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.
Photography: Fevi Yu
There was a time when a good golf game was a necessity for any budding business executive. A salesman who couldn’t close a deal after spending half a day in an electric buggy with a prospect was barely worth his salt. And the introductions those golf games generated couldn’t have been picked up any other way. These days, basic networking can be done online from the comfort of an office chair, and the endless rounds of conferences can go a long way towards making up for eighteen rounds with a small ball. But even if golf isn’t always the game of choice for today’s younger and geekier set, who are more likely to be playing Angry Birds or forming a guild in an MMORPG, it should be. There are good reasons that executives like golf and the sport can still teach rising entrepreneurs, even technical types, a thing or two about business success.
Technology Changes Everything
Start your own small business, especially online, and you’ll quickly need to develop a range of brand new skills: a little bit of HTML; a touch of Web design; some knowledge of usability; a grounding in marketing channels. But the skill you’re likely to be drawing on most is a version of a technique you’ve known since you were a child: the ability to write. Whether you’re creating sales copy, writing a blog or even just sending an email, you’ll need to do more than just put one letter after another. You’ll need to craft copy that persuades.
That’s a very different kind of writing skill and it’s one that depends entirely on context. Writing headlines is different from writing email subject lines and crafting a newsletter demands a different approach from that used when keeping a blog up to date. Even if you’re planning to outsource the writing to a professional at some point, you should still have enough basic knowledge to know what to ask for and to judge the work you’re buying.
Headline Writing
Owners of new businesses always make the same mistake. They begin by doing everything themselves. They build their own websites — often using a template service that produces a site that’s effective but not particularly attractive. They handle the production themselves, even to the point of packing the boxes and handing them to the mailman. They spend hours each month writing the invoices and doing the books. And they do all of that dull stuff while still holding on to their full-time job and trying to build a secondary business that they’re supposed to love. Owners of successful businesses, however, do none of those things. Instead of handling every part of the business themselves, they look for people they can trust and outsource the mundane tasks while they focus on the enjoyable, profitable bits. So what should you be outsourcing and what aspects of your new business should you be keeping for yourself?
For some experts, the answer is simple: everything that could be outsourced should be outsourced. For Tim Ferriss, for example, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, the aim is to reduce the work week to less than an hour a day, while spending the rest of the time traveling around the world, dancing in competitions and living a million-dollar lifestyle without the hard work involved in making a million dollars. That outsourcing even extends as far as dating: Ferriss famously outsourced the task of answering the emails he received on a singles site to an Indian call center.
More usually though, growing businesses outsource two kinds of tasks and they do it with an aim that’s less precise than the creation of a four-hour work week. Owners of small businesses want to make more money and have a better time doing it. That tends to mean outsourcing two kinds of work:
By now, we’re all supposed to be at home. Not sitting in front of the television but working, making use of email, VOIP, video chats and conference calls to turn the spare bedroom into an office and the company into a virtual entity. When you can achieve everything you need to accomplish in a day with nothing more than a keyboard, a monitor and an Internet connection, location is no longer a barrier and rented office space is an unnecessary expense. Business districts should be emptying and office buildings should be turning into malls and residential skyscrapers. It hasn’t quite worked out that way — and it may be the importance of face-to-face meetings that’s responsible.
According to a recent report by the Telework Research Network, a research firm, 45 percent of US workers hold a job that is compatible with at least part-time telework yet only 2.3 percent of the workforce considers the home their primary workplace. While the numbers of home-workers are expected to rise by 69 percent by 2018, those predictions are still far lower than earlier forecasts when virtual companies looked like the wave of the future.
The report cites mistrust and fear on the part of management as one reason for the unexpected slow growth of virtual working. Another reason though may be the persistent importance of face-to-face meetings as a way of deepening relationships both between suppliers and clients, and between virtual colleagues.
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
Writing a blog requires commitment. New content has to be posted regularly – at least once a week. But producing a minimum of 52 new blog post ideas every year isn’t easy. There will always be times when you’re searching for topics and hunting for an interesting topic to keep your readers and the search engines happy. Here’s a bunch of suggestions that should make the brainstorming easier while keeping your blog content at the highest level.
1. Report the News
News happens every day providing regular opportunities to take a topical event and explain the effect it might have on your industry. These are topics that professional editors have already decided the public will find interesting, so trust their judgment and adapt those topics to your blog.
YouTube might have been created as a place to share home movies but it’s now become a platform dominated by professional production companies. The most popular clips tend to be movie previews, television shows, sports segments and even ads that first aired on networks. Joe Public might be uploading the largest number of videos to the site, but it’s the professionals who, not surprisingly, are winning the views. But that doesn’t mean that a few amateurs haven’t managed to turn their YouTube appearance into the beginning of a beautiful career. Michelle Phan’s make-up tips have turned her into a spokeswoman for Lancome while a number of other talented amateurs have also managed to use a video camera to build an audience. Sometimes though, there’s a little more to even those self-starters than meets the eye.
Justin Bieber
It’s been just over a year since Facebook spread its Like button across the Internet and it’s hard to argue with the numbers. The average media site integrated with Facebook is said to have enjoyed a 300 percent rise in traffic; some major retailers have reported that sales increased as much as tenfold since adding Like buttons to their pages; Eventbrite has said that each click on its Like buttons is worth $2.52 in ticket sales, a figure beaten by Ticketmaster which says that its Like clicks bring $5.30 each. There’s no question that the Like button has been a boon for publishers and a moneymaker for marketers. It’s made sharing easier and provided an easy way for customers to spread personal recommendations — the best way for businesses to build their brand. But while the Like button has been good for some, it doesn’t work for everyone.
Part of the problem with Like is its public nature. Clicking the button is easy, and it’s easy, too, to forget that every time you do hit the button you tell the world about your personal tastes. That confession can have a real effect. Announce on a whim that you like a particular band, for example, and the next time you start up… say, Pandora… you might well find that the radio station knows more about you than you thought. Similarly, a quick browse of the profile of someone you barely know can turn up all sorts of personal preferences that might have been better kept personal. Liking is easy; Facebook’s privacy controls, which can block APIs and acquaintances from seeing your recommendations when used properly, are a lot more complex.
According to one story, YouTube was born six years ago when early Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim needed a way to share video footage shot at a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco apartment. But it isn’t true. Karim has denied that the site was born out of a meal at his friend’s place, and Hurley has said that the tale “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible.” In other words, even the origins of a site supposedly created to enable amateur video-sharing are now buried beneath a layer of professional marketing. It’s the kind of subtle professionalism that can be seen most clearly on the site itself where, despite the occasional popularity of finger-biting babies and toilet-trained cats, the most popular footage is produced and distributed not by enthusiasts but by professional content companies. YouTube’s first video might have been of Jawed Karim’s trip to the San Diego zoo, but its number one slots have now mostly been taken over by large media companies using the service to reach audiences directly.
Even many of the videos that appear to be amateur — and many of the clips that were uploaded by amateurs – have professionals behind them or rely on professionals for their popularity. Susan Boyle’s famous rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” for example, which has now picked up almost 70 million views, isn’t a clip of an amateur with a surprisingly good voice singing one of her own songs in the bathroom. It’s a cover from a top musical that appeared in a 2009 episode of Britain’s Got Talent, one of the UK’s most popular television shows. Nor was Gary Brolsma, the YouTube sensation who shot to fame with his lip sync of the Numa Numa song, uploading an original creation to the Web. In fact, by distributing a song he didn’t own, he was breaching copyright. (Not that the copyright owners would have had much reason to complain.) The site’s top performers at time of writing include Amy Winehouse’s flop in Belgrade, a Britney Spears video and an interview with an NBA player. There are precious few entirely amateur videos on the site’s Most Viewed list.
If people are a company’s most important asset, the most successful firms will be those that are able to generate the largest possible returns from those resources. Increasing productivity is one way to do that but an even more valuable method is to mine team members for ideas. Tap into your team’s thoughts and you might well find that your firm, however small, already has what it takes to zoom ahead of the competition. The trick though is to extract that creativity. Here are five ways to squeeze big ideas out of your team members.
1. Understand the Value of the Team in Fostering Creativity
Great ideas rarely come out of one person fully-formed and waiting for the rest of the team to pick up and start building. As leadership theorist John Eric Adair points out in his book Leadership for Innovation: How to Organize Creativity and Harvest Ideas, new ideas are more likely to be half-formed, full of mistakes and problems, and need plenty of tweaking before they’re ready to roll.
When we were putting together our new book, Internet Marketing Hype, we often found ourselves returning to the first chapter and debating whether the assertion that “Content is King” can really be counted as a myth. It’s certainly a cliché, repeated endlessly on sites around the Web, but for good reason. The pre-eminence of content makes publishers feel that what they’re doing is worthwhile. All of that research, writing, persuading and audience-building is what publishing is all about. But as anyone who has ever set up a website, written posts, then reviewed their Google Analytics stats knows, good content isn’t enough. You also need the search engine juice, the marketing and the promotion to bring in readers.
In the book, we stressed the importance of good content but argued that distribution should stand alongside it as an equal partner in a site’s success. The two though don’t always complement each other. In fact, the most common arena for the conflict between good content and good marketing is the Web page itself and the words it contains. For content producers, Web pages should be well-written, carefully researched and thoughtful enough to build an audience, create trust and produce sales. For search engine experts, sites are meant to be read by robots. They should be filled with keywords that push them up in the search results and bring in masses of traffic in the hope that enough visitors will convert to bring in revenue even if they don’t enjoy what they read.
Turning off the Keyword Firehose
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 of the most obvious differences between LinkedIn and its social media rivals, Facebook and Twitter, is its reach. It’s not easy these days to wander onto a Web page that doesn’t invite you to send a link to your Twitter followers or share the page with your Facebook friends. LinkedIn buttons? Not so much.
That might seem surprising. LinkedIn is popular both with users, who now number more than 100 million worldwide, and with investors. (The company’s stock finished up 109 percent on its first day of trading recently, the fifth-largest opening rise since the bursting of the dotcom bubble.) But it also has a lot to do with LinkedIn’s own slowness to make easy site integration available.
That, at least, is now changing. The relaunch of the site’s developer platform with an open set of APIs and the adoption of OAuth has now made integrating LinkedIn easier than ever for developers. “In Share” buttons are now beginning to appear on Web pages, competing for space and clicks with Facebook’s Like and Twitter’s Tweet. (You can see one in action at the top of this page on a blog about recruitment).
Picasso wasn’t just one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. He wasn’t just a celebrity with a personal life to put a rock star to shame. And he wasn’t just a multi-millionaire who owned his own castle. He was also a model for creative types looking to build their own successful careers. This is what the Spanish master can teach us all about creativity:
1. Make the Right Friends
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
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.
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.
