freelancer’s personal achievement but why that achievement is something that can be shared by others. A Web designer looking for publicity by creating the largest number of websites in an hour then could write a press release that began:

Local Web designer targets site-launching record

What all of these press stories have in common is that they all describe a freelancer but none of them is about a freelancer. Instead, they’re about the reader, and that’s what reporters are really looking for when they dole out the publicity.

Write a press release to announce that you’ve just designed a new site, landed a new client or brought out a new book, and few people are going to care. Tell readers that they have another reason to be proud of where they live or what they do and you’ll give them a reason to read the story. You’ll also give potential buyers an expert place to turn for services.

The hardest challenge for any marketer is pitching a product or a service to a new client. According to a survey conducted by Sales & Marketing Magazine, it takes more than twice the effort and costs 133 percent more money to sell a product to a new customer than to pitch it to an old one. Because trust has already been won, the selling is easier, the return on the cost of the marketing is higher and the business grows faster. It’s always worth knowing how to find and keep your clients over the long term.

And it’s worth it because the benefits of client retention don’t end with the ease of future pitching. According to Frederick Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, a client who sticks with a business is likely to:

• increase their spending, turning small jobs into big ones;
• be less price-sensitive than new clients, allowing the seller to maintain and even raise their pricing;
• and generate more referrals, bringing in more and better clients.

The longer a freelancer can keep his or her clients then, the more success their business should enjoy.

Sticky Clients Aren’t for Everyone

Not all businesses though lend themselves easily to client retention. A designer who specializes in logos, for example, will struggle to keep the same clients coming back for a new design on a regular basis. A sales letter writer is unlikely to find that a client needs a new landing page written every week. And once a piece of code  has been written and works, a freelance programmer is unlikely to be asked to write it again.

Those one-off jobs though could be used to tail-end a client into more long-term projects. Once a logo has demonstrated the designer’s talent, that designer would have an advantage when the client needs someone to produce their Web page or lay out their packaging materials. If the sales page generates conversions, then the blog that comes with it should need regular content to bring in traffic. And while the code might work, it will also need updating if it’s going to stay competitive.

Short-term jobs are worth pitching for but the pitching should always be done with an eye on the possibility of using the project as a showcase for more valuable work.

Pushing for that work though — and letting the client know that you’re available to do it — will take a little effort. Airlines, cafes and supermarkets use loyalty programs to keep customers coming back and away from the arms of competitors; they give buyers an incentive whose value is clear and measurable, whether it takes the form of a flight upgrade or a free cup of coffee. Every time they place an order and present their loyalty number, those clients are reminded of the reward that their loyalty can bring.

Some online companies do the same thing. The Teaching Company, for example, rewards previous buyers with regular updates that include discounts as large as 70 percent.

It’s not a strategy that translates easily from products to services though. When a company gives away a product, the cost of the offer is lower than the value enjoyed by the customer — businesses buy their products at wholesale prices. When a service provider agrees to complete a small project for free or cuts a percentage from the invoice though, the cost in lost hours is the same as the benefit.

But it is possible to do, provided the offer is chosen carefully and the value of the returning business outweighs the cost of the discount.

A harder challenge will be making that offer in the first place.

How to Keep Your Clients

The survey conducted by Sales & Marketing Magazine appears to have focused on telesales, a notoriously difficult way of making pitches. The Teaching Company however, delivers its loyalty rewards through newsletters by email to addresses captured at time of purchase. Even if that particular reward isn’t one that every buyer wants, it can be enough to keep a previously hired service provider in a former client’s mind.

Finding and keeping sticky clients then, tends to boil down to three strategies:

1. Focusing on long-term jobs.

Not all projects have the capacity to stretch on endlessly. Invest more time in pitching for projects that are ongoing and you should find that you’re picking up more sticky clients.

2. Maintaining contact with clients current and old.

To turn short-term clients into long-term clients, you’ll need to make sure that all your clients know you’re available and happy to continue working with them. Winning sticky clients is as much about communication management as it is about project management.

3. Make the rewards count.

Discounts are one way to reward long-term custom but perhaps the best way to implement special offers is naturally, by not charging for work that takes little time, especially small corrections or additions that are difficult to bill. Waiving the fee for a new icon design or a few extra lines of text should build gratitude and cement a relationship. Gifts on special occasions can help too (as long as they’re a bit more tasteful than this one.)

But even without offering rewards for long-term loyalty, freelancers should naturally bring a real value to clients over the long-term. The more a service provider understands the business they’re supplying, the easier the work becomes for both sides. The supplier knows what the client needs, and learns to produce it faster and more efficiently, and the buyer also knows what to expect and understands that he won’t need to ask for changes. To hire a new supplier means taking a risk that the service won’t be delivered exactly the way they want or the way they’re used to receiving it.

One of the best ways of creating clients who trust you, depend on your services and want to continue using you is to make yourself look irreplaceable.

And the best method of all is to remember that companies are filled with staff doing the work that someone once thought only they could do.

Image: spaceninja

Unless you’re creating apps or designing characters, computer games and freelance work rarely go together. They suck time, cost money and fill your thoughts with images of blasting aliens when you really should be considering a project or planning new ways to market your business. But those hours spent slaying orcs and building space stations could actually help to build a freelance business.

Here’s what computer games can teach you about successful freelancing.

Better Social Media Relationships from The Sims

Writing on CreateaWebsite.com, a site-building service, Kiesha Easley confessed that her addiction to The Sims, a strategy game in which players help computerized people make friends, build relationships and have a good time, “added up to days… while making no real progress” in her own life.

Those hours though, she argues, weren’t a complete waste. Although The Sims offers a simplified version of the mechanics of relationship-building, they did provide lessons that she was able to apply to social media.

Meeting new characters in the virtual world, for example, can take time but attempting to skip past the game’s getting-to-know-you phase and moving straight to the more advanced aspects of a relationship tended to provoke negative reactions. Small talk in The Sims has a purpose: it prepares the ground for the more valuable interaction that comes later, and leaving it behind to take the goodies immediately carries a price.

The same, Easley noticed, occurs on social media sites. Twitterers frequently pester important members to follow them, visit their blog or buy their product without investing first in conversation. A better strategy, she argues, is to act like a Sim: get to know new people first and the rewards will flow in later, by themselves:

“Try retweeting someone else’s posts, sharing their work on other networks, or even simply asking how they are doing, and pretty soon you’ll discover them returning the favor,” she suggests.

Relationship lessons aren’t limited to games whose main goal is to create a community though. Killing people can be a good way to make friends and, more importantly for a freelancer, understand the value of teamwork.

Freelance work tends to be fairly solitary. It tends to involve lots of time in front of a monitor, hacking at a keyboard and talking to yourself. The closest thing to sociability that many freelancers come to in a working day is ordering a coffee from the barista. That makes the occasional times when they’re forced to work together with other freelancers unfamiliar. But it’s also often necessary.

Designs have to be implemented with coders; sales copy has to suit the changing demands of the marketing team — and vice versa.

Gaming used to be solitary too until consoles learned to talk to each other and gamers were able to co-ordinate their actions with both friends and strangers around the world. It’s a vital part of raiding in World of Warcraft, an aspect of the game that even the most antisocial of gaming geeks can’t do alone.

And in the process, you come to practice all of the elements essential for teamed freelancing: the strategy meetings, the forced pace, the need to excel at your contribution to the team and, of course, the shared satisfaction when it all comes together that actually amounts to a sense of pride greater than that produced by a solitary achievement.

Killing dragons as part of a team teaches that “We did that!” beats “I did that!” — and helps you to do it, too.

Strategy Games Develop Business-Building Skills

If managing the lives of virtual people helps to manage relationships with important people online, and slaying monsters or shooting terrorists in groups can build team skills, then how much more useful can real strategy games be?

According to Collis Ta’eed, creator of the TutsPlus blogging network, very useful indeed.

For Ta’eed, the challenge in Starcraft, in which players have to manage their resources and plan their growth and expansion carefully, matched the early problems he encountered while developing his blogging business.

“[I]n many ways, it was kind of like being in one of those strategy games,” he wrote. “I had a little base, with a few posts going up a month, some resources coming in, and one guy to do my bidding – me! While not a bad situation to be in, I wanted to expand.”

His first blog, Psdtuts+, was bringing in about a thousand dollars in advertising a month, generated mostly through advertising, so like an ambitious starbase builder, he started using those resources to hire tutorial builders. That allowed him to grow a little but the extra costs meant that he still wasn’t generating profits.

He created a membership plan to provide source files, a step that took a lot of saving and plenty of hard work but, he says:

“as all players of strategy games know, this is often the case in building a pivotal part of your base.”

That new base moved the site from break even to profitability, at which point Ta’eed could have sat back and built up some cash reserves. But, he points out, in strategy games when your income grows, you build more. He did the same, hiring an editor, commissioning some celebrity writers, expanding the posting schedule and even building a sister site. As those expansions bring in new revenue, he’s been able to continue training, expanding and harvesting more resources.

So game-playing can:

• Sharpen the communication skills you need for social media.
• Provide practice for the teamwork needed from some freelance projects;
• Train freelancers in resource management, scaling and business-building.

But it can also do something else. Games take time and however much you tell yourself that blasting bad guys or improving your starbase is really work-training, you can’t help but feel at least a little guilty that you’re not putting the training from the previous session to work. Because freelancers only earn for the hours they spend producing, battling aliens also provides an acute awareness of the value of billable time.

Image: bornazombie

It’s always the most unexpected objections that people raise when you tell them you’re a freelancer. They couldn’t do it, they say, because if they didn’t have an office to go to, a boss over their head or the fear of being fired, they’d spend all day in the living room watching daytime soaps instead of doing their work. Or they’d miss their colleagues, they object, as though they chose them, like them or couldn’t stay in touch with the ones they do respect when they’re no longer making the same commute. Or they couldn’t live with the insecurity, they protest, as though companies never go bankrupt and HR departments don’t have drawers filled with P45s waiting to be completed.

And if it’s not the weird objections it’s the unrealistic benefits. How many times have you seen envy in the eyes of a salaryman imagining what it would be like to roll out of bed at eleven, start work at twelve and stop just in time for sundowners? Or listened to a former colleague wax lyrical about how he’d also love to be able to choose his own projects and get paid what he’s really worth if he wasn’t being enslaved and exploited by The Firm? And how often have you nodded through a lecture on the pleasures of life without a boss by someone who happens to be someone else’s boss?

Freelance life has its benefits. But it also has its drawbacks. It’s work not retirement, a big yacht and all the time in the world to enjoy both. This is what you can really expect to happen when you part company with the company and branch out on your own.

Deadlines Make Discipline

Boyle’s Law doesn’t just apply to gases; when it comes to labor, work expands too — to fill the time available. But no project ever reaches a freelancer with “whenever you feel it’s done” as the deadline. On the contrary, clients tend to have unrealistic expectations of how long it takes to complete a task, and freelancers understand that the longer they linger over their work, the more it costs them. Take five days to complete a job that you quoted for three, and you’ve cut your hourly rate and your annual income by two-fifths.

It’s not the boss in the office that stops a freelancer from settling into “The Bold and the Beautiful” then. It’s the client and the mortgage manager. Smart freelancers break even long projects into small bites, setting daily deadlines that keep their keyboards smoking.

No Hours Around the Clock

And for most freelancers, the keyboards start smoking early. While you are free to set your own hours — provided you meet the deadlines — there’s a reason that both office workers and freelancers clock in early morning and clock out in the early evening: it’s the most convenient time to work. It’s when you’re most likely to catch other people in the office, it’s when you’re at your freshest and most energetic, and it’s a rhythm that feels natural, leaving you free to play at the same time as salaried friends. The lack of a commute means that you don’t have get up at the crack of dawn to beat the traffic (unless, of course, you’ve got kids to drop off at school) but for most freelancers, the standard workday is the same as everyone else’s.

Except at weekends and holidays, which have a nasty habit of filling up with work too. The problem with expanding projects, deadlines tight enough to squeeze in as much productivity as possible, and no office key, is that boundaries between work time and play time break down. Fall behind, and you will find that weekends and evenings become time to negotiate between yourself and your family.

No Boss Means Lots of Bosses

That turns freelancing into working for the world’s most inconsiderate boss. In fact, it’s even worse. Work for The Man and at least you’ve only got one of them. Work as a freelancer and you’ll be juggling lots of different clients with overlapping deadlines, unrelated demands and no interest at all in the needs of other buyers. All of them act like bosses, and it will be up to you prioritize their demands and keep each one happy.

Those bosses are experts at delegation. They pass the project management on to the freelancer, leaving it up to you to handle the organization (including the paperwork) and crack the whip across the backs of distracted employees (still you.)

As a freelancer, you don’t have one boss. You have lots of little bosses and a big mean supervisor who’s always peering over your shoulder. If the upside of having lots of paymasters is that when one does fire you, you don’t lose all your income, the downside is that your supervisor gives you hell whenever that happens.

Choose Your Projects When You Can Choose to Eat

Earlier this year, Jacob Cass, a graphic designer, described on his blog how freelancing for him meant being able to choose the most interesting projects, although at the cost of marketing time and paperwork. But that was when he was working a 9-6 job for Carrot Creative, a design firm, fitting in his freelance work at the weekends. Now that he’s a full-time freelancer, it would be interesting know whether Jacob is still being so choosy.

Regular jobs usually involve a mixture of dull tasks and really interesting fun. Freelancing is largely the same with the difference being the degree of control you have over the dull stuff. When work is light and there are gaps in the schedule, you take anything that delivers cash. When the schedule is tight, freelancers can be pickier but generally are still willing to take anything. They just use price as a filter. Boring jobs (and difficult clients) pay more because they care less about losing them and want more compensation for handling them.

But that’s only for new clients. When you’re running a freelance business, regulars are your bread and butter, and they sometimes have dull jobs too. You accept them because they pay and you hope the next job is more interesting. Projects don’t get more interesting just because you’re doing them at home.

Freelance work then is still work. But it does have one huge benefit that no salaried employee ever enjoys: career control. You decide how big you become, which skills you acquire, which jobs you bid for. You can even choose to turn a one-person freelance business into a fully-fledged company with employees, if you want. Your future is in your hands — and that’s priceless.

Photography: callisto

When you market yourself as a freelancer, you try to be as open as you can. You might launch a blog to bring traffic to your website and demonstrate the way you work. You hit up clients for testimonials so that leads can see you have experience. You put up samples and portfolios so that anyone can browse the work you’ve produced and see what you can do. It’s all a matter of trust. The more secure you can make a lead feel about hiring you, the more likely they are to get in touch and hire you do the job. But when it comes to the new clients themselves, the same openness doesn’t apply. Clients tend not to be as forthcoming about their identity, their ideas and their experience as the freelancers they employ, and yet there’s plenty of risk on the freelancer’s side too. You can find yourself working for the kind of business that doesn’t pay until it sees a letter from a lawyer, or you can find that because you have little idea about the firm, you have no idea how to please its customers.

Neither of those two pieces of information is particularly easy to come by. Some freelance websites do allow service providers to write reviews of the hirers, which can give an indication of whether a company is likely to argue about the bill — or not pay it at all. But not all sites offer this and even contributors have an incentive to be nice about the people they’ve worked for: if they’ve said something nice, there’s always the chance that they’ll work for them again. Reviews on freelance sites then tend to either very good or very bad.

Google Only Tells You So Much

Googling too can only bring up what other people have chosen to put online. Not every swindled freelancer wants to advertise the fact that a client disputed the value of their work, let alone name the client, so while a reference to no pay should set off a warning light, the absence of a complaint doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is okay with your new paymaster.

A website can be a reasonably good indicator of a client’s professionalism. A cheap, unprofessional site suggests that the client is more interested in saving money than creating results. A blog that’s updated regularly shows that they have an eye on the future and that they’re willing to put in the day-to-day effort required to maintain a business.

But social media can be an even more helpful guide to a client’s reliability. If a buyer has put a lot of effort into maintaining a Facebook presence, a LinkedIn page and a Twitter stream then they’ve built a reputation. That reputation can be quickly damaged by allegations that the client doesn’t pay his bills or disputes every invoice in the hope of getting bargains. That doesn’t mean that every social media user is reliable. But when social media makes damaging a reputation this easy, bad clients are likely to have taken those blows already.

Rather than trying to figure out whether a client is reliable though, which often boils down to a sense of whether a job feels right than a definitive piece of evidence that it isn’t, it’s always better to make sure that you have built-in safeguards: milestones for payment and delivery; escrow for large payments; samples to ensure that you’re on the right track before you reach the end.

No less important though is information that can tell you what you need to do to please the client’s customers — and please the client.

Who Are Your Client’s Clients?

It’s never enough to rely on the client’s own description of their target audience. They might have an idea that they’re reaching a certain age group and a certain way of living  but the client has hired you because you have an even better idea, and he or she thinks that you can appeal to it. If you didn’t have the skills to program software that his target market uses, if you can’t write copy using language that appeals to the company’s demographic or design websites that match their expectations, then the client wouldn’t be hiring you. He’d be hiring someone else.

Rather than rely on the client’s own characterization of their audience then, you’re likely to be better off making your own judgments based on the nature of the product, the style of their marketing material and your awareness of the market. This is a time when it’s more important to know yourself than know your client.

But you’ll also need to know how your client wants to work, and that’s something only they can tell you. Every client is different. While some are happy to work entirely by email, receiving the work when it’s finished, others prefer regular Skype chats and even the odd personal meeting if possible. One of the first questions you’ll need to ask of a new client is how they want to communicate. (And while you might have your own ideas and your own preferences, as long as they’re paying the bills, the client gets to choose the communication tools.)

Every new job comes with a certain amount of mystery. You don’t know whether you’ll enjoy the work. You don’t know what the client will be like to work with and whether he’ll pay on time, if at all. You don’t know how long you’ll be working with him or whether you’ll want to continue working with him for a long time. Those first points of contact then are a little like a blind date. You test each other out, try to get a feel for who the client is and how they’re likely to behave, and slowly you begin to build a relationship, forgetting the baggage of previous collapses and hoping that this one will work out fine.

Because if it does, you’ll have another testimonial to add to your marketing material and bring in even more new clients.

One of the downsides to freelancing is the loose connection between buyers and suppliers. Finding a good replacement is never easy but for clients, freelancers are much easier to fire than permanent employees who have contracts and might demand compensation. Once you’ve managed to persuade a client to pay you for your work, you want to hold onto them — and you want to avoid these giant client killers that will soon have you pitching for new gigs.

1. Promising What You Can’t Deliver

The usual advice given for success in business is to underpromise and overdeliver. And the usual discovery of business owners is that when you underpromise you don’t get to deliver anything.

The problem though is that when you promise more than you can do, you only get to deliver once, and clients aren’t too keen on handing over the cash.

It’s a mistake that’s just too easy to make. You look at the specs, assume that you can do most of the tasks and tell yourself that you’ll either learn the rest or charge enough to outsource those elements you can’t do to someone who can.

But when the problems start, they quickly mount. It’s hard to gauge how long it will take to learn something you don’t know how to do, so the first symptom of being out of your depth will be a delay. The second symptom, and the one that will really kill off the relationship, will be amateur quality on delivery: if anyone could learn how to do the task in minimal time and get it spot on with no experience, the client would have done it himself.

The easiest solution is not to bid on projects you know you can’t do but to regard each spec as describing the skills you should be learning if you’re to dominate your niche. The real difficulty comes though, when it’s established clients who are asking you to do something that falls outside your skill sets. Saying no to someone who relies on you weakens their dependence — they now have to find someone else. But it’s still a better bet than committing and failing.

2. Disappearing from View

The result of promising what you can’t deliver will be a sinking feeling that this project is never going to get done. At that point, the temptation is to hide. Emails from the client asking for updates are stored for later, then ignored and never answered. When they’re not sure about the best way to explain a delay, some freelancers prefer to say nothing, hoping that if they can complete the project properly eventually, they’ll be able to repair any damage caused in the meantime.

It rarely works that way, especially when the product comes in substandard. At that point any forgiveness or polite requests for change are likely to be replaced by anger at being kept out of the loop about the difficulties as they came up.

It’s easy to disappear when you’re freelancing for a client at a distance but it’s smart business to stay in touch even when  things are difficult.

3. Disloyalty to the Firm

When you’re an employee, passing your resumé to a competitor would be grounds for instant dismissal — or at least a quick search for a replacement and then instant dismissal. Freelancers  have a little more freedom than that. Clients assume that they’re working for others and possibly even for competitors, but they also assume confidentiality. Sometimes, they’ll even nail that trust down with a non-disclosure agreement. So while you should be free to work with another business in the same field, you’re not free to share the information  you learn working for other people — however much you think the client might love you for the gossip.

When a current client hears you’ve been talking behind their back, you can be sure it won’t be long before they’re giving you a kick in the rear.

That’s a problem because professional small talk can help to cement relationships between a client and a freelancer who rarely meet in person. One solution then is to share either old stories about related businesses or anecdotes about non-competitive fields. So a programmer working for two security companies might talk about the work he did as an in-house programmer before he went freelance and he could also discuss the work he does for a law firm on a very different kind of program. Those stories might still contain lessons that could benefit the client but if they’re not sharing any confidential information , they won’t cost you the trust of an established buyer.

4. Disturbing the Peace

Good clients always say that if you have any questions they’ll be happy to answer them. And good freelancers always know their stuff well enough to rarely do it.

This goes to the heart of the reason the client is hiring a freelancer in the first place: they want to offload the project onto someone else so that they can concentrate on doing something else. If you’re constantly sending them emails or calling them up to ask questions, you’re taking up time that they could have spent doing the work themselves.

That doesn’t mean you should never ask a client questions. It’s better to check than to get something wrong, and it’s better to stay in touch than to disappear. But it’s best of all to get all of the information you need right at the beginning of the project so that you can work on the project undisturbed —and without disturbing the client either.

Freelancing, by its nature, is a precarious way of making a living. You need multiple revenue streams and multiple clients. But most important of all, you need the skill, the talent and the reliability to hold onto the clients you’ve got.

On the other hand, freelancers might be easy to fire but they’re not very easy to replace and for the client there’s no guarantee that their next choice won’t bring out one of these giant client killers too.

Ask a marketing guru how you can land more freelance clients and you’ll hear the same thing again and again: get referrals, build a website, pay for ads, do some networking, etc., etc. Like we aren’t doing all of that already. Some people though are acting a little smarter. They’re not just telling clients that they’re creative, they’re showing off their creativity with some out-of-the-box marketing ideas. They’re skipping past the conventional marketing strategies to create new channels, produce innovative ideas, and generate messages that prove their value. It’s the kind of thing that can quickly turn an empty schedule into a bursting calendar — and it’s fun too.

Here are five creative ways to land new clients that will have you wondering why you didn’t think of them yourself.

1. Share Your Love

David Airey is a brand identity designer with clients around the world. He writes two monthly blogs about graphic design that bring in more than 250,000 visitors and generate around a million monthly views. He also pitches for work on his site, inviting clients to contact him to talk about a project. So far so routine — even it’s been done unusually well. But David has also turned the content on his blog into a book. If Amazon’s sales ranks are anything to go by, it’s selling reasonably well but that’s not the point.

The point is that as the author of a book about branding, David looks like an expert. He also has something to give to clients that’s more interesting than a portfolio. But most important of all, his book shows that he’s passionate about his subject. There are a lot of good designers around but only a few have bothered to put that passion on the page and get it published — or even to publish it themselves. David’s book helps him to win clients not just by showing what he knows about his subject but by proving how much he cares about making his subject work for his clients.

2. Sell Stuff

David Airey’s book is for sale but the only people who will see it being used are the people reading it. Retail stores have long boxed a little cleverer than that. Buy a shirt in your local mall and it will be placed in a giant bag emblazoned with the company’s logo. As you stroll around the streets, you’ll have paid to become the store’s walking billboard. That might not have been the idea behind designer Chuck Anderson’s t-shirts but it could well be part of the effect (especially the design that incorporates the name of his website.)

It’s true that only a tiny portion of the people who see the t-shirts are likely to be leads, but make the products good enough and people will talk about them. Even if the profits on the sales are small, the buzz generated by the desire to own really cool items can be loud enough for clients to hear.

3. Brand an iPhone Game

Advertising companies weren’t slow to spot the sticky quality and mass appeal of iPhone games, creating apps for Dr. Pepper, Ford and even deodorant product, Axe. Few have been successful. Created on the cheap and sometimes with little connection to the brand, they failed to compete against the tens of thousands of other games available in the store. One game that has done well though is Waterslide Extreme. Based on a television ad for Barclaycard in which an office worker travels home by waterslide, shopping with his credit card without breaking his journey, the game generated more than four million downloads.

According to Advertising Age, an industry newspaper, there are rules to creating a successful branded app. The game has to be good; it has to be linked with the service it advertises; and it has to be marketed. But if you can come up with a game idea related to your work, you could be putting your name in the hands of clients around the world.

4. Challenge the World to Beat You

When something as creative as an iPhone game does well, it’s not just the client who benefits. The firm that came up with the idea, produced the product and pushed it to the top of the charts also gets an opportunity to show people what it can do. It was an opportunity not missed by Dare, the digital marketing agency behind Waterslide Extreme.

They set up a YouTube channel and challenged the public to create their own version of the ad. It was a competition that benefitted the client, who got more publicity for their brand, but it also benefitted Dare which was closely associated with the competition. Views of the top entrants totaled over 1.5 million and picked up over 1,000 comments.

Whenever you do something amazing, you can be sure that people will want to beat you. Give them a way to try and you’ll show that you’re confident, talented — and available.

5. Kill Santa

Or someone like him, because Mettiamoci Latesta, an Italian campaign to encourage businesses not to cut their advertising budgets has already beheaded him. The image, showing a decapitated Father Christmas, complete with bloodied beard, a tag marked “Claus, Santa, Dream Developer” and the slogan “Don’t cut a dream” was intended to shock. It took the idea of cuts and pushed it to an extreme to create an image that was eye-catching, creative and unforgettable.

As a strategy, shock is difficult to implement and each success raises the bar higher for the next campaign. But when you can make an idea related to your business look like a life-or-death issue, you’ll get noticed. And that notice should translate into new business.

There are lots of ways to win new clients, strategies that go beyond playing with AdWords keywords and posting updates on Twitter. The more creative you can make your client-winning approaches, the further your message will reach. And as you’re stretching to reach them, the effort alone will show that you’re worth hiring.

Photography: J. Star

Running a freelance business is like being continually unemployed. You might have a full schedule, you might have all the work you need right now, but you never know what tomorrow will bring and if you want to keep your career moving forward you need to bring in new clients all the time. That means being alert for interesting opportunities, persuading people to give you work, and starting new jobs on a regular basis. And like anyone starting a new job, you get the thrill of being chosen — and sometimes the horror of discovering you made a bad choice when you accepted the gig.

Just as some bosses are sweet and supportive while others are spiteful and slave-driving so some clients turn out to be less than the freelancer hoped. And just as it’s difficult to spot a bad job when you fill in the application form and even harder to leave once you’ve got your feet under the desk so it’s not always easy to spot a bad client before you take him or her on, then walk away once you’re counting the billable hours. There are though a few signs that a client is going to be more of a pain than a pleasure — and one great way of heading for the door.

The worst kinds of clients, of course, are those that don’t pay. But they’re also the smallest problems. Smart freelancers make sure that large projects for new clients are divided by milestones, with one payment up front and others paid out during the course of a project. Failure to cough up on time means that work stops and while some time will have been lost, the damages are restricted. In effect, the client is dumped until he stumps up the next installment — and is likely to be dropped at the end of the project anyway. Arguments over money owed always cause enough bad feeling for both sides to want distance.

Sweating the Small Stuff

More subtle are clients who negotiate over small amounts. If the best clients are those who understand the value of your work and accept your rates without a quibble, among the worst clients are those who assume that any quote is up for negotiation. There’s always room for flexibility when the project is big and interesting enough but when a new client starts asking for a discount for work that amounts to no more than a few hours a month, that’s a sure sign that you’re going to be spending as much time talking about the work as you’ll spend doing it. When that happens, you’re taking on a client for free.

It’s not just the pay a small client can create big fights about though. They can also make outsized demands, submitting a request on Friday afternoon, for example, and expecting the work to be ready by Monday morning. Big clients get to make big demands — especially when they only do it occasionally — but small clients who make demands bigger than their budget are another kind that freelancers really want to avoid.

Expecting priority (over other clients, over family, over sleep…) is common enough among bad clients but even more common is mission creep, when the agreed parameters of a new project suddenly start expanding. It usually begins with something small — so small it’s not really worth charging for — like adding a banner to a large website or producing a logo in a different color. Slowly though, those small extras start to grow. Soon, the freelancer is being asked to add more pages or change the design of the logo, and because she didn’t charge for it the first time, it’s hard to charge the second time — and even harder the third time.

When the mission creeps sideways like that, it’s not long before a significant portion of the day is lost to work that doesn’t appear on the invoice.

Mission Creepers Aren’t Bad Clients

Mission creep alone though isn’t necessarily a sign of a bad client. It’s a sign of bad planning. The freelancer can squish the problem by listing the work on the bill once the time becomes meaningful. A bad client is one who then argues about it, protesting that the price wasn’t quoted in advance, or worse, assuming that the extra was a freebie and that he wasn’t going to be charged for it at all. That’s a sign of one of the worst kinds of client: someone who believes the freelancer is working for him only because he likes him, because he enjoys the work and because, like him, he wants the venture to succeed. Freelancers should like their clients, enjoy the work and look forward to seeing the venture they’re helping to create go on to conquer the world — but they work because they need the money and good clients recognize that.

The worst kinds of  bad clients though are those who are the hardest to spot, and that’s true of clients who suddenly go silent for long periods of time. As a freelancer, you’ll clear your schedule, count the money and get ready for a couple of months of reliable work only to find that the project you thought was in the bag has effectively been put on hold. You won’t be told it’s been put on hold, only that they’re doing market research or talking to the marketing team or finishing up another project, and that they’ll be back in touch next week. Then they disappear and you’re left wondering whether you can take on another job or wait for that client to come back. The lack of reliability alone should tell what you need to do: what you should always do when you realize you’ve spotted a bad client…

Get busy enough to say “no” when the bad client returns — the best way to dump the worst of them. Of course, that means bringing in new clients, and trying to spot the signs that they’re bad ones.

Freelancing has to be the best job in the world – at least in the eyes of  cubicle workers. There’s no commute, no single boss, no enforced schedule and no office gossip. You can wear what you want, work when you want and bring in the projects you want. You’re in total control of your career and your life. There’s no better way to work.

If only. Freelancing has its moments but it also has plenty of bad times, enough in fact to rival the worst aspects of a regular job.

There are the holidays and vacation times for one. Or rather, there aren’t any holidays or vacation times. While it’s true that freelancers are able – in theory – to take time off whenever they want and without asking for permission (or a doctor’s note) in the way that an office worker does, they do face a couple of restraints. Deadlines in particular tend to dictate work schedules tighter than even the most tight-fisted boss. Start missing milestones and those Easter breaks, planned days off, and even weekends and evenings start to look like useful hours to catch up and get the project back on track. While friends and family are tossing cans around the barbeque, freelancers are often sitting at the desk, slaving over a keyboard and wishing they had the kind of office that locks out workers during the breaks.

Freelancers Pay $150 for a Picnic in the Park

And if they do manage to pull time off – perhaps as a reward at the end of a big project – there’s no one to pay for it. Freelancers don’t have holiday pay and they certainly don’t have time-off pay. Choose to spend the afternoon in the park, and you can count the amount of revenue that time off has cost you. Charge $50 an hour, for example, and three hours on the grass, eating sandwiches and tossing a Frisbee in the middle of the week will have cost $150. So much for the freedom to set your own hours as a freelancer. With that sort of bill, there’d better be caviar in that picnic.

So other people’s holidays are one bad time to be a freelancer. Your own holidays are another. And the end of every month is a third. Freelance income is unreliable. A good freelance business should have a solid base of regular work large enough to cover the expenses, but when no two month’s work are ever the same, no two months’ income are the same either. Life as a freelancer means binge-paying. While salaried workers know exactly how much they’re going to receive each month, freelancers can find that one month they’re barely making ends meet, and the next they’re flush with cash. It requires a whole different way of planning a budget and balancing the bank account – one that makes many freelancers, especially the breadwinners, look with nostalgia at payslips with permanent figures to match the stability of their expenses.

And those permanent figures can always go up in return for years served, good behavior and solid effort. The same isn’t necessarily true for freelancers. The flipside of being in control of your own career means that development doesn’t happen unless you make it happen.

That’s harder than it sounds. It doesn’t just mean pitching for bigger projects, taking on staff to outsource the lower-paid work or expanding to supply supplementary services. It means being ready to ditch older clients who aren’t growing with you and being brave enough to invest in marketing, equipment and products. As an employee, the only danger of asking for a pay raise is that you might not receive it – and become aware of exactly how much the company thinks you’re worth. For a freelancer who tries to advance by spending more time pitching for bigger projects, building a new website or learning new skills, the risk is direct and financial.

The result is that it’s often easier to stick with what you’ve got, cling to your old clients, continue doing work that doesn’t make the most of your abilities and be grateful that you’re making a living out of freelancing. Careers – unless you’re prepared to take risks, or get lucky — are for people in the corporate world.

Swapping One Boss for Lots of Bosses

And of course, there’s the time to pay for the benefits. When it comes to pensions, healthcare, insurance and even travel expenses, the self-employed have no one to chip in except themselves. Salaried employees tend only to look at the bottom line of their payslips, forgetting about the additional contributions paid by their employers; freelancers have to cough those fees up themselves, sending their bottom line even closer to the bottom.

If all that wasn’t enough, cubicle types might complain about their boss, but at least they only have one of them. Freelancers have as many bosses as they’re lucky to have clients. And each of these bosses is pulling in different directions, demanding extra time, wondering why they aren’t getting it — and looking for their dream freelancer who will work only for them, for a pittance and full-time, no benefits included.

So freelancing sucks. It sucks because there’s no free time – only time that brings in money and time that doesn’t bring in money. It sucks because there’s no regular pay – only the billable hours you’re able to invoice at the end of each month. It sucks because there are no benefits – only the benefits you’re prepared to pay for. And it sucks because there’s no boss – instead, there are lots of bosses, each with their own deadlines, demands and sources of further instability.

In fact, freelancing is so bad there’s only one thing worse than working for yourself, without a contract and on your own time, and that’s working for the man. Because if freelancing was really that bad, we’d head back to the cubicle and make our complaints there.

As an employee, it’s easy to make more money. You knock on the boss’s door, point out all of the wonderful things you’ve been doing for the company and ask him to add 10 percent to your salary. If he laughs, you either ask what you still need to do to get that raise or you start looking for another job. Either way, ambitious types should always know what’s coming next. For freelancers though, increasing earnings is a little tougher. The most obvious way – to charge more – can  have the effect of  reducing your income as you price yourself out of the market. There’s often a difference between what a freelancer thinks he’s worth and what the market says he’s worth. But there are a few things you can do to raise your income without raising your prices.

Increase Productivity

Perhaps the most obvious is to work harder. One of the biggest shocks for workers new to freelancing is the recognition that time is money. While it’s theoretically true that freelancers are free to take time off whenever they want, provided there’s no deadline looming (and when does that ever happen?), it’s certainly true that they’ll be counting the amount of money they didn’t earn during those hours at the beach. The more billable work you can pack into a day then, the more you’ll be able to earn.

Productivity systems like Getting Things Done might help – although their complexity could actually cost you time too – but really the most effective way to increase your productivity is to create short bursts of focused attention. Work in a café, for example, and you’ll know you’ve got a seat for about two hours, long enough to complete one task. That mini-deadline could be enough to keep you staring at the screen, instead of looking through the window. And if that doesn’t work, you could always choose a café without an Internet connection.

Aim to Upsell

Clients usually choose a freelancer who can complete a particular task. But it’s likely that there’s a whole bunch of other jobs you could be doing for the client as well, and some of them might just pay more. Each time you complete a job for a new client, look at other jobs you could be doing for her, and create a package deal.

Don’t pitch it right away though. If the client thought that project was good for her, she would have asked you to do it in the first place. Persuading her will take time, but most importantly, it will take trust. Wait until you’ve completed two or three jobs for the same client, proven that your knowledge as well as your skills have value, and then pitch your idea. You should find that you’re able to turn one job into two.

Increase Your Skills

Upselling will let you do more with the same set of skills. Increasing your skills though, will let you do more valuable kinds of work. For tech types, that’s relatively easy. Programmers can always add a new programming language to their resumes. Designers can learn new software or experiment with new techniques. But even freelance writers can sharpen their editing skills or take classes in technical or medical writing, niches with particularly high pay.

It might not be simple, fun or quick but it’s worth doing anyway, if only because it keeps your skills up to date, and lets you compete with new and better-skilled freelancers entering the marketplace.

Replace Your Old Clients

The first clients a talented freelancer picks up get a bargain. Demand is low so their negotiating power is strong. When the alternative is an empty book, a new freelancer will often be willing to accept a rate much lower rate than his work is worth. As his book fills though, time becomes rare and the freelancer starts to charge more. But that still leaves those old clients who were lucky enough to pick up an early deal.

Those are the people you can ask more money from. You know their work well enough that you’ll be hard to replace. Time will mean that you can at least ask for an inflation-linked rise. And if they prefer not to pay, then you’ll be able to replace them with a new client who’s willing to pay the full amount.

On the other hand though, familiarity with an old client can mean that you’re able to complete their work faster than you used to. Increasing productivity can mean shutting down the Web and turning off the radio but it can also mean working faster, something that happens naturally the more you do a particular job. Before you demand more cash from your old clients, it’s worth looking at whether you’re not already earning the same money in less time.

Outsource Your Work

And finally, the best way to increase your earnings is to hire freelancers yourself. It’s this approach that’s allowed Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, to lead a life of apparent idleness broken only by professional speaking, writing and promotional work. Some tasks you’ll always need to do. Your signature work, for example, particularly complex coding or writing that carries your name you’ll probably want to micromanage to the extent that you may as well do it yourself. (Although if Damien Hirst can hire people to do his paintings for him, then what can’t be outsourced?) But much of the day-to-day work that most freelancers do can often be passed on to other freelancers who charge less than you do for an hour of time. Simple coding, basic design and low-level editing can be trusted to hired help, freeing you up to earn a premium in that time.

It’s something that tends to happen only when the freelancer has enough work to pass around, is confident enough in his abilities to oversee the work of others and is ambitious enough to want to turn a one-freelancer enterprise into a growing business. It’s also the kind of thing that can remove all the limits to your freelance earnings.

Photography: Consumerist

It’s now easier than ever for an entrepreneur to find specialized help with minimal risk. A one-person business can do a pretty good impression of a small company by hiring a creative freelancer – even one on the other side of the planet – without having to pay a regular salary, benefits or get locked into a contract with commitments the growing firm isn’t quite ready to keep. In fact, as anyone who has ever posted a wanted ad on the Internet knows, when it comes to freelance help – even from specialists like Web designers or illustrators — entrepreneurs are spoilt for choice. And with that choice comes challenges. It might be easy enough to find a freelancer but finding one you can rely on requires a whole new bag of skills.

Unreliable freelancers come in a variety of forms. Contact is perhaps the biggest worry for hirers. When the person you’re working with isn’t sitting in the next office, and your biggest communication tool is email, there’s always the danger that your mini-employee has taken your instructions, your mock-ups — and your deposit – and run off to Timbuktu. Or at least relegated dealing with you and your project to the bottom of a to-do list that includes “getting a haircut,” “helping junior with homework,” “building my own company” and “buying a Caribbean island.” Your messages go out but nothing comes back.

For growing businesses, that lack of contact can feel like the worst of all worlds. You’re not certain whether you’re hired help is hired and helping or whether they’ve dropped the project and not bothered to tell you. You don’t know whether you should be looking to give the site plan to someone else, or sitting tight and hoping that it all works out. For many entrepreneurs, the result is stasis, worry and wasted time.

What You Want, When You Want It

That time ends at least when a deadline passes. If a freelancer disappears and still hasn’t made contact after the delivery day then he can have few complaints if you hire someone else. More usually though, missed deadlines — another common characteristic of unreliability — can be seen a long way off. Milestones get missed, apologies are made in advance and dates have to be rearranged. It’s all frustrating stuff and life would be much easier if everything were delivered exactly when you wanted it.

And it would be perfect if you didn’t just get your logo, your design or the copy when you wanted but it was always exactly the work you needed. The quality delivered by freelancers is rarely a hirer’s first worry but perhaps it should be. The kinds of people who make themselves available for freelancing range from stay-at-home moms hoping to make a few extra bucks from the doodling they’ve been doing for fun to seasoned pros who have long been making a living out of their training, talent and skills. If you’re lucky — and you’re willing to pay the full rate — you’ll get the second type. Get the first and you could find yourself unexpectedly looking at an image you can’t use or a design that needs to be redone almost entirely.

Finding — and Creating — Reliable Freelancers

Each of these problems has fixes. Communication trouble can be solved by having more than one way of staying in touch, and it also helps to restrict the number of contacts. Shoot out an email every time you get a new idea or whenever you want to alert your freelancer to a model you’ve spotted and they won’t all be answered. If all she does is answer your emails, she’s not going to be working on your project. Save up all your comments for one email a day. And understand too that people respond to email at different times. You might treat email as chat and reply to a message you receive immediately, but others are happy to wait. Many followers of Getting Things Done, for example, aim to increase their productivity by only writing long emails at the beginning and end of the day.

Deadlines can also require flexibility and are often broken even outside the world of freelancing. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once said that he loved deadlines; he enjoyed the “whooshing sound they make as they fly past.” Assume that there’s always a chance that deadlines might be missed and set them so that they can be adjusted.  And as you approach the deadline, track the project’s progress so that you can see how close the finish actually is. For tasks like website design, you should be able to see how many pages have been completed and what still needs to be done.

Both of those are fairly straightforward. It’s finding a freelancer whose quality you can rely on that’s much harder, but there are a number of options here too. Freelance sites like Elance, Scriptlance and Guru all have feedback ratings and portfolio spaces but don’t rely on those ratings — or those sites — when you’re looking for someone reliable. Different clients are satisfied with different levels of quality. Nor is it easy to compare the work of creative people who are meant to think outside the box. So to get a deeper impression and to understand whether a freelancer might be good for you, try social media. If the person you’re considering is on Twitter, their tweets should give you an idea of their personality, their interests and what they’re saying about their current clients. You might also be able to find comments, links and examples of projects they’ve recently completed to supplement the top picks that made it into the portfolio.

More importantly, social media can also give you word-of-mouth recommendations. Search for the type of freelancer you need on Twitter’s search engine and there’s a good chance that you’ll find plenty of other people tweeting the same need. You’ll be able to check their timelines and see who’s replied to them and who is getting the recommendations. There’s usually plenty to choose from. A search for “web designer” turned up three requests, a  job search from a design company and a personal recommendation, complete with sample link, all posted in the space of an hour.

But if you really want to check the quality of a freelancer you’re considering, forget the generic terms and get specific. Instead of searching for “programmer,” search for “ajax,” “vectors” or some other term that would only be discussed by a freelancer who knows his stuff — and likes talking about it. Groups on Facebook, such as “Web Design,” can also be rich hunting grounds where you can browse the discussions and offer work to the contributors with the best ideas.

Even LinkedIn can be useful for plotting someone’s previous work experience, especially the short periods which they might have left off their freelance profile.

If all of that research sounds like more work than you’re really inclined to do, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s not unusual for freelance-employer relationships to break down quickly. Companies often find themselves ditching flakey freelancers then searching around for a more reliable replacement, often on a much tighter deadline and far smaller budgets.

Investing the time and effort to find someone you can rely on when you first hire a freelancer is always the best move, second only to the most important one: when you do find a freelancer you can rely on, make sure you keep her because there aren’t too many of them around.

Deciding how much to charge is both the first and the toughest issue that freelancers face. Economists will tell you that the correct price is always the highest amount that the market will pay, and business experts will tell you that you can figure that out by looking at your competitors’ price lists. But what no one will tell you is who your competitors are. When you pitch for a job, are you competing with other freelancers in your town? Or with other freelancers anywhere with similar skills? When you’re looking to pitch your own fees, whose prices should you be looking at?

The difference is important. Now that virtual companies can create virtual teams made up of qualified people in parts of the world you might never have heard of, identifying competitors isn’t always easy. It’s tempting, for example, to dismiss entirely a competing bid from a programmer in Mumbai whose price demands are half of yours. If they’re charging so much less, then their qualifications and experience must be that much lower. But if their living expenses are a quarter of yours, then in fact, they’re asking for twice as much – and a client could be paying half the amount you charge for someone twice as good.

How Much Does a Big Mac Cost to You?

It’s a question of purchasing power parity (PPP), an issue that few freelancers or their clients are likely to have considered but one which we all increasingly need to bear in mind as we make bids and assess offers. Telecommuting means that equally qualified people can be submitting bids from areas with very unequal economies.

The principle of PPP is that in a perfectly efficient market, identical products will have just one price. Exchange rates then should move towards the rate at which those products reflect that price. The Economist famously uses the Big Mac to represent an identical product sold in 120 countries because the burgers largely use local ingredients: bread, beef, cheese, tomatoes, advertising, packaging etc. Comparing the prices of Big Macs in various parts of the world with the official exchange rates should reveal whether a currency is over- or undervalued. According to the latest compilation of the Big Mac index, the iconic double-burger cost an average of $3.54 in the US but $5.60 in Switzerland and $1.74 in Indonesia. Because the exchange rates alone didn’t reflect those differences, the Swiss Franc was described as 58 percent overvalued and the Indonesian Rupiah 51 percent undervalued.

That’s nice to know if you’re hungry in Indonesia or Switzerland (and have a steel stomach and no taste buds) but what does it mean for freelancers? A report conducted by UBS recently provided a slightly more useful take. It offered an alternative Big Mac index that looked at the number of hours it takes to earn the money needed to buy a Big Mac in 73 cities. In Chicago, Tokyo and Toronto, a typical worker only has to sweat for twelve minutes to afford the burger; in Nairobi, they’d still be going hungry two-and-a-half hours later.

Of course, the Big Mac isn’t a perfect model. In Chicago, it’s poor man’s food; in Nairobi, McDonalds is where the foreigners and the nouveau riche hang out. But the principle should be clear: when it comes to setting a price, it’s not the figure that matters, but what you can do with that figure when you receive it.

World Quality Demands a World Price

For example, a buyer might find himself considering bids from two freelance designers charging $30 an hour. The first freelancer lives in Chicago; the second in Sao Paulo. To the buyer, the price isn’t an issue — whichever supplier he chooses the cost will be the same. But a glance at the alternative Big Mac index shows that in PPP terms, the Brazilian designer is more than three times as expensive. If he’s not three times better, then the buyer will be paying more than the real value of the supplier’s work. Of course, if that Brazilian designer is better at all than the Chicagoan, then to the buyer, that extra value has arrived for free.

Buyers then need to be aware not just of the amounts they’re being asked to pay but what they should expect in return for that money. For sellers, it’s a little more complex. Clearly, freelancers working in low-cost economies and selling to higher-priced economies should have an advantage. Charge a US buyer a rate that conforms to PPP — a price equal to the one charged by an American supplier — and they’re giving up an advantage. If they charge less, they can undercut competition in the buyer’s local market and still earn more than their cost of living demands. But if a buyer is prepared to pay a certain rate for a set quality of work then accepting less for that service means that they’re selling themselves cheap.

In practice, when things get this complex, simple economics takes over. Freelancers, wherever they may be, tend to look at the quality of the service they offer and consider the competition on a global scale. When they believe the quality they offer is truly world-class — and hard to find anywhere in the world — they feel free to charge the highest rates a buyer is willing to pay. When they feel their work falls short of that level, they use their price advantage to bring in work.

And for buyers too, things become much simpler when they stop comparing prices and start comparing portfolios. When they know what they’re willing to pay and can see what they can get for that money then how many Big Macs their supplier is buying when the job is done soon becomes irrelevant.

The bottom line is that the ease of telecommuting and the ability to work virtually from anywhere in the world has been good news for buyers who now have a greater range of suppliers to choose from. And it’s been good news too for freelancers who can now pitch their services anywhere and charge the highest possible rates for the highest quality work wherever they may be.

The only losers, in fact, are low-quality suppliers pitching in countries with expensive Big Macs.

Freelancers face two giant challenges at the beginning of every new job. They need to agree a price for the work they’ve been asked to do; and they need to agree a deadline for the delivery of that work. Although a lot of attention is paid to the first challenge — calculating hourly rates, comparing the prices of competitors, dreaming of the check — it’s the deadline that’s actually the more important challenge and the hardest one to overcome. Pitch your quote too high and the worst that will happen is that you’ll lose that job. Pitch too low, and you’ll lose money… once. Miss a deadline though, and you could find that you lose a client forever.

Even that though looks welcome when you consider some of the consequences of missing deadlines. Of the roughly 35,000 lawsuits that clients file against lawyers each year, the second most common cause of the suit was that the lawyer failed to meet a deadline. A third of all claims result in damages and in one in six of those claims the damages top $100,000. That would be a high price to pay for being late.

Miss a Deadline, Pay $200,000

Nor are those high costs restricted to highly-paid and well-insured lawyers. When writer Douglas Brinkley missed the deadline for his biography of Jack Kerouac — and in the process, missed the 50^th anniversary of the publication of “On the Road”  — Penguin, his publisher, sued. They demanded the return of his $200,000 advance, half of which Brinkley had already paid to Kerouac’s estate in return for access to the author’s papers. While that’s not a problem that’s likely to affect every freelancer, it is an issue for anyone who demands payments of 50 percent up front. Especially, if they spend the money before completing the project.

But missed deadlines are a threat to everyone, even the most organized of workers (and how many of those are there?) In part, that’s because the late freelancer’s favorite excuse — “It’s not my fault!” — might well have some justification. Ronda Muir, a management consultant with Robin Rolfe, notes that many of the typical management methods used in legal firms actually encourage missed deadlines. By setting dates that fall a long way before the item is actually needed, managers suggest that the deadline is soft and can be missed with no real consequences. And by micromanaging — checking in constantly to see if it’s ready — they take the responsibility for proper pacing away from the worker. If he falls behind, the worker thinks, then the client or manager will spot the problem pretty quickly… so they don’t need to do it themselves. That’s not a training routine limited to law firms.

There are technical solutions. Orbisoft’s Task Manager is supposed to solve the organizational problems that cause projects to fall behind. The Omni Group’s OmniPlan claims that it can make “project management painless.” And, of course, although Getting Things Done isn’t a piece of software, it is about as complex as one. It does seem to work for some people… and exasperate many others.

What all of these solutions have in common though is that they all demand time, something that’s always in short supply when you’re trying to reach a deadline, and seeing your schedule get tighter and tighter.

The Worst Kind of Deadline

The best solutions then might be the least technical and also the least demanding. One solution that many freelancers turn to is the imposition of milestones. Instead of agreeing to hand over the completed project on the final day, the two sides agree delivery dates for partial work. That allows the client to see the work as it’s progressing, ensure that it’s on track and ask for changes while it’s being created instead of waiting until the end. For the freelancer, it can also create a staggered payment schedule.

It’s also a solution that can help service providers to meet even the hardest kinds of deadlines: the ones that are a long way away.

While tight deadlines will always make a service provider sweat, when the time to the deadline is more than twice the amount of time it takes to complete the project, there’s too often a temptation to procrastinate. As smaller projects pop up in the meantime, the larger project with the distant deadline is continually pushed away… until it becomes clear that there’s only half the time needed.

Not all clients want to see half-completed work though, and not all freelancers are happy supplying drafts instead of polished projects that show them at their best, so an alternative solution is to set your own mini-deadlines. You can set a certain number of pages that need to be completed by a certain day, allocate a number of lines of code to write each week, or list the leads that need to be contacted each month.

While the occasional deadline might be missed, attempting to keep to them will always be a good discipline and an effective way of working to schedule.

Not even that though will solve perhaps the most infuriating kind of deadline: the one missed by other members of the team. If you’re waiting on someone else’s work before you can complete your own — or worse, if you’re managing a team of freelancers — it only takes one person to fall behind to put everyone behind schedule.

There’s not a huge amount you can do about that — beyond making sure it’s not you that’s causing the delay. Making sure that the team are in close contact might help. It’s one thing to let down a client or a colleague you’ve never met but when you feel you know the people you’re working then delivering late means that you’re letting down a friend, and that can be painful. Ultimately, though it’s up to the project manager to set deadlines that are tight enough to create focus but still loose enough to take the inevitable delays into account. It might also be possible to set overlapping tasks so that the Web designer, for example, can work with only some of the copy or the marketing team at least have a demo that they can show leads even if the final product isn’t ready yet.

But perhaps the best way to ensure that deadlines aren’t missed is to be honest. It’s never easy to say ‘no’ to a client but if you feel that the deadline is too tight and that you’re not going to make it, suggesting a more realistic date is always a better strategy than having to say ‘no’ on delivery day when the client asks if it’s ready.

Tell regular jobbers that you work as a freelancer and you can see the envy in their eyes. They imagine you sitting on the beach with your laptop propped on your knees. They see you crawling out of bed while they’re still sitting in traffic, believe you take leisurely lunch breaks as they’re rushing back to their desks, and assume that you never have to argue with the boss.

If only. What day jobbers – and new freelancers too — fail to understand is that freelancing is work, and like any work, it comes with difficulties and frustrations, challenges which can, and sometimes even should, drive a freelancer back to the safety of the 9-5.

There are no figures that describe the numbers of people hanging up their lances and heading back to the office, but only around 48 percent of respondents in some surveys indicated that they would even consider telecommuting. A similar number said that they would like to stick to the day job but with flexible hours. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that despite the improvement in communications, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rate of self-employment has remained relatively steady at between 7-9 percent of the workforce since the 1970s.

Freelancing is Lonely

Perhaps the regular workers know something we don’t. Freelancing, after all, isn’t the same as retiring. For one, working for yourself can be anti-social. While wireless connections in cafes and libraries allow digital nomads to escape the home office, neither is a particularly social space.

The longest conversation you’re likely to have in a Starbucks is trying to explain how you’d like your green tea frapuccino.

It’s the need to speak to someone other than a barista that has led to the growth of co-working sites. But these can be expensive, typically charging from $25 a day to over $500 a month. That’s less than the cost of renting an office, but it’s a lot of money to buy new friends, even if you do end up liking most of them. A regular job would give you that social life for free.

Nor is there any guarantee that you would have anything in common with your fellow Jelly workers – except the lack of a regular paycheck.

Of course, for many freelancers, and wannabe freelancers, it’s precisely that financial instability that’s often the biggest anchor pulling them back to a cubicle. Dan Florio, a freelance developer, has talked of trying to build up enough savings to give him a three-month buffer if all of his clients disappeared at the same time.

“Even when I was just starting as a freelancer I didn’t have any trouble finding work so I doubt if I’ll ever come close to needing that much of a buffer but it certainly helps…” he says on his blog.

In practice, low income – and no income – tends to be the biggest concern at the beginning of a freelancing career. Over time, a growing portfolio makes new work easier to find, word-of-mouth brings in business for no extra effort, and regular clients give income levels at least a firm foundation with the occasional jobs topping up the rest.

The More You Do, The More You Earn

But even for established freelancers, the fear of losing everything never goes away, and that’s one of the reasons that the self-employed often have far worse bosses than those they fired. When you have no contract, no right to severance pay, no benefits and an awareness that plenty of other people could do the job almost as well – and that they’re no more than a website away – it’s hard to say no to a client even when their demands are unreasonable and your book is already looking fuller than you’d like.

And, of course, the more billable work you can squeeze into a month, the more money you can expect to take home at the end of it, a double-edged bonus. Without a plan and plenty of self-discipline, freelancers can easily find themselves working longer hours than they used to – and without many of the benefits of those long hours. After all, when a regular jobber stays late at the office, they’re looking for more than overtime. They expect their commitment to be noticed and rewarded with more responsibility, a grander title and higher pay overall. While income is most new freelancers’ first concern, established freelancers often find themselves wrestling with the question of “What next?” At least one developer has reported doing the same kinds of tasks after three years that he had been doing when he started. It was one of the reasons he cited for giving up freelancing.

And that’s perhaps the biggest reason that freelancing isn’t for everyone, and it’s the ultimate way to know whether it’s right for you.

You can replace the lost sociability with an active extra-curricular life, one filled with classes, sports, activities and new friends.

You can get your boss under control by placing firm limits on the time you stop working in the evenings, and steering clear of the computer at the weekends.

You can even learn to live with an unstable income with a bit of fiscal discipline and a base of regular clients whose repeat jobs pay the mortgage and fill the grocery cart.

But to freelance in the long term, you also need to know not just what you can do but what you’d like to do with your skills. You need to know where you want your career path to take you, and what you need to do to get there as you build experience and knowledge.

Freelancing might be the ultimate ambition for many workers but ambitious workers won’t just need to be driven and focused if they’re to achieve their goals. They also need to be their own career managers.

The alternative is to find a boss to do it for you.

Photography: James_Michael_Hill

If prizes were ever given for poorly-coined terms, “freelance” might well have to hire a writer to put together its acceptance speech. Few of us carry lances around these days and if the “free” refers to anything, it’s more likely to be the amount clients expect to pay for their products than the freedom that should come with being free of a boss.

In practice, freelancers just have lots of bosses, multiple deadlines (sometimes in the same day) and, thankfully no shortage of work.

That might sound surprising. After all, there’s no shortage of people hoping to replace the 9-5 with a 10-4 routine of café-hopping, down-dressing and downstairs commutes. eLance alone, a site that lets freelancers bid on gigs, has more than 110,000 freelancers on topics from Web and Programming to Engineering and Manufacturing.

Six-Figure Freelancers

And yet, the top earners regularly generate six-figure sums, amounts that many freelancers might have struggled to earn in a regular job.

Or perhaps it only looks that way. One of the biggest untold secrets of freelancing is that some freelancers freelance for… well, other freelancers.

When a good freelancer finds work plentiful and time short, a solution is to switch sides, become a client and pass the work on, paying a slightly lower fee and pocketing the difference.

Clearly, there’s a danger here. You’re paying less so there’s a chance you’re going to be receiving less. The last freelancer in the chain also knows that it’s not his name on the line, so he has less to lose by turning in lower-grade work. Even if he loses a client by not being as careful as usual, he might also have damaged a more powerful competitor. And the time it takes you to correct lower quality work and bring it up to scratch, might not be worth the small profit you generate from the work itself.

There are methods though that freelancers can use to keep their own freelancers motivated and working at their best.

One is not to be too possessive. There is a danger that if the second freelancer knows who the client is, he’s going to cut out the middle man, head straight for the client and steal the show. That’s possible, but it doesn’t happen often. Most people are well-behaved, and even those without ethics would have to think twice about risking a certain income for only the possibility of earning the same or only a slightly higher income directly from the client.

Usually, it’s a risk worth taking because understanding exactly what the client is trying to do lets the freelancer see the big picture. It provides context, a feel for the client’s tastes and preferences, and — most importantly – a sense that their work has meaning.

It takes a certain type of freelancer to produce work without being interested in how that work is going to be used. In general, those are the sort of freelancers you want to avoid working with.

“I Did That!”

Asking your helper for advice can have a similar effect. When one freelancer outsources work to another, the relationship between them changes. The worker with the money has more power than the worker who wants to earn. But at every other time, neither has any power over the other and they compete as peers, respecting each other’s work and status. Keeping some of that respect in the freelancer-freelancer relationship can prove to be very rewarding too. It helps the supplier feel invested in the project, especially when their opinions are listened to and acted on.

Being able to say “I did that” – even if you’re only saying it to yourself – can be a better motivator even than money.

Not that money isn’t important, and this is perhaps one of the hardest things about paying other freelancers. Because the freelance world is so competitive, there’s very little room for a winning bid to include someone else’s pay. The more generous you are though, the more the supplier is going to feel that his work is valued and that you’re hiring him not to make a profit – although you should be doing that – but because you just can’t take on all this work yourself.

Again, it’s always more comfortable to feel that you’re lending a hand rather than just renting yourself out, even if you’re actually doing both.

Praise though is free and yet it’s oddly rare in the freelance world. We expect our work to be well-received, and we’re always more interested in the checks and the Paypal receipts than the kind words and slaps on the back. But it is still amazing how much being told that your work is good can raise your motivation. Being generous with the compliments can do the same thing for your own freelancers – and it’s cheaper than paying more.

Freelancing is a tricky business and few things are harder than finding good help that you can rely on. When you need it and you find it, it’s worth getting the most out of it.

By now, you’ve probably seen a number of Geekpreneur posts about mind mapping. Mind maps are a powerful tool that when used properly can multiply your productivity.

Here are some of the general ways that mind mapping can make the average freelancer (and other people) more productive in their work, followed by a list of some specific uses.

1. Offers blank canvas. Mind mapping software (or paper) gives you a blank canvas to work with.
2. Facilitates brainstorming. Allows unstructured brainstorming where ideas can be organized later.
3. Shows multiple detail views. You can switch between high-level and low-level detail, allowing you to see the big picture or focus when necessary.
4. Cues learning. More closely resembles human thought processes, so mind mapping research notes on a topic makes it easier to remember the concepts as a whole. This makes it easier to learn complex topics.
5. Integrates your digital workflow, since all mind mapping software allows map nodes to link to either other maps or document files. Clicking on a linked node fires up the default application for that file type.
6. Controls your workload. Allows you to break down complex problems into more manageable parts. For example, you can take a piecemeal/ step by step approach to writing articles and other documents.
7. Complexity flexibility. Mind maps can be simple or complex. Personal dashboards, for example, can be your daily workflow command center, integrating all your digtal/ web work tasks into one place.
8. Controls admin records. Easy to keep project completion records, with links to invoice files or to web documents.
9. Controls information overload. Freelancers – especially writers – often have to do a fair bit of research. Information overload can be a daily problem, but when using mind maps, it’s easy to build a reference map of articles, group and regroup information as necessary.

Some Daily Uses of Mind Mapping for Freelancers
Here are some more specific uses of mind maps for freelancers.

1. Personal Dashboard. A personal dashboard using a mind map allows you a powerful way to manage your work and personal life. Sections of a personal dashboard can start as a cluster of notes but can later transform into articles, documents, books, websites, business plans.

2. Task Management. Personal and work tasks are only a fragment of what you might put in a personal dashboard, but they’re an important part of your daily life. There are a variety of ways that you can manage tasks using mind maps. You can use them for simple to-do lists, track goal completion, develop ideas and more.

3. Idea Generation/ Idea Bank. Using mind mapping software, it’s fairly easy to simply brainstorm ideas. Once you’re finished brainstorming, you can applying filtering criteria to accept or reject each idea. After filtering your list down, you’re left with an idea bank. You can now easily organize your ideas. Hierarchies for information often “reveal” themselves, so it’s dificult to say in general how you should organize everything.

4. Learning Log. Mind maps aren’t just for brainstorming and recording ideas. If one of your tasks is to learn a subject or niche topic, mind maps allow you to build an organic knowledge base.

Start by recording what you know, in the same way that you might brainstorm. Brainstorm first, then organize your thoughts. Now arrange your notes into whatever natural information hierarchy occurs. You can add notes to your knowledge base as you learn something new, and even turn it into an idea bank.

Need to learn a language so that you can translate your writing (or someone else’s)? Mind mapping is one of the most ideal ways to learn a language. Not only can you link to web pages with podcasts or lessons, you can add images to map nodes to speed the learning process. You can build your own paced lesson plan this way, and with some mind mapping packages, share interactive maps.

5. Problem-Solving. A visual approach to problem solving often stimulates solutions that might not otherwise have occurred to you.

1. It allows you a big-picture view of the problem, although you can zoom in on details as well.
2. Mind mapping also allows you to break a problem down into component parts and dissect it piecemeal.
3. Allows you to explore relevant questions and various options radiantly, without confiining you like a list or spreadsheet would.
4. Stimulates “intersection” (Medici Effect) solutions from unrelated disciplines. These are those types of solutions that are often labelled “inspired.”

6. Scope, Plan, Develop and Write a Book. Regardless of the type of freelancing you do, if you plan to write a book about your skills, mind mapping software is a perfect tool. Some mind mapping tools are even integrated with word processing software, making conversion from map to finished document even simpler. Mind mapping also works for developing novels.

7. Document Version Control. Create a sophisticated version control manager for your documents, whether you write articles or code, do graphic design, or some other form of digital freelancing work.

8. Easy-Access Password Cache. Freelancers often have to maintain multiple website accounts. A password cache mind map allows you to hiearchically organize accounts by category of web service. Add in the site’s logo or favicon and you have a visual cue to find passwords faster. Most mind mapping programs let you link a map node to web page, so you can activate each web service from its corresponding map node.

It’s been said that if you don’t have a plan to grow your business within the next five years, you’re likely to hit stagnation at some point. Whether you’re a freelancer, contractor or consider yourself an entrepreneur, even if your financial goals are small, it’s worth setting them so that you have something concrete to work towards.

On the other hand, some people are afraid to set big goals either for fear of failure or because they don’t believe they’re capable of achieving them.

Consider for a moment that you want to earn $100K/ year, gross, working only 20 days/ month, for a maximum of 50 weeks/ year. If you’re only earning $40K/year from your business, it might be emotionally difficult to believe $100K is possible, let alone anything more. But if you break that down into a daily rate ($400), the number is not so intimidating.

Tips
Here are some tips for setting your business financial goals.

1. Have a concrete financial goal. For the sake of argument, say it’s to earn $240K/ year in revenue from all sources, active and passive. Can you do it? Absolutely. Will you do it? Maybe. Do you have an emotionally strong reason to reach this financial goal? Is it strong enough to carry you through tough times.

2. Make the goal easier. Break the goal down into stages. For example, $240K/year might be emotionally difficult to accept. Break it down to monthly ($20K), weekly (~$4.6K), or even daily (~$660) earnings.

3. Build multiple streams of income. An earnings rate of $660/day might seem intimidating, might be hard to accept emotionally. That’s because the tendency when you’re starting out is to think, “What job could I do that would earn me that much?” If you think that way, then you’re already defeated already.

If you’re building your own business, then you have to think like a business owner, even if you’re just freelancing or contracting. Successful businesses typically offer more than one product and/or service over time. In a similar vein, you can build your financial goals from multiple streams of income. You’re building your revenue in multiple ways, never reliant on just one.

Key to making multiple streams of income work for you is that you maximize the passive streams. There’s no point in trying earn extra income if you have to work day and night to do so. However, if you spend some extra time initially to build passive streams, they may pay off in the future. There are many online opportunities for building passive income.

Having multiple streams of income, especially passive, gives you several benefits. Firstly, because you’re not reliant on one stream, you’re less likely to be in a situation where you have to take a gig or contract that you don’t like. Secondly, because you lift the feeling of desperation, the positive state this creates carries over to your entire way of running your business, doing your work.

4. Know what you need to do. Understand what your financial goal means mechanically. That is, how many hours of work, how many projects at a certain rate, how many units of sales, etc. Determine this for all your streams based on historical information.

Obviously, some income streams will earn more than others, but it’s far easier to emotionally accept the possibility of achieving your goal of $20K/month if you have multiple sources.

5. Build your timeframe. Step backwards. Use reverse tunneling to move backwards through your goal, to break it into easier to achieve smaller goals. For example, if you want $200K/ month in Dec 2009, what do you need achieve (sales and actions) in Nov 2009? Now what about in Oct 2009? Step backwards in consistent increments (in this one month).

Example
If you’re only earning your income from one source, say freelance writing, then think about how much work you have to produce each and every day to earn $660. Unless you’re one of those fortunate (and skilled) few commanding high rates per project, then that’s an awful lot of planning, researching and writing. Instead, think in terms of a number of services (multiple streams of income) at different rates. Include as many passive income streams as possible.

Types and Sources of Income
Here are few types of income you should consider:

1. hourly rate
2. daily rate
3. project rates
4. monthly income
5. passive income – note that there’s no restriction in terms of earning period, but often passive income is paid out monthly if you’re working online.

Here are some possible income sources, generically speaking:

1. active
   1. salary
   2. freelance
   3. contract
   4. advances
   5. bonuses
2. passive/ semi-passive
   1. advertising revenue
   2. ebook sales
   3. web service subscriptions
   4. royalties
   5. interest
   6. dividends
3. windfalls
4. capital gains

Which combination of income strams you aim for is really up to you, and dependent on the kind of work you’re interested in. It depends on your current situation, your knowledge, available time, and career and financial goals.

It’s important to keep in mind that passive revenue streams do require some initial effort. If you don’t have large blocks of time to devote to building what will become passive streams of income, then you may have to take a piecemeal approach.

An example of passive income is royalties from a book. The advance you get for writing it is active income. If you get asked to write a second edition, the earnings from that are semi-passive.

Semi-passive income refers to streams that require some ongoing effort to maintain. Another example is a subscription-based website. Keeping the site active with either a moderated forum or with fresh new articles, or both, is what will keep people coming back. This will also draw new visitors who might become subscribers. These new people will either supplement your current subscriber base or replace those that leave.

Consider this undesirable freelancing scenario: you’ve gotten to the level of success in your business that you have so much freelance/ contract client work that you can’t think straight and can’t get the work done. If so, then you need to manage your workload. Even if you’re not overwhelmed with work at the moment, setting good workflow habits now will save you grief later. Having work you can’t complete is probably worse than not having it at all – something I’ve had to deal with earlier this year, when my productivity slipped.

Knowing that you could handle more work if it came to you makes you more receptive to opportunities that do pop up. What’s more, if you have an efficient workflow, that makes it easier for you to outsource to someone reliable and be able to manage them. This sparks the beginning of a transition from freelancer to entrepreneur.

Project Selection
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself when you’re at the project selection stage.

1. One client or several? It’s rarely a good idea to only work with one client. Sure, there’ll be transition periods, but you want to deveop an active list. The Pareto Principle (aka 80/20 or 70/30 Rule) could be interpreted to suggest that most (e.g., 80%) of your income will come from the fewest (e.g., 20%) clients. However, there’s the matter of the other 20% of your income, and what happens if your big clients drop out for a while or even permanently. What’s bad, too, is having just one client and worrying about that constantly.
2. One project or several? This more difficult to answer and really depends on your work efficiency and ability to handle large projects. If you’re bad at breaking down a project into smaller tasks and systematically completing them, then you might be better off take more small projects. Personally, I prefer a mix.

Ultimately, what you pick (clients, projects) really depends on how you work and what type of work you do. For me, I prefer (or used to) more small coding projects but more large writing projects. (It’s hard to have to come up with lots of fresh writing content week after week. Freelance blogging is not quite as systematic as maybe technical writing.

Setting Project Priorities
Whether you choose lots of small projects, fewer large projects, or a mix, it’s important to set your task priorities. A task might be a complete small project or part of a large project.

1. Prioritize projects by due date first.
2. Then prioritize by size, not fee.
3. Break large projects down into smaller tasks.
4. Give each task an approximate value, whether it’s a whole project or part of one. This is very important for large project tasks, else it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

For example, if I have a $50 project and a $500 project, regardless of deadline, the larger one is going to be more intimidating. But if I break it into logical subtasks and assign a rough value (based on a fraction of the project rate), then its easier to be systematic. This is more important for freelancers, since we tend to have to work on many projects simultaneously. Keeping a clear list of achievable tasks and subtasks is key to managing a large workload.

Setting a Work Schedule
If there’s one luxury most freelancers have, it’s that of being able to choose your work schedule. If you want to work evenings, go ahead. Do what works for yourself and your clients. I prefer to code in the day and write on evenings and weekends. That’s not always the case, but it’s nice if I get to pick based on mood. Creative work is often affected by mood, so schedule freedom helps productivity.

1. Choose your work session durations. Assuming for a moment that you’re going to put in a 40-hour work week, there are many ways you can split it up, depending on other demands in your life. It might also depend on the type of freelance work you do. Some people prefer to put in a 5-day week of 8 hours each. Others prefer a 4-day week of 10 hours each. For coding, I used to prefer 10 hour days. For writing, I like to split the day up into 2-4 three-hour chunks, depending on deadlines.
2. Choose task order.  You do want to factor in time for research, interacting with clients, doing administrative tasks, and so on. My rule of thumb: if I’m feeling productively creative, I write. Otherwise I do non-creative tasks.
3. Go with the flow. If you’re really efficient and come up with a killer workflow model that maximizes your personal productivity, go with it. However, if it starts to change, don’t be afraid to let it. My workflow models often change within a few months, based on the needs of the work i’m doing or my personal productivity level at that time.

Efficiency of work flow is often affected by personal life. If you have a strong personal reason for being efficient, you’ll find it. If you’re having trouble with workflow, maybe there’s an area of knowledge that you need to refresh or update.

Procrastination causes loss of revenue and is the often a manifestation of a problem with either (1) your workflow; (2) your choice of projects or clients; (3) a feeling of lack of knowledge; or (4) health issues or personal problems that need to be sorted out. These are issues that need to be dealt with, if you if you want to build up to an efficient workflow.

Are you considering becoming a freelancer? Or maybe you already are but are not sure about going fulltime or haven’t got the hang of it yet. Here are a variety of tips for getting the most out of your freelancing career.

Naming Your Services

Pick a name. It’s important that you give your business a name, even if it includes your actual name. This sort of branding makes it easier for clients to remember you, and might also differentiate you from other people with the same or similar name. You don’t necessarily have to incorporate; however, you might consider registering a “doing business as” name. Having a business name might also make it easier to get a suitable domain name for your website.

Setting Your Rates

1. Have personal, business and financial goals. Know what you want to get out of your freelancing. Decide on a financial goal for the year. Determine what services and products you need to offer to achieve this.

For example, if you want to earn $120K/ year in 44 weeks (2 months holiday), in just 25 hours week, then you have 1100 work hours per year (220 days). Your effective DPH (Dollars per Hour) will be about $109. Your average daily earning needs to be $120K/220 = $546/day. Now determine what you can offer to accomplish this daily rate on a regular basis.

2. Factor in billable work, admin tasks, and operating expenses. Note that the 25 hrs/wk in the example above is billable time, not working/ admin/ research time. The diagram below gives you a possible breakdown of your work week.

Time breakdown:

1. Billable hours:
   1. Client work
   2. Client meetings
   3. Client admin
   4. misc
2. Non-billable hours:
   1. Networking, marketing, promoting.
   2. Wooing new clients. Chatting, talking, emailing.
   3. Client work scoping. Writing proposals, agreeing on work.
   4. Research.
   5. Client work estimates
   6. Admin work, billing/ invoicing, banking, taxes.
   7. Personal tasks
   8. Personal development.
      1. Conferences.
      2. Workshops.
      3. Skills-building
   9. Down time.

3. See what others are doing. What are your colleagues charging for various services? You do not necessarily need to charge more or less to compete, though who you target as a client might have to change as a result. Regardless, it helps to know what market rates currently are.

4. Don’t work for free, or slave wages, just to get your foot in the door. This usually doesn’t work, and many clients won’t respect you.

5. Be flexible. It’s not always a good idea to advertise an hourly rate. By using project rates, a client not only benefits by knowing what they have to spend, it gives you leeway for earning a higher hourly rate if you’re efficient and can complete the work quickly. Note that this does not mean you shouldn’t have your own private hourly rate, to help you base your project quotes on.

6. Pick a rate, any rate.You can earn more by charging less, provided you’re fast. That’s because you potentially increase your client base. On the other hand, going too low might give some clients the impression that your work quality is lower. As well, a lower rate means more projects to manage. A higher rate might reduce your potential client base, but it means less overall project management. Consider a mix of rates, depending on the service you’re offering.

7. Update rates. If you’ve set a rate to base your project quotes on but you are not reaching your target income despite getting work, maybe you’re charging too little. You either need to update your rates from time to time, or learn to work efficiently. A good workflow makes the difference between freelance success and just getting by.

Getting the Clients

Just as you should have multiple clients, you should progress towards covering more than one industry and different types of work:

1. per article
2. per project
3. bid work
4. books/ ebooks
5. editing
6. design
7. coding
8. customization
9. consulting

Being full-service improves your chances of meeting your income goals. You might have to partner or hire other freelancers, but your income will rise.

To find work:

1. Bidding sites.
2. Cold calling.
3. Former employers.
4. Word of mouth. Colleagues, friends, family might know of potential clients. Facebook and LInkedIn can be very valuable to freelancers, especially if you work to actively build your list of “friends”.
5. Freelance job boards.
6. Job search engines.

Managing Your Workload: 7 Simple Rules

Okay, there are probably more than seven “task management” rules, but here are some of the important ones.

1. Let ideas incubate. Brainstorming helps you to produce some raw ideas, but the best ideas take time to develop properly. Just try to do this within the confines of project deadlines. If you’ve taken the time to allow ideas to develop mentally, you can get to the point where you can produce “sketches” or even finished work quickly.
2. Have a schedule. This give you a framework to work within, and will not make you feel as if you’re working all hours of the day.
3. Focus on one project at a time. That does not mean you cannot take a break to think things over and switch to another project. Just be sure that you allot sufficient time to each project before you switch to something else.
4. Change projects. If you’re “spinning” on a project, try to work on some unrelated project, but apply Rule #1 when you do.
5. Take a break. This is sometimes far more productive that spending extra time trying to solve a stubborn problem. It allows your mind to rest, and background processes to take over.
6. Take an average. Don’t measure your success or failure by the earnings of a single day. Freelance work often involves projects that bring in differing rates. It’s good to have a financial goal, as discussed earlier, but gauge yourself on the basis of a daily – both on a weekly basis and on a monthly basis. This is less stressful than worrying that you didn’t meet your daily rate goal today because you needed to do research. Otherwise you might start resenting research then slip into a creative block.
7. Don’t procrastinate. The key here is to not wait until the last minute. Prep currently active projects and you might find that when you actually get around to focusing on a project, it’ll feel like you’re in the flow.

Other Sources of Income

Diamonds might be forever, but clients are not. Try to build in passive revenue streams whenever you can, to iron out those periods in a given year where client work is ebbing. Not doing so means possibly going through a feast or famine cycle – something that’s commonplace for freelancers, contractors, and agencies in creative niches.

When it comes to online sources of revenue, treat them like an investment that pays interest: the sooner you get started, the sooner the revenue will build rapidly. It’s all exponential, and there are mathematical theories as to why. But it’s actually quite simple: if you rely on a website to generate income, it takes time for other websites to link to you and send you web traffic. All it takes is one to start with, and it builds from there. This is an approach that all freelancers should take now. Treat it as a retirement fund of sorts.

Photography: Annie Mole.

Have you ever thought what the ultimate telecommute might mean to you? Not the kind of telecommute where you work at home, but rather the kind where you travel the world and work wherever you can.

You probably already know the story: working from home not only gives you freedom of work schedule but can save you money in the long-term, from savings on commuting costs. But what if you could go one step further and make the world your home – anywhere you wanted? How adventurous are you? Could you live a long-term work and travel lifestyle? There are people already doing this.

The Internet and other technologies have made web working possible, and now people are pushing the envelope to become Nomadic Webpreneurs – running an online-based business from wherever they can get an Internet connection. Freelance web working, in particular, gives you the freedom to work from anywhere.

[Note: "online-based" does not mean that there's no offline component. It merely means that part of your operations is online, to source out clients or receive payment or to promote yourself.]

Ideal Conditions for Being a Nomadic Entrepreneur

Nomadic professionals have always existed, but technology has made it even easier for many more people to enjoy a work and travel lifestyle. This lifestyle is no longer limited to the jetset, ambassadors and politicians, athletes, authors, various other celebrities, travel writers and the odd business person.

With Internet access becoming so readily available, pretty much anyone can not only become a nomadic web worker but even a nomadic entrepreneur – running a web business online. All you need to satisfy are a few simple conditions:

1. Choose work that you can delivered remotely. Online freelancers have an ideal opportunity, since all of their work tends to be delivered online.

2. Choose suitable countries. Obviously, you’re going to want to pick where you’ll be staying as part of your traveling. You might choose to stay a few months here, a few months there, or put down roots for longer periods. If you find some place that you really enjoy, you might even settle down and become an expat (ex-patriate) – in which case you’re back to just being a work-at-home freelancer. When picking out host countries for your travels, besides picking somewhere safe, consider the following suggestions:

1. Desire. Countries you’ve wanted to visit. Maybe you have relatives or friends somewhere, want to see the sights of a country, or have work opportunities. (If the latter, keep in mind that you might need to get a work VISA.)
2. No VISA requirement. Countries with long-term non-VISA visitation waivers. Many countries let you stay up to six months (180 days) without requiring a VISA (assuming you can convince customs officials you’re not going to be “a burden on the system.” If you’re working solely on your computer, there may not be an issues.If your work requires some stability of location, you could spend 3-6 months at a time per country. (Check your home country’s rules for taxes, health care, etc., as there might be minimum residency requirements to remain eligible for certain services or deductions.)
3. Favorable exchange rate. If you have savings in your home currency and the exchange rate of the country you’re heading for is favorable, then you can go a lot longer than usual with your funds. In other words, you might take some time out to actually sightsee instead of always working.
4. Affordable, accessible Internet. Since without an Internet connection, you can’t be a nomadic webpreneur, this is an important condition to satisfy.
5. Countries with access to PayPal. PayPal is not available everywhere, though there are other online payment processing services. Just make sure that your host country’s banking system gives you access to your money through instant teller machines. Alternatives:
   1. Countries that allow visitors to have a temporary bank account.
   2. A means of depositing client payments into your bank account while out of country. Maybe you can have a friend or relative back home transfer monies into your account (from PayPal, etc.) for you.

3. Have the right tools.
Aside from the prerequisite passport, ID, insurance and various official documents, nomadic web workers and webpreneurs (i.e., Digital Nomads) are enabled by a number of tools and services, most of which are web-based or are gadgets:

1. Gadgets: cell phones, laptops/ notebooks/ netbooks, universal chargers. If you’re adventuring in other countries (not just working), you might want to add a few more items to your gadget list: GPS device, still and/or video camera, media player. Something worth noting is that some hotels are RFiD-enabled. That is, if you have an NFS-enabled cell phone in certain European and Asian countries, the key for your hotel room actually becomes a numeric code that’s downloaded to your cell phone, once you pay for your room.
2. Wi-fi or some ready means of getting an Internet connection.
3. Web services. E.g., web-based applications and services such as payment processors (PayPal) and banking, invoicing, travel planners.
4. Membership in social networks. It does get lonely out there sometimes, especially if you’re traveling alone. Your social network “friends” can keep you up to date on goings on as well as be a sounding board.
5. Co-working offices. If you don’t/ cannot work from where you are living, consider a co-working office. If you can’t find one, then you might have to resort to cafes, libraries, universities/ colleges. Or rent.
6. Cloud services/ applications/ technology. “Cloud technology” refers collectively to applications and web services that allow web workers to run software in a web browser and to store documents “online”. An example is Flickr, which lets you post your images online. Another is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which gives you desktop application functionality in a web browser. So even if you do not have your laptop with you, as long as you have an Internet connection, you can access your documents.

Profiles of Nomadic Entrepreneurs/ Digital Nomads

While you muse over this approach to work and life, keep in mind that as a digital nomad, you’re not bound to having to travel the world. Some nomads use the lifestyle to see the country they live in, while maintaining a career to pay the bills. However, should you want to start traveling, this lifestyle allows for the possibility for long periods away from home.

If you’re interested in how others are living the Digital Nomad lifestyle, a great motivator is the Nomad Stories category on the Digital Nomads website. Some of these posts have embedded videos where digital nomad personalities talk about how they’ve maintained their lifestyle, made a living, etc. Pay particular attention to the interviews with Treehugger’s founder, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith and New Media expert Julia Allison.

The Geekpreneur article Digital Entrepreneuring: The New Blog Marketing Strategy outlined some of the ways that blog publishers are monetizing their websites. In that article, I suggested that freelance blogging, however, was not an easy way to make a living. That may not be the case, especially if you broaden your approach and think of yourself as a freelance “online” writer.

Now Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb recently wrote an article based on a survey of top bloggers’ writing rates. In it he suggested that of the top bloggers who responded to his survey, most are making about $25 per blog post. That doesn’t sound very promising, but here are two facts. First, the sample size of 10 people is hardly indicative of reality. Secondly, there are freelance bloggers who make much more than $25/post on a regular basis and they are not top-tier bloggers. Albeit there are probably not many of them and these types of gigs are not easy to come by.

Quick Profiles

Now unless you take a more broadminded approach to your freelancing writing – even if you limit yourself to online venues – it seems tough to make a living this way. Except that there actually are some people doing it, including Chris of Chrisblogging and Yuwanda Black of Inkwell Editorial.

Chrisblogging/ Freelance Writing

Chris of Chrisblogging.com announced in July 2008 that June freelance writing income hit the $10K/mth. Prorated, that’s $120K/yr. There’s no breakdown beyond stating that the total projects completed amounted to thirty. So on average, each project is paying over $300. (Hint hint: those do not sound like blogging gigs.) Compared to June 2007, total projects went down but income went up.

Yuwanda Black/ Inkwell Editorial

Yuwanda Black of Inkwell Editorial says that she regularly bills $200-500/day for SEO articles, and sometimes even $1000. Her comfort limit is a maximum of 15-20 articles in a day, at about $25 apiece for 400-500 word posts. That’s not a bad day’s work. If you’re organized and know your topics, a good article does not have to take long. From what I can gather, she’s not always getting a byline.

Now the hardest part about handling that much writing in a day, every day is building a good workflow system. A good, well-organized writer can pull off more than 20 articles in one day, but it’s not easy to sustain. Quality can also suffer, and that can lose you clients.

Approach

Setting a Business Goal. Setting a financial goal for your freelancing business is an important starting point. Are you looking to make a full-time living, or supplementary income? How much do you want to make? Have you factored all the non-billable work necessary? E.g., research, finding clients, administrative tasks. Those are hours you need to allocate but will not earn any money for.

It’s easier to gauge your relative success when you know what you want to earn. So write down both short-term and long-term goals. Break large goals down by applying the reverse tunneling method of problem-solving. This allows you to understand the series of efforts you’ll need to take to get to your future goal. You will then have a small starting goal, then a plan for moving up.

Branding and Promoting. Some methods of building your personal brand and promoting yourself are as follows:

1. Blogging. You’ll need your own site as a sort of home base. By blogging there, you demonstrate your writing skills, and make yourself more visible in search engines.
2. Guest write. Make friends online and offer free guest posts with a byline, and preferably with a link to your personal/ freelance website.
3. Use new media content. Supplement your website with relevant podcasts, vodcasts, screencasts, and other web media. Remember to watermark your site URL into any web video that you post on video sharing sites.
4. Implement viral ideas. Viral marketing can mean almost anything that catches the attention of a large group of people online. This could be a great WordPress blog theme, a WP plugin, an entertaining web video series, a free ebook that you allow people to redistribute (for free as well). Provided that your site URL or a personal logo or brand name is present in all these types of content, you increase your own noticeability.
5. Use social media. Promote yourself via Twitter, Plurk, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and so on. Just make sure you temper your self-promotion by sharing other useful links, and most especially conversing with other members of microblogging and social media sites.

General Work Tips

1. Balance big and small gigs. For example, taking several $200-500/mth gigs can take you closer to a full-time income. Write related posts in batches to minimize research time.
2. Don’t focus on just freelance blogging. Take other types of writing gigs, including ghostwriting for blogs and minisites, ebooks, reports, survey summaries, interviews, whitepapers, resumes and more. Edit documents, do SEO work, consult.
3. Think long-term. A stable gig that pays less per post but offers higher volume over a long-term might be better than just a large one-off project. If you can handle both, even better – something that’s possible with good workflow.
4. Be efficient in your workflow. That’s absolutely crucial to freelance writing (or any type) of success.
5. Work for a former employer. Even during a recession, writing work has to get done, and employers save money on casual/ temp workers over employees, when it comes to short-term work.
6. Check freelance writing job boards. Problogger Jobs is one such, and Freelance Writing Jobs aggregates listings with a bit of commentary. There are a wide range of rates for gigs, and the choicest ones are often announced via word of mouth (or more specifically through email or IM/chat between colleagues).
7. Consider bid sites. Be cautious, use a reputable site such as Guru or eLance. Check the profiles of each buyer. There are buyers who use bid sites to find slave-labor writers, but there are big-budget projects as well. Start by creating a “vendor” profile. Some experienced bid site users suggest having a friend or two offer a closed project that’s awarded to you, which quickly builds your vendor credentials. Provided you do real work, this seems like a reasonable approach.
8. Save long-term. Recent events show us that stability in career doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Build your own stability by being future-minded. When you save a dollar for next year, try to save several for many years down the road. When you have money in the bank, you’re going to be more relaxed and therefore are more likely to produce quality work, which will eventually attract more work.
9. Always network. Be professional but let people know you run a freelance writing business and are available.
10. Worst case scenario: take some local temp, part-time, or driving work to pad out the rough spots.

Build up to as much work as you can handle. Establish good working relationships with colleagues, in case you have to say “no” to a client. You could then pass on the work to someone you trust.

Viral marketing isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s been used since before the Internet existed, but the online world makes it far easier to spread ideas. It’s a method that can benefit freelancers.

What is viral marketing? In a nutshell, it’s any method of promoting a concept (message, product or “content”) in a manner that allows it to be self-propagating, or not far from it.

Maki of DoshDosh has written extensively about viral marketing in general, and had a simple, to-the-point explanation of viral marketing in the online world:

Your message is the virus. The carriers are your audience.

Catch popular attention with your concept, and it’ll get passed on by others who want to share it.

So how do you get people’s attention and how does this apply to freelancers? What are good formats for viral content, and how do you even produce viral content?

How Do You Get Viral Attention?
There are several ways that you can get readers/ viewers/ listeners to propagate viral content.

1. Be exclusive, at least initially. Allowing others to be part of an exclusive group will often give people an incentive to talk about you or your message.
2. Employ an element of surprise. Uniqueness of idea isn’t always enough. Novelty does work, but interest will taper off faster if the idea is too novel and otherwise lacking value. For example, LisaNova, an online comedian, had the novel idea of free video collabcharacters. Unfortunately, many people think she was serious, and from that viewpoint, her approach is far too annoying.
3. Trip emotional triggers: Surprise, joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust.
4. Be targeted. If your viral content is aimed at or about current online influencers, it’s potentially more viral. They’ll start the conversation for you – whether to praise or criticize – and their influencees will carry on the conversation.
5. Promote your campaigns. For a viral marketing campaign to work, you have to get enough word of mouth from other people. Start with willing colleagues, and maybe they’ll have their own colleagues that’ll tip the viral effect. Use microblogging services (e.g., Twitter) and guest articles. All this employs the idea of Six Degrees of Separation and the concept that “word of mouth” is the fastest way in the world of communicating an idea – whether it’s in person, on the phone, or via some digital form such as IM/chat, email, microblogging or whatever.

What is a Good Format for Viral Content?
Viral messages get passed on through numerous mediums: verbally; through IM/ chat; Twitter or other microblogging services; an email; or websites that link to your digital content or embed it. So a viral effect can be achieve in a number of ways, and to facilitate that, viral content has to be easy to propagate. Here are a few forms of potentially viral content.

1. Video. Web video particularly seems to catch the attention of the online world. Some of the popular video series so far include:

1. Ask a Ninja.
2. You Suck at Photoshop.
3. Will It Blend?
4. Pepsi/ Coke + Mentos soda spray fountains.

All of these are catchy enough that they’ve been embedded on thousands of web pages, virally propagating interest in them. They’re all unique, but Will It Blend actually promotes a product – Blendtec’s commercial blender. In the video below, host Tom Dickson tests the Blendtec on golf balls.

The diet soda and mentos idea (below) is so easy to implement (and for the most part fun) that it spawned hundreds of similar videos.

According to a MarketingSherpa survey, web video in an ad can increase viewer response. Likewise, web video in general can be a very effective means of virally spreading a message, since the content is generally easily embedded into website and blog pages. Music videos can be especially effective. As Chris Brogan points out, musician Chris Blake created a [video for “Someone Else,” a song from his WAVE album, simply by using images and text. The text came from search results when he looked up “Biggest regrets” on Google.

2. Ebooks. Free ebooks go in and out of favor, but the ones whose authors openly tell you to redistribute are often the books you’ll see over and over again. Hence, a viral effect.

3. Websites and blogs. Groundbreaking or otherwise attention-getting articles can go viral. There are numerous websites out there that enjoy constant popularity as a result. Articles get promoted and linked to by readers and other writers, thereby getting propagated semi-virally. Skelliewag has list of nearly forty viral article ideas to consider.

4. Themes and plugins for the free WordPress blogging platform are also immensely popular, and have even created a mini online economy for “premium” versions.

5. An image or diagram. A clever diagram or a captivating image can be just as viral as other content.

6. A message on a t-shirt. (While this an offline medium, if the shirt is available exclusively on a t-shirt website, then the idea has the potential to go viral.)

7. A slogan or saying. Twitter can be an effective medium to “pass it on.” So can your Facebook wall.

8. A podcast. Podcasts don’t enjoy nearly the kind of popularity that web videos do, though a well-executed series that’s catchy and properly promoted has the potential to be viral as well.

How Do You Produce Viral Content?
Viral marketing can never be an exact science, but you can prep yourself to produce the kind of creative thinking that’s necessary. In fact, it’s intersects quite closely with the same sort of effort needed to simply think creatively:

1. Consume information, esp. related to pop culture.
2. Track and tap into trends. Study trends relevant to your freelancing niche, both directly and peripherally.
3. Employ the Medici Efect by broadening the sources of your daily diet of information. Absorb news from several niches/ markets, and in several forms (audio, video, TV, newsprint, online articles). Cross-discipline thinking is often where the greatest ideas come from.
4. Be unique. Using the same idea someone else has just won’t work. But just as with patents, you might be able to take something that worked before and give it a new twist. So study other viral marketing campaigns.
5. Be fast and be first when you have a new, unique idea.

How Does Viral Marketing Apply to Freelancers?
If you have a main website (and you should) to promote your brand of services, then you can apply viral marketing for several purposes:

1. Draw attention to yourself.
2. Display your skills in a creative manner.
3. Increase traffic to your website, and thus your potential client base.

The more attention you draw to yourself, the greater the chances that someone will be interested in your services. You’ve proven that you can get attention online, which is a commodity. Provided that the attention is not negative (or sometimes even if it is), then that should eventually translate into an increased demand for your services – especially if your work is targeted to the online market.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the original Renaissance Man, was best known as a master painter and sculptor. He was also a capable inventor, mathematician, scientist and more. In fact, he was a polymath who studied multiple disciplines including music, writing, anatomy, architecture, botany, plate tectonics, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

The number of scientific inventions da Vinci produced was truly remarkable. These include the basic designs for a helicopter, tank, solar power, and calculator. He documented a great deal of his thoughts in a series of notebooks, the text versions (sans images) of which are available for free at the Project Gutenberg website.

Photography: manoellemos.

Arguably, every inventor today can learn something valuable by studying da Vinci’s life work. Freelancers can learn a great deal as well.

The promise of freelancing is that you get to pick and choose from work offered to you. The reality is that you are sometimes limited in your choices. However, that does not mean you cannot enjoy what you’re doing. In fact, quite the opposite.

Freelancers are often generalists, able to learn a new niche fairly quickly. The true enjoyment of freelancing – beyond the superficial aspects of freedom of work choice and schedule – is the opportunity to learn many disciplines and produce original work.

Analyzing da Vinci

Here is a rundown of some of Leonardo da Vinci’s thinking and work procesess, plus an interpretation of how freelancers can be benefit by doing likewise.

1. Study structure. Da Vinci was a master artist (painter, sculptor) because he spent so much time understanding the underlying structure of his subject. He studied anatomy, 2d/ 3d geometry, physics, and architecture, the understanding of which gives his work so much realism.

Interpretation: Prep and prime your mind by studying the theory and structure behind your subject. Understand what makes up the building blocks of your subject, and how the blocks interact together.

2. Build broad knowledge. He was part of the original Medici Effect. He learned about art, the human body, architecture, science and then came up with fresh concepts for inventions as well as masterpieces of art.

Interpretation: Absorb knowledge from many niches and create your own modern Medici Effect. The intersection of fields leads to some of the most groundbreaking ideas. You do not have to be an expert in everything. Focus on 1-3 areas of expertise, and treat everything else as a interest. This gives you flexibility to change careers, if necessary.

3. Learn by osmosis. Da Vinci regularly sketched out ideas or wrote down his thoughts in his many notebooks.

Interepretation: You can absorb information by not only consuming information in many forms (print/ web, audio/ podcasts, TV/ movies/ web video) but also by using mind mapping to learn niches. Using point-form notes, mind maps allow you to absorb concept with a deeper understanding than if you simply tried to memorize a list of details. This approach can be like learning by osmosis.

4. Demonstrate your understanding. Da Vinci made thousands of sketches in his now famous sketchbooks. (Though he also filled them with mundane items and logged monies owed to him.) His multitude of sketch studies allowed him to produce masterly finished works.

Interpretation: Do your own “sketches,” whether that means drawings, writing exercises, or snippets of code. For example, before I was a salaried/ contract programmer, I taught the basics of computer coding to students. I knew how the basic computer statements worked, regardless of programming language, and learned “structure” by applying pseudocode first before writing real code.

5. Value your studies. When da Vinci wasn’t doing commissioned work (or even when he was), he was pondering or experimenting on new ideas, exploring his thought processes. He managed to balance personal interests and work.

Interpretation: Always be learning or testing your ideas. When one project is going nowhere, work on something else, or deepen your knowledge of an area of interest. You might in fact find the answers you’re looking for

6. Value your effort. A careful study of da Vinci’s sketches shows that he reused his knowledge of a subject over and over. Anything that he had done before was rarely wasted effort.

Interpretation: Leverage your previously gained knowledge, but keep in mind that even if you have to start over on a project, the existing effort was not wasted, provided you learned something. It’s far better to start fresh than to spin your wheels try to revive something that just won’t work. In Project Management principles, this is known as sunk costs – a cost that has been spent and will not be recovered. That itself possibly spawned the saying, “don’t put good money after bad.” If “time” is your money, then putting in more (good) time after bad (spent, wasted) time is a bad idea. Just start again. The knowledge gained from whatever effort you’ve put in already might be leveraged at some future time on another project.

7. Multitask properly. Da Vinci’s varied interest meant that he worked on many projects, probably in an overlapping time period. While he was learning about one discipline, he might have been working on a commissioned project.

Interpretation: To have success as a freelancer, most of us need to manage many projects (work and research) over time – sometimes simultaneously. To do that, you need good workflow and the ability multitask properly. Multitasking done right produces an efficient workflow. The basis of that means not trying to tackle a big project all in one shot. Break it down into smaller tasks and take one step at a time. This allows you to work on something, get away from it to “think it over,” and meanwhile work on something else.

Photography: The Joy of the Mundane

In theory, it should be the solution to the ultimate challenge for the one-person freelance business. How can you take on more work when you only have one pair of hands and 24 hours in a day?

Sure, you can start earlier and work later. You can give up our weekends and dream of retiring early. And you can raise your rates until your lower-paying clients squeak and disappear.

But working longer hours can lead to burn-out, and saying “no” to work as a freelancer can hurt as much as carpal tunnel syndrome. Worse, it effectively means that you’re never going to grow. After all, if you ‘re not expanding when you have more clients than you can handle, when are you going to do it?

The Two Ways to Earn More

There are only way two ways to earn more income as a freelancer: charge more money; and take on more work. Ideally, we should all be doing both of them, and the best way to do that is to look for help.

Outsourcing projects to other freelancers is a common practice, and one not often discussed with clients who might like to that the person they’re speaking to is the person who will be completing the project. But many freelancers have a half-secret list of helpers that they know they can turn to during crunch times, and when it works, it can be very rewarding. Instead of sweating for your salary, you get to see someone else sweat while you take home a tidy commission for relatively little effort.

Find someone good, in fact, and it can become addictive. Gradually, you can shift from being a hands-on freelancer to being a freelance agency in which work is passed along for a fee. That’s fine if that’s the way you want to go. It’s still work though; it’s just a very different kind of work.

If you want to do both – to accept freelance projects that you do yourself while outsourcing work that you can’t or don’t want to do – it’s important to know which work to pass along and which you should never share.

Projects provided by your best clients, for example, you should always do yourself. The 20 percent of your clients who provide 80 percent of your income need to be well looked after. They form the bedrock of your business and the only way to be absolutely sure that they’re getting exactly what they need is to do it yourself. If your helper decides to move on and do find another job – which, of course, they can do at any time — you don’t want to be in the position of having to scrabble around to find and train someone new, and risk losing the biggest source of your income.

What’s your Signature Worth?

The same is true when you’re hired to produce your signature work. Designers, writers and other creative freelancers might all offer similar services but we’re all unique, with specializations and styles that are often the reason we’re hired. Some clients will want talent rather than style – they’ll be pleased with the help of any capable freelancer. Others though, will want what you bring to the table. Chuck Anderson, for example, is a graphic designer known for his psychedelic style. When he’s hired by clients like Coca Cola and Nike to produce that style in their ads, it’s unlikely that he outsources. He might do that though if he’s asked to produce work that anyone could do.

Those two conditions depend on the type of projects you’re asked to produce and the people who are asking you to produce them. But who you’re giving them to is important as well. It’s a mistake to believe that outsourcing your work is entirely effort-free. One of the biggest advantages of bringing in help is that the work gets a second look before it’s passed on to the client. You get to check the quality, tidy up any typos or mistakes and give the client work that’s truly finished. That takes time, and it’s time that has to be paid for.

If you’re finding that the time you spend editing and correcting pays less than the amount you would normally have earned, then your outsourcing isn’t working and you should probably be doing the work yourself – or turn it down.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, you shouldn’t outsource your work when you don’t completely trust the person who’s supplying it. It might take time to build that trust — and that’s always a tricky period – but even when you do have it, you have to understand what sort of work you can trust them with, and you have to know you can depend on them to deliver on time, time after time.

Outsourcing your freelance work can be an ideal way to grow from a one-desk enterprise into a small business. But it has to be done carefully, and with the right judgments about what to keep and what to share.

Photography: jpot.punkt

There are times when you just need the work. Maybe your schedule isn’t full or a project’s been cancelled. Maybe you’re just starting out in the world of telecommuting and want an easy way to get your feet wet.

Or maybe you’ve just had it with clients and want to accept projects from someone who treats you like a friend instead of an employee.

Working for a freelancer may sound like you’re simply swapping one type of client for another but taking someone’s overflow can be a whole different experience. Someone who’s been in your position, who understands what it’s like to work from job to job and who knows how to put a request in an email in a way that’s clear and to the point is less likely to pay you late, promise projects that never pan out or ask for a million-and-one revisions. They’ll be understanding when it looks like you’re going to bust a deadline and they’re not going to keep making a project bigger while expecting you to keep your estimate the same.

Freelancers Make the Best Clients

That’s the theory, at least, and although the “client” will still have to meet deadlines, work within a budget and receive work at the right quality, on the whole, the theory seems to stand up.

Freelancers really do make the best clients, even if their own commissions mean that they’re rarely the best-paying.

So how do you find jobs like this?

Perhaps the easiest is to head to one of the freelance sites – eLance is miles ahead of the competition – and ask one of the top service providers if they need any help. There’s a good chance they will – or at the very least, will want someone with a good portfolio easy to hand when they do. That’s because if you look at the number of jobs the top bidders have won and the amount of money they’ve earned (both statistics are easily viewable at eLance), you’ll find that many of the top providers are taking on far more work than they can possibly handle. They’re accepting multiple jobs at the same time then farming them out to other providers. It gives them a chance to take a cut of the revenues while still milking a large and regular supply of work.

You might need to write to a few of the most successful providers before some of that overflow starts heading your way but indicate that you’re available – and show the sort of samples that fit their needs – and you should find that you’re soon attracting the attention of a very different sort of client.

But your approach has to be right too, and that’s a little trickier than tracking down busy freelancers in the first place. It’s not difficult for a major freelancer to look through the list of service providers and choose someone, but when he does that, he faces the same challenge that job suppliers have to overcome: how do they know that the person they’re hiring is both skilled and reliable?

Help the freelance to solve that problem and you’ll be starting with a huge advantage.

Again, your portfolio of work is going to be important but when you make contact, indicate that you’re  not a freelancer in desperate need of work – the best freelancers rarely are – but rather a professional who sometimes finds herself with time on her hands. Point out that you don’t really have the time to look for work and bid on projects but you’d be happy to consider providing any help they’d need if they think your experience and skills suit the project.

Help Offered

Create the impression that you’re offering help, not looking for it, and the other freelancer will see you as a team member rather than a member of staff – and that’s really what working for freelancers should be about.

But there’s one more thing that working for freelancers should be about, and that’s receiving not one job but a regular stream of jobs from someone prepared to do the searching and pitching for you. When you get the relationship right, you should find that it changes from being one of client/provider and even team member/team member to agent/client. Instead of spending time seeking out projects, making pitches and negotiating fees, you’ll have someone to do all of the dull stuff for you, letting you focus on your most valuable actions: designing the Web pages, writing the content, creating the code or whatever it may be.

The secret to keeping that work flowing is to resist the temptation to see the service you’re supplying as assisting another freelancer, and to consider it as doing your own work instead.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. You’ll be aware that anything you submit will be reviewed, edited, and maybe even changed in important ways before it’s passed on. It will also carry the “client’s” name not yours so your reputation will be left relatively unharmed if you fail to come up to scratch.

All of those things just add up to an interesting test of your work ethic – with valuable rewards if you come through. Not only will you have a steady supply of work, you’ll also have reduced your own job-searching workload, and you’ll have picked up a client you can rely on and enjoy working for. That’s the sort of thing that can lead to some very good times indeed.

Photography: Wallyg

Start freelancing during a boom and it feels that nothing can go wrong. Companies have more work than employees, more money than they know what to do with and more gigs to pass out to freelancers than available contractors. You’ll be picking and choosing your jobs, demanding higher prices each time and wondering where it’s all going to take you.

Presumably then when the economy hits a wall, freelance opportunities dry up, money is short and the future a wave of instability. Recessions should be good for no one, including those with no one employer and no permanent contracts.

In practice, hard times don’t seem to put people off trying. According to the US Department of Labor, the percentage of employed people describing themselves as “independent contractors” remained level at 6.7 percent from 1995-1997, fell slightly during the Internet boom years from 1999-2001, rose sharply in 2005 and is now back to the 2001 level of 6.4 percent. Whether the economy is growing or not, people still seem to see independent work as a solution.

It’s the problem however, that might be different and that should affect how freelancers market themselves in tough times.

Recession Strategies 101

During a boom, companies outsource because they want to grow fast and haven’t found enough qualified people to do everything themselves. In a recession, companies outsource because they want to save money and only want to pay for the work, not the employee.

So as the sales shrink, they keep the core staff – the programmers who make the software and the engineers who build it – and they start laying off the extraneous stuff: often, the copywriters and designers who make the products look attractive.

But once the product has been completed, the marketing still has to be done, so often those laid-off workers will get a call from the same personnel department that wielded the pink slip a few months before, asking how they’re doing, whether they’ve found another job… and inviting them to work – on a freelance basis — on a product that’s ready to roll. From the company’s point of view, it’s an obvious winner: they get someone who’s not just experienced but who knows the product and the company; they don’t have to pay benefits; and when the project is done, they can fire the worker all over again and this time without compensation.

And for the worker, if they’re looking for a job, it’s better than nothing. If they’re freelancing, it’s just another gig, and one they’re familiar with.

For other freelancers though, these sorts of situations are also opportunities. Not all laid-off workers are still available — or willing — to work for a company that’s told them to clear their desks.

So a company that’s known to be laying off should also be seen as a company with needs that can no longer be met in-house. That makes a cold call worthwhile. Ask for the personnel department, enquire whether they ever use freelancers and show them your portfolio. Not every company will need someone at the time you’re pitching but some might… and all of them will keep your contact details ready for when they do.

It’s also possible to look beyond companies to industries as a whole. FreelanceSwitch recently listed a number of industries that are likely to be looking for freelancers during a bust.

The best strategy is probably to combine both approaches. Identify industries that are most at risk during a recession, check the news and company press releases to see which are laying off workers then make your enquiry.

“You’ll Save, Not Grow”

Whatever you say in those cold calls though, the thought that will be going through the mind of the hirer is that now they can get the services they need for far less than they’d pay an employee. They’re thinking savings, not growth.

That should affect all the marketing you do during a recession.

The change from what you during the good times doesn’t have to be big. Smart marketing should use measurable data to show the value of a service or product. But often it shows how much income a product will generate. During tough times, focusing on how much money that service will save a business should bring better results for services aimed at firms.

You can think of this approach as a mirror-image of information products that promise to make the buyer rich. Courses that teach people how to generate a seven-figure income always sell, and they sell especially well at times when there seem to fewer paths for individuals to grow. But when marketing to companies, it pays to focus on how your service will save a company seven figures – and keep it alive until the next boom – rather than turn it into the next Microsoft.

The bottom line is that in a recession companies worry about the bottom line first. As freelancers, that gives us an advantage. We take care of our own pensions, our own health insurance and create stability by having a number of different employers. We might charge more per hour than a hired worker to make up for those expenses but for companies looking for someone in the short-term, that extra amount is worth paying.

Recessions are a time to worry. For freelancers, they can also be a time to grow.

[tags] freelancing [/tags]