Crowdsourcing has picked up a lot of good press over the last few years. Entrepreneurs can now raise cash for projects through Kickstarter. Philanthropists and volunteers can collect funds on platforms like IndieGoGo. Researchers and developers can build cheap, large-scale workforces through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. They follow the work of organizations like SETI which for years have been making use of thousands of idle computers to sort through massive amounts of data. For a long time, it’s seemed as though the power of the crowd could do lots of good and never any wrong. The reaction to the Boston bombing, though, has shown what can happen when an online crowd becomes a connected mob — and raises important questions about how even freelancers and small entrepreneurs should be using networks to build their businesses.

What Went Wrong?

Following the bombing Reddit’s users took upon themselves the task of sorting through the hours of video footage showing the crowd at the Boston marathon. Thousands of eyeballs, they believed, would be able to help the police look for suspicious behavior among the crowds in the stands. Having isolated individuals who appeared to be up to no good, the community’s tech-savvy members could then get to work on identifying them. They would also be able to scour the local news, Facebook pages and forums for information about people who could have been involved.

Users focused on Sunil Trapathi, a missing Brown University student with no involvement in the bombing. His family was harassed and forced to take down the Facebook page that asked for help finding him. His sister received 72 phone calls on her mobile phone between 3am and 4.30am. (Trapathi’s body may now have been recovered from the Providence River.)

Reddit has since apologized to the Trapathi family both publicly and in private. The community also noted that its policy of not posting personal information on the site was created precisely to avoid this kind of personal targeting:

This was because “let’s find out who this is” events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives. We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong.

When Crowdsourcing is Bad for Freelancers

Reddit’s blunder could be an extreme case. After the bombing, the site’s traffic peaked at 272,000 users as people flocked to the platform to discuss what had happened and try to help locate the bombers. Few crowdsourcing efforts can build on either that level of motivation or on crowds of that size, but sometimes it doesn’t take much for an online crowd to turn into a mob.

When photographer Dana Dawes posted a cheap offer on Groupon in 2010, she might have expected some criticism from other photographers concerned about her low prices. She got that, but she also picked up a huge reaction from people who spotted that many of the images she had placed on her website to attract buyers had been copied from the websites of other photographers. The discussion, deleted by Groupon but kept by Petapixel, started with questions about how Dawes would cope with the demand but soon descended into increasingly angry comments, threats of legal actions and accusations of fraud. Dawes’s website now contains nothing but AdSense supported articles.

Dawes’ victims were spotted by other photographers suspicious of the difference between her low prices and the quality of her images. When the freelancer herself spots the fraud, there’s a whole new danger, especially when that freelancer has a large following.

Photographer Grace Chon, for example, has built a name for herself as a pet photographer in Los Angeles. Her Facebook page has more than 3,000 likes and her posts frequently attract triple-figure likes and plenty of comments. Her photos also attract copycats who imitate her website, her copy and her images. Rather than set her followers onto those imitators, Chon tends to point out that she’s spotted them and contacted her lawyers, but she doesn’t mention their name. That’s a smart move considering the most common reactions to her post. The most frequent comment is “Let’s get her.”

The commenters might not have been serious (not least about putting flaming dog poop on the copycat’s porch, as one follower suggested) but they do show that creative freelancers with loyal followings need to be careful about what they say to their fans.

Crowdsourcing Can Work for Freelancers

It’s not all bad news though. LinkedIn’s growth to 200 million users (and the most lucrative of the social media platforms) has everything to do with its ability to turn a small number of connections into a large network capable of delivering job offers, clients and opportunities. Although posting a request for a job on a social media site rarely brings interviews, targeted approaches that ask for introductions to friends of friends can solve the problem of needing to know the right people to complement the skills you already know.

Dribbble, a site that allows graphic designers to gain feedback from their peers on their work in progress has also proved itself to be a good place to crowdsource professional advice and recommendations. The reactions, views and votes act as crowdsourced recommendations for potential new clients looking for freelancers to help them with new projects. The site has no shortage of talented designers whose success on the platform has allowed them to pick and choose their next prestigious projects.

It’s too easy to say that Reddit’s witch hunt has shown that crowdsourcing is dangerous, wrong and will always have negative consequences. Rather, it’s shown that crowds, even those online, can have the potential to turn into a mob when faced with wrongdoing that they believe they have the power to fix. But just as a mob can hunt down an individual, even an innocent one, so a crowd can also bring help to people who need it. Freelancers should be ready to use crowds to find clients or fund their projects. Kickstarting works; hunting criminals, even copyright thieves, not so much.

Social media is usually treated as a marketing tool, a way to build a relationship with a market, maintain that relationship and make sure that it’s ready when we’ve got a product to sell.  We use it to make sales, and we want to be sure that whether we’re pitching watercolor paintings or computer programming the time we invest in writing tweets and uploading photos to Facebook are hours that deliver a return. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one understands better than freelancers and small business owners that every hour has a price and that time spent on activities that don’t deliver a measurable return is time spent not earning.

But there’s more than one way of measuring the return on social media activity and more than one goal for a professional social media account. Sales delivered through social media are nice but they’re not the only reason to tweet, post and upload to Instagram.

Those multiple benefits are already known to large corporations. Raytheon, for example, is an aerospace and defense company that sells rockets and radar systems to government buyers. Nothing the firm writes on its Facebook page or its Twitter timelines is going to affect the chances that it will win a contract from the Department of Defense for a new air-to-ground missile system. Those sorts of decisions are influenced by prices and jobs, delivery schedules and capabilities, not sharp photography uploaded to a social media page.

Brand Journalism

And yet, on Raytheon’s website is a social media section that contains widgets for its Google+ account, its YouTube channel, its LinkedIn account, its two Facebook pages and its four Twitter timelines. Another page explains the firm’s “social media participation guidelines,” a set of rules for commenting on the company’s pages that even threatens to delete comments that aren’t relevant or respectful.

The company has clearly decided that social media is worth the effort and is investing time and money in keeping multiple platforms active and updated even though it knows that none of them will result in a single additional sale.

The reason becomes clear when you look at the topics of those timelines and the subjects the posts and tweets cover. Although the company does show photographs of its defense system on its Facebook page, most of its posts relate to recruitment. Readers are challenged with a “math mystery,” told about the opening of a new learning center at the University of Arizona, and shown pictures of students at the National Space Symposium.

Raytheon isn’t using social media to compete with other sellers pitching products to a market; it’s using social media to compete with other companies pitching their career openings at science graduates.

That approach might not result in more sales in the short term but if smart engineers move to Raytheon instead of choosing to build the latest mobile phone or write server software, the company will be able to continue generating sales in the long term.

And the strategy does produce measurable results that go beyond an impressive GPA among new recruits.

According to David Meerman Scott, an author and social media expert, Raytheon’s strategy can be described as “brand journalism.” Instead of hiring copywriters and marketing staff to promote the firm on social media, the company recruited journalists and editors, including Chris Hawley, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Associated Press. The result is that the stories the firm highlights on its Web page and its social media platforms are often picked up by the mainstream press and spread across the media. After attending the Association of the US Army annual conference last year, a major trade show for the defense industry, Raytheon chose to highlight just three stories rather than the 20 it had promoted in 2010. Traffic and exposure increased by as much as 451 percent over the 2010’s figures.

Even if you’re not looking to recruit more staff for your growing firm, you can still use social media to rustle up some mainstream publicity.

Comments In, Charity Out

You can also use it to win feedback on the development of your business. Elina Lorenz is an artist who sells her work on Etsy. Her pictures are posted on her personal Facebook page rather than on a dedicated business page, and while some of them are shown with prices, photos of others are simply uploaded as finished work and often posted to the page of the Society for All Artists.

The aim of these posts isn’t so much to generate new sales as to make the most of an opportunity to show off her work to her peers and win their feedback. It’s unlikely that Elina would be counting the responses and changing the style of her work but even if the compliments and comments have little effect on her output, they can deliver enough confidence to keep pitching, even at times when sales are low and the marketing is failing to make an impact.

And another valuable use of social media that is unlikely to deliver direct sales but is still worth doing is charitable work. Most of the posts placed on the Facebook page of the Roots Soap Company  show off the small company’s soap and announce its new products. A few promote other related businesses, which presumably promote the soap firm in return, but scattered between the posts are occasional charitable appeals.

It’s possible that those appeals help to brand the company, show that it’s trying to give back and portray it as a positive firm that’s trying to do good. But it’s more likely that the company just wants to support a good cause and is using the audience it’s picked up on social media as a way to help.

Again, those appeals probably won’t sell more soap. But they could well push a little money in the direction of a charity — and that’s always worth doing on social media, even for a freelancer or a small business.

When I started freelancing a dozen years ago, it was meant to be a stopgap. The Web company I’d been working for had popped with the Internet bubble and freelancing seemed to be a good way to keep some revenue rolling in while I looked for my next job. I’d seen Elance open on a friend’s computer, joined and within a week had landed my first job. I picked up a second job a couple of days later and haven’t looked back since. I still work for that second client and my client base is now solid enough for me not to have to pitch for jobs or bid on projects. Work comes to me and the ten bucks a month I pay to Elance now functions as a kind of unemployment insurance, keeping my reviews, my ratings and my profile up to date just in case I need it. It’s been a long time since I have needed it.

Freelancing turned out to be my next job.

I have learned a few things over the last dozen years or so. These are the most important things I’ve picked up:

1.     You Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Spend any time in a workplace, and you’ll hear people criticizing management, expressing their incomprehension at decisions they have to follow and wondering why they’re not being listened to. When you work for yourself, those negative feelings disappear.

Sure, clients don’t always do what you think they should do. Projects disappear in weird directions and you wonder sometimes how a client will ever sell what she’s asked you to create. But it doesn’t matter. You finish the project. You collect the payment. You move on to the next job. Employees are stuck with their bosses. Freelancers get to change them.

2.     Freelancing Is More Stable Than It Looks

The biggest concern for new freelancers is the loss of a stable income. It’s true that no two months are ever the same but it’s also true that they don’t vary very much. Once you have a solid base of regular clients with predictable needs, you’ll find that income stays within a narrow band.

In practice, the biggest challenge isn’t that freelance income will drop too low but that you’ll struggle to keep pushing it up.

3.     Bad Times Don’t Last Long

That isn’t to say that there are never worrying dips in income. They can happen. A couple of years ago, when the recession was at its deepest, a couple of clients reduced their output and for the first time in a decade I found that days were actually long enough to complete everything I needed to do.

It was worrying while it lasted but it didn’t last long. A few job pitches later, my schedule was full, everything was back to normal and I was racing to get everything done in time again.

4.     You Never Have a Free Moment

Freelancing is a form of self-employment which means that you’re in control of every part of your business. Yes, you’ll be producing your designs or articles or code or whatever it may be, but you’ll also be reading professional literature, maintaining your website, emailing clients, collecting invoices, managing payments and sometimes marketing for new jobs.

Any moment you’re not doing one of those things is time that you’re not earning. (I find myself doing invoices in the evening in front of the television so that I don’t waste productive hours on paperwork.)

Freelancing allows you to set your schedule but it also gives every hour a value.

5.     People Think All Your Moments Are Free

On the other hand, because you’re working from home, and because you set your schedule, people around you tend to think that you time is more flexible than theirs. When there’s a chore to be done, a shirt to be collected from the dry cleaners or a kid to be taken to the doctor’s, it usually falls to the freelancer because they don’t have to ask the boss for permission.

You can just miss a deadline.

Freelancing does provide plenty of freedom… but not as much as people think.

6.     Change Is (Usually) Good

A base of regular clients will give you stability but it’s also restrictive and you can come to depend on the income even when you no longer enjoy the work. That’s always dangerous. It makes improving your career difficult and it means that the loss of a client can be more frightening than it should be.

Clients come and clients go, even clients you’ve served for years. What I’ve found though, is that at the end of every client relationship is an entirely new one — and usually it’s better than the one that just ended.

7.     I’m In Control of My Career

If there’s no point in complaining about my boss as a freelancer, it’s mostly because I have the power to change the direction of my career. If I want to write more books, about a different subject or earn more money, I have to work towards that direction myself.

That’s not easy. It requires planning, an understanding of the opportunities available and an awareness of the training I’d need to do and the connections I’d need to build to move my career in the direction I want it to go. Most importantly, it means that I have to know whether the kind of work I think I want to do is really the kind of work that would make me happiest.

8.     Freelancing Isn’t the Best Way to Work, But It’s the Best Way for Me

There are plenty of reasons not to freelance. A regular job would give me more company, perhaps some stock options, a clear career path, more stability. The benefits would be better and cheaper, and I’d have the same kind of routine that friends and family enjoy.

But freelancing suits me. I like the solitude. I like the control. I like the clients and I like the work, its variety and its challenges. I may have started freelancing temporarily but I’ve learned that I’m sticking with it permanently.

You’d expect to see creative agencies using Twitter to promote their clients. Even seven years after its launch, the platform retains a certain cachet. As Facebook saturates and stalls and Pinterest struggles to get past its audience of shopping-addicted women, Twitter has managed to hold on to and grow its audience of mostly urban microbloggers. Its market of 200 million and the challenge of cramming a message into just 140 characters give Twitter a strong appeal among the creative types who get the fun of being brief, witty and connected to other brief, witty types.

It’s no surprise then that plenty of companies have come up with creative campaigns on Twitter to promote themselves — or their clients. Simply Zesty, a UK digital agency, produced a list of five of the most “brilliantly creative campaigns that used Twitter” in  2012. They included Ben and Jerry’s promotion of Fair Trade Day for which the firm built an app that used leftover characters in tweets to push a fair trade message; a drinks company in South Africa that created a tweet-operated vending machine that turned every purchase into a public announcement; and a commercial for Mercedes Benz that let Twitter users choose the plot of an unraveling story.

And yet, while Twitter has provided plenty of creative campaigns for big brands, it’s rare to find creatives marketing themselves on the platform — which is why  a new idea from Floyd Hayes, the former creative director of “specialized guerrilla and non-traditional advertising agency,” Cunning, has attracted so much attention.

The World’s Fastest Agency

Calling his new venture “The World’s Fastest Agency,” the advertising veteran is offering to deliver immediate ideas to struggling brands. The companies issue a 140 character brief through Twitter’s direct message system, and Floyd, or one of his consultants, shoots a creative pitch back the same way. That’s a pitch delivered in 24 hours and in no more than 140 characters. The fee for the service is $999.

Among the examples Floyd gives are a brief to “Gain media and buzz for our park anywhere small car.” His response would be “Attach replica cars to landmark city buildings,” an idea he used to promote the Mini.

It sounds insane, and yet apparently it works. According to Business Insider, within 24 hours, Floyd had received three paying clients — as well as 20 freelance offers from other creatives and six offers to work as an intern.

Judging by the agency’s website, Floyd Hayes appears to be taking the venture seriously. He stresses that clients aren’t just getting 140 characters for just shy of a thousand bucks. They’re getting the benefit of fifteen years of experience from one of the advertising industry’s leading lights. While they could pay a lot more to sit in endless meetings with ad executives, for a fraction of the price The Fastest Agency can deliver a workable idea in just 24 hours.

But a look at The Fastest Agency’s timeline suggests an ulterior motive. The first tweets weren’t about the benefits of the service or the amount of time and money clients waste in pointless pitches. They were about the extent of the media coverage the agency was generating. While The Fastest Agency might bring in the odd client with a thousand bucks to spare and a willingness to gamble on receiving something useless for their money, the biggest benefit the agency will bring will be publicity for Floyd Hayes.

The story has given the creative professional a chance to talk about his experience and achievements in front of a whole new audience. He’s using the agency as a personal branding tool and Twitter as the channel to deliver it. (If that sounds a little cynical, bear in mind that Floyd’s previous work includes creating a floating soccer field on the River Thames to promote Dockers and renting out his voice to shout “Hall’s Fruit Breezers” around New York landmarks.)

Connections Count More Than Publicity

That kind of creative self-promotion of creative workers isn’t unique. Back in 2010, copywriter Alec Brownstein created a series of Google ads that appeared when the art directors he most wanted to work for searched the Internet for their names. The ad pitched his services and asked for a job. He ended up with three interviews and two offers.

But it is rare. Usually creative firms and freelancers make do with flashy websites and impressive portfolios. A few create showreels which they place on YouTube. Even the most popular of those, though, rarely generate more than a few thousand views, a large number of which are likely to come from students rather than potential clients.

If creatives active on social media, they’re no more active than anyone else and if they advertise, their commercials are a lot less prominent than the award-winning campaigns they create for their clients.

The reason for the apparent modesty of professionals whose job is to broadcast benefits reveals a great deal about the best way to market the value of good work. If art directors and creative executives are selling quietly, it’s because they know that their work speaks for itself. Campaigns are covered in the trade press, and when they go viral they make it into the mainstream press. (That Wieden + Kennedy were responsible for the Old Spice ads was made known by outlets from AdWeek to CNN.) A client looking for an agency to create a campaign knows where to look to find out who’s doing which campaigns and which agencies have the style he or she would like to see in their advertising.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be using creative campaigns to attract attention, win press write-ups and perhaps land the odd thousand dollars for a 140-character pitch. But you don’t have to depend on them. Instead, you should be focusing on creating great work for your clients — and making sure everyone knows what you’re doing as well as what you’ve done.

Bad clients are easy to describe. We’ve all had them and in more than twelve years of freelancing I’ve had my fair share. I’ve had clients who paid late or didn’t pay at all; who demanded additions to projects but were surprised to see the days added to the bill; who said they wanted one thing until I delivered it when they realized they actually wanted something completely different; and who imposed impossible deadlines forcing me to work nights and weekends then sat on the finished work until it was out of date. Clients like these turn up in a freelancer’s career but they don’t turn up as often you might expect and they pass quickly. Most clients, like most freelancers, are reliable and professional. They know roughly what they need, they pay for the work and they’re grateful for the skills and talent you can bring to their project. Clients like those are easy to find.

Perfect clients though aren’t just harder to find; they’re also much harder to describe. That they should pay the bills on time and without argument is a given. That they should make your efforts feel appreciated and important would be a part of it. That you can rely on them to deliver work on a regular basis so that you can count on their income to the same degree that they need your deliverables is important too. Freelance life is unstable; a client with regular demands goes a long way towards stabilizing a schedule.

The (Almost) Perfect Client

I found a client who meets all those qualifications very early. He was the second client I took on when I turned freelance, and I’ve been writing his newsletter every month since 2001. He’s given me some additional work since then and both those projects form a pillar of my freelance schedule. He’s such a good payer, I don’t even need to invoice him. I send him the work at the end of the month and within two or three days, he’ll send the money through Paypal. He never asks for changes, never argues with the decisions I take about the content I include and never tells me what to write. He’s so appreciative that every Christmas he sends me a gift. What started as a box (a big box) of chocolates has grown to include an iPod Nano, a voice recorder and a remote-controlled helicopter. I’ve spoken to him on the phone just once and met him in person once when we happened to find ourselves in the same city at the same time. As freelance relationships go, our connection couldn’t be easier.

That might sound like my search for a perfect client didn’t need more than a month of looking. But I’ve been doing P.’s work for so long now it isn’t a challenge. The work hasn’t changed at all. I’ve got faster at it, so what used to take me a day I can now knock out before lunch. Our relationship works because I know what the client expects and can deliver exactly the same thing time after time. It’s not boring but it doesn’t stretch me and if I tried to get creative, I’d risk the reliability that the client buys from me.

More Creativity, Less Control

I did find another client a few years later though who does expect creativity. She acts more like an agent than a client, selling a particular writing service that I supply through her company to individuals who want it. Because each job is slightly different, each piece has to be unique. It’s informal so I have some freedom to play around. And of course, in more than seven years, she’s never missed a payment.

If a perfect client is someone who gives you the room to work the way you want, then M. goes a long way towards achieving it.

But because the client is doing all the marketing, the work isn’t reliable. If she decides to push hard or launches a promotion, I can find myself unexpectedly overwhelmed. If she eases back to focus on other parts of her business — as she’s perfectly entitled to do — that otherwise reliable revenue stream can suddenly shrink. M. is a perfect client… except in one small way: unlike P. she has control over my schedule, making my week hard to predict.

Both those experiences have made me realize that the hardest part of looking for the perfect freelance client is defining it. Beyond paying on time, the client should also supply regular work  that’s creative, challenging and still varied. And it should keep me in control so that I’m able to plan my week and arrange my hours.

That sounds impossible, right? I should be grateful for all of the great clients I have (and I have a number of others who, in their own way, are just as good) — and I am grateful for them all. But it’s taken me twelve years to realize what the perfect client looks like, and to realize that I’ve found him.

It’s me.

If I want someone who pays regularly, lets me work the way I want, allows me to be creative and gives me control over my schedule, instead of selling my work to clients who then sell it onto others, I should  be selling it for myself.

Other people do that. There’s no shortage of freelance writers now who self-publish and organize workshops, promote their books on Twitter and Facebook, and write what they want in the hope of finding a market for it.

But then I wouldn’t just be a freelance writer. I’d also be an entrepreneur and a marketer. I’d need to hire a designer to create the website and someone with the expertise and inclination to do the SEO work no freelance writer can ever stomach. I wouldn’t just be my own client; I’d be the client of half a dozen other freelancers all of whom I’d have to rely on to make my business work.

I’m pretty sure I’d make a good client. But I doubt that any of them would think they’d found the perfect one.

When it comes to freelancers carrying their laptops to cafes and turning coffee bars into offices, the rules are relatively clear. They’re a mixture of common sense and consideration with a big tip to the wait staff thrown in. Break the rules and the worst thing that will happen is that you have to find a different café or spend more time working from home. For telecommuters, though, the rules are a great deal tougher. Human resource departments, especially in government organizations, tend to pour out detailed eligibility requirements before they allow employees to set up a cubicle in their bedroom. Their suspicion of this new way of working makes the risks higher even as the practice becomes more popular; get the rules wrong and you could find your telecommuting privileges revoked and your job pulled back into the office.

Here are the rules to follow if you want to retain your opportunity to work in your pajamas:

1.     Don’t Work in Your Pajamas

Sure, you have the opportunity to work in your pajamas, your underwear or even with a laptop propped up against your knees without leaving the bed if you want to. But don’t do it. The first rule of telecommuting is to work as though you were in the office. That doesn’t mean that you have to wear a business suit or put on a uniform, but what you wear will affect the seriousness with which you treat the work. You should feel that you’re a professional even if you’re not in a professional environment. And it will save you embarrassment if your boss or a client suddenly pops up on Skype and wonders why you’re not operating the camera.

2.     Always Deliver

Telecommuting is a privilege that businesses grant to their employees to make them happy when they can’t think of a good reason not to allow it. While there’s plenty of evidence that suggests working from home increases productivity, reduces absenteeism, lowers stress and generally makes workers happier and more effective, for businesses new to the idea, it also requires a great deal of trust. Managers want to be certain that if they let their underlings do their own thing in their own time in their own homes, they’re still going to get the results they want.

You always have to deliver those results, even if that means putting in the extra hours.

Before you leave the office building for your day or two at home, know exactly what you’ll be bringing back to the office — and let the boss know what to expect. When you turn up again with exactly what you promised, your boss will know that this telecommuting thing is a good idea.

3.     Don’t Wait to Make Contact

One of the benefits of telecommuting is that you don’t have to see or talk to anyone at the office. After seeing them for eight to ten hours the day before, that’s a real advantage. But just because they’re out of sight doesn’t mean they should be out of your mind.

If you’ve got a question, if there’s something you need, be sure to get in touch with your colleagues immediately. Don’t wait until you see them again. Your colleagues should feel that you’re still working alongside them even if you’re not actually in the next cubicle over.

An email or a call during the work day reminds everyone that you’re not sitting in front of the television while they’re slaving over a hot keyboard but are simply slaving away over a different keyboard in a different office. You don’t have to go as far as installing an instant messaging system that would reveal when you’re in front of the computer and when you’ve popped down to the stores to get a sandwich, but you don’t want to create the impression that when you’re out of the office building, you’re off the team.

4.     Make Use of the Office Time

When you find yourself spending a few days working from home, the time in the office takes on a different meaning. It’s not just a chance to catch up on office gossip and see what teammates have been doing while you’ve been sitting at your kitchen table; it’s also a time to prepare for your next telecommuting days.

There are some things that you just can’t do when you’re not in the office or in the same room as your boss and your other team mates. You can’t look at the overall status of a project that involves lots of different people. You can’t have everyone together in the same room, looking at a screen, discussing what should go where and suggesting improvements. You can’t bounce an idea off the person next to you in an open-plan office and feel the embarrassment when they ask where the search field is or point out that this function has a different layout to the same function elsewhere on the site.

There is plenty that you can do with shared document services, Skype video conferencing and even Google Plus’s Hangouts. But none of them have the same freedom as sitting in a real meeting room together and knowing that you’ve got the time to have your say.

Use your days in the office to hold meetings and talk, so that when you’re working from home, you can focus on the tasks.

5.     Make Your Calls from Home

If you are going to find yourself making telephone calls for work during telecommuting days, try to do them from the office. It’s true that it’s hard to sit in a Starbucks today without hearing a lawyer discussing a case at the table next to you or a start-up founder trying to talk some money out of an investor but when you’re discussing business, you want to do it in private and the person you’re talking to wants to feel that he’s got your full attention.

That’s true too if you’re expecting a call. If you know that a customer, a manager or a supplier is going to be calling you at a certain time during one of your telecommuting days, try to be home when the call comes in. When you’re finished, then you can pick up your laptop and head to a café with wifi, good coffee and its own set of rules.

I finally did it. In fact, I did it twice. Not only did I trade up to a smartphone at last, but I betrayed Apple and bought an Android device. In terms of productivity, it looks like I made a good choice.

The enhancements from my old dumbphone are clear enough. Texting is easier with a real keyboard; Bluetooth means that I can talk while I drive to the offices of local freelance clients; being able to listen to audiobooks and podcasts in the car, neither of which I could do on my dumbphone, turn time on the road into valuable learning time.

I could have done all that with an iPhone, of course, and sticking with Apple was tempting. When I’m not in front of my PC, I’ve usually got my face stuck in front of my iPad. Part of the reason for buying a smartphone was to replace my first generation iPod Touch, bought as soon as Apple announced it was getting into the touchscreen business. I’ve grown used to carrying it around for the last five years but I haven’t been able to upgrade it since iOS 3.1, the earphone socket doesn’t work (the first generation shipped without a speaker), it’s painfully slow and the irreplaceable battery now dies before the end of the day. Had I swapped it for an iPhone, I would have had access to all of the apps I’ve bought and downloaded since the day the App Store opened. Sharing from my iPad to the iPhone would have been a breeze: all of the documents stored on iCloud would have been instantly accessible on the iPhone. And the OS would have been familiar and supported by the largest selection of apps available in the mobile market. Developers generally develop for iOS first, then think about adapting to Android. If a productivity app is available, it’s available on the iPhone.

And yet Android does have a number of important advantages.

Now is the Time for Google Now

The launch of Google Now certainly looks like a draw. For the first time, Android has a native app for which Apple has no answer. Automated cards full of location-based information aren’t really productivity pluses, but they’re certainly useful in the same unexpected way that a constant Internet connection has become essential. Google has done what Apple has become famous for doing over the last few years: producing something that no one knew they needed until someone built it for them.

But more important than Google’s new application is the connectivity of Google’s range of different apps that play so well together and which are so neatly embedded into Android — the reason that the search company bought the OS and give it away for free to device makers in the first place.

My initial concern, for example, about having to set up a new account on Google Play, Android’s main app store, before I could start downloading turned out to be misplaced. As soon as I had logged into my Google account using my Gmail password, I was able to start downloading many of the free apps I’d grown used to using on my iPad. I didn’t have to complete any forms or enter my credit card details. Within minutes, I had my Evernote content, my Kindle books and the Chrome browser synced to tabs open on my PC. Even though I’m now using three different operating systems — Windows, iOS and Android — shifting my browsing experience and my reading content from one platform to another is seamless.

Production, however, is a different issue, and it’s here that the advantage of a Google-based system over an Apple system is clearest. On my PC, I write using Microsoft Word with the Google Cloud Connect plugin. The plugin gives me a narrow bar underneath the ribbons which shrinks to an almost invisible strip at the click of a button. When I finish writing, in addition to saving the document on my hard drive, I can press the Sync button and send it to Google Drive. I can even change the settings so that it makes the upload automatically. If I want to read back what I’ve been writing and edit while I’m away from my PC, I can just open the Google Drive app on my phone, edit it within the app or use Kingsoft’s free office suite, and save any changes back onto Google’s online storage.

While I can also use Google Drive on my iPad, opening and editing the document in Apple’s Pages app, sending it back to Google Drive isn’t straightforward. Apple expects me to save my documents to its own iCloud service, which it does even while I’m writing. To continue working on that document on my PC, I have to download it from iCloud, a process that’s unfriendly and which changes the formatting.

Getting Pages to Work with Google Drive

There is a workaround. Open an account at Otixo.com, a cloud storage manager, and you’ll be able to save your documents from Pages on the iPad to Google Drive (as well as Dropbox and other online storage systems.) When you’ve finished working on a document in Pages, hold your finger over the icon until it starts to shake, press the share icon and choose “Copy to WebDAV.” Once you’ve signed into Otixo, you’ll be able to save your document as Pages, PDF or Word file to Google Drive, giving you access to the file on an Android device and a PC. It works but it’s clunky. On Android, it just works.

The result is that I now have a smoother, more natural relationship between the work I do on my laptop, my main professional tool, and my mobile platform.

Of course, it’s not perfect. The screen on my Android phone is much smaller than the screen on my iPad 2, which is still a better work tool than a phone, but at 4.3 inches my Android screen is bigger than that of an iPhone 5. I miss having a large single button to return immediately to the home screen but unlike the iPhone I can download a range of different keyboards that go a long way towards making up for iOS’s lack of arrow keys. That’s more important to me when I’m editing a blog post.

This isn’t to say that Android is better than iOS or that Google beats Apple. My iPod lasted five years because it was a wonderful device and I’m still very attached to my iPad. But when it comes to productivity on a mobile phone, a good Android makes life easier than an iPhone does.

Back in July 2012, Rory Cellan-Jones created a Facebook page for “VirtualBagel Ltd.,” a company selling downloadable bagels. The page contained a small amount of  basic information, a picture of a bagel and a description of a dream of delivering virtual bagels across the Internet to a Web full of virtual eaters. He then created a Facebook ad with a budget of $10 targeted to people aged under 45 interested in cookery and consumer electronics, and living in the United States, the UK, Russia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, an audience of around 112 million customers. Twenty-four hours later, his $10 was gone and his page had picked up 1,600 likes — an instant community.

It’s a story that should show the power of Facebook and its main product. With just ten bucks any business, even one completely new to Facebook, can use Facebook ads to build a big audience in no more than a day.

Except that it didn’t work.

When Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, looked closely at who exactly was liking his page, he found that most of his audience was made up of people outside the main markets of the US and UK. While his overall clickthrough rate was 0.55 percent, that figure fell by a factor of ten to 0.059 percent when the ad was targeted to just those two countries. He also found that many of the likes outside the US and UK seemed to come from profiles that did nothing but like random pages on Facebook. Attempting to buy followers to create a fast community on Facebook was looking like a waste of money.

Facebook has since tried to clamp down on fake likes, cutting more than 45,000 from Farmville in September 2012 and more than 96,000 from Texas HoldEm Poker. But while some small businesses continue to hope for a short cut to Facebook growth (a service that other firms are willing to supply) the best option for relationship marketing is to let the community grow slowly and naturally, so that the people you’re bringing on board are customers who have bought from you in the past and leads who are likely to buy from you in the future.

For Passion-Based Businesses, Small is Beautiful

That’s the approach taken by many of the top sellers on craft site Etsy.

Claudia Rosilla, for example, is a textile artist from Uruguay who runs an Etsy boutique called Texturable. Her Facebook page has picked up 964 likes, over 600 less than Rory Cellan-Jones found that he could buy in a day for ten dollars. Those likes don’t come in particularly fast. In December 2012, her Facebook page was picking up between three and ten likes each week. That figure jumped to between 40 and 50 likes a week after her store was featured on Etsy then fell again once that buzz had died down. Between January 10 and January 24, she picked up just two new likes.

Her reach though, what Facebook calls “People Talking About This,” has remained high even as the number of likes her page picks up has fallen. Between mid- and late-December, the figure, which tracks shares, comments, replies and other activities, declined from 42 to just nine. It rocketed to nearly 150 during Texturable’s time as an Etsy highlight, and although it has since fallen, Claudia Rosilla’s store is still scoring between 30 and 50.

Those likes, in other words, originating largely from other craft-lovers on Etsy, are translating into continuing activity on Facebook.

So what are those new followers talking about? What kind of content on Facebook is picking up new followers, sparking conversations and spreading the name of Claudia Rosilla’s store wider?

Use Facebook Pages to Show Who You Are and How You Work

Mostly, they’re talking about pictures. Texturable’s Facebook page is filled with well-taken images. The page contains behind-the-scenes shots of her works in progress, images of her workspace, as well as photos of her latest products complete with a link to the Etsy store. There are a few personal things in there too: a shot of her cat and her dog; a picture of her son on his birthday; the view of the sea from her home. The effect is to close the gap between a business based in Uruguay and a buyer who may be anywhere in the world. Customers can genuinely feel that they’re buying from someone they know. They understand how the products are being made and they can feel confident that they’re being made with passion and care.

Other Etsy sellers follow a similar strategy. The Facebook page of Odelae Graphic Design & Book Arts, Erica Ekrem’s one-woman design company that specializes in hand-stitched journals, includes a range of different kinds of content. Any mentions in the press are reported to her followers, recommendations to Kickstarter projects that appeal to Erica get a mention, new products (such as her clam-shell book) receive due attention, and Erica will also throw in the occasional announcement of a gift certificate. The only thing missing is discount offers and exclusive bargains.

With just 260 likes, Erica’s following isn’t massive but her pictures do pick up comments and likes, and it’s likely some of those comments and likes are translating into sales too.

Facebook has developed into a model in which big businesses set up free pages then pour money into advertising to encourage potential customers to click “like.” That’s an easy strategy to copy if you’re willing to invest the dollars but much of the money will be wasted and a large chunk of the community you build will be useless.

For passion-based businesses in particular, a community of people who appreciate your art and your skill is essential. Let your community grow slowly, use your Facebook page to show who you are, what you do and how you work, and you should find that even though your following is small, your activity translates into engagement, trust and additional sales.

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In December, 2012, more than 14 million people tuned into NBC to watch a show about mentors. Four professional singers competed to attract a team of hopeful stars and train them up to see who would become the best of the bunch. The Voice, based on a Dutch television show, has been a huge success, the format spreading around the world and creating dream careers for winners Javier Colon, Jermaine Paul and Cassadee Pope. But the show hasn’t just been good for the student singers and entertaining for viewers. It’s also delivered a powerful demonstration of the benefits of mentoring — of learning how to perform tasks under the guidance of someone who already who knows how to complete them well.

It’s a method that’s not new, of course, nor is it limited to rising performers. Tennis player Andy Murray’s first Grand Slam title at last year’s US Open has often been put down to his decision to hire former world number one Ivan Lendl as his new coach. And even when he was the best golfer in the world, Tiger Woods worked alongside a trainer and now takes instruction twice a week in the off-season from Sean Foley, a golf coach who places a strong emphasis on biomechanics and physics. If the best in the world can see the benefit of learning from people who haven’t even reached their heights of success, then surely entrepreneurs, freelancers and anyone hoping to achieve a goal should be looking for a mentor.

Internships and Apprenticeships

Mentoring isn’t the only way of learning from someone who has achieved the goals you’re aiming for — or who understands how to reach them. Once you move away from the knowledge acquisition supplied by universities and colleges, and start looking for the hands-on experience that really makes a difference, the choices also run to internships and apprenticeships.

The two appear similar but have important differences.

According to the Department of Labor, apprenticeships are:

“a combination of on-the-job training and related classroom instruction in which workers learn the practical and theoretical aspects of a highly skilled occupation. Apprenticeship programs are sponsored by joint employer and labor groups, individual employers, and/or employer associations.”

To create an apprenticeship program, an employer has to work with the Office of Apprenticeship or the State Apprenticeship Agency to develop training standards. These include an on-the-job training outline, a related classroom instruction curriculum and operating procedures. The program will only be registered if it meets Federal requirements.

Internships can be muchless clearly planned. Participants don’t take classes or follow a curriculum and their tasks may be relatively mundane: more fetching and photocopying than fitting engines and fixing machinery. To get the most out of an internship, Nike, which runs twelve-week internships for trainee designers at its offices near Beaverton, Oregon and Hilversum, The Netherlands, recommends that participants “be a snoop; talk to people about their processes on things you like.”

Despite that vague advice, Nike’s internships are paid and carefully laid out, with plenty of lectures and personal projects that interns are expected to complete. That isn’t true of all positions, however. In early 2012, Xuedan “Diana” Wang filed a lawsuit against the Hearst Corporation, arguing that the internship she completed for Harper’s Bazaar actually consisted of five months of unpaid labor. The suit, which was joined by two other interns, alleged that the magazine required Wang, as “head intern,” to work 40 to 55-hour weeks overseeing a team of eight unpaid workers whose job was primarily to transport clothes to and from PR firms. Wang claimed that the work failed to meet the Department of Labor’s guidelines for internships.

Those guidelines lay out six criteria that an internship has to meet in order to be exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act requiring companies to pay employees at least a minimum wage. They include work that is “similar to training which would be given in an educational environment,” not displacing regular employees and a requirement that the employer providing the training “derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.”

Paying a salary might just be easier than trying to meet those guidelines, and that’s a choice made by a number of firms, especially large companies and those trying to recruit workers for which there’s a high demand. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, about 87 percent of engineering and computing science majors will take paid internships, with the average wage ranging from $16 to $18 per hour.

And those internships tend to be an effective first step into the business. While no internship ever guarantees a job, completing an internship does increase the chances of landing one. In 2008, companies offered jobs to nearly 70 percent of their interns, a rise from 57 percent in 2001. In 2009, only 14 percent of college seniors left school with a job waiting for them but that portion rose to nearly a quarter for those who had completed internships.

Modern Mentoring Methods

While apprenticeships and internships tend to take place in businesses, mentors tend to work one-on-one with their charges. The relationship is personal, between master and student, rather than between new employee and established firm. That’s the model most often used by sports stars but it’s not the only way of learning how to reach a goal.

Escapologist Harry Houdini might have started the trend by picking up his skills through a mentor he never met. It was after reading the autobiography of French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin that the teenage Ehrich Weiss changed his name to match that of the man he regarded as his mentor and went on to become the world’s most famous escape artist. He later wrote a book about the life of Robert Houdin.

Stamp dealer and collector Ian Kimmerly took a broader approach. He first filled in his knowledge by joining philatelic societies in the United States and later in Ottawa. That gave him access to the combined expertise of the clubs’ members and led to a job writing a weekly stamp column in the Ottawa Citizen. Kimmerly is now the only stamp dealer between Montreal and Toronto, and is also a mentor to other collectors and rising experts.

Today, that kind of distance mentoring through books and clubs can be performed online. In July last year, craft site Etsy began building a Seller Education Program. The site invited fifteen “community and entrepreneurial superstars” from across the US and Canada to its offices in New York where a full day of classes turned those successful sellers into mentors ready to train other sellers. Craftmakers who want to build their own successful businesses on Etsy can subscribe to the School of Etsy Sellers run through SkillShare. The classes include a guided tour of Etsy given by Mandala artist Christine Claringbold, and shop critiques provided by Caroline and Jose Vasquez of Paloma’s Nest, a top Etsy seller whose work has been featured in Martha Stewart Weddings. Gabriella Cetrulo of Tomorrow is Forever credits her “internship” with allowing her to create her own business. Her Etsy store has now made 90 sales and picked up more than 2,000 admirers. The site’s users can also join “Teams” and forums where they can ask questions and exchange ideas with other sellers, a community feature which is often the first step for people hoping to increase their sales.

Udemy tries to do something similar to Etsy’s Seller Education Program but on a broader scale, and in the process ends up moving closer to online learning. The site offers online courses created by leaders as well-known as Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, who teaches a class on New Product Development. Students don’t receive the one-on-one personal coaching that they can get on Etsy’s forums or from its certified educators but they can still pick up knowledge from some of their industry’s most successful leaders.

Alternatively, people looking for a more a personal — and more peer-based — approach to modern mentoring can look to co-working spaces. While these are really intended to provide shared offices rather than any form of training, in practice the camaraderie that can develop between people sharing a space can lead to some useful knowledge-sharing. General Assembly, for example, considers itself “a global network of campuses for individuals seeking opportunity and education in technology, business, and design” and combines its shared office space with classes in entrepreneurship, design and technology. Unlike traditional mentoring, users have to pay to access the site, with monthly fees typically around $300 to $500 but that includes access to a library and classrooms as well as a place to work and network.

Summer@Highland takes the idea even further by  picking student entrepreneurs and giving them free office space in Cambridge or Menlo Park, a $15,000 grant and access to a network of speakers and founders to question and learn from.

The Old Ways Still Work

While Etsy’s online internships might represent a new way in which those who have achieved success can share their skills and experience, the old ways are still working too. Keen photographers wondering what it takes to run their own studio and hoping to pick up the abilities to set out on their own have long worked as “photography assistants,” a kind of apprenticeship. In addition to carrying bags of equipment, getting the lenses ready and hanging up the backdrops, they might also be allowed to work as a second shooter at weddings, capturing moments missed by a main photographer busy focusing on the bride and groom. Most assistants are paid, with rates ranging from $250 to $350 for a ten-hour day in New York or Los Angeles but falling to $150 to $250 for less metropolitan markets. The ability to work as a digital technician (editing images in Photoshop, for example) can push those daily rates up as high as $500.

Finding those jobs is relatively straightforward too. In the UK, PhotoAssist acts as a job site for hopeful photography assistants while in the US, enthusiasts and students can turn to Flickr’s photography assistant groups or try calling local studios and asking to show them a portfolio.

The model of walking into a small business with a ready pair of hands and a willingness to learn in return for a small income can be applied to just about any business. Before Julie Cleaves started her dog training business, the Auntie Dog Training Studio, she took an apprenticeship at Doberman Rescue Unlimited, a rescue and adoption center. By the time she set up her own dog-related business, she had already picked up years of experience. And baker Kelly Delaney, who was mentored by Mindy Grossman, CEO of Home Shopping Network, after getting her business mentioned on television show Bloomberg: The Mentor, found the experience so helpful that she decided to give back by creating her own mentoring program at her shop Cakes4Occasions.

Choosing Your Mentor

Finding internships and apprenticeships is relatively straightforward. Large businesses such as Nike advertise them on their websites while college job fairs are big recruitment areas for businesses looking for new graduates to bring through their systems. Picking a mentor, such as a photographer or dog trainer, is a little harder and is often limited to the range of professionals who happen to be in your area.

In general though, it’s always essential to know who you’re working for, to choose your mentor based on what he or she can teach you and to pick your apprenticeship or internship based on what you’ll be doing. Future employers will be more impressed with a full portfolio and broad experience from a small firm than the expert photocopying and bag-carrying skills picked up working for a larger one.

However you look for the extra skills and knowledge you’ll need to create your own success, whether you do it the old-fashioned way through hands-on experience and a small wage or a newer approach that takes in virtual learning or co-sharing, you shouldn’t expect instant stardom. You can however expect to have the essential elements of your own business — and the opportunity to mentor others in return.

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Image courtesy: Friends Coffee House

I use a couple of cafés for freelance work. Both are within a ten-minute bike ride of where I live. Both have seats, tables, coffee and wifi access… and that’s about where the similarities end. One café is on a busy commercial street. It’s mostly empty when I arrive first thing in the morning so there’s always an electricity outlet available. But it doesn’t sell the filter coffee I like so I’m usually done drinking my double espresso ten minutes into my two-hour stay and have to put up with looks from waitresses wondering when I’m going to leave. The rock music the barista plays is irritatingly loud and the only reason it always falls to me to ask him to turn it down is that most of the other patrons are old enough to have trouble hearing. It’s a convenient place to go when I have chores to run but it’s a terrible place to work.

The other café sits opposite a park at the bottom of large office building that houses law firms, a health services company and a local outlet of RedHat. It sells good coffee but at nearly $4 a cup, it’s not cheap. It only has four electricity outlets against one wall and three more in one socket next to the bathrooms so there’s a good chance I’ll be working on battery power. The layout, with a long bar and glass dividers, feels more like an airport waiting room than a relaxing drinking hole but the music is soft enough not to notice and there’s always plenty of people writing Linux on laptops or holding meetings at tables to make me feel like I’m working not hiding in a coffee joint.

So one café is more work-friendly than the other but neither café is perfect and I’ll alternate between them and between enjoying complete days at home. It does make me wonder though what a perfect work-café would look like and where I can find it. It would need good facilities, the right sounds, an atmosphere conducive to getting things done and if it also had a view, that would be nice too.

Some cafes, in various parts of the world, seem to have mastered at least some of those characteristics.

When it comes to facilities, for example, I think you’d have trouble beating the Friends Coffee House in Prague. Not only does it roast its own coffee but it has three main spaces to work in: a library-style lounge good for research and reading; an open plan area with small armchairs and round tables perfect for creating; and a long glass-walled corridor with a fountain that makes for comfortable lunch meetings. Customers can even rent a conference room suitable for 20 people which includes a printer and presentation screen.

The B Cup Café inNew York’s East Village does well too but with a lot less effort. It also has comfortable couches and keeps a small area at the back that’s suitable for writers — or anyone else — who wants to focus on their screen with minimal distractions. It’s not as packed with meeting options as Friends Coffee House but when you’re just looking for a place to hack out a blog post or debug some code, sometimes you don’t need more than a table, a chair and a bit of quiet.

Unless what you’re looking for is music you can work to. In that case, Notes in London’s Covent Garden may be a good solution. The café in the heart of London’s tourist area places such an emphasis on the quality of its coffee that it even sells its beans in London’s markets but the baristas pay just as much attention to the café’s tunes. When the nearby Royal Opera House performed Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the café launched a series of Wagner evenings, accompanying lectures about the operas with German wines. More usually, laptop-carrying customers dropping by during the day will be treated to low-key jazz that’s more likely to keep them on their seats than tap their feet.

Sometimes, though, you don’t want any sounds at all. Forty Weight in New York City is famous for its “law-library” level of silence and the absence of mothers with pushchairs full of screaming babies and noisy chatting — at least until the lunch crowd start to arrive. Funnel Mill in Santa Monica might let customers choose from a wide range of different beans but freelancers hoping for some peace and quiet to go with the classical music and their keyboard clicking can enjoy the café’s no cell phone policy. That’s unusual to find (and you have to assume that it’s difficult to enforce) but considering the tendency of mobile conversation to take place at a volume louder than regular talks and ringtones to be particularly annoying, it’s an attractive policy for freelancers who don’t need to explain anything to clients.

But if part of your productivity depends on having things to see as well having nothing to hear, then Tree Coffeein Naha Harbour, Japan provides one — particularly odd — example. The café, which is accessible from a pair of spiral staircases, sits at the top of an enormous tree. Less unusual is A Cup of Tree in Bangkok, which has a living room style interior with hardwood floors, ceiling-high windows and an arboreal view.

The problem with finding the perfect café to work in, though, despite the examples of drinking holes around the world is that different projects require different atmospheres. Writing tends to demand a quiet ambience and inspiring views; data mining can work best with plenty of music and lots of activity; designers might find that they’re most creative surrounded by modern art and funky hipsters. That’s why it helps to try all of the cafés in your neighborhood, know what sort of work is suitable for each and match your project to the venue.

And for the days when nothing matches, there’s always your kettle, your headphones and the home office.

The Five Whys and the Drill Down Technique are two methods to identify and understand the root causes of problems that hold up a growing business. Both have the advantage of being simple and easy to use. Neither will require you to spend time drawing complex diagrams or remembering counter-intuitive strategies. (You won’t need a stack of folders or a willingness to follow David Allen, for example.) That simplicity though, masks weaknesses. Used alone, the Five Whys can create results that are too disorganized to point usefully to solutions and may suggest false trails. The Drill Down Technique helps to lay out the causes of problems clearly so that issues can be addressed but it doesn’t always help to uncover those causes.

Used together, however, the two methods can both identify the causes of problems and plan a path for their resolution. Here’s how it works:

Principles of the Five Whys

The Five Whys is said to originate with the Toyota Production System, the methodology that introduced “management by walking around” and “just in time” production. The idea is to use constant questioning to move beyond a surface problem to identify the root causes of an issue. The method is most commonly used by large organizations in group brainstorming sessions. The UK’s National Health Service, for example, recommends the Five Whys as  way of improving efficiency in patient care.

How the Five Whys Work

The methodology is very simple. The group leader (or in the case of a freelancer or entrepreneur, the entire one-man team) writes down the problem then asks why that problem happened. The word “Why?” is used to open up the problem so that its essential elements can be treated individually and in a manageable way.

When someone offers a solution, the leader than asks why that event happened. He or she then queries the cause of that event and so on until the root cause is identified and a solution becomes clear.

Although the method is called the Five Whys the number of questions that need to be asked to solve a problem may be larger or smaller than five.

Sample Methodology

The website of Company A has high traffic flow but receives few requests for quotes.

The team leader writes on the board:

Problem: The website has a low conversion rate. Why?

The team’s IT leader points out that actually few people even reach the quote page. The bounce rate of 73 percent means that only a small portion of visitors moves past the home page.

The team leader writes on the board:

The bounce rate is 73 percent. Why?

The sales manager then points out that for the last few months, most of the sales department’s efforts have focused on contacts made at conferences rather than through the keyword-targeted advertising or search engine optimization that the site was originally built for.

The team leader writes on the board:

Sales targets don’t match website targets. Why?

That question could then lead to a discussion of the relative merits of conference contacts over SEO marketing and a decision to either change the direction of the sales team or to redesign the website.

In this case, the problem needed no more than three questions to reach the core of the problem but other problems may require more or less questioning.

Principles of the Drill Down Technique

The principle of the Drill Down Technique is similar to that of the Five Whys, which is why the two methods work so well together. The aim is to break a problem down to its constituent parts so that a solution can be planned for each of the problem’s elements.

How the Drill Down Technique Works

While the Five Whys is often used in groups, the Drill Down Technique is more commonly used by individuals.

The entrepreneur or freelancer writes the problem on the left side of a large sheet of paper. To the right of the problem, he or she writes the details that make up that problem. For each of those details, the problem-solver describes more details, continuing the breakdown across the page.

Sample Methodology

A problem analysed using the Drill Down Technique might look something like this:

Combining the Two Methods

While the Five Whys provides a tool for cracking open a problem, the Drill Down Technique delivers a plan for neatly laying out the elements that make up a problem, identifying parts that need more research, isolating root causes and opening up space for solutions.

Instead of writing the problem at the top of a board, placing the question “why?” next to it and instead of working down the board, the team leader can work horizontally:

• He or she writes the problem on the left of the board and uses the Five Why’s questioning to produce not one cause but several. He or she then writes those elements next to the problem and adds the Five Whys’ question to each.
• When the team provides answers to each of those problems, they too are questioned and the process continues across the board until the root cause is identified.

The benefits of combining the Five Whys with the Drill Down Technique is that the questions provide a way of identifying causes of problems while the drilling down ensures that all causes are identified and laid out clearly.

The combination does, however, have limitations. Although the process identifies problems, it does nothing to propose solutions. A sales team that had recognized that efforts were focused in one direction while the website was targeted towards a different set of prospects would still have to decide whether to change the site or the team’s direction. And a freelancer struggling with time management would still need to figure out how to better assess their productivity — and improve it.

You could draw up a long list of all of the lessons for success that Steve Jobs has passed on to the world around him. His talent for public speaking turned product launch press conferences into international shows watched by hundreds of thousands of people online. It’s impossible now to imagine the launch of a major tech product that doesn’t involve a large auditorium, a casually-dressed CEO and a backdrop of giant screens. His attention to detail is legendary. The stories of him tossing an early iPod prototype into a fish tank and pointing out the bubbles to prove that there was still space under the hood that could be squeezed out may or may not be apocryphal (and is still slightly nuts) but it’s an inspiration to other managers wondering just how hard they can push their staff. But there’s one lesson that really stands out and it dominates Steve Jobs’ career, from his early partnership with Steve Wozniak to the launch of the iPad: his creativity.

It was unique in Silicon Valley. It powered Apple’s rise, then Pixar’s rise then Apple’s return as the most valuable company in the world. And it’s the lesson which has most influenced me — and which should most influence you too.

Know Your Talent, Not Stuff

To understand just how important that creativity is just think of the three most important tech companies to dominate the industry over the last decade or so; the differences between them stand out more than their similarities. True, Google and Microsoft are both primarily software firms but while the first delivers its services through the Web (and is therefore capable of reaching everyone), the second became a giant by ensuring that its programs were installed on every PC that left a factory owned by Dell, IBM, Toshiba or anyone else. They may be in competition in some areas, but Microsoft still dominates the PC market and Google is still a verb that means to search on the Web.

But both those firms were founded by geeks.

Sergei Brin and Larry Page were PhD students at Stanford University working on a research project about early search engine rankings. Bill Gates, who like Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg would go on to study at Harvard, was the archetypal computer nerd. His early teen projects included exploiting bugs in a mainframe’s operating system to wangle free computing time and writing a program to manage his school’s class schedule — which just happened to place him in classes with mostly female students.

Steve Jobs studied calligraphy then went to India. When he came back, he landed a job as a technician at Atari and was assigned the task of removing unnecessary chips from a circuit board for the game Breakout. He offered his friend Steve Wozniak half his bonus to do it for him. “Woz” managed to drop 50 chips from the board. Jobs dropped acid.

So while other rising tech firms were led by geeks who understood what was happening inside the case, Steve Jobs was alone in running a business about which he actually knew very little. In the same way that a car company might be led by someone who can’t even change the oil in his own car, so Apple was led by someone who didn’t know circuit boards but did know some great people who did.

The same was true when Jobs took over Pixar. Unlike Walt Disney, Jobs had no background in animation. In the same way that he depended on Steve Wozniak’s engineering skills in Apple’s early days (and on Jonathan Ive’s design talent in Apple’s more recent days) so Jobs was happy to depend on John Lasseter’s animation experience to power the successes behind Finding Nemo and Toy Story.

But what Jobs lacked in expertise, he made up for in his ability to think outside the box. That was literally true in the launch of the colorful iMac series in 1998 which, for the first time, made the outside of the box as important as the inside.

It was true in the launch of the iPod which certainly wasn’t the first digital music player but it was the first to make buying music from the big publishing firms easy and let users play that music in a unique, attractive — and cool — device.

And it was true, of course, in the launch of the iPad, a class of device which had been discussed for a long time, failed to take off but which has since revolutionized mobile computing.

It’s that ability to look at things differently that has inspire me the most, and it’s the lesson that applies to the largest number of people.

Thinking Beats Knowing

Few of us are the leading experts in anything. We might be passionate about photography or books or knitting or anything else, but there will always be someone who knows more than us — a professional photographer who produces outstanding landscapes, a writer who wins the Nobel Prize, a knitter whose designs are stocked in leading retail stores. Just as there has never been any shortage of people who could match Steve Jobs’ passion for technology and trump his knowledge of engineering so we all know that there are people who are bigger experts than us or have more refined skills.

But what we can each bring to our field is an ability to think differently. There may be someone who has a better grasp of lenses or literature or knitting loops than you — but if you can see something that they can’t see, you’ve got all you need to succeed.

That’s not something you can teach in the same way that Steve Jobs could have learned circuitry like Steve Wozniak or COBOL like Bill Gates. It’s something that you have to recognize, trust and learn how to nurture. You have to be able to act on your creativity and you have to be able to choose and hire people who can turn your thoughts into reality.

The most important lesson that I learned from Steve Jobs was that what I know is less important than how I think.

That old saying about finding a job you love so that you’ll never have to work another day in your life just isn’t true. You will have to work even when you’re doing something you love, and the work you do will be hard and the hours will be long. But for the most part, when you’re following your passion, those hours will be far more enjoyable, far more rewarding and much more satisfying than the sort of labor you do for someone else’s firm or when you’re completing projects that don’t make you excited.

And it’s possible.

Internet marketing, supportive online communities, fundraising ventures and long-distance payment systems now mean that anyone with a creative spirit, a sense of entrepreneurialism, a willingness to learn, the determination to succeed and an activity they love doing can turn their passion into a business.

Clearly, every one of those businesses will have its own challenges. But as they grow, they all pass through the same two stages and there are lessons and challenges that are universal for all of them.

In this guide, we’re going to look at those stages. We’ll explain the preparation you’ll need to do as you begin thinking about building your own passion-based business; and we’ll look at the different processes you can use to bring your goods and your talent to market — and make sales.

Let’s start with the groundwork, the plans you have to make before you can start turning a passion into a profit stream.

Stage 1: Preparation

Starting a home-based business out of your passion and in your spare time  isn’t like creating a company from scratch. Nor should it be. The risks of failure should be much lower. The start-up costs should be much smaller (although you will still have those costs.) You’ll already have premises and you won’t need employees, at least not initially.

So while a new business will need a business plan, that isn’t necessarily true for a business based on a passion. If you’re not looking to invest giant sums, raise loans or investment funds or take risks that could cost you a home or a career opportunity — if you’re just planning to continue to do what you do anyway (but try to sell the results) — you can begin by taking things easy.

Time will be a valuable resource though, so before you can start production, you will need to figure out a schedule that you can maintain. You’ll need to know what you can do, identify the special advantages that you can bring to your business and which will help you to compete, and you’ll need to know where you can find the money you’ll need to get started.

1. Create a Schedule and Fill It with Time

As a general rule, you can expect to give around half the time spent on your passion to creating the products and half to marketing and promoting them.

If you were working full-time, that would translate into about 20 hours of production each week and the same number of hours spent updating your website, writing blog posts and contributing to forums.

But initially at least, few people are able to work all day every day on their passion so time is going to be your most valuable resource. While you might begin by producing at the weekends and managing your online store in the evenings, ideally, you then want to move to the kinds of flexible hours that will let you give more time to the work you enjoy the most.

Ann Nguyen, for example, makes miniature furniture for doll houses which she sells through her website AmazingMiniatures.com as well as through her store on Etsy. She started her business about three years ago and it grew quickly to the point that she considered running it full time.

“I was very close to taking the jump two years ago,” she said, “but after doing the math, I realized that I would not be able to afford health insurance on my projected income.”

Instead, she did the next best thing: she landed a job at a non-profit that lets her work four days a week. From Monday to Thursday, she does fundraising, quality assurance and data analysis for the non-profit and from Friday to Sunday she creates and markets her miniatures.

And she also works in the evenings, taking on freelance graphic design, web design or online marketing consultation projects. Importantly, however, when she’s not in the office she makes her own creative work a priority. For now she’s able to divide her time between a flexible job that pays the bills and satisfying work that makes her really happy.

Before you start building your business, build a schedule. Know how you can manage your time, and how you can find more of it.

2. Be Good at What You Do

When you bring your products to the market, you’re going to be selling it to people who owe you nothing. Unlike your friends and family, they won’t buy your goods because they want to support you — not at first. They’ll buy because they value the product and want to own it. They’ll buy because what you’ve produced appeals to them more than the items produced by other people.

That only happens when your products are competitive, look professional and fit a niche.

Ann Nguyen’s toy furniture looks at least as well made as anything you can find in a toy store. It’s also beautifully photographed and it’s unique. Ann prefers modern designs so she’s able to offer dolls house furniture that’s different to the usual beds and chairs sold in toy stores. The market might be small, but she’s found a niche and filled it with high quality goods.

That isn’t true of every passionista trying to bring their goods to market.

On Ebay, for example, buyers looking to purchase art directly from artists have to wade through pages and pages of mediocre works before they can find something worth buying. But the site was Heather Galler’s first stop as an art enthusiast, and now as a professional artist, it’s still the place that she relies on most to deliver sales.

“That website has all the reach a person could need to be successful if they have the right product to sell,” she says.

Shortly after her first sale on Ebay, in 2007, Galler’s business went bankrupt and she turned to painting full time. Her colorful, modern interpretations of dogs and cats, flowers and angels aren’t the sort of artworks you’re likely to find in museums and galleries. But they are better than most of the work you’ll find on Ebay. They’re competitive and professional, and they sell. Galler now has an agent, more demand than she can meet and her work is available in retail stores around the world.

Comparing the quality of your work to that of others isn’t easy. Friends are more likely to provide support than an honest opinion, and even the market isn’t a great judge if your product isn’t backed by a smart marketing campaign.

Once you’ve uploaded your products, join forums, Etsy teams and discussions and get feedback from peers. They’re the best judges of the quality of your skills and your readiness for the market.

3. Use What You Already Know

So if you’re not going to go through the whole palaver of writing a complete business plan, you’ll need to know your schedule — and how you can free up more time in it; and you’ll need to know how to create items that are at least as good as anything you can already find in stores.

You should also know what knowledge and assets you already possess that can help in your marketing.

If you have experience building websites, as Ann Nguyen does, you’re going to be able to make your own sales site quickly, and give it the kind of search engine optimization that will make it easy to find. That will save you a lot of time and money.

If  you’re an administrative assistant hoping to make some additional money selling quilts at the weekend (with an eye, perhaps, to quitting the desk and running your own firm) then you’ll be organized and you’ll understand the value of outsourcing help — because people outsource their tasks to you. That will keep you efficient.

Everyone with any kind of experience has knowledge that can help them in their new business, however different that business may be. When Jamie Kutch threw in his day job as a Wall Street trader to set himself as a California winemaker, for example, he couldn’t have made a bigger leap. He’d drunk lots of wine and spent plenty of time at tastings and on wine enthusiast forums. But there’s a big difference between understanding wine and making and selling it. According to Entrepreneur magazine, when he arrived in California people in the wine industry saw him as someone with no knowledge and no experience. They wouldn’t even sell him their grapes.

That was back in 2005. Now his brand of Kutch Wines is making a profit. The 1,000 cases of 2009 vintage he produced recently earned him $360,000 and he’s had interest from buyers for his company — even though he owns none of the wine-making equipment he uses, or even a vineyard.

But as Jamie Kutch was building his business and waiting for his wines to mature, he used the skills that he’d picked up on Wall Street. The winery was funded in part by buying cases of expensive imported wines and selling them at a profit to buyers in Asia. That’s something that few other new winemakers would have been able to do. It was a skill that came from his experience with arbitrage and it gave him an edge over other struggling winemakers.

Even when you move from one field to a completely different one, you bring knowledge that can help you make the transition and give you an advantage. Identify that advantage and know how to use it.

4. Get the Money

In a survey that we ran recently the most commonly cited reason for not following a passion, particularly among women, was a lack of funds. The amount of money that you’ll need will vary from pastime to pastime but every new business will require an investment even if it’s only in paints, canvases or eBay and Etsy listing payments.

The most common way for passionistas — or any entrepreneur — to get their businesses off the ground is to dip into their own funds. Jamie Kutch started his winery with savings of $100,000 but within two years and despite help from his wife’s new PR business, they were down to $10,000. Friends and family can help too. They’ll either make up your first customers, giving you the early profits you need to continue buying supplies, or they’ll be more willing than a bank to lend you the money you need to expand.

Those two options are fairly traditional. New options though include Kickstarter which has already grown into a way to do more than help entrepreneurs raise money for new businesses. Horticulturalist Jennifer Lee Segale used the site to raise money for a trip to Belize to research local plants. Designer and musician Justin Page Wood used it as a way of setting goals and collecting money from friends and family to produce an album. Outdoors enthusiast Josh Sprague used IndieGogo, another crowdfunding site, when he was looking for funds to create a new kind of backpack for water bottles. The site, he said, allowed him both to reach customers and impress stores who might have been willing to sell his product.

“The intent here was twofold,” he explained. “First was to obviously generate sales while we were finalizing our product; second was to document in full disclosure a successful campaign so that retailers can see we are a real brand and have a solid product.”

Using crowdfunding isn’t simple. Videos are important for persuading supporters (half of projects that include videos succeed as opposed to 30 percent of those that lack videos) and successful Kickstarters tend to use social media to spread the word and bring in funds. Kickstarter provides the platform but leaves it to the project owners to raise the money. Much of that will come from friends and relations but pitches with price options at $20 and below, and limited to a month or less, tend to do best.

While bootstrapping is likely to be your default option, when it comes to large projects or works that will take time, crowdfunding can both bring in funds and deliver marketing and publicity.

Stage 2. Make and Sell

Once you’ve organized your time, figured out how good your products need to be, identified the unique advantages you can bring to the market and raided your bank account, you’ll be ready to start making inventory — and begin making sales.

That’s got easier recently too. Crafters with an armload of homemade teddy bears or boxes of beaded jewelry no longer need to drag them from store to store in the hope of finding a retailer. We’ve already seen that Ebay is one way of reaching buyers, but for most sellers, it’s highly competitive, low-priced and not particularly reliable. Heather Galler is relatively exceptional for having made it work. For today’s crafter, the entrance to the marketplace more usually comes in three ways: through craft site Etsy; through the seller’s own website; and through art fairs.

1. Etsy is the World’s Biggest Craft Fair

With over 20 million members, 800,000 shops, 17 million items and sales approaching a billion dollars in 2012, Etsy is the most popular place for crafters to sell their goods and their designs.

The site’s most obvious advantages are its ease of use, its low cost and its familiarity to buyers of unique handmade items. A store can be built, designed and stocked within just a few hours and without any knowledge of coding or Web design. The fees are just 20 cents per item and a 3.5 percent commission on the sale. And with 40 million monthly visitors, Etsy is to crafts what Amazon is to books.

Not surprisingly though, it’s also very competitive with no shortage of other people offering their own jewelry ideas to the same mass of buyers. But in practice those competitors also become valuable advisors. The site’s “Teams” function brings together people working in the same field so that they can compare works and offer advice. They’ll tell you whether your prices are too high or too low (both will reduce your sales), explain how to take better pictures and offer tips on promotion.

So once you have your store built, you’ll need to take good photos of your products to pull in buyers, and mingle in the teams to gain suggestions.

And you’ll then need to do some marketing. Etsy is known to buyers; your Etsy store is not. It will be up to you to reach out, find buyers and give them a reason to visit your store rather than anyone else’s.

Olga Zamyatina, who has been selling her handmade stuffed animals on Etsy for about a year, uses her blog and her Facebook page to promote her works. She also offers giveaways on other people’s blogs to bring in new people. In her first twelve months on the site, she made around 100 sales.

Etsy is likely to be your first move. Build the store, talk to other sellers then look for ways to reach your market.

2. Build Your Own Website

Etsy is a good place to begin but it shouldn’t be the only place you sell your products to buyers. Although the service isn’t expensive, sales that you make from your own site won’t take a 3.5 percent commission. Your own site will also allow you to talk more freely about your goods, make special offers, and produce dynamic content — blog posts — that search engines love. That will help you to bring in people searching the Web for the sorts of products you sell.

Once you’ve created a website to support your Etsy store, you’ll find that your store becomes an outlet, one that you can even embed into your site, while the site itself becomes a hub where you can brand your goods and attract buyers directly.

And while Etsy has just one kind of store, you’ll have a much broader choice when it comes to building your own site. You could, for example, buy a unique domain name, rent space on a server such as GoDaddy’s and hire a Web developer or use a template system like MoonFruit to create your site. Or you can use something as simple as a blog.

Olga Ivanova uses Blogger, a blogging service run by Google. Her site, wassupbrothers.blogspot.com, incorporates the name of her store, allows her to add dynamic content that both sells her designs and attracts searchers — and it includes links to her store on Etsy courtesy of apps created by Etsy developers. Had Olga created her blog with WordPress, she would have needed a host and a domain name, but she could also have easily used any one of a number of store plugins to sell directly from her site without sending buyers to Etsy.

It’s the marketing that’s going to be the biggest headache for online sellers both on Etsy and through your own site. You will need to think about search engine optimization. You’ll need to create a Facebook page, post updates and encourage your followers to share pictures of your products. And you’ll need to contact sellers of related goods to form joint promotion opportunities. Capture emails (in return for a short guide that teaches others how to create their own works) and you’ll have a new channel for pushing special offers.

Use your website to attract buyers, offer bargains and talk directly to customers. WordPress gives you the greatest flexibility with minimum cost and fuss. But be prepared to become an expert in online marketing.

3. Art Fairs Make You a Real Life Seller

Both Etsy and your own website have the advantage of selling online, from home. You won’t meet your customers, and while you will have to spend time boxing and mailing inventory, the entire business is run at a distance.

An art fair gives you an opportunity to meet your buyers. You’ll be able to see how they interact with your products, listen to their praise directly and make more sales in a typical day than you’re likely to make in a month online.

And if the fair is juried — and you win — you can start to build the kind of history that can even open gallery doors.

Jewelry maker Anita Summers chose to sell exclusively at art fairs when she saw the level of competition from other jewelry products on Etsy. She does around four sales a year, all in her local area, and says that she makes more in a weekend than many Etsy sellers make in a year.

Although art fairs can be particularly rewarding, their biggest challenge is the up-front costs. A tent and display materials will cost several hundred dollars and you’ll have to add booth fees and insurance too. ArtFairInsiders.com often lists used display materials for sale and some sellers are willing to share a booth. For Anita Summers, those costs were frightening but the investment turned out to be a good one.

“That was definitely a scary cart-before-the-horse feeling for me: you have to shell out the money to buy all that equipment in advance, without knowing how you’re going to do at the fairs,” she said. “[But] I made booth fee and recouped almost all my initial investment in equipment for fairs at my first one.”

Art fairs will also require a bit of research. Visit the fairs before you apply for a booth. Talk to sellers about the market and any special considerations that the place might impose on your display or your choice of inventory, and take note of the sorts of prices other sellers are asking for similar goods.

Selling at art fairs requires a higher level of commitment than selling online, including the purchase of display materials, but the rewards both in terms of profits and the opportunity to meet buyers and other sellers can be enormous.

Selling products that you’ve created is always going to be hugely rewarding. That’s true whether you’re selling online through Etsy or your own website or offline at art fairs or even in galleries. It’s also work. Some of that work — such as the boxing and mailing, writing blog posts that target important search terms, dealing with problems at payment firms like Paypal or Square or handling customer complaints (because even the best sellers get customer complaints) — are going to contain all of the headaches of real work.

But mostly it will be work you love doing something for which you feel a genuine passion.

Correction: In the original version of this post, we used Olga Zamyatina’s maiden name. Sorry.

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For many entrepreneurs, a new business starts with a trip to the bank. They either present their business plan to the loan manager at their local branch and hope for a line of credit or they head to the Bank of Mom and Dad to ask for an advance on their inheritance. But banks these days are holding onto their cash and not all parents are able to write a check to finance all of their children’s business ideas. If venture capitalists and angel investors aren’t willing to fill the gap, you still have options.

Here are five you’ve never considered.

Talk to a Pawnbroker

Pawning goods to borrow money is almost as old as… well, money. In return for handing over an item, the broker lends you a percentage of the item’s resale value. Pay back the loan with interest and you get the item back. Fail to pay the loan and the broker sells your goods for a profit. Traditionally used by low earners in a squeeze or as an advance on payday, some pawn companies have now grown, migrated online and are targeting businesses. Pawntique, for example, lends between 60 and 70 percent of the value of the items it receives from clients, half of whom are businesses. Loans are typically short term, last for three months and are charged at 3-6 percent per month. That’s significantly higher than current 5-6 percent charged by banks annually. According to Pawntique though, 80 percent of loans are repaid.

Advantage: If you’ve got an asset, you can have the money in as little as a day.

Disadvantage: High interest rates, short terms and the loss of your asset if you don’t pay the loan back.

Get Professional Help

The range of different loans makes finding and choosing the right finance product a real challenge. Different banks offer different kinds of loan, each loan will have a different rate, different criteria and be made for a specific purpose. Time spent sorting through each of the options across different lending institutions is time that you’re not spending working on the product.

A loan adviser can help. Multifunding, for example, will do all the comparisons for you, helping to find a lender that meets your needs. In return, it takes 1-2.5 percent of the loan as a commission. The company claims a success rate of 80 percent.

Advantage: The advisor will do the shopping around for the finances, letting you focus on your business.

Disadvantage: You’ll need to shop around to find the right advisor.

Lease What You Need

Your inability to find funding doesn’t just affect you. It also affects the vendors you’d be spending the money on — and they want to help you purchase or at least use their equipment. If you’re wondering how you’re going to buy some giant piece of machinery to make your unique iPad covers or hand carve your Etsy products, it’s worth talking to the manufacturer about financing the purchase through a lease. Even if they can’t do it themselves, you might find that an equipment leasing company will be able to do it for you.

There’s no shortage of firms that can provide this solution and while it won’t supply you with any cash, it might reduce the payments to a level low enough for you to build up enough revenue to pick up a loan at a better rate. Just be sure to factor the fees for the lease into your product manufacturing costs.

Advantage: A lease can make essential equipment affordable.

Disadvantage: Leases are often more expensive than outright purchases and you’ll still need money up-front.

Ask for a Loan Guarantee

The Bank of Mom and Dad might balk at passing you their life savings but they — or someone else — might be willing to use some of their money to help you raise the cash you need from the bank. A loan guarantor tells the bank that if you can’t pay back the loan, they will.

In practice, of course, it’s both more complicated and more expensive than that. The bank needs to be completely certain that the loan guarantor really does have the funds available to cover the loan and that those funds will still be there when the money is due.

Typically, the process begins with the guarantor moving the money into “marginal securities,” an asset that can be used as collateral. They then need to obtain a letter of credit from their bank promising to deliver the funds to the lender at a fixed date. The fee for that letter is usually 1-2 percent of the value of the loan which is often passed on to the recipient. Loan guarantors may also charge a fee for putting everything together, which can be as high as 5 percent of the value of the loan, but if you’ve managed to persuade someone you know to stand up the guarantee they may choose to waive it. Finally, the bank will charge around Prime plus 1 percent for making the loan, even though they’re guaranteed to get the money back and are taking no risk at all.

Advantage: A loan guarantee makes a bank loan easier to obtain.

Disadvantage: It’s big commitment from the guarantor — and you’ll still have to pay fees.

Offer a Royalty on Sales

Loans generally need to be paid back regardless of the health or situation of the company. Royalty financing gives lenders a share of the company’s sales for a set period or until it has paid a set amount.

It’s a technique that appeals to a wide variety of investors who receive something like short term equity in the business they’re financing. Financial consultancy firms often obtain royalty financing from local business development organizations that are set up to support local firms.

The deals can be complex, with negotiations held over the size of the royalty, the total amount to be paid back and the duration of the agreement — as well as the definition of a sale.

Advantage: As an alternative to selling equity, royalty financing ensures that the company remains in the original owner’s hands.

Disadvantage: Can be complex and the amounts to be repaid may be much higher than the cost of a bank loan.

From its website, Stormy Studio looks every part a professional digital production company. The website is beautifully designed, the portfolio is impressive and the announcement of a prestigious award run by the company’s founder, Jon Draper, is enough to give any potential client the confidence to pick up the phone and discuss a project. But a clue to the way the company actually works lies in its description of a “local and world wide team” who can assure “quality, speed and competitive costs.” The business is part-time and run from Draper’s home as he works a full-time job at an animation studio. His employees are himself and his wife and that “local and world wide team”? A freelance graphic designer, music composer, photographer, 3D modeler/animator, and a mobile developer scattered around the world and ready to take on work as it comes in. Stormy Studio is a company based on outsourcing. But while outsourcing is helping Jon Draper achieve his goal of running his own full-time production company, it’s not a solution for everyone at every time.

One problem, although perhaps not the biggest, is the cost. Sharing the work also means sharing the revenue so that winning a job worth, say $5,000, may result in less than a thousand flowing to the company if most of the work is outsourced. When that revenue minus outsourcing fees is earned without effort, outsourcing looks like a good deal, an opportunity to make a profit while allowing others to do the work.

From a Specialist to a Manager

In practice though, that’s not what happens. Business owners like Jon Draper will still be doing work even if they’re outsourcing the bulk of the labor. Instead of doing the fun things like design or modeling, they’ll be doing the less interesting (at least for someone who studied animation and production) tasks of marketing, negotiating and project management.

And they’ll be taking on risk. Outsourcing work to freelancers means taking on a commitment to pay them regardless of what happens to the client. It’s not unusual to find that a client at some point will either delay or dispute payment, forcing the entrepreneur to pay out of pocket until the dispute is settled.

If you can’t guarantee that the freelancer will be paid, even if it means dipping into your own cash until you receive the money from your client, then you shouldn’t be outsourcing.

Those kinds of problems though are relatively rare. More common and much harder to answer is the question of what to outsource. Hand out work that you’re capable of doing yourself and you will be changing your job from hands-on designer, copywriter, animator or whatever it may be to a job in management and sales — fine, if that’s what you want to do. At least you’ll be doing it for your own firm.

More common though is the outsourcing of work that the company’s founder lacks the skill to do. A company formed by an animator, for example, may well need to look to a freelance music composer to produce the score for a film or a specialist modeler to generate the 3D animation.

That, though, raises new issues. Even if the entrepreneur lacks enough skill and knowledge to do the freelancer’s work, he or she must still have enough expertise to be able to judge its quality. And having acquired that expertise, there’s always the temptation to enhance it so that the next time a client needs a film with a score, a particular kind of writing or some photography to match their website, the entrepreneur will be able to provide it themselves.

Outsourcing work to experts is one solution to a problem. The other solution — and it can be a big temptation — is to regard that request as revealing the holes in your own knowledge and an opportunity to become a better all-round professional.

A Freelancer’s Time Isn’t Yours

Timing is an issue too. Stormy Studio’s promise that its worldwide team means faster service is only true if you take into account the benefits of different time zones. The company is based in the UK which means any local freelancers will have completed a day’s work just as a client in the United States is checking his morning email.

But the distance has a downside. Freelancers work for multiple clients and the people who hire them only have control over a small number of their hours each day or each week. When a client tells a traditional company that it needs a product right away, the boss can tell the team to drop what it’s doing and focus on a more urgent task for now. Someone who hires a freelancer can only stress the urgency and hope that the person he hired has a flexible enough schedule to be able to take it into account. It doesn’t always work that way.

But the biggest reason to think twice before outsourcing work to a freelancer is the hardest to resolve. You have to trust the freelancer to produce work that’s as good as yours.

The client isn’t going to care who did the actually work. He won’t know that someone in Romania wrote the code or that the animation came from Russia. He’ll only know that it came from you — and if the work is shoddy or below professional standard, it’s your name that he’ll be warning people against.

Outsourcing work means putting your reputation in the hands of freelancers whom you might not know and who will care far less about your name than you do.

None of this to say that you should never outsource work to others or that you should try to do everything yourself. If you’re a talented designer it makes sense to hire an equally talented programmer to do the coding. But you need to be sure that:

• you have the money to pay your freelancer;
• are outsourcing work that you can’t do better yourself;
• that the freelancer can produce the work based on the schedule agreed with the client;
• and that the work really will be as good as yours.

Get all that right, and you’ll be running your own virtual business too.

There’s no easy way to make money doing the things you love. Whether you’re into photography or painting, ball games or biking, you’re going to find plenty of competition for the money that people are willing to spend on that activity. But earning money from a passion isn’t a zero-sum game, and not all competition is equal. Only a small number of the people who enjoy taking pictures, for example, take pictures that are sellable. Only a small number of those people  will even try to sell them — and an even smaller number will know how to sell them.

Combine your talent and expertise with knowledge of the right sales channels for your works and you can make money doing something you currently do for fun. It might not be anything like as hard as you think.

Ebay

Ebay is not the most obvious place to look when you’re hoping to sell your art. It’s best known as the world’s largest yard sale, a place to look for used items that other people don’t want. But the site does have a section for artists to sell their own work and it’s one that’s remarkably effective. Artists can sell just about anything they’ve made themselves, including paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture and textile art. It’s where a number of artists have made their first steps as professionals and discovered that they really could turn a love for making pictures into a full-time job.

What’s Easy?

Listing your items is easy. Anyone can sign up, place their works for auction and hope to make a sale. Ebay isn’t a place to push avant garde works or edgy art but it is possible to sell relatively small, commercial pieces that are priced at less than $50. Those kinds of revenues won’t make you rich but they can give you an audience who will pass on your name. It’s an easy way in to selling your art.

What’s Hard?

Ebay is competitive and you’ll have to hustle to find buyers. Tell your friends that you have works on the site and ask them to tell their friends. Use the Groups and Discussion pages to join the community; they will include buyers who will want to know about your offers. Don’t expect to sell works for huge sums but think of it as a way to push small, unchallenging works of popular subjects like cats, dogs and angels.

Etsy

If Ebay is a yard sale with a little art section, Etsy is a craft fair with a little vintage section. There’s no bidding here; you set your price and hope to find people who will pay it. The categories range from art and photography to jewelry and home designs.

What’s Easy?

Like Ebay, listing is easy although there is a greater emphasis on good photography on the sales page. Ebay’s sellers are often happy to settle for snaps of their products; Etsy’s are more likely to put some effort into choosing backgrounds, posing their works and often even placing them on models. Your creative efforts won’t end when your piece is complete.

What Etsy makes very easy, though, is your entry into a community of people who appreciate art and craft. The people you’ll be chatting with in the forums will be specialists in painting, modeling or metalwork. List on Etsy and you’ll already feel that you have crossed the line from hobbyist to artist.

What’s Hard?

Like Ebay, the competition on Etsy is tight — and it’s also high quality. On the auction site, buyers have to browse around to find items they might like; on Etsy, works that are at least as beautiful as yours are never more than a click away. Again, the forums and “teams,” targeted groups that cover a particular topic, will help. Sellers are buyers as well as competitors and they will pass your name around if they like what they see. They’ll also give you advice on what’s working on your sales pages.

Pricing will be tricky too. On Ebay, the buyers will set the price; on Etsy, you’re going to have to shop around, look at other stores and produce a price that’s competitive and which takes into account the cost of the material and the time involved in the production. Don’t be tempted to cut prices to attract sales though. Sellers usually find that buyers will pay a fair price for work they value.

Galleries

While anyone can list the results of their craft expertise on Etsy and Ebay, galleries have gatekeepers — which is why they’re so prestigious. There’s a huge difference between creating another store on an online craft site and holding a show in a downtown gallery. And getting in isn’t as hard as it sounds.

What’s Easy?

Getting your foot in the door is easy. Gallery owners are interested in seeing your work, and they’ll give it a fair review. Draw up a list of the galleries in your area, visit them to see the kinds of work they tend to show and while you’re there ask how you can make an appointment to show your work to the gallery owner. You’ll probably find that you’ll need to call in and fix a time. In many galleries, seizing the opportunity is relatively simple. Making the most of it is a lot harder.

What’s Hard?

The hard part is persuading the gallery owner to take you on. Remember that galleries only make money if your work sells, when they usually take a commission of 50 percent. If they give time to your work and it doesn’t sell, they’re not making any money.

You’ll need a portfolio of quality work that matches the kinds of art the gallery usually shows — edgy pieces for avant-garde galleries; traditional items for galleries serving more conservative collectors. You’ll need an artist bio that says who you are, and if you’ve managed to win any juried art shows, you’ll be able to prove that you’ve already persuaded your peers and a market that your work is desirable.

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Working in cafes might be one of the biggest advantages of freelancing but your choice of “coffice” will have a dramatic effect on your ability to get work done. Even Starbucks varies from site to site with different locations attracting different types of people, building a different atmosphere and influencing your mood and the speed with which you work. When companies like Google and Apple put so much thought into designing office space that enhances creativity and maximizes productivity, it pays not just to know your local coffee places but to understand which work you should be doing in which Java bar workspace.

The first thing you should be considering is the simplest: electrical outlets. Older cafes especially can have relatively few of these but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should give them a wide berth. It just means that you’re going to have to get your work done before the battery in your laptop calls it a day.

If you know that a café is short on electricity, you’re going to be sprinting. Depending on your machine and its age, you could have as little as two or three hours before your computer shuts itself down. That might be only as long as you wanted to stay anyway but knowing that lingering could shut your computer down in mid-flow will help to keep you focused on the job and your eyes on the screen.

Use powerless cafés for jobs that you can — and should — complete in short sprints of focused attention such as logo designs and short blog posts.

Don’t Bring Your Own Music

Music will play a role too. While you can bring headphones and plug yourself into your own tunes, listening to sounds that make you feel at home while sitting in a café surrounded by strangers can create an odd sense of dissonance. If you’re going to retreat that far into yourself, you may as well as well work from home.

Usually, the music you’ll be working to will be the choice of the café manager — and it will affect the pace at which you work. Fast rock is often more annoying than helpful when you’re trying to get things done but it can provide a useful rhythm for projects that don’t require too much creative thought such as data management or simple image editing. The kind of slower jazz more often found in cafes is really intended to enable conversation than produce a good work environment. As music to build databases to, it’s more likely to have you drifting back to the Internet than sticking to the task at hand but it can form a background strong enough to drown out the details of surrounding conversation without dominating thought. For longer blog posts, soft design work and careful debugging, you should be aiming for a café that has both plenty of space to plug in and the kind of soft music that won’t distract you.

Café-Working is a Networking Opportunity

But you’ll also want to be surrounded by the right people. This is an aspect of café-working that’s surprisingly overlooked. If you live in an area near a college, you can be confident that the café will be used to people sitting down, setting up their machines and staying for hours with a single cup of latte. But their books will also be spread across the tables, their earphones will be plugged into their computers (so you’re likely to get a chorus of second-hand tinny bass sounds) and you’ll struggle to find a table too, especially as the exams close in. You might not have to worry about being bothered by baristas who want you to order more or leave, but you also might feel too out of place to get much done — unless what you want to get done is studying a new programming language.

Alternatively, you can skip the student cafes and head to a Starbucks at the bottom of an office block. These are often the best places to work. Like student bars, the baristas will be used to people using their tables as workspaces. And because your co-drinkers are working too, when you look up from your keyboard, the sight of others being productive should make you feel guilty enough to dive back to your keyboard.

The meetings being held at neighboring tables will also help to remind you that you’re in the middle of a work day and doing the kinds of things that employees do between nine and five rather than taking a day off from a real office or biding your time until a proper job comes along.

And it’s just possible that the café can provide some valuable networking opportunities. Café-working is never the same as co-working but when the same space is being used by different people doing different types of work, the differences aren’t that big.

Pick an office-based café for long-term projects where you can build connections with other productive coffee-drinkers.

And the type of service on offer will also affect your ability to work. Cafes that have table service are more likely to have pushy waiters who want a flow of tip-leaving customers at tables. While tipping generously can help to keep them on your side (and is a good idea anyway) 20 percent of the price of a latte is still much less than 20 percent of the price of two lattes, a sandwich and a salad. In general, for all projects you want to avoid cafés with table service in favor of baristas who care less what you do with your order or how long you take to drink it.

Most freelancers can find more than one work-friendly café in a short walk, drive or bike ride from their home office. Your familiarity with those cafes and your ability to match the work you want to do with the place you want to do it will help to raise your productivity and ensure that you get things done while you’re sipping your beans.

The problems with all of the productivity systems that friends recommend, experts sell and self-help guides suggest is that they take so long to understand and implement that by the time you’ve finished putting them all in place, you could have shot a viral video, redesigned your website and written The Great American Novel. They take more time than they save. There are, though, a few little tweaks that you can make to your workday that will save you bags of time and massively boost your productivity.

Streamline Your Gmail

I don’t need to know this right now….

If you’re not using Gmail, you really should be, at least for one of your email addresses. A cloud-based email system lets you collect messages wherever you are and it also provides a form of automated back-up for your archives. Why pay a back-up service a monthly fee to hold on to copies of your old projects when everything you’ve ever sent to a client goes through Gmail and can be dug out of a Sent folder?

A couple of little settings in Gmail can have a big effect on your productivity:

1. Restrict Your Mail Notifications

David Allen’s advice, echoed by Tim Ferriss, to only check email at set times of the day is nice in theory. In practice, though, it’s hard to ignore the flag at the bottom of the screen notifying you that you’ve got a new message. But Gmail lets you set those notifications so that you’re only interrupted when you receive something important.

Press the cog icon in the top right corner and choose Settings.

Under the General tab, scroll down to “Desktop Notifications.” Set “Chat notifications” to off and “Important mail notifications” to on.

You’ll be leaving it up to Google to decide which of your messages are important but as long as you’re flagging messages and marking emails, its algorithms tend to do a pretty good job. You’ll be less likely to be interrupted by notifications about newsletters or junk.

2. Filter out the Jokes

Changing your notifications will affect the intrusive popups at the bottom of your screen. But they won’t stop you receiving the kinds of useless emails that friends and family insist on passing around.

And it doesn’t matter how often you ask to be left out, there will always be someone who insists on making you a link in some chain email, sharing a corny joke or showing a picture of a lolcat drinking from a toilet bowl. That’s just more junk to have to open, delete and push out of your mailbox.

But with Gmail you can filter them out at source.

Under Settings, open the Filters tab and click the link marked “Create a new filter” at the bottom of the page.

In the From field, Enter the names of the people who usually send you junk. In the Subject field, write “fw OR fwd.”

Press the “Create filter with this search” link, then mark the checkboxes “Mark as read,” “Never mark as important” and “Apply the label.” If you don’t have a label already in place for joke emails, then create one by choosing “Create new label” from the menu. Finally, press Create Filter.

Forwarded emails from those people won’t turn up in your notifications and they won’t stick out of your inbox, but you’ll still be able to review them to make sure you didn’t miss anything important.

Make the Cloud Work for You

A huge amount has been written about the benefits of storing documents in the cloud and how hard drives are a thing of the past. In practice, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, partly because the Web isn’t always available when you need it and partly because cloud services have a habit of going down.

They also add steps to your workflow, forcing you to save your work in additional folders, and their limitations mean that you either have to shell out cash or scatter your files across multiple services.

1. Sync Automatically Google Cloud Connect

After outages, the biggest problem with storing documents in the cloud is having to upload them. For a PC user syncing to iCloud, it means opening a browser, surfing to the iCloud website, choosing a folder and manually uploading. But even Dropbox users have to choose a second folder to make their saves.

Users of Google Drive, however, can install Google Cloud Connect as a plugin for their Office suite.

The free plugin installs automatically and adds a bar below the menu ribbon. You can choose to upload every document to your Google Drive account whenever you save it, or you can select manual syncing and upload only those documents you want to keep online by simply pressing a button. It makes saving your documents online a breeze.

2. Organize Your Cloud Services

Another downside of cloud services is that they’re limited. Dropbox gives you just 2.5 gigabytes for free. iCloud and Google Drive supply 5 gigabytes before they start charging. That means that in theory you have 12.5 gigabytes of free storage on the main services before you have to start thinking about opening your wallet. But when you’re spreading your files among several different online storage options, you risk wasting time checking each of them to find the file you need.

Use Google Drive for documents.

You’ll be able to upload automatically from Word, and if you want to access the files from a mobile device the Google Drive app is well designed and easy to use.

Use iCloud for Images

Download and install the iCloud Control Panel. On your iPhone or iPad, open Settings > iCloud and set Photo Stream to “on.” Once you’ve logged in, the Pictures folder on your PC will contain a folder called “Photo Stream.”

Any pictures taken on your iPhone or iPad and shared with a folder in the Photo Stream will appear automatically in the Pictures folder on your computer.

Use Evernote for Reading

Instead of copying and pasting text from Web pages into document files or favoriting addresses in your browser, download Evernote, then install the Evernote Web Clipper plugin.

You’ll get a small button on the top right corner of the browser that will let you save pages automatically to your Evernote account which will be synced with Evernote across all your devices.

What Felix Baumgartner Taught Me About Taking the Plunge

Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner’s leap from a balloon 128,000 feet above the Earth was pretty unique. He broke records that had stood for more than fifty years, fell faster than the speed of sound and dropped further than anyone had fallen before. None of us is likely to come close to his achievement. But the way he reached his goal, the discipline and determination with which he accomplished a dream big enough for him to tell the world afterwards that he’s “done,” has much to teach freelancers and entrepreneurs about reaching their targets.

Preparation Counts and So Does Patience

The YouTube webcast of the event (which itself broke a record by streaming to 8 million people) showed everything. We saw footage of Baumgartner walking down the runway before dawn, watched the balloon inflate, saw the crane chase the capsule down the tarmac then sat through two-and-a-half hours of spacesuit and mission control as the balloon rose slowly to the stratosphere.

What we didn’t see though was the work that went into building for that rise. The jump was seven years in the making and followed two test jumps earlier this year from 71,581 feet and 96,640 feet. It was also the culmination of a career that had seen Baumgartner leap from the top of the Petronas Towers and the hand of Jesus’s statue in Rio. Few of the 8 million people watching on their computers might have heard of Baumgartner before the jump but he hadn’t come from nowhere. Before taking on a project of this size he had made sure that he had the experience and the preparation needed to make it work.

While we might not have seen his preparation, we did see his patience. For nearly three hours Baumgartner sat unmoving as his capsule rose above New Mexico, shot through the jet stream then reached its maximum height. There was no in-flight entertainment system, no stewardess with duty-free and no iPad to fling birds at pigs while he waited for the time to pass.

Both those aspects of the event — the preparation we didn’t see and the Zen-like patience we did — are vital to success at freelancing and business-building too.

When you begin offering your services or launching a business, you’ll need to be sure that you know what you’re doing and can meet your clients’ needs. You’ll need to build a portfolio that proves your experience and shows that you can hit the target.

And you’ll need patience to sit through those first months when work is light and you rise slowly to your peak.

You Can Always Learn from Others

All of the attention during the jump was on Baumgartner, the man who was putting most at risk. But it was also clear that he wasn’t alone. Like a space launch, the event had a mission control filled with people sitting in front of computers and keeping track of the capsule’s progress. Most notably, it also had a veteran: Joe Kittinger, the current holder of the longest freefall record and — at Baumgartner’s request — the only person allowed to speak to Baumgartner during the ascent and fall.

It was the 84-year old Kittinger, not Art Thompson, the project’s technical director, who took Baumgartner through the 40 different checks necessary to ensure that the capsule and suit were working and to enable Baumgartner to disengage from the seat and prepare to jump.

Although Baumgartner valued the help of specialists and experts, he understood that nothing can replace the experience of someone who’s actually been there and done that.

The same is true for freelancers and entrepreneurs. You might hire specialist designers or niched copywriters. You might depend on developers and programmers in the way that Baumgartner chose expert balloon makers and suitmakers. But when it comes to decision-making and guidance, you want to be talking to people who really understand you. You want to be at conferences mingling with other people in your field, and you want to be on forums getting advice from other freelancers and entrepreneurs who have risen and taken the plunge.

Something Will Always Go Wrong

It was during one of those early checks that the first of three problems hit the jump. As Kittinger was taking Baumgartner through the checklist, it became clear that the heater in the visor wasn’t working. It sounded like a minor problem — far smaller than the winds that had whipped away the balloon and caused the postponement of the first launch. But it meant that the visor fogged up when Baumgartner exhaled, obscuring his vision. He had to make a decision: to abort the jump and return to the ground or continue and hope that he could see enough to perform his checks and complete the task.

The second problem wasn’t a problem at all, but to Baumgartner it looked like one. To open the door, he had to decompress the capsule. Only when the pressure outside the capsule was the same as the pressure inside would he be able to pull the door open. But Baumgartner had no way to check the internal air pressure so tugged on the door too early. Watch the film and you can hear the concern in his voice as he reports that the door won’t open. It took Kittinger to assure him calmly that when the pressures equalize the door would slide back.

The third problem though was the biggest and the most dangerous. As Baumgartner approached the speed of sound, he began to spin rapidly on all axes. It was a moment that the daredevil later described as “like being in hell.” If he couldn’t stop spinning there was a good chance that he would black out. If he deployed a small parachute to reduce the drag, he wouldn’t be able to break any speed records. He had to make a decision and quickly: to bet his life on the experience and knowledge that would allow him to control his spin or abandon his attempt to break the sound barrier.

As you build your career, you won’t have to make a decision that momentous but you will face a series of crises, some more serious than others — and a few that could cost you your company.

Things will go wrong. Projects will fail, clients will leave, contractors will let you down and you’ll find that you’ve taken on more than you can chew. Sometimes it will be clear that you need to push on through. At other times, you’ll listen to the advice of a friend or mentor who will reassure you when the situation looks bleak. And sometimes, you’ll bet it all on your knowledge and experience.

When you’re ready to do that, you’re ready to launch your business and ride it into the stratosphere.

The Pareto Principle states that “for many events” 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes. Also known as the 80-20 Rule, it’s used by business owners, freelancers and entrepreneurs as a reminder that 80 percent of their income derives from just 20 percent of their efforts. If they could just identify the areas in which their effort pays off the most, focus their energy on those activities and outsource, improve or kill off the rest, they’d be able to boost their income. In practice, though, the “rule” is rarely helpful, especially for freelancers.

The principle is named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who noticed in 1906 that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. He developed the idea after counting the 80 percent of the peas in his garden that came from 20 percent of the pods. Since then, the principle has also been seen in global wealth distribution where the richest 20 percent of the population is said to earn around 80 percent of the income, and even among the world’s top ten earners, Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett together own as much as the next seven billionaires combined.

But can that same principle be applied to a business environment? Does 80 percent of your income derive from 20 percent of your clients? Does 80 percent of your website traffic come from 20 percent of your traffic sources? Are 80 percent of your freelance bookings made for 20 percent of your services? And can you focus your business on the 20 percent of it that’s worth the most?

One Client Paid Seven Times More Than the Others

One person who tried to answer the question is freelance writer Ali Hale. Writing on the website of personal development trainer Sid Savara, she laid out in detail the income generated at the time by her five freelance clients.

• Client A pays $420/month for a blog
• Client B pays $400/month for blog
• Client C pays $80/month for a blog
• Client D pays $40/month for a blog
• Client E pays $284/month for a magazine article

At first glance, the principle appears to be close to being true: her three top-paying clients make up about 90 percent of her income. Break down the figures by article and the accuracy of the Pareto Principle appears even stronger. Hale’s four blogging clients pay her an average of $40 per post but one article written for a magazine delivers more than seven times the amount she’d make writing for a blog.

“This means that 5% of my writing outputs produces 23% of my income,” she writes. “This definitely comes closer to what the Pareto principle predicts – especially as many people say that the 80/20 figures can be adjusted to suit.  The easy conclusion to draw from this analysis is if I could write five magazine articles per month, I could replace my other income streams entirely.”

But, of course, it’s not as simple as that. Hale hasn’t factored the time taken to earn those different incomes. A $284 magazine article might deliver more than seven times the amount generated by a blog post but it also takes her at least four times as long to research and write. It’s still more profitable but not seven times as profitable. And those gigs are much harder to win. Hale’s magazine client only needs one article from her each month (while client B appears happy to take as many as ten.) Finding additional, high-paying magazine clients is much harder and takes much longer than winning blogging work, another factor she has to consider in her calculations.

Hale went so far as to measure the amount of time she spent on each of her tasks and compare them with the amount earned. On average, she noted, she spent:

• 40 minutes writing a post
• 5-10 minutes editing each post
• 5-20 minutes formatting, uploading and “administrating” each post (tasks that include adding HTML code, finding images and answering comments.)

“The figures were fairly consistent across the different blogs,” she writes, “and though some activities do not directly produce income (such as answering comments), I consider them a part of the job of producing a blog post, and further recognize that good communication with a blog editor and readers is a point in my favor when an editor is considering keeping me on.”

So although a small portion of her clients contributed the bulk of her overall income, the hourly rate she earned from each was largely the same. The only kind of client that paid significantly more —the magazine buyer — requires a large up-front investment of time spent querying with a low likelihood of seeing any return at all.

It’s the Numbers Not the Principle That Counts

That doesn’t mean that the Pareto Principle is entirely useless. It is vague and broad, encompassing everything from effort and time to income and hourly rates so that it’s always possible to place 80 percent of one thing alongside 20 percent of another, even when there’s no causal link between them. But looking for those figures and measuring them is helpful in itself.

Hale, a freelancer already working effectively, has little to gain from the Pareto Principle, but knowing that she spends an average of 40 minutes to write a blog post, with the time growing or shrinking depending on value and length, is a useful piece of business intelligence. She’ll need that information to make accurate bids, plan her day and supply estimates of delivery dates. And if some of her time is spent completing tasks that don’t bring in revenue directly, such as communicating with clients or reading journals, she knows to count that time as necessary to her production and business growth.

The Pareto Principle can always be found in any business and any endeavor — and that includes freelancing. But while the principle itself isn’t particularly useful, the measurements they require are. As long as they don’t include the number of peas in your garden.

Open Twitter’s advanced search page, and beneath the options  for words, people and places, you’ll find a section marked “other” that contains four checkboxes. Those checkboxes allow users to filter their search results to focus on retweets but also on posts that include question marks, “positive” smilies, or “negative” frowns. It’s the closest Twitter has come to fulfilling its promise as a market research tool for businesses looking to keep track of user conversations. And like much of that promise, it’s unreliable, inaccurate, and actually requires a very different set of strategies to produce real, usable market intelligence.

The biggest challenge with using social media for market research is apparent in those search options. Social media users have multiple ways of marking their like of a product or a company beyond a simple smiley; unhappy faces aren’t used to mark dislike as often as a clear expression of hate or a negative hashmark; not all questions on social media, especially on a character-limited site like Twitter, are grammatical enough to carry question marks; and not everyone who uses the product or company is on social media. Any business that relied on Twitter’s search page to track comments would only be picking up a fraction of a picture generated by the small number of people who happened to use those emoticons or are grammatical enough to always mark their questions. For a more accurate picture, the companies would need to look beyond Twitter’s quick suggestions and test their own search terms.

In other words, to discover the complaints of their customers who happened to be on social media, they’d first need to know what those complaints were.

We Love/Hate Your Customer Service

The same limitation is true for businesses that look beyond general statements to comments posted directly to their timelines. Open any verified timeline now, including those belonging to businesses, and you’ll find that you’re offered two kinds of content. The default is to show only those comments made by the business. Press “All,” though, and you’ll also see those posts directed to people who have written to the timeline.

So Virgin Atlantic’s Twitter timeline, for example, is filled with competition announcements and links to content. But its replies are customer service posts — and many of those posts are made in response to negative comments. From a random selection of ten replies posted over fifteen hours, half were made in response to complaints about pricing, customer treatment or loyalty points. The same is true of the company’s Facebook page where six out of the last ten postings were complaints ranging from air miles to broken entertainment system controllers. And yet, Virgin Atlantic has a customer satisfaction rating as high as 80 percent.

Even looking at the positive comments to see what the company is doing well can generate a confusing picture. While one customer on Facebook reported being put on hold by customer service for a long time, another raved about the person they spoke to.

If businesses can’t look to search to dig out a complete range of comments, both positive and negative, and they can’t rely on the queries they receive to measure or identify areas of satisfaction, what can they do to monitor their market on social media platforms?

One commonly recommended option is to track shares, likes and retweets. While those actions by fans will be a measure of the likeability of a particular post, they might also reveal the kinds of information that customers enjoy seeing and want their friends to see. On Virgin Atlantic’s page, for example, the most popular posts are aspirational. A picture of birds flying south for the winter won 600 likes and 35 shares. In comparison, an earlier announcement of new amenity kits picked up 317 likes. The difference could suggest that customers are more motivated by the thought of getting away than by the kind of toothbrush they’ll be using on the plane — information that might be useful for the company’s marketing team. But a post announcing that five eyeshades designed by Swarovski and worth £2,500 each picked up more than 900 likes and 225 shares, and even that figure is tiny compared to the 2,180 people who liked a picture of palm trees posted on the Facebook page of British Airways, a direct competitor which consistently ranks lower in customer satisfaction than Virgin Atlantic.

Again, looking solely at the stats reveals a mixed and perhaps misleading picture, which is why a better option is to pull away from the firehose of comments and ask your own questions. The timeline of drinks brand Ribena, for example, is filled with questions aimed at the page’s 625,000 followers. In mid-September, the company asked which flavor of Ribena customers were carrying in their bag.

In theory, that should have given the firm a snapshot of the relative popularity of the different flavors in which the drink is available. In practice though, retail sales figures would have provided an even more accurate figure and almost all of the questions on the page are intended not to deliver information but to generate “likes” that push the brand into their users’ timelines.

The Five Benefits of Social Media Market Research

In June this year, market research firm nmincite published a white paper noting five characteristics that made social media a valuable platform for market research. They included

an “infinite panel,” that “provides a lens into the beliefs, needs, desires and behaviors of millions of people across all consumer segments” and which is unlimited in size; “hidden insights” revealed by follower comments; complaints and praise made in customers’ own words; real time commentary; and low-cost monitoring.

In practice, though, when you use social media for market research, you usually get what you pay for: a small selection of comments with an emphasis on complaints drawn from a limited cross-section and which can be as contradictory as they are unhelpful. And on the rare occasion that you do pick up some useful data, you might well find that your own figures were fuller and more accurate anyway.

Social media can be a valuable way to spread the word of your business and your brand, to deal with customer complaints and to build up a general impression of  what customers think. But for the most part, your customer surveys and sales data will tell you a lot more.

In January 2012, a woman in Kauai answered an ad on Craigslist for what looked like a dream job. The advertiser was an energy firm called DSL Oil and the opening was for a work-at-home position. She applied, won the job, and the company sent her a check for $3,958, instructing her to keep $200 and wire the rest immediately back to their account. The request was strange enough for the woman to grow suspicious and she refused to send the money. She then received an email apparently from the FBI demanding that she send the cash within twenty four hours or face arrest and certain jail. The jobseeker contacted her local FBI office which informed her that she had been the victim of a “work at home” scam. The check was fake; her wire, which needed to be sent before the check bounced, would have been real.

The story, told on the FBI’s website, isn’t unusual. A search for “work at home jobs” on Google produces more than two billion results but it’s estimated that for every legitimate telecommuting job advertised online, as many as seventy are scams. Nor are those scams new. Back in 2007, when Sara Sutton Fell started looking for a flexible job that would fit her life as  new mom, she too found she herself sorting through a series of suspicious offers and ads that looked too good to be true. Fell, though, had been the co-founder of JobDirect, a job site that was later sold to Korn Ferry International. She knew that flextime and telecommuting jobs do exist and that companies were increasingly willing to advertise them. Still working from home, she launched FlexJobs.com, a jobs site specializing in telecommuting and part-time work but which would check all offers and the companies that make them before posting them on the site.

Flexible Jobs Have Risen 400 Percent

Today, FlexJobs lists more than 10,000 flexible positions in more than 50 career categories. More than 300,000 jobseekers have signed up over the last five years, applying for jobs that range from a telecommuting “Senior Enterprise Account Executive” to a part-time theatrical “Stage Manager” and from a “Freelance Traffic Manager” to a “Digital Design Teacher.” Each month the site releases a “Flexible Jobs Index” that shows the most popular career categories now advertising work with telecommuting or flexible hours. Medical and Health usually tops the list but other popular job categories include Education, Customer Service, Administration, and Sales.

Those positions are becoming increasingly popular. The number of jobs advertised on the site has increased 400 percent over the last five years, says Fell, with a number of major employers turning to telecommuting as a way of saving money. After the IRS closed a number of offices recently in a cost-cutting measure, a series of home-based positions with the IRS turned up on FlexJobs.

“More companies are taking advantage of the cost-benefits of flexible work options like telecommuting, and technology is making it easier than ever to work from home or branch out as a freelancer,” says Fell.

The site works by reversing the usual business model for jobs sites in favor of the model used on freelance sites. While Monster.com is free for jobseekers but charges advertisers, FlexJobs, like Elance, is free for businesses but charges jobseekers and freelancers. The fees range from $14.95 a month to $49.95 for a year’s membership. In return for their payment, users receive two services: aggregation that puts thousands of flexible jobs in one place; and the research that guarantees that those offers are genuine, safe and worthwhile. Each day the company’s researchers spend a combined 50 hours finding, screening and listing flexible job opportunities. Around 400 employers have also passed through an approval process to list jobs directly on the site.

FlexJobs is a Virtual Company

Those researchers are working flexibly too. The company’s 25 staff are scattered across the United States, with one employee in Europe. All work from home. Each week they get together virtually for departmental and company meetings.

“We really don’t run into many difficulties other than the occasional dropped call during our weekly conference calls,” says Fell. “Otherwise, we communicate very similarly to the way we would in an office. We email, IM, use Yammer [and] share documents.”

Although the list of team members posted on FlexJobs’ website includes just one man (another male worker prefers not to put his picture on the site), according to Fell, that division is not representative of the site’s userbase. A survey found that the site’s jobseekers divided evenly between men and women, a demographic picture in line with figures produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Bureau, which looked at workers who worked from home part-time, also found that that telecommuters are more likely to have a college degree and to work in a managerial or professional occupation. (Other research has found that telecommuters typically earn $58,000 per year, with more 75 percent making more than $65,000 per year.)

Surprisingly though, parents, says the Bureau, are only slightly more common among telecommuters than among regular office workers, suggesting that the need to spend more time with the children isn’t the main factor driving workers out of the office and back into the home. When asked why they were looking for a job they could do away from the traditional workplace 79 percent of FlexJobs’ users said they were looking for better work/life balance. Eighty-two percent, however, said that they wanted to be able to work without the distractions of in-office colleagues.

But while the work itself might be taking place in an untraditional (and more comfortable) environment, the way to win those jobs will be very familiar.

“Prepare as you would for seeking for any job,” advises Fell. “Send in a resume specifically for the job you are looking for with a cover letter that makes you stand out. Use your network to help find you an ‘in’ for the company you are applying for. Demonstrate that you can work flexibly.”

And watch out for the scams.

As the yawns that followed the release of Apple’s new hardware fade away, it’s worth remembering that the company that gave us the tablet computer, the ultrabook laptop and the slate smartphone isn’t always so clever. In fact, look beyond the revolutionary first iterations of the hardware his firm designed and you can see that when it comes to software, Steve Jobs was never as fastidious as he was made out to be — and that under Tim Cook, that tradition is continuing.

Take what has to be users’ biggest bugbear in Apple apps: the company’s tendency towards skeuomorphism, the implementation in design of elements that were necessary in previous technologies but are now outdated. Open the Notes app that comes with the iPad, for example, and you’ll get what looks like a block of lined, yellow paper, complete with a hint at torn sheets. The edge is bordered with an imitation of stitched leather and a fake pocket holds dates. Even the font is closer to Comic Sans than Times New Roman. The idea is to make us feel that we’re actually writing in a notebook rather than storing ideas in a thin computer.

But it’s not as though we’re new to making notes on simple word processors and need to be slowly eased in to jotting ideas onto a screen. Look for “notes” in the App Store, and you’ll get nearly 2,500 results for the iPad (and nearly double that amount for the iPhone). Even when those apps do employ their own skeuomorphism — as FiftyThree does with Paper’s moleskine-style notebooks — the combination of technology and tradition still works much better than Apple’s attempt which is just unimaginative, a throwback to an age that Apple helped destroy. If Apple had made the iPhone with the same approach it took in the development of Notes, the number pad would be rotary and the device would be six inches thick.

Looks Just Like Paper

That skeuomorphism hasn’t disappeared. It turned up again in the company’s most recent release: the Podcast app spun out of iTunes. Press Play on a podcast with no cover art, and you’ll be given a picture of two tape reels. This from the company that gave use the album carousel and did more to move music away from cassettes and into the digital age than any other.

But it wasn’t the poor design that ensured Podcast has received 452 one-star ratings in the App Store — more than four times the number of five-star ratings it’s collected. The bugs did that. Reviewers have complained of sluggish start-ups and hanging processes. Users have complained of sudden crashes, failure to sync, an inability to understand when a podcast has been played, the random removal of unplayed podcasts, restricted search options, subscription failures and mid-play stoppages. One user suggested in the customer ratings that “Apple developers decided to create this app while intoxicated.”

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised though. The Podcast app did come from iTunes, a program that remains essential for Apple’s mobile devices despite the company’s constant attempts to persuade us that we’re living in a post-PC age. Not only is iTunes necessary though, it’s also poor, a good example of a program that tries to do too much and ends up doing none of them well.

Leave aside its retention of Ping (at least for now), the biggest social media failure since MySpace (which was at least popular once). Leave aside too, the question of ownership of media files which is a rights issue rather than a software problem. And leave aside, too, iTunes’ habit of losing files so that when you press play instead of hearing the opening notes, you get an exclamation mark and a regret that you hadn’t backed up your entire music library on an external device. Focus instead on the poor functionality that has turned what should have been a simple media manager into a bloated store/audio player/encoder/video player and so much more into a confusing mess of counterintuitive options and dialogs. Try to slide an app from your iTunes Apps library onto your iPad, for example, and you’ll get both a starred number indicating that you’re about to add an app and a “no entry” sign indicating that you’re not adding anything. Slide it back and the “no entry” sign turns into a plus suggesting that you’re making a new entry, even though the app is already there.

Don’t Sync! You’ve Been Warned

The solution that Apple expects you to figure out is to open the Apps tab in the iPad part of iTunes and check the “Sync Apps” box. When iTunes then asks if you’re “sure you want to sync apps” and warns you that “all existing apps and their data” will be replaced by apps from the iTunes library, the warning is frightening enough to have you unplugging your iPad and trying to keep it as far away from your computer as possible.

iTunes isn’t the only landmark Apple software that’s a long way from perfect. Pages is deliberately incompatible with Dropbox, despite that service’s ubiquity and even though automated syncing to iCloud takes place only on mobile devices. (On your Mac, you’ll need to remember to upload your files manually.) It also plays badly with Word, even though the absence of Microsoft’s Office suite from the App Store gives Apple a golden opportunity to steal the market. Upload a Word document from a PC to iCloud and when you download it to Pages, you’ll have to wait for the app to convert it — stripping out much of the formatting in the process. You might also run into the strange problem in which the location of the words on the screen fail to line up with their location according to the iPad. The red underline that marks names or misspellings can run under a space and when you place your finger on a word to make an edit, you find that you’ve deleted the wrong word and the line jumps as the text realigns.

Of course, software will have bugs. Updates can help to iron out early errors just as new models can be big improvements on first releases. (The original iPod Touch came with no speakers or microphone, remember.) But compare the quality of Apple’s software with its hardware (as well as with the software available from iOS developers) and it’s no surprise if its apps are greeted with a mocking giggle to match the iPhone 5’s yawns.

LinkedIn connects you to jobs, Facebook connects you to the people you know and Twitter connects you to the people you want to know — the people who need a writer, a designer, or a freelancer programmer, for example. All you have to do is follow people who look like they might need the services you provide and, as soon as they’re ready, they’ll drop you a line and ask you to pitch. In practice, it rarely works out that way. If it did, Twellow, a Twitter directory, would list more than 4,572 freelancers, a fraction of the nearly 600,000 individuals and businesses listed on Elance. And yet, attraction-based marketing and Twitter do go together, giving freelancers an opportunity to land gigs, and helping clients to find service providers who already fill them with confidence. Here’s how to do it.

Start by Searching Smart

The key to making attraction-based marketing work on Twitter is to identify the right people looking for the right sorts of services and persuade them to like you.

That first step used to be fairly difficult and Twitter still depends to a large extent on organic growth. Users follow their friends on Facebook but on Twitter, they follow strangers after seeing a retweet or a reply or after spotting a button on a company website.

Twitter’s search engine though does have an Advanced Search feature that allows you to finely target the people you’d like to meet. Forget the search box at the top of the page, which is only good for Boolean-trained librarians and looking for hashtags, and surf to Twitter.com/search-advanced.

The page is divided into three sections: words, people and places. Focus on the first section:

You want to use this section to look for professional questions. Think of it as a chance to stand out on Twitter in the same way that some experts can stand out as “top answerers” on Quora. Because they’re willing to lend a hand, they get a chance to show off their knowledge. They also get to start a relationship with potential new clients by giving those leads professional help for free.

Land the Client by Offering Help

That’s the kind of start that’s going give the freelancer a huge advantage when the lead is ready to hire.

• In the field marked “All of these words,” enter a keyword related your services.
• In the field marked “This exact phrase,” enter “How do I”.

For example if you were a designer looking for clients you might do a search for “How do I” and add “logos,” “web page,” “brochure,” or “design.”

At the bottom of the page is a checkbox that lets you search for a question. It actually searches for a question mark in the tweet, which isn’t quite the same thing. It looks like a useful shortcut but actually, it will just cut out the punctuation-challenged. They might not have been great at English class but they might have made for high-paying clients. Leave it unchecked.

Hit “Search” and you should see a list of all the tweets made in the last couple of weeks by people looking for the sort of specialist knowledge you possess.

Not all of the responses will be relevant. But in between the questions from people who want to put the logo from their favorite band on their ripped CDs will be questions about inserting logos into emails, turning them into a brand or creating a logo from scratch. It won’t take more than a minute to hit the Follow button and send back an answer.

You won’t be making a pitch with your answer nor will you be trying to persuade people to hire you or point out that you can create their logo for them for a very competitive fee. The engagement, retention and desire to buy should come from a timeline filled with interesting, relevant tweets, a growing relationship — and a prominent link on your bio.

Before you answer though, click the cog icon on the right. You’ll be shown a drop-down menu that includes the option to save the search.

Once you’ve done that, it will only take a minute to repeat it, throw out some more answers and show off your skills to more people interested in logos, ebooks, websites or whatever it is you produce.

That’s not all that Twitter’s Advanced Search can offer though. The People fields can be useful for tracking specific conversations with people you’re already following or comments they’re receiving but they’ll be fairly unhelpful for freelancers looking for clients. A quick check of the timeline of someone relevant will show you who they consider important.

The “Places” field will be vital if you need to meet your clients face-to-face. That’s not important for every freelancer but being local can be an advantage. Even if freelancers like to telecommute, not all clients are comfortable conducting every discussion by telephone and email.

There are other ways to use Twitter to find freelance clients, of course. One Twitter usage that seems to come up again and again is that of a kind of professional clubhouse: freelancers working alone are able to swap tips and suggestions with other freelancers. Sometimes those connections do blossom into opportunities for mutual marketing. A wedding photographer and a wedding planner from the same town who meet on Twitter might agree to recommend each other, for example.

A simple search for “freelance job” will throw out several requests an hour. (Although those offers are always going to be hugely competitive and win lots of responses.)

In general, the best strategy for finding clients on Twitter isn’t to look for opportunities. When they turn up there will be too many people running after them. It’s to make sure that you’re the most obvious choice and the first freelancer a lead thinks of when an opportunity opens.

You can do that by:

1. Finding people who have shown that they lack the knowledge you possess — and need it;
2. And by offering a sample of your specialist knowledge for free so that they know that your professional advice will be worth the money.

Get that combination right and you should be picking up clients on Twitter.

Forget Nigerian emails offering pots of cash in return for your bank account details and don’t worry about herbal mood enhancers that are made of nothing more than horny goat weed and ginger. Only the truly dumb are taken in by one of those spam-delivered cons. Some Internet-based confidence tricks though are spectacular, smart and they might well have got past you. Here are five of the best and the biggest.

R.J. Ellory’s Sock Puppets

The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival sounds like the sort of event in which authors discuss acts of deception rather than confess to them. But that’s what ebook author Stephen Leather did earlier this summer at the annual Harrogate writers’ get-together. As he defended the economics of low-priced digital books and argued that pirates help to promote his titles, he also confessed to using “sock puppets.” He posted fake positive reviews of his own books on Amazon and used false identities on forums to recommend his titles.

“As soon as my book is out I’m on Facebook and Twitter several times a day talking about it. I’ll go on to several forums, the well-known forums, and post there under my name and under various other names and various other characters. You build up this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself,” he told the festival.

That got people talking but it was author Jeremy Duns’ outing of crime writer RJ Ellory as Amazon reviewer Nicodemus Jones that really kicked up a storm. It wasn’t enough that “Jones,” just one of a number of Ellory’s sock puppets, had a fawning love of Ellory’s books; he also had a particularly unpleasant attitude towards the works of Ellory’s competitors dismissing them as imitative and clichéd.

Reviewing your own work appears to breach Amazon’s review guidelines which prohibit “Sentiments by or on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product (including reviews by publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product)” but as far as Amazon is concerned there’s nothing wrong with knocking a competitor’s work even if you do it under an assumed name. When author Ian Mortimer wrote to Amazon to complain about criticism placed under his book by a rival author, Amazon just told him to add his own positive reviews.

Sock puppets aren’t new. The New York Times has a story from 2007 about executives using false identities in online forums. But if you’ve ever made a book-buying decision based on an Amazon recommendation, you could have been taken in by a master of crime.

The Eve Online Phaser Inc. Ponzi Scheme

The sock puppetry of authors was discovered following a confession, then an outing which prompted an apology from RJ Ellory. “Mordor Exuel” and  “Eddie Lampert” were less contrite last year following the discovery of their online fraud. The two players of Eve Online, a space-based MMORPG, set up Phaser Inc., an investment firm which promised to help players grow their ISK, the currency used in the game to buy ships, mods and other in-game items.

Right from the beginning though, the scheme was intended as a fraud. The goal was to steal more than 1 trillion ISK.

The pair began by spamming local chat channels and accepting invitations to private conversations. Gradually, they automated the process, using an API to update accounts while placing ads in emails. Within eight months, they’d taken in more than a trillion ISK, were spending as much time defrauding players as working in real life jobs, and called it a day.

The justification for their actions, posted on Eve News 24, was that they fitted the morality of a game in which players try to shoot each other.

“We went through the possible options to earn ISK and decided a scam would be the most profitable thing to do. The downside of a scam, however, is that other players lose the ISK that we gain. This was, at first, a rather large moral obstacle for both of us. We talked it over for quite a while and came to the decision that we could live with it. The main reason being that scramming people’s money is allowed by CCP. The game rules support – maybe even encourage – scam and fraud. It’s actually as much allowed as two players shooting one another in low and nullsec. Simply put: it’s part of the game.”

Players seemed to agree. More than the success of the scheme, the con artists were surprised by the messages of support they received — even from their victims.

UK Minister Sells Website Scraper

“Mordor Exuel” and  “Eddie Lampert” walked out of their scheme with a certain level of popularity. That’s harder to say of Grant Shapps. Previously the UK’s Housing Minister and now the chairman of the Conservative Party, Shapps was previously known as Michael Green — and Sebastian Fox — an Internet marketing expert responsible for TrafficPaymaster. The software package, which sells for $497, creates AdSense-supported Web pages by automatically rewriting the content of existing Web pages.

According to The Guardian Shapps has promised buyers that they could be making $20,000 in 20 days by putting Google’s ads on their automated pages. He says his wife now runs the firm.

Those figures were always unlikely. They’re even less likely to be realistic considering that Google has already found TrafficPaymaster to be in in “violation” of its policies regarding unoriginal content. Its algorithms will drop the ranking of any Web pages made with the software.

“We have strict policies in place to ensure web users are presented with useful ads when browsing sites in our content network and to ensure our advertisers reach an engaged audience. If we are alerted to a site which breaks our AdSense policies, we will review it and can remove it from our network,” the company told  The Guardian.

You might not be willing to spend $497 on a program that Google hates, but if you live in the UK, your taxes are paying the salary of the man who has sold it.

Web Scam Generates False Advertising

There’s nothing subtle about the one-page sales letter and oversized promises of TrafficPaymaster. One group of Estonians, though,  came up with a scam that was so quiet you wouldn’t have noticed it — if they hadn’t infected 100 computers at NASA, an act which brought in the FBI and the help of security firms.

The hackers first used infected websites to install malware on around half a million US computers. The malware did two things: it changed search results so that companies favored by the hackers were placed higher.  A search for “I.R.S.,” for instance, took users to tax preparers H&R Block who paid the swindlers a referral fee. And, even more cunningly, the software also swapped graphic ads on sites including Amazon and ESPN for ads that produced click revenue for the hackers.

Publishers would have felt a drop in their earnings, but users would have noticed little wrong.

Conning the Feds

Fortunately though, not all Internet con artists are as bright as the Estonians. In June 2010, undercover investigators set up their own website where hackers could meet, gather and swap tips — all under the eyes of the Feds. Among those arrested were a New Yorker who swapped the account details of fifteen credit card holders for a digital camera. He later complained that the model wasn’t exactly what he was looking for. The investigator who gave it to him might not have been the client he was looking for either.

The sting ran for two years and according to MercuryNews protected more than 400,000 potential victims and prevented losses of around $205 million.

Kickstarter has an impressive success rate of just under 44 percent. Or to put in another way, your Kickstarter project has a 56 percent chance of failure despite the hours you’ll have put into preparing the pitch video, choosing the rewards and marketing the page. But just because your project failed to reach its funding target — and therefore failed to give you any cash at all — doesn’t mean you’ve reached the end of the road.

Back in 2010, for example, Dave Chenell and Eric Cleckner, two Syracuse University students, launched a Kickstarter campaign for their graFighters project. The pair were looking for $20,000 to create an online fighting game in which players could upload their doodles and battle them against each other in PvP combat. They raised a touch over $3,000.

The reasons for their failure, they say, were varied. The rewards weren’t particularly rewarding (it took $300 to net a backer a t-shirt); there was no marketing to support the campaign; and $20,000 was a big target (the average successful project generates $5,487.) But the pair were lucky. After the campaign had failed, they received an email from a fund manager at X.Million Venture Capital. He had seen their campaign, watched their videos… and agreed to give them $200,000 to turn their basic idea into a fully-fledged game.

That success was the result of a combination of a good idea and dumb luck. Other failed Kickstarter projects though offer more helpful lessons.

Scale Your Project to the Pledges

When Eliza Dawson tried to raise $30,000 for a Kickstarter project that would create a series of short films to encourage creativity in families, she made two mistakes: she promised to make the results of the project available for free — which left backers with little motivation to pay; and, like the creators of graFighters, she set a target that was unrealistically high. The project raised just over $4,700.

That was disappointing. Dawson and her family had pushed hard to bring in backers and spread the word. But they knew that the project had managed to raise nearly $5,000. They gave their plan a second look, scaled it back and launched a second Kickstarter project with a shorter duration (to increase urgency) and a target of just $3,000. This time they raised $5,058. Although that’s much less than the amount they had originally targeted, it did allow them to get the project off the ground.

One lesson to be learned from Dawson’s story is not to give up. But a better lesson might be to think hard about the amount of money you really need to get your project started. A failed Kickstarter project might not have given you any money, but it will have told you how much money people are willing to give you to create it. Think about what you could do with that money, repost a scaled-back version of the project and try to persuade backers to pledge again.

Build on a Different Platform

Eliza Dawson relaunched her Kickstarter project on Kickstarter itself. It worked, but she did have other options. Game designer Chris Crawford has just seen his attempt to raise $150,000 to create an environmental simulation game called Balance of the Planet fall far short of its target. A day before the campaign was due to end, he had raised just $13,488.

In an interview with games site Gamasutra, Crawford put the failure down to his decision to use Kickstarter.

“Kickstarter used to be a semi-charitable operation in which people could assist worthy creative projects that might not make it commercially, but still ought to be done. But in the area of games and comics, this is no longer the case.

“What’s going on now, which I did not comprehend at the time, is that Kickstarter is a marketing channel [for games], so instead of buying a game after it’s made, people just pay for a game before it’s made. It works in that context, but I had entirely the wrong context in mind, so Balance of the Planet’s Kickstarter became a dismal failure.” 

That sounds like an attempt to shift the blame but it is true that pre-orders disguised as rewards have turned Kickstarter into a place to raise funds for marketable products rather than good causes. Other sites can do issues better, though. It’s possible that had Crawford placed his project on IndieGogo, which has a section dedicated to environmental causes, he would have pulled in more money.

If your project fails to gain traction on Kickstarter, then you can think about relaunching it on the same site with a goal in line with the pledges you’ve received. But you can also think about trying one of Kickstarter’s niched alternatives.

Create Your Own Kickstarter

Digitulus’s Skyjacker came close enough to its goal to consider a second shot. The games company managed to raise an impressive $128,238 to complete its space combat game. But it was aiming for $200,000 so it got nothing.

That all or nothing approach is one of Kickstarter’s most important principles. Creators, the site believes, shouldn’t have to try to complete a project with an incomplete budget. But that’s not an approach that suits everyone. Digitulus’s response was to move its rewards to its online store where customers can pay up to $10,000 for an “I’m a Legend” bundle. The firm may not make the full $200,000 and without a time limit or a sense that the project will be canceled if it’s not supported, backers may simply choose to wait until the game comes out then buy a copy.

But if the money is a bonus that enables you to enhance a project rather than complete it, then shifting the rewards from Kickstarter to your own site will allow you to continue to raise cash as you work towards the release.

Being one of the small majority of Kickstarters that fails to get funded might be disappointing but it doesn’t have to mean the end of your dream. There’s no limit to the number of times you can put the same project on Kickstarter; there are plenty of alternatives to Kickstarter; and you don’t have to use Kickstarter to sell your rewards and take the cash.

Amazon is more than a fixture on the Internet’s high street and it’s long been more than an online bookstore. With a market value in excess of $109 billion, the company, which started selling books online at discounted rates, is now a grocer, a tech firm, a publishing company and just about everything in between. But despite its size, its importance and the vital role the firm plays in almost every aspect of online life — from the books you download to your iPad to the servers that deliver the content you read on a browser — Amazon does next to nothing well. In fact, its failures are worrying and they’re particularly worrying for freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Start with the role that Amazon plays underpinning some of the Web’s most important online services. Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix are just three of the many giant companies with millions of users who make use of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). The company’s mixture of cloud-based storage, computing and databasing is supposed to handle the information work, leaving the tech firms to focus on the front-end usability and service provision.

It’s a system that’s great in theory and unnoticeable when everything goes to plan. But too often, it doesn’t. In late June, a storm took out an Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia. According to Wired, Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service, which should have spread the processing loads of firms such as Netflix across data centers when one center goes offline, also failed. Netflix was unavailable for three hours, including the peak hours of 8pm to 11pm. That was the second outage to hit Amazon, and its clients, that month.

Outages like those affect plenty of people. But they might be forgivable — at least from the point of view of developers — if AWS were actually a solution to a real problem: the delivery and management of data online. In fact though, AWS may create at least as many problems as it solves. A look at the long list of the most common mistakes made by firms using AWS suggests a system that’s overly complicated and which leads to inefficiencies and wastage, especially for small businesses on tight budgets. And that’s when it works.

Developers looking for a way to host their back-end services may consider Amazon a solution, but they need to be aware of both its complexities and the vulnerabilities that can take it offline.

Kindle Burns Writers

Amazon’s Web Services are valuable, even if they’re less useful or reliable than they should be. But tech services aren’t the company’s main offering. Amazon’s most important service is still retail sales, and in particular its Kindle Store, the ever-growing outlet of electronic books. According to one recent report, Amazon.co.uk now sells 114 ebooks for every 100 print books the store delivers — and that doesn’t include the downloading of free ebooks.

For writers though, whether they’re pitching their epic sci-fi series or offering a work of non-fiction written to establish their expertise, those ebook sales represent a risk and a loss of control as well as an opportunity.

The loss of control comes in the pricing. Self-published books tend to sell through Kindle at a price significantly lower than the cost of ebooks published through traditional publishers. According to Piotr Kowalczyk at ebookfriendly.com, the average price of a self-published ebook in 2011 was just $1.40. The average price overall for books in the Top 100 was $8.26.

The need to cut your price to such low levels is bad enough, but sell on Kindle and you allow Amazon to lower the price even further if it wants to. Fantasy writer Jim C. Hines, for example, placed a collection of short stories on Amazon for $2.99, a price that give him a 70 percent royalty, or $2 for every copy sold. He was pretty shocked to discover that Amazon had cut the price, without telling him, to just 99 cents. That was low enough to trigger a lower royalty rate of just 35 percent.

Amazon was entitled to make that change because its terms and conditions allow it to set the retail price of ebooks sold through Kindle. The company later informed that Hines that it had lowered the price because it had noticed that Kobo had sold the same book for 99 cents “at some point ‘over the last couple of months.’”

Of course, bookstores can also lower their retail prices, but the author’s royalties are still calculated on the list price, not the retail price. As Hines pointed out, Amazon was offering a 50 percent pre-order discount on his book Libriomancer. But because that book was published by  Penguin imprint DAW, the royalty that he received was based on the full price set by the publisher, not the bargain price offered by Amazon.

Jim C. Hines is exceptional though in that he’s a published author who also sells some of his work himself through Kindle. For many writers though, Amazon’s self-publishing platform is the place to put books that have failed to make it past the publishing world’s gatekeepers at publishing firms. That means buyers have to trawl their way through piles of spam, digitally compiled productions and even books plagiarized from other authors. Writers of quality works have to put up with seeing their books paired with unedited content that no one in the publishing industry would touch, and buyers have try to sort the titles worth reading from the three-dollar ebooks that cost more than they’re worth.

The Kindle Store might be a convenient way to download reading material to a tablet or a smartphone but the combination of an open platform and tight corporate control over items on that platform make it a difficult environment for both buyers and sellers.

In the end, Amazon’s price (and royalty) slashing didn’t cost Jim C. Hines much. He estimated his losses at a little over $20 and he doesn’t recommend that writers turn their backs on Amazon. They just need to know what to expect and to understand that “Amazon is not pro-author. They’re pro-Amazon.” That’s worth remembering whether you’re looking for a company to handle your data or a platform to sell your book.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a freelancer or the marketing manager of someone else’s business, you know that you need a blog. Without a place to post articles, attract traffic and deliver news, you’re barely on the Internet. It’s a belief that led 65 percent of businesses to add a blog to their website by 2011 — a rise from 48 percent just two years earlier.  But is blogging really necessary, and is it the right idea for you and your business?

The Benefits of Blogging

The rewards of blogging are well-known and well-documented. You can divide them into four clear benefits.

• Search Engine Optimization

A blog provides the opportunity to create multiple pages on multiple topics. Those pages can target different keywords and draw inbound links. That helps to increase a site’s pagerank and pushes it higher in the search results. There’s a tension between content written for humans and content aimed at search engine robots, but a well-planned blog should have a dramatic effect on search traffic levels.

• Build a Community

Beyond what a blog can do for the number of a site’s visitors, it can also change the way readers feel about the company. Not only will a blog push up the number of new visitors, it will also increase the number of returning visitors, readers who come back regularly to participate in the community.

Those community members represent a pool of enthusiastic leads.

• Expertise and Leadership

A blog should be an authoritative source, a place where visitors go to learn new information. Because your company is now known to possess that knowledge it gets seen as a leader in its field. Informative, researched blog posts build trust, the first step in building sales.

• News

And a blog can be entirely functional too, a place to deliver news about product releases. Dodocase’s Posterous blog, for example, mixes up news of awards with pictures of the staff on their bikes and updates about product enhancements. It’s a combination of knowledge that brings the company closer to the reader and keeps them informed about the quality of the products on offer.

The Drawbacks of Blogging

So those are the benefits of corporate blogging and they should be pretty persuasive. If they deliver. The problem is that they don’t always deliver, and they don’t deliver for a number of reasons.

• Audiences Takes Time to Build

Creating a blog, on WordPress, Blogger or Posterous, takes minutes. Writing blog content might take an hour a two. But time to build a blog audience has to be measured in months and years. Although it’s impossible to give a flat figure to expect — too much depends on subject and effort — even a good, well-written and well-marketed blog won’t send in more than a few hundred visitors a day a year after launch.

If you’re looking to use a blog to deliver a quick burst of traffic to promote a product, then blogging probably isn’t for you.

• Blogging Costs Money

It’s possible to start blogging with no money down at all and even a professional blog, with a unique domain and a designed WordPress theme, won’t cost more than a few hundred bucks. But the time you’ll need to invest in maintaining the blog — creating content, engaging with readers, tracking stats, reviewing keywords and promoting the new posts — will be much larger. According to one survey around half of corporate bloggers spend up to three hours each week on their blog and more than one in three spend between three and twenty hours in front of their blogging control panels each week.

That’s time that could have been spent making cold calls or developing the product.

If you’ve got something to do with your time that would deliver better results, then either stop blogging or outsource it to someone else.

• Blogging Depends on Great Content

The usual route for a corporate blog is to outsource the writing to a marketing manager or an external writer, tweak the keywords to bring in traffic and post regularly to ensure that an audience always has a reason to come back.

That’s a recipe for plenty of visitors — and a high bounce rate that suggests people aren’t finding what they’re looking for.

The success of a business blog needs to be measured in two figures: the bounce rate, a figure that shows how many users thought the content interesting enough to stick around to read; and the rise in the sales figures, which show how many of those readers are being won over enough to purchase a product. Both of those figures depend on quality content and on information that’s good enough to win time from other sites writing on similar subjects.

In her series on why corporate blogs fail, marketing expert Doriane Mouret cites a lack of innovation as the fifth reason that companies’ content pages fail to live up to their potential. More importantly, she also lists a number of sites, from Best Western’s On the Go with Amy to Southwest’s Nuts About Southwest that are original enough to break the mold and build an audience.

If you don’t have the time or the expertise to post content that’s more than mediocre, then you’re probably better off not blogging at all.

For entrepreneurs, freelancers and marketing managers, the decision to create a blog should be tougher than it looks. The benefits, from search engine traffic to the ability to build a community and post content that converts into sales, are inviting enough. But if you’re not willing or unable to:

• Invest the time needed each day to create, build and market your blog;
• Look to your blog’s long-term success rather than hope for short term benefits;
• Research and write informative content that’s entertaining and unique;
• Engage with your growing community of readers, track their interests and produce content that you can be confident you’ll like;

then you’ll probably be better off not blogging for your business at all — and putting more effort into your social media marketing.

There’s never been a better time to be a freelance writer. With ads on blogs and publishing platforms open to all, anyone with writing talent has the opportunity to make a living on their own terms. Before you fire your clients and start working for yourself though, here are 23 things you need to know.

1. Your Blog is (Probably) Not Going to Make Money

Few bloggers actually make any serious money writing blog posts. According to one survey of 1,000 bloggers only around 8 percent of bloggers make enough money “to be able to support a family.” About 81 percent fail to even make $100.

2. WordPress is the Most Popular Platform

When you’re creating your blog, you should probably be using WordPress. It’s the most popular platform with around 43 percent of the blogging market in comparison to Blogger’s 35 percent. Its range of themes also make it flexible and easy to use.

3. Corporate Blogs Show Plenty of Opportunity

If you’re worried that your own blog won’t make money, think about writing a blog for a business. Sixty percent of businesses realized that a blog was important enough to build; sixty five percent of them haven’t updated them in more than a year. That’s a demand you can meet. Find corporate blogging jobs on Elance and Odesk.

4. Starting and Running a Blog Isn’t Cost-Free

Blogs have expenses. A domain name costs money. Hosting costs money. WordPress themes are free but good WordPress themes cost money. Unique, designed themes cost even more money. And images cost money too. While those expenses might be as little as five bucks here or there at the beginning, as your blog grows so do the costs. And if you’re looking to be professional, you’ll need to lay out some professional fees. Jason Larkins of WorkSaveLive.com, for example, spent $500 to set up his blog and host it for two years.

5. Income Takes Time to Build

While your start-up costs will have to be paid immediately, your blog income will take time to raise. In January 2012, Jason Larkin’s blog had picked up a little over 15,000 visits — and earned less than $28 in advertising revenue. By May, and without the help of a link on a popular site, his visits had fallen below 5,000 and his revenue to $17.

6. Pay Attention to the Affiliate Sales — And the Content that Supports Them

While AdSense and other CPC ad systems will be an important part of your blog’s revenue plan, you should also be paying attention to affiliate links. They pay more per sale but those sales only come in when you write the sorts of posts that recommend the products. You’re going to have to find affiliate products you want to promote and produce the content that drives sales.

7. The Audience Remains Big

Despite the difficulties of making money with a blog, the opportunity remains huge.  More than 57 million people are said to read blogs, spending 23 hours in front of their screens each week. That’s a lot of eyeballs to put ads in front of.

8. Tumblr is Simple Blogging Made Even Simpler

If writing full-length blog posts several times each week sounds like too large a commitment, remember that you have an alternative in the form of Tumblr. Posts can be shorter, set-up cheaper — and you can still place ads and make money.

9. If You Build It, You Also Have To Build the Roads to It

Build your blog alone, and no one will come. You also have to bring people into the site. According to developer Paul O’Brien, that means using an exceptional theme, adding a WordPress Greet Box, writing controversial content, using email marketing and even using affiliate marketing to bring in users who might buy products on your site. Without the marketing, you won’t make money.

10. SEO Still Beats Social Media as the Main Source of Blog Traffic

It’s notable that when it comes to building traffic, experts including Paul O’Brien, focus on SEO plugins, keyworded permalinks and linkbait content. Despite the rise of Facebook and Twitter, search engine optimization still rules. SEO brings new readers; social media turns those readers into a loyal community.

11. Free Blogging Can Bring Rewards

One of the biggest criticisms laid against the Huffington Post is that the site doesn’t pay the thousands of bloggers that provide most of its content. So one way to build a blog worth millions might be to create a platform that thousands of people are prepared to contribute to. More realistically though, you can still win benefits by giving away your content. Art critic Mat Gleason, for example, has been invited to jury art fairs as a result of the valuable content he kindly gives to Arianna Huffington.

12. Ebooks Cost Money to Produce

After Rasmus, a Danish entrepreneur who wanted to follow Tim Ferriss to a four-hour workweek, decided to create and sell an ebook, he laid out the money he spent on it. A set of SEO articles to bring in buyers cost him $200. A salesletter cost him $400. He paid Clickbank $50 to sell it and hired a designer for $195. Altogether, his bill came to $1,195. That was cheap. (He paid just $250 for a writer to create the 90-page book itself, a choice that would reduce the quality to a level that would make it hard to sell.) But it does show that book production, even ebook production, isn’t free. Even if you’re writing the book yourself, you can still expect to make a four-figure investment.

13. Authors Earn Less for Ebooks than for Print Books

Ebooks can look like a pot of gold for writers. Apple and Amazon leave 70 percent of the sales price to authors compared with less than 10 percent for print books. But prices for ebooks tend to be much lower than those of print books, as low as a dollar or two. While the percentage might be higher, the revenues per sale are usually much lower for ebooks and overall sales are lower too. Amazon has just reported that its ebooks sales now outnumber its print sales. That still leaves half the market untapped by ebook publishers.

14. Most Self-Published eBooks Fail to Make Money

Although there are now a number of top-selling self-published ebook authors, most of those 99 cent books on Amazon aren’t making money. Even some of the most successful ebook authors expect that few self-published ebooks will sell more than 100 copies.

15. Many of the Biggest Selling Self-Published eBook Authors Turned to Mainstream Publishers

Amanda Hocking and J.A. Konrath might be raking in the cash as self-published ebook authors but most of the biggest authors are still sticking to traditional publishing. J.K. Rowling’s new book will be out in print and Dan Patterson shows no sign of firing his publishers. Even authors such as E.L. James, whose 50 Shades of Gray started as self-published fan fic used a mainstream publisher to reach the mass market.

16. But Enough Writers Are Making Large Sales to Give Everyone Hope

The huge numbers of poorly-written, unedited and unsold books on Amazon should give any writer pause for thought — at least until they see the still-impressive numbers of self-published writers who have moved more than 50,000 books. That’s enough to give anyone hope.

17. Forget Amazon, Sell Your Ebooks From Your Own Site

Think of ebooks and you’re going to be thinking of Kindle and perhaps iBooks too. But the real money may be away from the big platforms and on your own website. Yuwanda Black, author of 50 ebooks, sells about 90 percent of her copies directly from her own site.

18. Amazon is Filled with Plagiarists

Once you’ve written and published your book, you also have to protect it. Amazon doesn’t bother to check for plagiarized content so you have to. And there may be plenty of it. Each sale of a copied book is one sale that you’ve lost.

19. But Piracy — and Freebies — Can Boost Sales

Plagiarized books might steal sales but what about pirated books? If your ebook becomes popular on Amazon or your website, it’s a safe bet that it will be popular on BitTorrent too. But that might not be a bad thing. Author Neil Gaiman was so impressed by the rise in sales that each issue of a pirated book brought his titles that he persuaded his publisher to release American Gods, one of his highest selling books, for free.

20. Pricing Your Books — and Changing Your Prices — Can Be a Challenge

Work with a traditional publisher and the company will set the price. Self-publish and you’ll have to decide how much you charge. That’s not going to be an easy decision. Pitch too high for a new author and you won’t be able to build an audience. Pitch too low and you’ll lose revenue. Derek Canyon, whose four ebooks generated $9,700 in royalties (and about half that in profits) found that raising his cover price from 99 cents to $2.99 raised his revenues but lowered his sales — which didn’t recover.

21. Report Formats Can Demand Premium Prices

One alternative to selling books for 99 cents is to sell content for $99 and more. Startupplays.com, for example, charges relatively large sums for relatively short guides. You’ll need to have a proven record, a  good idea and a platform from which to sell but readers will pay premium sums for content that they believe will deliver premium rewards.

22. You Can Create Your Own Magazine

Not every writer wants to be an author — or a blogger. If you fancy yourself as more of a magazine journalist (or editor), you can also set up your own magazine. MagCloud is run by HP and allows anyone to lay out and print on demand their own magazines.

23. You Have to Write Stuff People Want to Read

Whatever you write and however you want to publish and sell it, there’s one rule that remains true: you have to produce content that people actually want to read. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed even while the rest of publishing is undergoing a revolution.

We’re all lazy. Left to our own devices, the chances are pretty high that we’d walk away from the computer right now, fire up our iPads and settle down to an iBook or a movie, or shoot birds at some egg-stealing pigs. We’d ignore all of the amazing benefits that David Allen’s Getting Things Done system could be doing for our efficiency and not get anything done at all. We’d even lose the opportunity to be more idle. That seems to be the belief among some followers of GTD — and they’re right. Sometimes GTD can work if only we made the effort to make it work. But only sometimes and only for some people.

Posting a comment on a previous GTD post, for example, “Ben,” a GTD user, writes:

“there are people with ADD. maybe it’s not for them. then there are people who are so lazy that they don’t want to learn how to be lazier, because it’s too much ‘work.’”

Ben concedes that he, too, is lazy. But the effort he invests in learning and practicing GTD pays off, he argues, because it means that he can work more efficiently. He gets things done faster and with less effort, leaving him more free time while still completing his tasks. It works for him.

Although that post actually laid out 26 reasons NOT to use GTD (and all of those reasons still hold true), he’s right, of course. Just as he’s right when he points out that there are thousands of people who “are on fire and making crazy, precise consistent headway on wide swathes of life with the GTD thing.”

Of course there are times when GTD works. It must work otherwise no one would ever do it at all, and that’s clearly not true. So who does it work for and when it is it most likely to deliver results?

1. GTD works when it just plain HAS to work

In his comment, Ben notes that not having a system doesn’t work for him at all:

“i personally despise doing something in a non systematic way most of the time, because i know that almost everytime i do it takes way more time and effort than if i think about it and figure out a good, efficient, “lazy” way to get what i want done. so a lot of the actual time i’m doing something i’m not good at is spent analyzing it to see how to do it not only better, but smarter.”

That’s fair enough… for Ben. But most of us don’t “despise” doing things in a non-systematic way.” Not having a system can make task completion inefficient and it can require putting a bit more effort into the execution and less into the planning which can be uncomfortable, but “despise” would be putting it strongly. For many of us. We’re happy to plan each task one at a time, to lay out the main points in a blog post before we start writing, for example, or make a list of the books we have to read or the designs we want to look at when we’re searching for inspiration. We’re ready to use a system no more complex than a list and to adapt it for each task we have to do — and it doesn’t bother us to work that way.

But not everyone is like that.

When not writing a thought down and putting it in a list means that you’re obsessing about it, worrying about it and not getting anything done, or when the lack of an overriding system leads to a feeling as strong as “despise” then GTD might be a good solution for you.

2. GTD can work in context.

Context is a big thing in GTD. It’s the first of the “Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment.” Action reminders should always be organized by context, says David Allen, such as “Calls,” “At Home,” “At Computer,” and “Errands,” etc. It all sounds very organized until you realize that it boils down to recognizing that you can’t buy milk if you’re not in the shop and you can’t hold a face-to-face meeting with someone in another city.

“If you can’t do the action because you’re not in the appropriate location or don’t have the appropriate tool, don’t worry about it,” writes Allen.

That’s one of the blindingly obvious parts of GTD but context can play an important role in the system — and even for people who don’t use the system. Putting your task list on a post-it note with the name of the task at the top and you’ll be provide context for your to-dos and adapt part of GTD to a much simpler system.

3. GTD can work when you work it.

Lots of people do that. Tac Anderson, for example, describes himself as a geek and a “digital anthropologist.” He’s also a GTD aficionado… but only to a certain extent. His blog explains in detail how he’s hacked David Allen’s system using moleskins and tabs. He’s not alone. A search for “gtd hacks” on Google turns up nearly 26,000 results.

For many people, it seems, David Allen’s principles of prioritizing, contextualizing, listing and organizing are more important than the precise methodology he teaches to do those things. They accept the idea that they should write down their tasks and goals, organize them into different categories and choose the right time to implement them. But they reject the precise methods.

Instead of using 43 folders, they’re using moleskins. Or apps. Or a whole bunch of other tools. If you’ve got the creativity to adapt GTD to make it work, it can work for you. It just might not be GTD.

GTD is incredibly complex. As one commenter put it, the system can up to a year to fully master, only the brave and very motivated will make it and the failure rate is very high. For those who do make it, the system undoubtedly works and works well. It ensures that they get things done. But actually so do the rest of us… right after we’ve put down our iPads and got back to work.

Judging by its website, Gambill Photography is a fairly typical small photography business. The husband and wife team sell a set of different photography services aimed at the general public: engagements, weddings, seniors, babies and families. Even though there’s a big difference between the skills needed to photograph a baby and those that a photographer will need during a five-hour wedding shoot, they’re all shown off together on the company’s website. The navigation bar contains links to portfolios for each those photography niches.

Compare that to the way that Jerry Lodriguss sells his photography skills. Nowhere on the home page of his astrophotography website is there any mention that Lodriguss is actually a professional sports photographer. And nowhere on his sports photography landing page is there any indication that he also sells astrophotography stock. Those two niches are kept completely separate.

Marketers as famous as Seth Godin are always telling entrepreneurs, big and small, that they should spot a niche and conquer it. In practice though, sellers tend to aim for more than one niche at the same time. They sell wedding photography and baby photography, design logos as well as websites or program apps as well as database software. When should you push those niches together, and when should you separate them so that buyers believe that they’re talking to a specialist?

1. What Do Buyers Want?

The first place to look for an answer is at the buyers. Gambill Photography’s services could all be bought by the same customer. A couple could hire the company for an engagement shoot, then a wedding shoot, baby photographs, family portraits and eventually seniors. Despite the differences in technique and work required for each of those jobs, the business will be trying to keep previous customers on board and remind them that they remain available as their family grows.

A customer who hires Jerry Lodriguss to shoot a sporting event is unlikely to also buy a shot of the Andromeda galaxy. He’s not interested in Lodriguss’s knowledge of astrophotography and night shooting. It’s not relevant now and it’s unlikely to be in the future. He just wants to be sure that the images he gets back from the game are going to be good enough for him to use. He wants to feel that he’s hiring a specialist in the niche in which he works.

When two niches appeal to the same market, sell them together; when they appeal to different markets, sell them separately.

2. Spread the Brand

Even when you separate the niches though, you can still tie them together so that the benefits earned by succeeding in one are also enjoyed by the other.

The Economist, for example, is best known for its weekly newspaper. It’s less well-known for its Economist Intelligence Unit, a publishing company that puts out reports on countries, industries and economic data, as well as special reports on topics as varied as the cost of living and doing business in Myanmar. Those reports are much more expensive than the $270 annual subscription to the newspaper. A report on “Saving mobile broadband: ‘4G’ first movers: network and pricing strategies,” for example, costs $2,950.

The Economist separates its two niches. Readers of its newspaper receive general news about world politics and business; readers of its reports get highly specialized and detailed analyses of specific regions and industries. Those are two different kinds of readers — general and commercial — so each niche is marketed on its own.

But both niches depend on the newspaper’s reputation for clarity, detail and accuracy. Although a student reading a copy of The Economist to learn about the financial crisis in Europe is unlikely to fork out nearly $3,000 for a database of 4G pricing, a buyer of a special report from the Economist Intelligence Unit is also likely to be a subscriber to the newspaper. That customer will have come to associate The Economist’s logo with the company’s writing style, research and analysis. One niche brings in a customer and sells the customer on the company’s reliability. When the customer reaches the products sold in the commercial niche, he sees the logo and is reminded of the trust he feels in the company.

Logos and other branding tools can move trust and brand characteristics between separated niches.

3. Managing Your Multiple Niches

So what does this mean for the owner of a small business or for someone looking to make money out of more than one passion?

It means that it pays to understand your market, identify the reason that one niche succeeds and know not just when to separate your niches but how to make the two work together.

One example of someone who does that is Ana Paula Rimoli, a designer of amigurumi, a kind of crocheted doll. Ana sells her dolls in an Etsy store which has made more than 8,000 sales. She also uses that store to promote her amigurumi books, a different product but one that appeals to a similar market. But Ana also has a second store on Etsy which sells hand-carved stamps. That store has made 167 sales.

Those are two very different products in two different markets and with different degrees of success. Ana is best known for being an expert on crochet dolls so she doesn’t push the stamps particularly hard. They’re mentioned in one line at the bottom of the announcement on her main store below several paragraphs about her books, patterns and presence on Twitter. She certainly doesn’t put her stamps in her main Etsy store alongside her crochet dolls. That would only confuse her regular customers and people who have heard about her and want to see her crochet work.

You can extend this principle beyond Etsy to websites and even bricks and mortar stores. When you’re planning to sell to more than one market, keep the niches separate but transfer the trust from one to the other. When you’re selling to the same market, push both niches at the same time and try to transfer buyers from one niche to the other.

Kickstarter is the place to go when you’re ready to kick away your freelance career and build your own business. With 44 percent of the nearly 63,000 projects posted on the site fully funded, including seven that received more than a million dollars (and one that picked up more than $10 million), if your idea fits one of the platform’s categories you’ve got a good chance of raising the cash you need to create your own computer game, put on a dance performance or build your own hi-tech, Bluetooth-supported gadget. But what if you’re happy freelancing? What can the lessons of Kickstarter’s large number of successful funding pitches do for someone looking to increase the success rate of their freelance job pitches?

At first glance, the two goals have little in common. Kickstarter entrepreneurs are usually looking for funds that will enable them to sell a product. Whether they’re making a computer game, a new iPad stylus or an album, they’re aiming to work for themselves not pitch talent and ability that will persuade someone to hire them.

The tools are different too. A lot has been written about what it takes to succeed on Kickstarter (including on Geekpreneur, as well as on Kickstarter itself) but the key ingredients are an eye-catching video, clear rewards and plenty of marketing to build awareness of the project off the site.

None of those things apply directly to bidding for work on a freelance job site. Not even Elance, with all its bells and whistles, allows users to upload a video for each pitch (although you can put a video in the Overview section of the profile). And marketing your pitch offline is going to be little use when you only need one decision from one lead.

But the principles that make videos effective on Kickstarter, that make marketing important and force entrepreneurs to think hard about rewards apply to job bidding too.

Video Pitching for Freelance Jobs

You can’t create  a tailored video to support a job bid, but you don’t have to. Videos don’t succeed on Kickstarter because of the moving images. They succeed because they show potential funders exactly what they’re buying. They act as top-rate portfolios.

For freelancers to enjoy the same kinds of benefits that videos bring to Kickstarters, they’ve got a few options.

The most obvious is to go ahead and make your own videos. Elance does allow members to place a video on their profiles and to link to a YouTube video but how many potential clients will actually look at them? They’re less interested in who the freelancer is than in whether the freelancer can do the specific job that they need completed.

The real freelancer equivalent to a Kickstarter video is a set of three relevant samples. That’s what a Kickstarter video does. It doesn’t show off the pitcher’s skills; it shows the customer exactly what he’s going to receive.

The lesson that freelancer need to learn from the importance of Kickstarter videos is that people will buy when you show them that you can deliver what they need. You don’t need a video for that. You just need proof that you’ve created similar work.

State Your Rewards… and Your Benefits

As important as the pitch on a Kickstarter page is the list of rewards. Funders can contribute at different levels, taking their pick of the benefits on offer. Kickstarters have to think hard about offering rewards at levels that can meet different budgets in return for different versions of the product.

Again, that appears to be very different to the way that freelance job pitches work. The client will be clear about what he or she wants to receive. You get to adjust the price but you don’t get to change the task.

But you do get to state the benefits and the rewards. The client might know that he wants a logo or a set of SEO articles. But once you’ve offered relevant samples that show what the client can expect, you can also adjust the receivables and add a description of what they’ll do.

When the client looks at bids from other freelancers, he’ll see logos. When he sees your bid, he’ll see “logos that are memorable, that come with three revisions and which will be preformatted for watermarks and Facebook pages as well as for websites.” And he’ll receive all of that for the same price as other offers.

You can’t draw up a long list of rewards like a Kickstarter can, but you can make a long list of different benefits and let the client choose you.

Gather the Referrals

Perhaps the most important aspect of a successful Kickstarter campaign isn’t the video or the rewards. The concept certainly plays a role but it’s the marketing that really brings people in. Amanda Palmer’s million-dollar album success might have been down to a snappy video. But the involvement of her writer husband Neil Gaiman and his nearly two million Twitter followers couldn’t have done her any harm.

When you’re pitching for a freelance job, you can’t ask your Twitter followers to weigh in and support your bid. But you can enjoy the same benefits of word-of-mouth marketing by making sure that previous clients leave good feedback and positive reviews. You can include quotes from satisfied clients or — even better — from the customers of the products you created for them. While you might not want to offer to collect references for every job, you can state that they’re available when the client looks like a long-term prospect that can significantly boost your freelance career.

Kickstarter may be a site for entrepreneurs but for those looking for funding, it’s also a place where they have to market to a skeptical public, generate interest, prove a need, build trust and make sales. The techniques necessary to do that are as true for freelancers as they are for hopeful owners of small businesses. Freelance job sites might not look like Kickstarter but they rely on the exact same principles — and they can land you a 44 percent success rate too.

Productivity experts might tell us to make lists and draw chains, create files and label folders but in practice, there’s one productivity system that all freelancers use every day. Email might not have been invented to manage our work routines but that’s often how we use it. We flag messages to make sure that communications aren’t forgotten. We email ourselves reminders to make sure that we complete tasks. We pray that every time we reply to an enquiry, our email service is automatically adding the address to a contact list we never organize.

There are more efficient ways to use email as your freelance management hub. Here’s how to do it.

Build An All-In-One Control Center with Google Apps 

Google Apps provides a range of different services and products. It’s targeted at businesses who pay up to $50 per year per user or as much as $10 per user per month for more services that include email and chat archiving, applied “retention policies,” and e-discovery that makes litigation and compliance audits simple. For individual users though, it’s free.

What Will It Do?

Google Apps is a suite of applications some of which you’re likely to already use — at least occasionally. It includes Gmail, for example, as well as Google Docs, Google Drive (its Dropbox competitor) and Google Calendar, among many others.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll get access to a cpanel from which you can control the settings for each of the apps in the suite.

You’ll be able to personalize your Gmail, share documents and even create mini-sites.

Who Is It Really For?

Google Apps used to be called Google Apps for Domains and is now called Google Apps for Business. It’s really aimed at managers of virtual teams. As administrators, they’ll have access to all messages and content used as part of a project. Individual freelancers can use any app separately and won’t need to sign up, let alone pay.

Disadvantages

Google Apps is big and unwieldy. Few businesses are likely to use all the apps available and the sign up process includes domain confirmation which doesn’t always work. Even the “express” set-up takes half an hour. You’ll find it easier to sign up to any apps you want to use individually.

Advantages

Although the entire suite will be overkill for most freelancers, the service does include some little known apps that are remarkably useful. Cloud Connect, for example, integrates with Microsoft Office to save documents and files automatically to the cloud. It’s a kind of instant back-up of your current files that saves you having to remember to back up manually. Now that’s useful.

Manage Your Contacts with Contactually

Every time you write an email through Gmail, the program records the address and adds it to a list. That makes for quite a list. It’s going to include customer service addresses you used once, email addresses you used for confirmation as well as the addresses of clients, leads, friends and family.

You never sort through those lists to segment and categorize them. No one ever does. Google helps a little by separating out the most contacted addresses but for the rest, you’re on your own.

If you want to send an update to leads and prospects inviting them to get back in touch, you’ll have to sort through thousands of lines of data to pick out the best options.

Contactually will do that organizing for you.


What Will It Do?

Contactually connects with your Google account to pull up all your contacts. It also works with other email clients, as well as social media lists and mobile contact to put everyone in one place.

But that’s only the beginning. Contactually also scans the Web for publicly available information about each entry, keeping your list updated automatically. It categorizes contacts on the basis of a quick email that you send, including tags and keywords. And it even notes when you haven’t contacted someone for a while and encourages you to get back in touch.

The basic service is free and a “freelancer” version costs $15 per month.

Who Is It Really For?

Contactually will probably work best for sales people who bring in plenty of leads and have trouble managing and acting on them all. But it is good for freelancers too. The company’s case studies include freelancers who use Contactually’s reminders as a way of maintaining a network and keeping in touch with old clients.

Disadvantages

Fifteen dollars a month isn’t much but until an old lead hands over a project you’ll wonder why you’re paying it. The twice daily reminders are likely to be more annoying than useful (although you can shut them off.) More worrying is the feeling of lost confidentiality. Use an email to categorize your contacts and they will be seen by real people:

“Any information you send to us is accessible to only a select few individuals, and all have signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). We process the emails you send to us to better understand the meaning if your data, and parse it accordingly.”

That can feel a little creepy.

Advantages

Organize your contact list even from within Gmail, know that your entries are being updated automatically, bring them all together from across social media platforms and you’ll have a pretty valuable resource — one strong enough, perhaps, to keep the work flowing in.

Beat Filing with CloudMagic

Just as no one ever manages their various contacts lists so our folders and files are never as organized as we might wish — and not everything we want to find is buried in our hard drive. Google’s ability to pull up a social media post, for example, is limited and you’ll need to use different search fields to plough through your email, your document folder or your Twitter timeline.

CloudMagic lets your search everywhere, all at once.

What Will It Do?

CloudMagic is a universal search engine for your personal data. It will index your information and allow you to make one search that covers:

• Gmail
• Google Apps Email
• Google Chat, Docs, Calendar and Contacts
• Twitter
• Microsoft Exchange Email, Calendar and Contacts (Exchange Server 2007 and 2010)
• Microsoft Office 365 Email, Calendar and Contacts

Who Is It Really For?

The people who will benefit most from CloudMagic are heavy users of Twitter, Gmail and Microsoft’s email, calendar and contacts.

Disadvantages

Despite its attempts to be universal, CloudMagic doesn’t cover everything. You’ll still be dependent on your OS’s search engine to find your hard drive documents and if you’re looking for a post someone made on Facebook, you’re out of luck.

Advantages

Searching your contacts on Twitter can be frustrating. CloudMagic is fast, effective and sits in your browser.

Conduct a quick search on Twitter as you’re waiting for your next freelance project to come in, and you might just get a bit of a surprise. Hidden among the tweets about breakfast cereals, Justin Bieber, and #threewordstosayaftersex are a series of requests for freelance workers in a variety of different fields. At a rough average, a new plea for a freelance help goes out every few minutes on Twitter from someone somewhere in the world. And that’s just Twitter. When it comes to landing freelance work, social media might just be the new Elance. Here’s how to use social media to find freelance clients.

Facebook

The biggest opportunities for freelancers are on the biggest social media site of all. Facebook is rapidly approaching its billionth member and while one American jobseeker in six found their last job through a social media platform, it’s Facebook that lands 44 percent of the jobseeking activity.

Advantage

• Size. With more than 900 million active members and over 125 billion friend connections, it’s almost certain that your next client is on Facebook somewhere.

Disadvantage

• It’s personal. Although Facebook has business pages, most activity on the site occurs between friends. Asking for work on Facebook can feel like making a business pitch at a dinner party.

How to Do It

• Use the privacy settings to target your hunt.

Tell people that you’re looking for more freelance work and ask if anyone on your contact list knows anyone who needs a freelancer. But before you hit “Post” use the dropdown menu next to the button to change the custom settings. You’ll want to make sure that your request can be seen by “friends of friends” and that it’s hidden from any current clients who might worry about your time commitments.

• Add a portfolio.

When your message reaches a potential new client, they’ll come to your Facebook page to find out who you are. Unless you have a business page though, they’re going to see pictures of your vacation and your friends — interesting, but not likely to win you a job. New York-based graphic designer Takeem Owens makes sure that his pictures include an album of his client work — and makes the pictures public. That’s a smart way to turn a Facebook profile into a business portfolio.

• Talk about your work.

Sure, most of your Facebook conversations are going to be lighthearted but when you meet friends they ask how work is going. Tell them. Link to sites you’ve just finished, logos you’ve just designed, projects you’ve just completed. Every time you congratulate yourself, you remind your friends what you do — and stay on their minds when they hear of someone who needs a freelancer.

Twitter

Advantage

• Easy and professional. Twitter tends to be more professional than personal and relationships are maintained with less investment of effort than that required on Facebook. Freelance jobs are often advertised on the platform too.

Disadvantage

• Contacts are wide but shallow. While the referrals you generate through Facebook will pass through trusted friends, the recommendations and requests you see on Twitter could come from people who know no more about than they see on Twitter.

How to Do It

• Search for work.

The easiest way to find freelance work on Twitter is to look for it. Search for “freelance.” Filter for the hashtag “#job.” Follow specialist freelance job timelines such as @work_freelance, @joblance_jobs and @ifreelancer.

• Build Your Network

Following people you don’t know on Facebook is always a bit creepy. On Twitter, it’s encouraged. Follow the companies you want to work for and interact with their timelines to make sure they know who you are and what you do. Don’t pitch for work directly unless they ask for help but stay on their radar.

• Use Your Bio

Twitter’s minimalism makes it a difficult place to show off your work. But make sure that your bio includes your profession, your URL leads to your professional site and that your photo roll includes samples of your work. It’s the closest you can get on Twitter to a portfolio.

LinkedIn

Advantage

• It’s a job site. LinkedIn’s main purpose is to boost careers. Few people use it to keep their friends and colleagues updated in the way that they use Facebook or Twitter but they do keep their resumés updated and assume that their connections could lead to work.

Disadvantage

• Weak communication channels. It’s much easier to make a request go viral on Facebook or Twitter than it is on LinkedIn. Updates tend to be automated announcements of new connections or feeds from Twitter rather than news posts made directly to the site.

How to Do It

• Complete Your Profile

LinkedIn provides plenty of space to list your skills and describe your experience. Make sure that you complete all of the fields but also add a picture, pick up recommendations and use the job title to reflect the kind of work you’re hoping to do.

• Improve Your LinkedIn SEO

LinkedIn’s summary includes a place to list your specialties. Use that field to add plenty of keywords and turn up in the site’s search results.

• Keep Building Connections

Because LinkedIn is the most static of social media’s Big Three, staying visible takes effort. Each time you create a new connection however, you’ll appear on the home page of your contacts, reminding them that you exist and showing the sort of skills that you can offer. Try to make a new contact or update at least once a week.

• Join Groups

Freelance requests tend not to pass through LinkedIn’s connections. They’re more likely to turn up in specific groups where clients ask for help and other freelancers discuss terms and challenges — and look for places to outsource their overflow. Some of the biggest groups include Designers Talk which has more than 38,000 members, Freelance Professionals, with over 28,000 members, and Advertising Freelance whose 10,000-plus freelancers all work in one industry.

Don’t join all the groups at once, though. Join a new group every week to keep your name visible on your contacts’ homepages.

Increasing your productivity means doing more than making a list or improving the way you answer your email. It requires making changes to as many as a dozen different aspects of your life. That, at least, is the theory of Casey Moore, a Virginia-based productivity coach who takes a holistic approach to improving output rates. Moore started her career in 2000 as a part-time professional organizer, helping Texans to organize their homes and businesses. She soon moved to full-time work and by the middle of the decade  was focused on improving business efficiency rather than domestic organization.

“Although I love organizing ‘stuff,’ I realized that helping people work more effectively (and thereby live the lives they wanted) was more challenging, interesting and rewarding,” she said. “To me, ‘productivity’ means producing whatever you want — accomplishing more at work, feeling more restful at home, or navigating more successfully between the two.”

Taking a Holistic Approach to Productivity

What Moore found as she spent time with business clients was that there was never one simple solution to an inefficient process. Organizing a shoe rack might help someone who can’t decide which pumps to wear in the morning but revving up those days when work seems to move like molasses requires doing more than just renaming folders or creating workflow rules.

Clients might have been hoping for a quick fix that could have them completing their chores in half an hour, leaving them free to focus on the really important stuff, but a real, permanent solution demands more than a change in the technology. It requires changes to a number of different aspects of a freelancer or entrepreneur’s life: to their health, their attitude and their relationships, among others. And because each aspect impacts another, making just one change — using a new calendar tool or screening calls — can only have limited effect.

“Most people I encounter are overwhelmed at both work and home as a result of decades of chronic downsizing and our consumer culture,” says Moore. “The demands and expectations they face are enormous… [and they] don’t realize that the factors that affect their productivity are complex and inter-related. They hope a magic bullet—usually some email trick—will make everything better. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet.”

One common problem, says Moore, is boundary-setting. People find it difficult to say “no” both to themselves and to others. When they take on too much though, their health suffers, as do their relationships. That, in turn, affects the ability to organize, plan, delegate and get things done. Their lack of productivity might be traced back to their willingness to please but it influences a number of different areas of their working life.

For Moore, the interrelation between different aspects of working life can be expressed as a series of twelve links that include: Boundary-setting/; Communication/Relationships; Decision-making; Delegation; Drive; Goal-setting/Prioritization; Health; Organization (of objects and data); Planning; Reinvention; Resources; and Task/Project Management.

These links, which relate to skills, knowledge and abilities, depend on each other, ensuring that a worker or a freelancer’s productivity is only as strong as the weakest link. A number of Moore’s clients, for example, come to her overwhelmed by email and believing that they need to learn to process it more quickly. That would be part of the Task/Project Management link but the ability to meet that challenge actually involves other parts of the chain too.

“When we dig deeper, however, it often turns out they really need to communicate more clearly themselves (Communication/Relationships link), resign from some list servs (Boundary-setting link), and/or train their team not to copy them on so many messages (Delegation link),” says Moore. “Strengthening these other links dramatically decreases the number of emails that arrive in their inboxes in the first place. The Productivity Chain guides you to address root causes.”

Understanding how the Chain works is relatively simple, and the changes that strengthen the links don’t have to be particularly complex, says Moore. A lack of drive might be linked to health which could be strengthened by spending more time in the gym, for example, or by eating lighter, healthier lunches. But identifying which links need strengthening first and how is a little less clear. Moore has a quick quiz that delivers a productivity assessment and which identifies the weakest links in The Productivity Chain (in return for contact details). Her book, Start Organizing, Start Producing contains more detail on each of the links and suggestions to strengthen them.

Get Some Sleep

For freelancers, raising productivity can begin by taking the test, then making small changes that strengthen each of the links in turn: delegating more tasks, for example, or setting career goals. The result should be a flow of work which the freelancer cranks out with ease — and maintaining that high productivity level should be simple because no link is at risk of cracking. The Productivity Chain can even work with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system. Moore is an advocate of Allen’s master list concept, and recommends listing the top three to five priorities each morning when the brain is rested and fed — and to put any tasks not accomplished back into the mix for the next day.

That “rested and fed” brain may actually be the most important factor of all in raising productivity. Asked to describe the one most important change that a freelancer needs to make to increase productivity, and Moore’s answer was clear:

“Get sufficient sleep. That means at least 7.5 hours a night, which allows for five 90-minute sleep cycles. Most Americans get far less—and it’s killing them and their productivity. They’ve been sleep-deprived for so long, they’ve forgotten how it feels to be fully rested. One tip: people who get enough sleep on a regular schedule don’t need alarms to wake up on time.”

But if they’re like most freelancers, they’ll still need coffee in the morning before they dive into their projects.

Multitasking is inefficient, unproductive and if it doesn’t get you fired, it probably should. That’s been the reaction to the increasing tendency, especially among young people, to do more than one thing at the same time. They — we — surf the Web, write documents, complete calculations, text friends, listen to music and make phone calls all at the same time. The fingers of one hand might be tapping a keyboard while the thumb on the other hand squeezes out an SMS message and our ears are taking in our favorite tunes from Pandora.

It looks like we’re being hugely efficient, and getting a massive amount done at the same time. In fact, say the experts, we’re not multitasking at all. We’re “switchtasking,” moving from one job to another without giving any one of them the attention they need — and losing time with each shift.

“What we are really doing is switching back and forth between two tasks rapidly, typing here, paying attention there, checking our ‘crackberry’ here, answering voicemail there, back and forth, back and forth at a high rate,” says productivity expert Dave Crenshaw, author of  The Myth of Multitasking: How ‘Doing It All’ Gets Nothing Done. “It is these switches that cause people to lose time. In this way, switchtasking causes us to be exponentially less productive…. Keep this up over a long period of time, and you have deeply engrained habits that cause stress and anxiety and dropped responsibilities and a myriad of productivity and focus problems.”

It’s a position that’s been supported by a number of studies, some of which have shown that the more you multitask the worse your brain function. In 2009, researchers at Stanford University asked a mixture of light and heavy multitaskers to try to recall the positions of red rectangles at the same time that they were being distracted by the addition of random blue rectangles. The researchers consistently found that the high multitaskers performed worse and were more likely to be distracted than the low multitaskers. The more people multitasked, the less able they were to sort relevant information from irrelevant interference.

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Dave Crenshaw’s Tips to Beat Multitasking Temptation

Take control over technology 

Your cell phone ringer (even on vibrate) doesn’t need to be on all the time. You can turn off email notification on your computer as well. Become master over the nagging beeps and buzzes by creating some silence.

Schedule what you can schedule 

Set regular times in the day and week to check your voicemail and email. Let others know you will be using that schedule so they know when to expect a reply.

Focus on the person 

When you switchtask with a computer, you simply lose efficiency. But if you switchtask on a human being, you additionally damage a relationship. Be present, listen carefully, and make sure everything has been taken care of before moving on.

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Multitaskers are Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

Some experts have gone even further, comparing the loss in ability caused by multitasking to that of alcohol use. They’ve called for texting while behind the wheel to be treated with the same seriousness as drunk driving. And there’s certainly no question that constantly reaching for your cell phone during a romantic date will eventually crash a relationship.

So the verdict seems to be in: the more you try to do at the same time, the less you actually get done and the less able you are to integrate, sort and recall all that data that you’re processing from all those different sources. The results are always a loss in efficiency, sometimes a loss of a relationship and occasionally even dangerous.

But before you pull out earphones and shut down your browser, it’s worth noting that not all multitasking is the same. Even Dave Crenshaw distinguishes between switchtasking and what he calls “background tasking.”

“Background tasking is when you do something mindless and mundane in the background,” he explains. “Examples of background tasking include starting your copy machine on a large print job while you answer email, or watching TV and exercising at the same time. Background tasking is actually a fairly efficient way to operate.”

So some types of multitasking is okay and experiments that show the costs of multitasking can also bear little relationship to the way that multitasking is done in real life, or its benefits. It’s possible that people who are likely to multitask are also more likely to lose focus but it’s also possible that when we do lose focus, we give it to something equally valuable. Multitaskers are more likely to be reading an important article at the same time as writing an article than they are to be avoiding blue rectangles.

A Little Music Can Help

A more recent study even suggests that when multitaskers listen while completing a task, their productivity improves. Volunteers in  Hong Kong were set a visual search task but some were also given a short noise that indicated when the target object changed color. Researchers found that the volunteers who tended to multitask the most, by listening to listening to sounds at the same time as they used their eyes, performed best when they worked accompanied by a short pip noise. Made to work in silence and they had worse results than the low multitaskers.

“Those who media multitasked the most tended to be more efficient at multisensory integration,” said the researchers in a press release. “It appears that their ability to routinely take in information from a number of different sources made it easier for them to use the unexpected auditory signal in the task with tone, leading to a large improvement in performance in the presence of the tone… Media multitasking may not always be a bad thing.”

The challenge for freelancers hoping to maximize their efficiency — and get through a day comfortably but without costly distractions — will be to know when they’re harmlessly background tasking and when they’re expensively switchtasking. If you’re used to listening to music while you work then turning it off might actually damage your productivity. But if you really want to get things done, and not crash your clients, you might want to avoid texting while you’re typing or designing.

Despite the fact that Apple has now sold more than 67 million iPads since its release two years ago, despite the fact that even the old iPad 2 is crushing Kindle Fire and despite the fact that sales of the tablet are still rising (they’re up 150 percent since last year) Apple’s iPad has many failings. This is what’s wrong with the world’s leading tablet computer.

The Screen Isn’t All That

The new iPad’s biggest sales point — the only real positive difference to affect the user, in fact — is its “Retina” screen. Those 3.1 million pixels on a 2048 x 1536 resolution, giving four times the number of pixels in an iPad 2 and a million more pixels than an HDTV can’t be bad, can they? After all, more has got to be better.

And when you look at Apple’s own features site, the improvement is clear. Move the loupe around the replica screens of the new iPad and the iPad 2, and the text of Treasure Island on the new iPad stays sharp while the type on the old iPad has fuzzy edges.

But who reads on an iPad with a magnifying glass? The smallest magnification on Amazon’s Kindle app produces text that’s about the same size and sharpness as a printed book, and even at full magnification, the blurry edges around the letters aren’t visible. The same is true of images. Apple’s marketing shows fingers zooming in on an image of a flower which stays sharp but for most people, the photos of friends and family on their iPad are viewed 1:1 as a slideshow.

For every user who isn’t a photographer or is so visually impaired that they’ll probably need the iPad’s accessibility features the screen on the iPad 2 is fantastic. Having slightly brighter colors and knowing that you can now zoom in without losing sharpness is nice but it’s not what users have been crying out for.

What we have been crying out for is the ability read in a sunny yard without feeling like were peering through gauze. Samsung has figured out how to do that with its AMOLED screen. If Apple had put half the effort it put into adding pixels we don’t really need into beating screen glare, we might have had new glass that provided real benefits.

The Battery’s a Bummer

And we’d have had them at lower costs. Those extra pixels might not be necessary but they are a giant drain on every aspect of the iPad’s workings, including power. The new iPad now packs a 42.5 watt-hour battery. That’s larger even than the 35 watt-hour battery in the 11-inch MacBook Air and much larger than the 25 watt-hour cells used in the iPad 2.

But that giant battery is being fed by the same 10 watt adapter that comes with older versions of the iPad. It’s like filling an Olympic sized swimming pool with the same hosepipe you use to fill a paddling pool. It’s no wonder that the new iPad can take as much as six hours to charge to just 80 percent — and if you’re using the iPad at the same time with full brightness, it struggles even to hold the charge.

If you like to read on the iPad in bed before you go to sleep, you’re going to need to put the charger on your bedside table or get used to losing usage for a large chunk of the day.

You’re Getting Less for Your Money

When Steve Jobs announced the first iPad, the biggest gasp of the show was for the price. At a hair under $500 buyers of the lowest specced iPad were getting a powerful little computer for a fee that was comparable to the netbooks it replaced. They might have been getting only 16 GB of storage, but that was enough to give them a reasonable selection of music, apps and videos.

One of the effects of the Retina display though is that apps have jumped in size as they load up on bigger pictures. Apple’s own Pages app has leapt from 95 MB to 269 MB. Numbers nearly tripled from 109 MB to 283 MB. iMovie used to be a svelte 70 MB. Now it’s 404 MB, and it’s no longer unusual for a top game like Infinity Blade or FIFA Soccer to weigh in at over a gigabyte.

As CNET has pointed out, although Apple limits apps to 2 GB, for owners of the cheapest 16 GB new iPad that barely leaves space for seven apps — and no music or videos. The new iPad has given us extra pixels on the screen but for budget-watchers those extra dots translate into less space for the content itself.

No Siri for You

Apple announced the iPhone 4s (which we now know stands for “for Siri”) in October 2011. It announced the new iPad in March 2012… without Siri. The prices for the two products are comparable. The functionality is almost the same — and almost the same, in fact, as the iPhone 4. And yet the new iPad lacked the single outstanding feature that Apple trumpeted on its new mobile phone.

As an act of discrimination, it’s hard to understand and even harder to justify. CNET has speculated that the absence could be because of Siri’s reliance on 3G networks, something not available on all iPads. Or, they say, it could be because Siri has been a bit of a disappointment. There’s no shortage of rumor suggesting the voice control app will be coming to iOS 6 but that would still leave unanswered the question of why we had to wait so long.

There’s no question that the iPad is a great device. It’s great for reading. It’s great for watching. And yes, it’s even good too for writing the odd blog post. But it could have been better. The screen could have solved the glare problem instead of a pixel problem it didn’t have. If it was going to have a bigger battery and a faster processor, it could have kept all those goodies for operations instead of giving them all to those pesky pixels. It could have let us tell it what to do instead of having to type. And it could have had a proper name too.

Mark Cuban has an unusual way of screening his calls. The entrepreneur, who sold his social marketing firm Flowtown to Demandforce last year, charges $10,000 for an hour’s chat. On the other hand, you can pay just $4.17 per minute and call top Silicon Valley venture capitalist (and “nose-picker extraordinaire”) Dave McClure. Both donate their fees to charity and both dispense their advice and the benefit of their experience through Clarity, a service created by Mark Cuban that allows experts to sell their knowledge.

The service isn’t unique. There are now lots of different ways for people who need specialist information and advice to pick up the knowledge they need from successful types with experience. They also allow experts — and often anyone who wants to call themselves an expert — to make a little extra money sharing their knowledge. Here’s a rundown of some of the different ways you can learn from the best or teach the rest.

Clarity

What is It?

Clarity is a phone-based service that allows users looking for answers to call experts with knowledge. The service is said to have signed up 1,200 advisors and to have already placed more than 4,000 calls. In addition to Dave McClure, other contributors include Josh Elman of Greylock Partners and Eric Ries author of The Lean Startup.

Who Can Dispense Advice?

Anyone. Although Clarity has manage to land some well-known personalities, signing up as an expert is as simple as using Facebook Connect. Anyone can dispense advice.

How Do You Find an Expert?

Finding an expert isn’t simple. Clarity doesn’t yet have a directory and the featured experts only show a small share of the people available. The service depends on users sending in questions which an algorithm then matches to a short list of specialists.

Costs and Fees

Fees for calling are usually in the hundreds of dollars for an hour’s  chat but about 80 percent of experts who charge donate the revenue to charity and only about 15 percent of experts have chosen to charge. Clarity takes a 15 percent cut of any money not donated.

Benefits

An easy way to find experts often for free, and to sell advice. The service’s technology also makes scheduling for both callers and experts convenient.

Disadvantages

Not easy to find experts and the site’s open sign up means that you can’t always tell the pedigree of the person handing out the advice.

Startup Plays

What is It?

Startup Plays sells step-by-step guides written by selected experts that explain exactly what other entrepreneurs have to do to grow their website, build a community or get seed funding, among other specialized topics.

Who Can Dispense Advice?

Startup Plays is selective. To become a Startup Play author, you have to apply and make a pitch.

How Do You Find an Expert?

The site currently has a small, easily browsed library of about eighteen plays.

Costs and Fees

Although the site has one or two free, sample plays, prices range from $49 to $299.

Benefits

The plays are simple to follow and unlike a phone call, they provide something that users can take away with them and turn back to over the long term. They’re also practical and goal oriented.

Disadvantages

The number of plays available is still small, they’re expensive and they’re not as personal as a conversation.

ExpertView

What is It?

ExpertView is one of a number (together with GLG Research and Alphasights) of advice services that specialize in the finance sector — for ExpertView, that currently means the Media and Entertainment business.

Who Can Dispense Advice?

Experts must complete a three-page form that includes details of their expertise and current employment. Applications take 72 hours to process.

How Do You Find an Expert?

You don’t. ExpertView does the matching for you, acting as an intermediary that brings together clients seeking financial advice with experts willing to dispense it for a fee.

Costs and Fees

ExpertView negotiates a consultancy fee with the expert. The experts don’t get to set their own rates, and clients have little option to shop around.

Benefits

ExpertView’s role as an intermediary, and the specialized nature of its expertise, means that clients are getting carefully chosen advice that can help them make decisions with serious financial consequences.

Disadvantages

It’s specialized, and ExpertView’s micromanagement offers little freedom for experts to charge rates of their choice and pick their own clients.

MinuteBox

What is It?

MinuteBox is a communication tool that allows anyone to make themselves available to give advice. Experts get a widget that they can place on their website and set a fee for their calls.

Who Can Dispense Advice?

Anyone can sign up for MinuteBox. The company provides the technology and a place where users can find experts but there are no background checks or reviews. Information is pulled in through LinkedIn and other social media sites.

How Do You Find an Expert?

MinuteBox has a directory divided into categories but the site expects experts to market themselves, using their widgets to add a revenue stream to an already successful online presence.

Costs and Fees

MinuteBox’s experts set their own fee, using Paypal to charge by the minute. Rates range from fifty cents to ten bucks a minute.

Benefits

For experts, MinuteBox makes paid expertise a very simple option. Potential clients are able to speak directly to a person whose knowledge they respect — provided they’re using the service.

Disadvantages

The service’s open nature means that many of the “experts” could have little more than basic or professional knowledge. Marketing relies largely on the expert’s own connections and platform.

Quora

What is It?

Quora is a question and answer website that uses crowdsourcing to vote up or down answers, and has a reputation for winning replies from leading experts.

Who Can Dispense Advice?

Although there are no restrictions on contributors, the site has manage to persuade experts including CEOs, top investors and experienced specialists to answer complex questions. The best answers are voted to the top of the response pile.

How Do You Find an Expert?

Questioners can’t ask specific experts. They can only ask a question and hope that the biggest expert weighs in.

Costs and Fees

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Image: miiCard

The biggest challenge in selling freelance services isn’t finding potential new clients. And it isn’t choosing the works to show in your portfolio. It’s creating trust,  the tipping point where the questions about your ability transform into a belief that you can do the job. That’s what every sales process does to a prospect: it allows them to trust that you can create the product they need, at a schedule that roughly suits them and according to the budget you’ve agreed.

But trust works both ways. Just as a client who’s just handed over a deposit to a freelancer needs to feel that that sum they’re paying will translate into a product they can use, so the freelancer needs to believe that the deposit they receive won’t be the last payment that comes their way. We need to trust the client to accept good work and pay for it.

The initial process is pretty simple. If the client has come in through a referral, then we’ll already feel pretty at ease about handling the work; a trusted client can lend trust to a new prospect. For other clients, there’s usually half-hour or an hour spent researching who they are and what they’ve done. It’s not actually due diligence, more like a cursory glance to understand who we’ll be working with and whether they look professional. If they have a website that’s well-designed, maintained and up-to-date, they win a little trust. If their LinkedIn profile has plenty of connections, a good background and carefully written text, we’ll know where they’re coming from. If a quick Google turns up nothing suspicious, negative or worrying then we can assume that the client offers nothing to worry about and is just one of the majority of people who are reliable and trustworthy.

“You’re working for Mark Zuckerberg. Really.”

But all those attempts to build trust rely on everyone being who they say they are. In theory, there’s nothing to stop an apparent client from claiming to be Mark Zuckerberg, for example, leaving the freelancer scrabbling to produce work for a valuable client then writing to Facebook for the payment. And there’s also nothing to stop a freelancer claiming to be someone they’re not in the hope of leaving behind a reputation for poor work and missing deliveries.

If either of those situations sounds unlikely, consider that identity fraud rose by 13 percent in 2011, affecting more than 11.6 million adults in the US. The most popular social media platform for stealing identities wasn’t Facebook, where little more than 5 percent of users were affected, but business site LinkedIn whose identity fraud incident rate was a remarkable 10 percent.

It’s a risk that the government has already noticed. In order to prevent money-laundering, regulations now require professional service providers such as accountants, real estate agents and legal companies to conduct identity checks on new clients. To open an account with investment firm Leader Capital, for example, clients need to provide a taxpayer ID number or passport, and “provide identification documents as necessary to enable the Firm to verify your identity.” The company will also screen clients’ names against “various databases.”

Online Photo ID

That clunky process, which has to be repeated every time someone uses one of those services, has led Canadian entrepreneur and IT expert James Varga to try to create a kind of online passport that anyone can use to prove their identity. miiCard opened its beta in February and has been growing steadily in the seven countries the firm supports. Users can sign up then use their online bank accounts to verify their identities, receiving a password through SMS. Finally, they can link their social media accounts to their miiCards, guaranteeing that their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts (and soon their Facebook accounts as well) really do represent them. The cards are free for the first 10,000 users then cost $1.99 per month or $19.99 a year.

The goal is to create an online ID card as trustworthy as driving licenses and other forms of photo ID that would allow users to buy and sell safely online, prove their identities on dating sites and verify their social media accounts — even when they’re not famous enough for Twitter to do it for them.

There is a hope too, though, that the cards will allow freelancers and clients to build up some early trust.

“Your miiCard lets you prove you are who you say you are in your social and professional networks, and replaces the traditional offline identity checks associated with applying for a range products and services in financial and professional services,” says Cassie Anderson, miiCard’s Marketing Manager. “We imagine miiCard could be used in freelance and group collaborations where individuals have never met or done business before and are looking to establish a level of trust before commencing work.”

In practice, for freelancers, the biggest risk is that clients won’t pay them. While contracts can bring some level of recourse, the best solution is to break the payments into milestones so that any amounts lost are minimized. Even if your contract is watertight and you win both the case and costs, there’s no guarantee that you’ll see any money and you certainly won’t win back the time spent fighting for it.

It’s also possible though that some clients will misuse the services you provide, selling your designs as their own, for example, or adding them to their portfolios without due credit. There’s little you can do about that beyond pointing the theft out on blogs and forums, a method that quickly kills the thief’s reputation. A miiCard or other form of ID is less likely to help there than proof that you created the image, design or content first.

But while the identity risks for most freelancers remain low, identity verification could become an issue if more people use it. Once other freelancers are verifying their identities, service providers who don’t could start to look suspicious. That would make winning trust a great deal harder.

With several projects now topping a million dollars in pledges, Kickstarter strategies are becoming clearer.

Between the evening of February 8, 2012 and the evening of February 9, 2012 Kickstarter had the craziest 24 hours it had seen in its three-year history. On Wednesday, at 6.54 pm, Elevation Dock, a concept for an iPhone stand from design and manufacturing firm ElevationLab, passed TikTok to become the largest project in Kickstarter history by winning $942,579 in pledges. The company had asked for $75,000. At around 2 pm the following day, it became the first million dollar Kickstarter project. It would go on to make $1,464,706. Four hours later, game maker Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure became the second Kickstarter project to pass a million dollars — reaching the milestone less than a day after launching. It went on to earn $3,336,371.

Those are huge successes for two very different projects, and they’re not alone. The open-source funding service has provided the means for projects as varied as comic books and gardening gear to find the money they need to go into production. So what does it take to turn a concept not just into a success on Kickstarter, but into a blockbuster that gives you all you dreamed of and more? What lessons can we learn from the some of the site’s biggest success stories?

Below we look at three Kickstarter projects that earned giant sums of money, explain what they were, why they worked  — and how you can copy their success.

The Order of the Stick Reprint Drive

What is it?

The Order of the Stick is a comedy/fantasy Web comic published by Rich Burlew. The comic has been online since 2003, and story prequels became available in print form in 2005. By 2010, however, those books were out of print. The aim of the Kickstarter project was to raise funds for a second print run.

Target Amount

$57,500 (reached within 48 hours)

Amount Raised

$1,254,120 from 14,952 backers.

Main Reason for Success

Reach

The comic has been online for nearly a decade, has a catalog of 800 strips and a large community of fans familiar with the work. Kickstarter gave Burlew a way for his audience to pay him for a product he was confident they wanted; he didn’t need to build a market for a product no one had heard of.

Reach is an element in many (although not all) of Kickstarter’s most successful projects, including the Double Fine Adventure and former Dresden Doll (and Mrs Neil Gaiman) Amanda Palmer’s new album.

How to Build Reach for Your Kickstarter Project

Use free samples to prepare your market.

In an interview with Kickstarter’s blog, Rich Burlew explains in simple terms how to build an audience for a creative work.

Let them read it (or watch it) for free. Because unless you have the marketing department of a large corporation behind you, you’re not likely to get enough people to take a chance on your unknown property, even through Kickstarter. On the other hand, if you give it away first, people will form their opinion of you and your work before you ask them for money. And readers are a lot more likely to spend money on things they know they like than things they hope they will like.

Before you launch your Kickstarter project, build a website that contains plenty of free samples. Use the reaction to those samples to build interest and hone the product (early Order of the Stick strips are heavy on RPG geekery and light on artwork.)

Reach takes time to build so you’ll have to plan ahead. But a product takes time, too, so as you’re creating your main product, give away samples. You’ll then be able to launch to a prepared market after eight to twelve months.

Windowfarms

What is it?

Windowfarms are hanging pots that allow apartment owners to create edible gardens using window light and a home’s climate control.

Target Amount

$50,000

Amount Raised

$257,307 from 1,577 backers.

Main Reason for Success

Community

While Rich Burlew had built a market for his specific product, Britta Riley, the artist and technology designer behind Windowfarms, was able to tap into a worldwide community of 22,000 windowfarmers that was already experimenting with the concept. Windowfarms itself started in 2009 as an open source community art project.

How to use a Community to Support Your Kickstarter Project

Join the community early and play an active role.

The difference between reach and community is that reach focuses on a single product; a community is part of a movement that might buy related products but which has momentum and ideas of its own.

Before creating the product, join the community and play an active role in its issues. Create forums and open blogs where other community members can post information and manage discussions (such as this one on Windowfarms’ own site.) As you near launch show off your prototypes to gain feedback and display what you’re offering. When you launch, use the community to spread the word. From a community of 22,000, Windowfarms was able to convert about one in fourteen.

Elevation Dock

What is it?

Elevation Dock is an aluminum dock for iPhones that work with cases and which remain on the table when the user picks up the device.

Target Amount

$75,000 (reached in eight hours and fourteen minutes.)

Amount Raised

$1,464,706 from 12,521 backers.

Main Reason for Success

Smart rewards and a good product.

An early thumbs up from John Gruber of Daring Fireball helped to get Elevation Dock rolling. Its rapid growth — $25,000 in the first two hours — attracted media attention that kept the momentum. But a big part of the success for this item, one of a large number of Apple-related products on Kickstarter, was its smart rewards. While other firms go overboard, offering personal meetings and customized designs, Elevation Dock kept things simple. It had a good product that had caught the attention of some important outlets and it allowed people to buy it.

How to Create Smart Rewards to Support Your Kickstarter Project

Keep the rewards simple, and include reseller options.

The bulk of Elevation Dock’s pledges came for different versions of the product. A creative product, such as a show or an album, might require and have the space for personal touches but a physical product should be good enough to stand on its own merits.

Create three different versions of the product with three different price points. Those three products will make for three different pledge options. Add reseller rewards that allow some buyers to purchase in bulk and sell in stores or online. About $155,000 of Elevation Dock’s pledges came from merchants hoping to be the first to stock the product.

Each of these products had a single outstanding sales point that increased their chances of success. Combine them all by making great offers of a great product to a prepared fan base, and you might just be onto a blockbuster too.

Freelancers are usually passionate about their work but freelance crossword constructors have managed to turn their passion into their work.

Will Shortz has a unique degree. The editor of the New York Times crossword page is the only person in the United States with a bachelor’s degree in enigmatology — the study of puzzles. It was a course that he was able to put together himself using the Individualized Major Program at Indiana University where he wrote his thesis on “The History of American Word Puzzles Before 1860.” In addition to creating clues and editing submissions every day for the world’s most famous crossword puzzle, he has also been the editor of Games Magazine, and is now the founder and director of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. He’s one of the few people who have managed to build a career out of an activity usually done for fun.

But he’s not unique, and the ability to make money doing what you love, even from home, isn’t restricted to an editor at a national newspaper. Shortz himself doesn’t produce the puzzles published in the Times, relying instead on the 75-100 submissions that flow into the newspaper each week from crossword enthusiasts. He’ll pick crosswords from about 100 freelance contributors each year.

Those crossword creators are likely to be amateurs happy to earn an occasional $200 or so for a midweek crossword and as much as $1,000 for a Sunday edition. But a few crossword setters have been able to turn their love of puzzles into a reliable business that brings in money every day.

An Audience of Two Million

Myles Mellor, for example, sells crosswords to between 80 and 100 publications every month. His work has been published in magazines that range from airline glossies to art publications and from The History Channel Magazine to Homes Magazine Canada. He has published eight  books of crosswords through Books a Million bookstores, sells more crossword compendiums through Kindle, and in 2011, published seven crossword books that are sold in Barnes and Noble stores.

Although he’s been solving puzzles since he was a child, Mellor only started creating crosswords in 2001. When the death of his mother left his father in England lonely and depressed, Mellor made him some crosswords to help him pass the time.

“I was here in the US,” says Mellor. “I knew he loved puzzles as he taught me how to solve them when I was young. I started doing them for him and he loved them. After a few of them he said I should try to publish them.”

Today, Mellor’s crosswords are believed to reach as many as two million people.

Not all of the puzzles that Mellor creates are aimed at readers of mainstream newspapers and magazines. One of the most important factors that have contributed to the success of his freelance crossword business may be that Mellor has targeted a particular niche in the crossword market: the demand for themed crosswords used in corporate material and even in advertising. Clues and answers will be related to the product, the company or the subject of the magazine. One crossword for Wine Trails magazine, for example, used types of grape, flavors and other wine-related words. In addition to a host of magazines, his clients have included companies like McClaren McCann, Nascar and Pepsi whose completed puzzle revealed the phrase “Drink Diet Pepsi.” His puzzles appear in industry magazines in fields from fashion to finance, and he has even created a puzzle that was used as a wedding proposal.

Each puzzle is different, and the terms targeted in each industry will present a unique challenge, but the hardest kind of puzzles to create, says Mellor, are large custom puzzles that require real ingenuity to insert the words related to the product or the industry.

“I did some for MasterCard which had full newspaper page grids and were all custom,” Mellor recalls. “Six hundred and eighty clues. They were used for an ad campaign in major Canadian newspapers. That was the high end of the difficulty level.”

The crosswords will typically take between two hours and ten hours  to write, depending on the size and complexity of the puzzle. A newspaper style puzzle usually takes about two to five hours. Pricing varies, too, and depends on the client, as well as the size and type of crossword the client wants. Even the medium can affect the price with different models used for print, interactive and mobile crosswords. The cheapest may cost as little as $4 while the most expensive sell for as much as $1,000.

“There are many different models for different scenarios,” says Mellor.

Finding the work might require as much ingenuity as writing the clues. Clients reach Mellor in part through Google searches for crossword setters. (He says he has a “presence on Google” that enables clients to find him when they want theme or custom crosswords.) But he also pitches publications directly, following the submission guidelines laid down by the publisher.

The Cost is a Good Time

Costs, at least, are relatively low. Mellor uses Crossword Compiler, a software tool for crossword constructors that costs $169 for a professional bundle. The remaining costs will be a combination of online marketing, particularly search engine marketing to pull in clients, hours lost on unsolicited submissions that are rejected — and the time spent thinking up clues and testing the final puzzle.

But if time is the biggest expense it’s also a fee that most freelance crossword enthusiasts would be happy to pay.

Freelancers are generally a pretty happy lot. We consistently show greater job satisfaction and higher rates of optimism and happiness than salaried staff, helped in part by the ability to set our own schedules and manage our own time. But it can’t hurt that 87 percent of freelancers surveyed by Elance said that they were “following their passion.” Crossword enthusiasts though aren’t the only people who can turn their passion into a freelance business. Whether you spend your spare time gardening, gaming, filling crosswords or completing Sudoku puzzles, you should be able to find an opportunity to build that passion into a successful freelance business.

You want leads, clients and companies to know about your biggest achievements. Geekli.st gives you a place to brag.

Out of all the thousands of tasks you’ve completed and from all the jobs you’ve been hired to do over the course of your career, there’s probably no more than a handful that really stick out. They’re your biggest successes: the site design that won an award, the app that made the App Store lists, the blog post that went viral or the script now sitting on millions of computers. They’re the accomplishments that act as your introduction at dinner parties and they’re the benchmarks against which you measure each new job you complete. They’re also the highlights of your resume — the real reason that any employer will give you a job or any client hire your freelance services.

It’s those headlines that are the standout feature on Geekli.st, a job-seeking service for geeks of all kinds. The site, which just celebrated its first anniversary, doesn’t share the specific number of its users but membership is “deep into the tens of thousands,” says co-founder Reuben Katz. He expects the site to reach 250,000 members this year. No less importantly, the site has already picked up its first paying client in Spotify.

Keep Your Achievements Short

At first glance, Geekli.st looks pretty Spartan. Click through to view the profiles of the geeks shown in tiny avatars on the home page and you’ll reach a page with a mini-bio linked closely to the member’s Twitter stream. (You’ll even be invited to follow them on Twitter, and signing up can be done using Twitter’s API although you’ll have to wait for a private beta invite before you can start using the site fully.) While LinkedIn provides space to write an autobiography, Geekli.st offers nothing more than the equivalent of a headline to introduce yourself.

Beneath that mini-bio are cards containing the highlights of the geek’s career. Laurence Gonsalves, for example, says modestly that he likes “making things, and code is one of my favorite ingredients.” His first card though states: “I helped build Google AdSense 1.0 from the ground up.” Other cards declare that he also helped to build Google Reader and AdSense 2.0, and was the original author of Google’s internal “.virmc,” a tool used on Unix. Nathan Barry, a freelance Web designer and coder, gets to tell the world that he “designed the original Teletubbies site for the BBC, which regularly got over a million hits a day.”

As far as personal details are concerned, that’s pretty much it. Those short statements of a geek’s biggest successes are supposed to be enough to tempt a potential client or employee to check out their Twitter stream and click through to their website. But with those cards are a number of interactive tools. Members can follow each other to keep track of new accomplishments. They can “hi five” cards, a kind of Facebook-style “like” that can be shared on social media or kept on Geekli.st.  They can also add “contributors,” a list of the people who helped them achieve their success and which adds a level of validation. (Although the cost of sharing the credit seems to have put many members off using it. Most cards appear to have zero contributors.)

“The idea is to provide a safe zone where developers can share their great work and achievements with their peers, while building their geek identity and persona,” says Reuben Katz. “This provides companies with the first ever place to build relationships with developers in a passive community.”

That’s questionable. Companies can already build relationships with developers on Twitter — provided they can find them — and they can certainly do it on LinkedIn which has plenty of developer groups and networks that allow for an even greater level of interaction than Geekli.st does. And it’s hard to see the advantage that a passive community has over an active one that provides room to learn about personality as well as accomplishments.

The Anti-Resume

But Katz’s main competitor isn’t so much LinkedIn or Twitter but traditional resumes, still the most popular way for companies to assess applicants despite their limitations.

“They don’t work,” says Katz. “They show a superficial overview but have no relational value…. Geeklist is completely relational, pulling together who you did what with and what they do as well.”

In practice, Geekli.st acts as a kind of boasting platform for geeks whose accomplishments can then be sent echoing through social media. Companies might use it as a first step towards identifying top prospects before they do a little more serious due diligence by reading the applicant or the freelancer’s LinkedIn page, website or Twitter stream. It might not be as effective at winning work for developers as Dribbble has proved for designers but it’s much harder for coders to show and discuss a work in progress than it is for artists to display their current designs.

On the other hand, one of the things that most surprised the people behind Geekli.st was just how broad a spectrum of talent the term “geek” can cover. While most of the people on the site are developers “or builders of things,” Geekli.st also includes an artist whose work was displayed in orbit on the International Space Station and an entrepreneur who competed in Olympic trials.

“We have learned that Geeks are not just developers but all people who share a passion for certain things that may be outside the mainstream idea of what is ‘cool,’” says Katz.

Whether Geekli.st will land you a new client any time soon is debatable — certainly as long as the site remains in private beta. But it is simple to use, and it won’t just give you place to boast about your biggest successes without boring your dinner party guests. It will also give you a chance to boast about the people who hi fived you on Geekli.st.

Does the iPad’s mobility mean that GTD can really get things done?

David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system has always felt as though it added work rather than saved time. The complex system of multiple folders, workflow and priority setting has long appealed to geeks and nerds with a knack for organization. For more typical freelancers, though, the kind of people who tend to make do with whiteboard lists, flagged emails and missed deadlines, GTD always seemed too fiddly and too time-consuming to become a part of a fast-moving day. The popularity of the iPad, though, might just have changed all that. With 85 percent of US tablet owners playing with their devices as the same time as they watch television and 30 percent of all iPad time spent in front of the box, it’s now possible — even easy — for iPad owners to turn their evening relaxation into a productive hour organizing their work and preparing for the next day.

You will need to use the right app, though, and here you’re going to be spoilt for choice. The App Store offers about 1,167 list-making apps that range from the general but popular Evernote to Santa’s list, shopping lists and anime lists. Choose the wrong one and you won’t do much for your workflow but you might be able to zip around the grocery store a little faster. Here are a number of apps and a workflow that can make your GTD-based productivity a bit more useful.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is the app that David Allen himself recommends. In addition to listing all of the tasks you need to complete — something that the iPad’s own Reminders app  can do — the app also lets you provide contexts for tasks so that you can see the jobs you need to complete in the supermarket, when you’re downtown or as you’re stepping into the office. A Forecast section provides a preview — some might call it a nagging reminder — of the tasks coming up next. And, of course, you can have plenty of fun sorting your actions into projects and folders, an essential element of the GTD experience.

With a testimonial from David Allen, not to mention a five-star ranking from more than 50 reviewers, OmniFocus should be all a GTD-inclined organizer needs. Even Rob Corddry of The Daily Show has said that the app is an essential part of his workflow. But priced at $39.99, it’s one of the most expensive apps in the App Store, and you’ll need to pay another $79.99 for a Mac version, although the versions will at least sync automatically.

That makes OmniFocus an option only for dedicated David Allen fans who know what they want and have the funds to pay for it. Other freelancers will need to keep looking.

Wunderlist

Also popular with GTD followers is Wunderlist — and not just because it’s free. The app’s multi-platform functionality — with free versions available for PC, Mac, Linux, Blackberry and Android as well as iPad — makes it feel a lot like Evernote but without that app’s recipe-building flexibility. Wunderlist, in fact, is a fairly simple list-making app.

You can add notes to each task. You can search through your tasks and you can prioritize tasks by adding an asterisk and placing them on a calendar. But categorization is only done by creating different lists. That might make the app useful for freelancers who want to keep track of all the different tasks that that they have to complete for different clients. But for GTD followers looking for all of the multiple folders and prioritization options that David Allen recommends, Wunderlist’s inability to grade tasks and move them easily from one list to another might make it too simple — at least for now. 6Wunderkinder, the company behind Wunderlist, is now working on Wunderkit, a collaborative tool that allows teams to share notes, tasks, profiles and other productivity tools. It might move the app further from David Allen’s teachings, which are geared towards individual workers, but expect GTD-inclined clients to ask you to sign up.

Chronodex

GTD isn’t just about making and prioritizing lists of tasks; it’s also a way of organizing a day. Blogger and photographer Patrick Ng has adapted his Chronodex system — a way of dividing a day into prioritized segments rather than into vertical sections — to David Allen’s GTD system. After initially offering Chronodex pages as free downloads that can be printed and assembled into planners, he’s now created versions suitable for some iPad note-taking apps.

The pages work particularly well with Noteshelf and Ghostwriter Notes. To use them, you’ll need to:

1. Download the Chronodex Daily GTD for GhostWriter Notes JPG from Box, and save the image in your photo roll.
2. Open Noteshelf or Ghostwriter Notes.
3. Create a new notebook.
4. When asked to select paper, choose the Chronodex page from your photo roll.

You’ll then be free to draw on the lists you’ve created in your other apps and place them, using a stylus, around your Chronodex.

Easy iPad GTD

All of these apps can help a freelancer employ GTD, even as they’re watching television. But Omnifocus is broad but expensive, Wunderlist is cheap but limited and Chronodex takes some getting used to. In practice, though, it is possible to employ GTD using the kind of common apps you’re likely to be familiar with anyway. Emanuele Castagno, author of Time Management with GTD and iPad offers a workflow that consists of:

1. Is the task actionable? If no: trash it; add it to a “some day/maybe” list on Apple’s Reminders app; or place it in a Reference section in Evernote.
2. If yes: create a new project in Evernote if multiple actions are required; do it if it takes less than two minutes; delegate it by adding to a “waiting for” list in Reminders; or place it in the Calendar linked to the Reminders list.

It’s simple, it doesn’t use any paid apps and you should be able to do it in the time it takes to finish watching the commercials.

Freelancers can struggle to succeed and struggle with success. Help is at hand.

Freelancers tend to work alone. We sit in our home offices, Skype occasionally with clients and rely on social media for contact with the outside world during work hours. If we’re lucky enough to live close to a co-working space, we might get to meet other freelancers occasionally but for the most part, freelancing is a lonely profession. That doesn’t just mean there’s no one to gossip with; it also means that there’s no one to turn to for help.

There’s nowhere to turn for creative ideas. There’s nowhere to turn for technical assistance. And, no less importantly, there’s nowhere to turn when the business hits a wall.

That’s the service that Jenny Shih is attempting to provide. Shih describes herself as “a coach and consultant for right-brained, creative entrepreneurs.” Her clients, she says, are “solopreneurs,” “idea factories” who are struggling to implement their ideas by themselves. Her background is in high-tech engineering where she managed multi-million dollar projects across four continents with teams made up of hundreds of staff. While other managers were putting in the kind of sixty-plus hour weeks typical of high tech companies, though, Shih was able to apply time management strategies, efficient processes and delegation so that her week’s work was done in forty hours or less.

“I got more done with less stress, less chaos, and less overhead,” she says on her website. “I even had time to goof off.”

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Tips for Freelance Growth

• Delegate whenever possible.

Jenny Shih’s first contact with a client is handled by her assistant, giving her more time for her personal touch. Hand over as much as you can to a virtual assistant, and you’ll have more time in your ‘genius zone.’

• Automate processes.

A number of the elements in Jenny Shih’s packages are prepared courses. She’s able to offer extra value and key solutions without extra work.

• Love the Business

Enjoy the marketing, the sales and growth. You’ll be doing a lot of it!

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Help for Fast Growth and No Growth

Goofing off might not be the aim of “solopreneurs,” for whom time spent away from the keyboard is time not spent earning, but many would certainly like to make more money in the time they have available — and use that time to achieve their goals.

Shih’s clients tend to reach her at three different stages of their business growth. New entrepreneurs, says Shih, ask for help when they’re just starting out “especially if they want to do it right the first time.” They might also turn to her after they’ve been trying for a few years to get their freelance business off the ground and failing to gain momentum.

“They hire me when they realize they’re missing something, but they’re not sure what it is. They’re ready to invest in coaching and consulting so they can make money doing what they love.”

A second group of freelancers and entrepreneurs is made up of people who know what they want but aren’t certain how to do it. They have an idea for a product or a service but the project is so large that they don’t know how to put all the pieces together themselves. They hire Shih to create a plan and explain to them how to execute it.

And the third group of clients consists of people who might look like they really don’t need any help at all.  These are entrepreneurs whose businesses have grown so large, their client lists so long and their workloads so heavy that they’re working long hours and still aren’t managing to get things done.

“Everything is such a mess that they don’t know how to fix things or even where to start,” says Shih.

Despite her background in the mostly male world of high tech engineering, almost all of Jenny Shih’s clients are women. Their businesses though cover a broad range of industries. One of her current clients is the owner of a dog-training company and is trying to start a new canine sport. Another is the owner of a high-end interior design firm.

The process of fixing the problem begins with the entrepreneur completing a short questionnaire then taking part in a free telephone consultation. Jenny Shih will use that conversation to understand the challenges the prospect is facing and make sure that she can help them. If the two find that they’re a match, the client can usually choose one of two packages both of which are delivered either by phone or by Skype.

The first, called “How to Actually Make Money,” includes a business assessment, focus session and action plan as well as digital courses on gaining subscribers, creating freebies and building a business. The goal of the package is to give entrepreneurs an understanding of their ideal clients, a website that speaks to them, offers they’ll want to buy and an active newsletter and blog.

The second package, called “Your Get It Done Master Plan” is aimed more at businesses that are already established but which are a bit chaotic. Shih works with the entrepreneur to create efficient systems, solutions to sticking points and tasks that can be delegated to an assistant. The fees for each of these packages are $1,500 and $2,000 respectively.

Love the Business of Business

While the kinds of challenges that clients face are similar — whether they’re problems dealing with getting started or coping with growth — Shih provides unique solutions tempered to the clients’ particular needs. But, she says, for all entrepreneurs and freelancers two pieces of advice are the most important.

Business owners should always follow their passion, she recommends. While that’s a mantra familiar to anyone wondering what to do with their career, it’s something that Shih has found to have a real effect on her own business.

“When I’m passionate about my work and determined to grow a successful business, it’s easy to write that next blog post, be ‘on’ for my next consult, and to create my next product,” she says. “Without passion, we can easily fizzle out and give up.”

That’s simple enough. The other piece of advice though is much harder: as well as being in love with the work you’ve created your business to do, you also have to be in love with the business of being in business. You have to get a kick out of doing the marketing, closing deals and talking to clients. You have to enjoy creating the processes that allow for managed growth  and turn ideas into reality. Fail to do that, and even if you’ve chosen a niche for which you have a passion, even a consultant will have limited benefits.

“If you don’t like the idea of being in business, keep your passions as your hobbies and get a job,” warns Shih. 

Publishing your own book might be a useful way to show off your skills but making sales is difficult. Libboo might be able to help.

It’s not just freelance writers who dream about become admired authors. For any freelancer, a book laying out their ideas, their approach and their philosophy can function as a business card that shows off their expertise. When the book is sold it generates revenue. When it’s shared, it spreads the freelancer’s brand. But writing a book is hard. It takes time. And the real work begins when it’s published. In order for the book to have an effect, it has to be promoted and sold, discussed and read.

For authors working with traditional publishers, that work is done by a professional team. Editors pore over the text looking for errors and improvements. Fact checkers make sure claims are accurate. Illustrators add the drawings. And professional public relations staff ensure that copies reach reviewers, and journalists discuss the book’s content. When self-publishers have to do all of that work themselves, it’s no surprise that they struggle to make sales — especially if they’re also trying to run a freelance business at the same time.

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Tips for Using Libboo

• Complete your profile. Add a picture and a bio so that followers can see who you are.
• Network. Look for other writers in your genre and interact to attract the attention of promoters and team members.
• Talk to the staff. Libboo’s team is available for questions and advice. If you get stuck, ask!

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Build Your Team of Book Promoters

It’s that problem that Libboo is trying to solve. The company uses online networking to bring together authors and a team of people who can help to push their book forward.

“We aim to give the power, royalties and joy back to the author by allowing them to build teams to do the leg work that normal publishers would do, and have every team member share in its success,” says co-founder Fernando Albertorio.

The service originally launched in the UK in 2008 as platform to help authors become discovered. By the beginning of 2011, it was a beta that was developing into a community of writers, illustrators, editors and others who could help promote any form of written content. It then began to grow into a start-up, first as part of the Venture Mentoring Services at MIT and later, after winning into Boston’s MassChallenge small business accelerator program, as a corporation. The site launched in September 2011, and now allows authors and their teams to publish their works on every major self-published site at the click of a button, then mobilize their audience and build their reputation. By summer, says Dr. Albertorio, authors will be able to build promotional teams to help reach their target audience and provide opportunities for promoters.

The process for authors is relatively straightforward. Having signed up, you’ll be asked to give your “libbook” a title, then choose a category and sub-category. You can paste in the text right away, or you can agree to the terms and start writing afterwards, using the site’s online editor to add text, mark chapters, and add a summary, synopsis and tags. Authors can even upload a cover, or use a default cover supplied by the site. The Preview option lets authors see the state of the book as it develops, making the site valuable for the simplicity of its self-publishing tool alone.

Once the manuscript has been prepared, it should be just a matter of hitting the Publish button to send it into the world and see it in formats suitable for Kindle, Nook and other digital platforms.

The idea behind Libboo, though, is that authors will be able to do more than that. They can also make their books available for other people on the site to read, enabling them to build a team who can help them with the promotion or contribute illustrations or other services.

The Art of Finding Followers

At the moment, that set-up isn’t quite complete. Begin creating a book on Libboo and you’ll be followed by Richard Hawthorn, Fernando Albertorio and Chris Howard, the site’s founders. But to begin building other followers, you’ll need to browse follower lists to identify authors in similar fields or with books you might like to help promote — largely by distributing a link. There’s no easy way, though, to identify promoters with an interest in the kinds of book you want to write or find an illustrator with experience of drawing pictures for books in your field.

It’s also worth noting that books begin with a Creative Commons license that allows the book to be shared but not sold. Copyright, though, does remain with the author who can assign a percentage of the royalties for the book to each member of the team.

“For instance, an author may assign 15% (or 15 shares out of 100) of the wholesale royalties to a promoter,” explains Dr. Albertorio. “By working on a royalty share model, team members become invested in the success of the book.”

The team members aren’t the only ones who get a share of the sales price. The retailer also gets a large cut, and Libboo’s revenue model is to take ten percent. So a book sold on Amazon for $9.99 would produce just $5.94 to be divided between the team members.

Despite the lack of promoters on the site, the platform is already becoming popular. It now offers about 700 titles from around 1,200 registered authors.

The most popular categories, though, aren’t business or non-fiction but short stories within the comedy and young adult fiction genre. That might not be too surprising; there’s no shortage of people who want to become authors, especially of fiction. There is a shortage, however, of people who know how to promote authors and sell books. The question for Libboo will be whether the offer of a share of the revenues will be enough to bring those people to the site, look for books about which they feel sufficiently passionate to want to evangelize, and join a team.

The question for freelancers will be whether the site’s easy publishing platform makes Libboo worth using even without those promoters.

Loft Resumes uses graphic design to give the traditional resume a makeover.

We’ve seen a few creative approaches to jobseeking over the last few years. We’ve seen video resumes that go above and beyond and we’ve read about Alec Brownstein who landed a job at an advertising firm after running search ads that targeted his favorite creative directors. But for most jobseekers, the tools of the trade remain pretty simple: a cover letter and a black-and-white resume listing their skills, education and experience. They might play with the fonts a bit, and they might use the layout to make the most important elements stand out and easy to read, but for the most part, a resume has always been a pretty simple tool.

That might change though if Dodd Caldwell and Emory Cash have anything to say about it. The designers from Greenville, South Carolina, have launched Loft Resumes, a service that lets job seekers turn a standard list of skills and experience into a marketing brochure designed to land an interview. The extra design elements, they argue, can have a dramatic effect on the response rate.

“I had a friend who hired a graphic artist to design his resume, and he ended up getting a lot of interest from employers mainly because of the visual appeal of his resume,” Caldwell told Fast Company. “At the same time, my cofounder was designing his wife’s resume and realized that when he was searching for great looking resumes as guides, he couldn’t really find anything.”

The pair collected fifteen designers and asked them to produce a range of 50 different layouts that portray skills and knowledge. The designs they created are colorful and they’re certainly broad. “Urban Shadow” looks relatively austere, the kind of resume an attorney might send to a law firm or a financial analyst to a bank. “The Dialogue Mind,” however, uses a giant speech bubble to highlight the jobseeker’s goal and turns the education section into a headline. The page looks more like a newsletter than a resume and it’s easy to see it being used by an editor pitching for a job at a magazine or a copywriter hoping to impress an ad firm.

Unique Resumes from Templates

Jobseekers choose the design they want then upload the content. Loft Resumes’ graphic artists then custom-typeset the words. Buyers can ask for a couple of revisions and at the end of the process, they receive a PDF of their resume with a matching cover letter that can be edited in Word or Pages. Because the content of each resume is always different, designers might have to alter their designs slightly to make the words fit.

“No two resumes look exactly the same,” Caldwell told us.

A single page resume costs $99 with a $10 fee for each additional page. Jobseekers can also pay extra for an expedited service, for custom colors and for additional revisions. But the price hasn’t stopped people from signing up. Within a couple of weeks of the service’s launch at the end of February, they had already sold more than 30 resumes for professions ranging from Game Modeling and Engineering Sales to Communication Director and Chief Financial Officer.

For those jobseekers, the benefits of a designed resume are clear. If they’re applying for a job online, a colorful page, carefully designed and laid out might just capture a bit more attention than the usual 30 seconds that employers give candidates. And if they’re bringing their resume to an in-person interview at a job fair or a meeting, the page looks memorable and valuable enough to hold onto.

“It shows that you’ve gone the extra mile and really care about how you present yourself,” says Caldwell.

The resumes even impress database software — or at least they don’t confuse them. According to Loft Resumes, the PDF design files can be parsed in databases, allowing the keywords to be extracted so that the resumes can later be retrieved and viewed by the employer.

If you’re looking for a job, coughing up the $99 the service demands for a designed resume (and the $85 or so you might also want to pay for a professional resume writer, a service that Loft Resumes doesn’t supply), might well be a good investment.

But even for freelancers who are more likely to be looking for jobs than a job and trying to impress leads rather than win over employers, the company still has plenty to offer —not just because clients do sometimes want to see a resume, and not just because it turned to freelance designers to supply and typeset the resumes. (The company currently has all the freelancers it needs but says that might change as it grows.) Loft Resumes also offers a lesson in spotting a flaw, seeing an opportunity and turning freelance work into a scalable business.

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What Loft Resumes Can Do For You (Other Than Improve Your Resume)

• Sell your resume designs (when the company grows.)
• Inspire you to redesign your bio page design.
• Prompt you to outsource parts of your work to create a scalable, passive business.

A Scalable Business Model for Freelancers

Dodd Caldwell and Emory Cash have managed to build a business by applying their skills in color and design to an important tool that more usually relies on text and layout. They spotted a flaw in jobseekers’ self-marketing and created a service that plugs that gap. But jobseekers aren’t the only people whose marketing is less than perfect, and it might equally be true that your bio page or portfolio is similarly lacking in impressive design.

But the most important way that Loft Resumes can help freelancers is by providing a business model for service providers who want to do more than be hired from job to job. It’s notable that although both founders are designers themselves, they turned to fifteen other designers to produce unique resume layouts for them. That gives their products a broader range of styles but it also gives the business both passive revenue and scalability. Dodd Caldwell and Emory Cash can make money by selling templates and passing them on to their designers to typeset, and they can grow by turning to more designers. It’s a model also used by LookBetterOnline.com, a company that sends online daters to a network of photographers around the country while taking a cut of the set fee.

If you can find a way to adapt that outsourcing model to your own services, you might just have a profitable alternative to freelancing. And if you can’t do that, you can always ask Loft Resumes to help you find a job.

Docracy applies crowdsourcing to legal documents and produces a resource that just might help freelancers cut their legal costs.

Freelancers of every type receive legal documents all the time. We’re asked to sign non-disclosure agreements when we take on new clients. We’re given contracts that specify timelines and deliverables. And we’re asked to put our names on agreements that state exactly who owns the rights to the work we’ve created.

Most of those contracts are fine and standard, and few are worth giving to a lawyer before we put pen to paper. That’s especially true for freelancers and new businesses working on shoestring budgets and keen to avoid the giant costs of a lawyer’s legal fees every time they close a small deal. The result is that we often sign contracts with a slightly queasy feeling and a sense that we could be agreeing to something we might not like and taking on an obligation that could cost us a great deal in the future.

It was a worry that concerned entrepreneurs Matt Hall and John Watkinson. As they were building their app start-up Larva Labs, another small company asked the pair to sign an NDA.

“It became obvious that neither of us knew the real source of our NDA,” said Matt. “What we needed was an independently-sourced NDA that we both could trust and execute without major changes.”

The result was Docracy, an open source site to which other freelancers and entrepreneurs can upload the contracts they’ve used in the past. Other users can read them, download them, alter them and use them. They can also comment on them publicly, alerting other users to paragraphs they might want to delete or suggest protections they might want to add. During the beta, which is set to end soon, registered users can even make alterations to the contracts on the site itself, a process that makes the documents private, then digitally sign them before sending them on to the other party for review and agreement.

The site now has about 200 documents which have been downloaded “thousands” of times. The contracts cover aspects of law from real estate and inheritance to intellectual property and equity, and have been supplied by lawyers, associations and individuals. The most popular include a generic NDA, which has been downloaded nearly 500 times, and Docracy’s old terms of service which have been downloaded more than 300 times.

“Our early focus is on freelancers and startups so the documents we have cover many of the situations they face,” says Matt.

The ability to sign digitally and keep the alterations on Docracy’s site isn’t just a useful feature for entrepreneurs and freelancers though. It’s also an essential element of the way that Docracy works.

Can Crowdsourcing Work for the Law?

The site’s design is based on Github, an open source repository of code — and it faces similar challenges. If an NDA supplied by a fellow start-up is questionable because it lacks a clear source, why should an agreement uploaded to a website be any more trustworthy?

The answer should be the contract’s popularity. The best documents, argues Docracy, will rise to the top through use, commentary and contributions from the community. If Docracy’s old terms of service are popular, it’s because they’re clear, concise and accurate enough for other entrepreneurs and freelancers to build on as they’re creating their own sites. Contracts for frequently encountered issues that do less well are likely to have problems in coverage, wording or the ease with which they can be used in different circumstances.

“This is the same trust curve that open source software went through,” explains Matt. “It went from ‘who would use software written by a bunch of unknown people?’ to an integral part of the Internet of arguably better quality than commercial alternatives.”

But there is an important difference between the code supplied on Github and the legal contracts uploaded to Docracy. The people who create the scripts uploaded to Github are the same kinds of people who download them: both are professional programmers. A Github user doesn’t just need to rely on the popularity of a script to trust that it can do the job; he or she can check it themselves, easily making any corrections and changes that they see fit.

Docracy’s users, however, are uploading documents that they might not have written themselves. While they might have used them and found them serviceable, they might not have fully understood them — and the same is true of the people downloading them. If Matt Hall and John Watkinson had been lawyers, they wouldn’t have needed to know the source of the NDA they were signing. They could have written it themselves.

Worse, those second users also won’t be qualified to make changes to the contracts without accidentally creating the kinds of loopholes that can kill the agreement.

Lawyers will still be necessary then, concedes Matt Hall. Freelancers and start-up entrepreneurs will still need to turn to professional advice to understand the trade-offs discussed in the contract, and they’ll still need to educate themselves in order to understand the advice the lawyer supplies.

“[B]ut in the cases where it makes sense to have a standard it will be more valuable to have that standard publicly available and discussed,” says Matt.

Docracy then isn’t a complete answer. It won’t mean that freelancers will never have to ask a lawyer to look over a complex contract. But it might mean that they don’t have to pay a lawyer to draft a standard document such as a non-disclosure agreement or a usage license when they can find one on Docracy, check what other users have said about it, and ask the lawyer to adapt it to their business. As long as lawyers charge by the hour (and in increments of fifteen minutes), anything a freelancer or an entrepreneur can do to reduce that time can only be of help.

Handicrafters know they can sell on Etsy and designers can always turn to Zazzle, but there are plenty more ways for people to turn just about any passion into a profit.

Store sites and affiliate programs, eBay and Craigslist have all made a love of an activity into a potential moneyspinner. But what if you’re not into knitting handmade covers for iPads and you don’t want put your art up for auction in the world’s biggest garage sale? Here are five surprising ways in which passions are being turned into cash.

1.     Share Your Designs

The usual step after designing a new product is to protect that design as much as you can. It’s why inventors filed more than half a million patents with the US Patent Office in 2010. When the makers of Arduino created the hardware and software for their micro-controller, however, they chose to make it open source. Allowing the electronics community to hack their board, improve it and build on it while requiring them to share their hacks even as they sell the products they create would only improve the device and increase its appeal, they believed.

The company itself largely makes money by being known for its expertise. Businesses who need exclusive tools based on the microcontroller hire Arduino’s team as consultants. “Basically, what we have is the brand,” Tom Igoe, an associate professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and Arduino team member told Wired Magazine in 2008. “And brand matters.”

But that doesn’t mean that businesses aren’t making money with Arduino boards. The device hasn’t just created a community; it’s also led to a network of distributors that are willing to sell kits based on Arduino designs for community members to put together. Botanicalls, for example, manufactures a leaf-shaped widget that senses moisture levels in plant pots and sends a text message when the soil needs watering. The kit is sold around the world for just under $100 through electronics companies like SparkFun. Distributors can act as retailers that buy the kits on a wholesale basis from the maker or they put the parts together themselves and pay the maker a royalty. The requirement to publish the designs on a Creative Commons Share Alike basis does nothing to reduce their value while helping makers to improve their function.

You don’t have to be a whiz with a soldering iron to make money by sharing designs though. One of the advantages of Arduino is that sellers don’t have to do the manufacturing. If they’re selling to the rest of the community, it’s enough to collect the bits and write down the instructions. That’s something other makers can do too. Origami enthusiasts, for example, have long published their plans in books, while makers of amigurumi, crocheted dolls, sell downloadable PDFs of their plans. Freebies of simple patterns can help bring in new hobbyists while the complex designs land the profits.

2.     Don’t Sell, Buy

Most ways of making money involve offering something valuable to someone who’s willing to buy it. Buyers, though, have the advantage of being paid to make purchases — an ideal job for anyone passionate about shopping.

Companies use full-time buyers to make deals with vendors, a job that’s as much about negotiation as picking items but shopping enthusiasts can also earn money on a part-time basis while emptying the contents of someone else’s wallet.

At the bottom of the ladder are mystery shoppers, people who test the customer services at department stores and retail chains. The rates are fairly low — around $12 to $25 for each trip — although shoppers might also be able to keep some of the items they purchase. They can also enjoy free meals in restaurants or get their car serviced on someone else’s dime.  The Mystery Shopping Provider’s Association provides a list of companies that hand out jobs to secret shoppers and even offers accreditation which it suggests might help applicants win more work.

Higher up the pyramid are personal shoppers. While these may be people who buy groceries for old folks in the neighborhood, the more enjoyable work has more to do with styling than bagging and carrying. The Association of Image Consultants International provides a list of courses that people can take to help others look their best, some of which cost thousands of dollars.

Buying sharp suits and designer shoes for someone else might not be as much fun as going on a shopping spree for yourself but it is a satisfying way to turn a passion for something as simple as shopping into a money spinner.

3.     Share What You Think

Bruce Allen could well have the second best job in the world. He flies a helicopter over the mountains of British Columbia while tossing explosives out of the window to start avalanches. It’s a form of safety control that has to be hugely satisfying. Even his job though has to come second to that of Adrian Gill. A writer for the London Times, Gill is the newspaper’s restaurant critic, television critic and travel correspondent. Or to put it another way, he gets paid to eat in expensive restaurants, to take exotic vacations and, when those are too strenuous he needs a rest, he gets paid to stay at home and watch TV.

Few people can land a job that good but anyone can create it for themselves. Earning money from a website is always difficult — a site has to bring in large amounts of traffic, which is difficult to monetize — but review sites are among the easiest. Affiliate links will bring in commissions, advertisers will pay for placements and top sites land free items to handle and play with before anyone else gets to see them. The challenge will always be to review something which feeds a niche market and has little competition.

But that just means thinking about your niche passion. You might like eating out but create a site that only reviews curries or Persian food and you’ll be able to capture much of the market  — and find it easier to top search engines and attract advertisers.

The real money though will come when you take a simple review site that gives you a little money for doing something you love, and build on it to win work in that field, or even a related one. Vegansaurus, for example, offers reviews of vegan businesses but it also functions as portfolio for the site’s writers and founder, bringing in all sorts of interesting work.

Tell people what you think of something you love and even if you don’t make much from the reviews, you might make some more from the people who read it.

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You might not be using ConceptShare, but your dream clients are — and they’ll expect you to know it.

When the creatives in Mad Men need to present their designs, they pin them on a board and let the client point to the bits that are wrong. That’s not so easy when you’re a freelancer working in a different office, in a different time zone, perhaps in a different country. Instead of standing by a desk while the client tells you what he or she thinks, you’ll email across your work and the client then has to figure out how to make his or her changes understood. A lot will be lost in the transmission.

“Email is never the right tool for collaborating on creative work,” says Nish Patel, CEO of collaboration software firm ConceptShare. “Whether it’s for one project or a hundred or if you are collaborating between two people or 20 people, email just was not designed for effective collaboration on creative work.”

Trying to use email, Patel argues, won’t just make the workflow clumsy and inefficient. It will translate into more mistakes, more change requests and more revisions before the freelancer receives client approval.

That, at least, was the experience of ConceptShare’s founders. A designer, a developer, and a business developer working at different companies, Bernie Aho, Chris D’Aoust, and Scott Brooks  were brainstorming ideas for a new technology venture and became frustrated at the difficulties they experienced whenever they tried to discuss interface designs through email. Their service launched in 2006 and has since been used by thousands of people including freelancers, boutique agencies and some of the world’s biggest brands.

Only for Creatives

Collaboration software isn’t unique, of course. Google has a range of free online tools and there’s no shortage of competitors trying to provide a virtual workspace shared by multiple users. But ConceptShare stands out by focusing entirely on the needs of creative professionals. Clients are able to draw on mock-ups and even video footage, highlighting elements that need to be changed and placing common markup shapes on top of the assets. Discussions take place through threaded strings designed to keep debate focused on a single point. Documents can be imported in a range of formats and displayed as storyboards so that sections can reviewed, discussed and approved separately.

“ConceptShare is not a general, all-purpose collaboration tool,” explains Nish Patel. “We address the needs of a very specific user and a very specific workflow. Everything that you see in our product is shaped by our focus on delivering a tool that makes it easy to share, communicate and collaborate on creative work.”

The tool comes in four editions. The Project edition is aimed at freelancers and small teams working on print projects, images and the Web. The Group edition targets small agencies, studios and teams, and includes video collaboration tools. The Professional edition is for “multi-office organizations,” while the Enterprise edition of ConceptShare serves “global organizations” in part by adding regulatory collaboration to its suite of tools.

Pricing for the smallest edition starts at just $5 per user per month, a level low enough to be affordable to just about any creative freelancer. But although ConceptShare says that freelancers represent “a healthy portion” of its user base, it’s the big companies using the system that are the most impressive. Listed as customers are Disney Interactive Studios, which uses ConceptShare to annotate game art produced by in-house and outside artists; HBO CE (Central Europe) which uses ConceptShare to review on-air promotions across local offices and with HBO USA; and Gamemaker Timbuk2 Studios which found the platform essential in allowing the company to supply artwork to gamemaker Big Fish Games.

“ConceptShare gives us the ability to work with outsourcers — and even more importantly, work with outsourcers in an efficient way,” Big Fish Games’s art director Jeff Haynie says in a case study on ConceptShare’s website.

How different companies use ConceptShare varies from industry to industry. According to Nish Patel, in House Agencies use ConceptShare to review and approve company marketing assets, from brochures and websites to online video; digital Agencies capture feedback and track change requests from clients; game studios like Big Fish Games and Disney Interactive review and approve game art assets being developed by third party studios and freelancers; and internet Retailers use the site’s collaboration tools to review and approve online marketing campaign assets, from banner ads and email marketing campaigns to landing pages and online video.

ConceptShare Will Make You a Better Freelancer

That makes for a remarkably broad range of industries and usages, and a variety of different projects that ConceptShare’s users could send for review on the platform. The question for individual freelancers though is whether they need to use it.

Clearly, if all you’re doing is sending across the odd logo, then ConceptShare’s on-image mark-up features are going to feel like overkill. But if you’re hoping one day to do more than create logos, to perhaps create video game art for Disney or edit ads for HBO, then it’s worth getting to know ConceptShare if only so that you’ll be ready as you move up your career ladder.

And even if you don’t plan to work for a giant client, ConceptShare can still help creative professionals to reach their goals.

“I know it sounds simple,” says Nish Patel, “but the more you use it the more value you end up getting out of it. Freelancers really succeed with tools like ConceptShare when they incorporate it into how they work with other project team members and with their clients. Using it on a day-to-day basis, across all of their projects, we see that these freelancers start to operate with a higher level of efficiency than their peers.”

Now all you have to do is persuade your clients to use ConceptShare — and persuade them that your concepts and mock-ups don’t need any changes at all.

Correction: Scott Brooks has been added as ConceptShare’s third founder

Photography: madrideducacion.es

Freelancers usually work alone, in home offices free of distractions, noises, colleagues and bosses. That should allow us to work at our best, in environments that we’ve created. In fact though, if we really want to improve our productivity, the best strategy might be to gather a bunch of people in a room and work alongside them.

That’s one of the principles of co-working — spaces which allow freelancers and others to share the kind of open plan office that employees usually try so hard to avoid. Although sitting at a large desk with a dozen other people should always do wonders for a lone freelancer’s social life, that co-working can actually improve productivity is a bit more surprising. According to one survey reported last year, 93 percent of co-workers said that the practice had increased their social circle and 88 percent said it had reduced their feelings of isolation. An incredible 76 percent of co-workers though also said that joining a co-working space actually improved their work output.

“It’s not intuitive that leaving their ‘office of solitude’ to work alongside ten other people would actually help freelancers to be more productive,” says Kristin Golliher of Cohere, a co-working space in Fort Collins, CO. “But over and over we hear stories of that exact thing happening.”

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Get More Out of Co-Working

You can only take out of co-working what you put in. Here’s how to make the most of a shared workspace.

• Discuss your work Let your new friends know what you’re working on. You might well find that you’re sharing a table with someone who can help you finish the job — or who knows someone who needs a similar project completed.

• Offer help The more support you provide, the more support you can expect to receive. If you can lend a hand to someone else in the co-working community, don’t miss the chance.

• Look for collaborative opportunities Companies have multiple employees because it allows them to make the most of different kinds of talent. When a co-working space has skills as varied as designers, writers, and programmers, there are always opportunities for new start-ups.

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The Buzz of a Workspace

Some of that improved productivity can be put down to the environment. A good co-working office will have the buzz of a workspace rather than the relaxed atmosphere of a home or the multiple distractions of a corner table in a café. When you’re surrounded by other freelancers who have their heads down and are focused on a project, peer pressure forces you to do the same.

Other co-workers have also found that going to an “office” lets them to draw a clear line between work and personal time, enabling them to get more out of each period.

“This reduces stress and allows them to feel more relaxed when not ‘at work,’ says Golliher.

But the increased productivity can mostly be put down to the camaraderie that co-workers feel about their community — as well as the opportunities those connections can bring.

Cohere, for example, has existed for two years and now has 36 members, most of whom pay either for a five-day a week membership plan or a one-day a week membership plan. The site contains four private offices, all of which are rented out, a conference room capable of seating fifteen, a kitchen and two private phone booths. Members include computer programmers and IT professionals, writers and designers, consultants, researchers, lawyers, accountants, artists, musicians, marketing and public relations professionals, photographers and students too. (The site is close to Colorado State University.) At any one time, as many as fifteen people can be found working on various desks around the office.

That mixed community has led to a number of collaborative projects. Four of the members have begun building a niche start-up called “4 Courses.” Two have worked together to create ebooks about the benefits of co-working.

“Cohere has introduced these professionals to each other, and friendships, increased incomes, and even new companies have resulted,” says Golliher. “This type of collaboration is contagious, and many of our members can’t imagine working without it.”

Take Out Your Ear Buds

The productivity — and collaboration — benefits of co-working don’t come to freelancers automatically with a key and a membership fee though. Golliher notes that users of co-working spaces need to see the site as more than a desk, a chair and endless free coffee to match the Internet access. Plugging in your ear buds and communing only with your computer might look like the best way to get work done but making the most of co-working requires engaging with the community, becoming a part of it and allowing it to support you.

“We all have ‘do not disturb’ days, but this is not coworking,” says Golliher. “Getting to know your neighbor, participating in both social and educational activities, and piping up when you can offer advice, feedback or encouragement to someone is how you tap into the real value of co-working.”

In fact, those social and educational activities are becoming increasingly important in co-working. What started as a way for lone freelancers to work together in February 2006 when Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford formed Jelly, is beginning to grow into an incubator for freelancers who want to build their knowledge and develop connections as well as get out of the house and away from the coffee shop. New York space General Assembly, for  example, is known as much for its campus that includes classes on group buying, algorithms, getting hired and reading a cap table, and as a launchpad for start-ups like Art.sy and Amicus, as it’s known as a community for rising entrepreneurs.

It’s possible that the declining economy and the loss of full-time jobs has pushed some freelancers into co-working. But it’s also becoming clear that those freelancers are staying for the camaraderie, the opportunity and the increased productivity.

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Further Reading

Jelly

The first co-working space is still a valuable resource for anyone looking for an place in their area.

General Assembly

New York’s entrepreneurial site shows the new trend in co-working with education and networking as important as desk space and wireless connections.

Cohere

A co-working space in Fort Collins, CO.

Coworking: Building Community As A Space Catalyst

A guide to creating a co-working space by Cohere’s Angel Kwiatkowski and Beth Buczynski.

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