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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According to one report the number of unemployed Americans who tried to raise a start-up last year was the lowest in more than 25 years. In 2011 just 3.3 percent of Americans without a job started their own businesses, a fall from 4.7% the year before. In 1989 more than one in five saw themselves as entrepreneurs in the making. The reason for that decline may be that building a business from scratch is harder than ever, and demands a broader knowledge of skills that range from incorporation and hiring staff, to pitching to VCs and planning social media operations. One startup is trying to make the process easier with step-by-step “plays” that guide would-be entrepreneurs through each stage of business-building.

Startup Plays comes from Scott Annan, an entrepreneur and CEO of Mercury Grove, a software company that specializes in collaboration software. Entrepreneurs, says Annan, usually know what they need to do in order to create the business they want, but can find it difficult to focus and execute at the level they need. They’re strong in some areas but spend a lot of time trying to figure out all of the other tasks that owners of new businesses are expected to do themselves.

 “You’ve got to execute every area of your business like a pro, in a short period [and] on a tight budget,” says Annan. “Ninety nine percent of the time we do it through trial and error – and sometimes we get lucky.”

Better Than a Book

The usual way to get lucky is to turn to books and blogs, to take classes and watch videos. It’s a demand that allows sites like Clickbank to distribute information products that generated more than $350 million in 2011.

For Annan though that kind of learning isn’t sufficient. It provides passive, conceptual learning, a transmission of knowledge rather than a guide to action.

“When you take a course, you absorb information and sometimes do exercises that are conceptual,” he says. “To apply this learning, you need to absorb and understand the information, create a plan, and then execute it.”

There’s a difference between knowing and doing, and the test bed for any new entrepreneur isn’t going to be the kind of sandbox used as practice by developers and designers but the new business itself. As attempts to find money, outsource tasks and build interest fail, the failures build experience but they also eat away at savings, time and the small pool of funds available in the startup’s earliest stages.

Startup Plays provides an alternative approach by offering step-by-step task lists in which each task contains everything that an entrepreneur needs, including detailed information, professional tips, links to resources and templates used by the entrepreneur.

The plays aren’t static, like an ebook. Users log in to StartupPlays.com and work through lists that might require them to create job descriptions for existing employees or determine compensation for a new worker. Each task comes with an explanation and might even be accompanied by a downloadable template or a form the entrepreneur can use to complete the task. As you’d expect from a product created by a firm that builds collaboration software, entrepreneurs can also assign tasks to other members of a team.

Startup Plays currently offers eighteen plays with two going up each week. The prices vary. A play that explains how art firm DNA 11 manages to win publicity contains four milestones, 24 tasks and four excel templates. It promises entrepreneurs that they’ll have a media calendar, a press contact list, a killer pitch for their startup and “press in major publications.” And it estimates that the execution time is just one week. The play is available for $99, a 66 percent discount on the list price of $299.

Been There, Done That

If that sounds significantly more expensive than a typical ebook, the extra value lies in both the play’s practical nature and in the experience of the person who wrote it. Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA 11 and CanvasPop, has been mentioned on Mashable!, TechCrunch, and Wired, and profiled on CSI:New York and the Conan O’Brian show.  Other contributors include Jeff Goldenberg, co-founder of Top Chef University, Aaron Hall of Dressrush and investor Dave McClure.

“We look for founders who have demonstrated success in the specific area (not consultants, people who have done it),” says Annan. “We try to focus on recent success and more on substance than hype.”

What all of those entrepreneurs have in common, of course, is that none of them used plays to build their success. How much they might have benefitted from them is debatable. Although being able to take a shortcut from concept to successful execution is going to be worth more than the $99 charged for a play, each startup is also unique, presents its own challenges and has its own needs. A playbook that worked for one entrepreneur and one business might be less effective when used in a business in a different field and in a different stage of development. The key to making the plays work won’t be in following them slavishly but in applying them to the firm and mixing them up to create your own playbook.

Startup Plays would also like to see successful entrepreneurs contributing their own formulas for other startups to use. Revenue share for plays ranges from 40 percent to 70 percent, depending on the level of co-marketing activity.

But perhaps the most important aspect of the plays isn’t just that they contain distilled experience and the practical steps followed by successful entrepreneurs. It’s that they give the owner of a new startup a chance to engage in focused action. They’re no longer reading then wondering how to apply what they read. They’re able to do exactly what the play says to produce a definite result.

The only thing that’s missing is a play for winning luck. But maybe when you’ve created the right playbook, that luck comes by itself.

Readers looking for a book know they can turn to Amazon. Shoppers looking for… well, anything, can turn to eBay. But what if you’re looking for a Web designer or a caterer? Or a wedding planner or a house cleaner? What if you’re looking for the kinds of local services that tend to be supplied by freelancers but which aren’t available from outlets like Amazon or eBay, and you want to make a hire now, as easily as any other online purchase? Today those buyers can turn to Thumbtack — and freelancers can advertise their services in one location at a site aimed directly at the clients they’re used to serving.

Thumbtack lists 230,000 suppliers, about 70 percent of which are home improvement professionals such as carpenters, electricians and cleaners, and event service suppliers such as disk jockeys and wedding planners. The remaining 30 percent of freelancers though cover a broad range of categories, from Web designers to auto services and hot dog trucks. About 3,000 new freelancers and small businesses join every week.

Pay Per Lead

Membership is free but freelancers pay for leads. Buyers answer a series of questions describing the job they need completed, and Thumbtack sends the wanted ad to qualified service providers. Those freelancers then respond with a quote and a pitch, and the lead makes his or her choice.

“We seek to be not a directory listing site, but rather a ‘decision engine’ where you instantly and conveniently find, book, and pay for any kind of local service you need,” explains Sander Daniels, the site’s co-founder and Director of Business Development. “Right now, you can go to our site, submit virtually any kind of job request anywhere in the country, and receive 3-5 bids on that job to your email inbox within 24 hours.”

Freelancers can choose to pay a commission of between 4 and 15 percent for each job they win (not including the cost of materials) or a flat fee of between $4 and $40 to answer an ad from a lead. Freelancers listed on the site can realistically expect to receive at least two good leads a month. Some receive a dozen or more.

For some freelancers, the service has been remarkably successful. Judy Musgrove is a freelance Web designer who has been on Thumbtack since the end of August. Before joining Thumbtack, her business had been based entirely on word-of-mouth. Although she was reluctant to pitch her services to people she didn’t know, she finds that the site sends her between four and six job requests every month from across the United States. Most of those calls for help are coming from small business owners who need help with WordPress setup but she’s also asked to design business cards and to manage social media accounts.

Mahal Ramos, a resumé and speech writer, has been on the site for about a year, and has a similar success rate, receiving about five requests each month from people she’s able to serve remotely.

“The clients fit the profile of the kinds of clients I normally service,” she says.

 

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Steps for Success on Thumbtack

1.     Complete the Profile
Add a picture, complete the FAQ, build credentials and ask for reviews. The more complete your profile, the more it will be noticed.

2.     Link Your Thumbtack Profile to Your Social Media Activity

Post directly to the site and place links on Facebook and LinkedIn that lead to your Thumbtack page.

3.     Build Your Credentials

Verified credentials build trust, something that’s very important for remote freelancers. Thumbtack provides plenty of ways to verify its members. They may be overkill but an absence of a verified Facebook page or LinkedIn account chips away at that trust.

4.     Ask for Reviews

Use Thumbtack’s system to pick up testimonials.

5.     Offer Transparent Pricing

Once you’ve received the lead, you’ll still have to win the job. A clear price structure and a complete response will help.

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Write Your Own Interview

But while the theory of how Thumbtack works is simple enough, the practice is a little more complex. As with any job site, freelancers have to create profiles that look inviting, build trust and allow the buyer to feel confident about making the hire. Sander Daniels recommends filling out the listing as completely as possible, and notes that the site encourages freelancers to do so by awarding points for adding photos, answering questions about their business or linking social media accounts to the profile. A dedicated tool also lets freelancers email past clients to encourage them to leave reviews.

A typical page on Thumbtack will contain a picture of the freelancer, a series of credentials such as address, phone number, social media page and website that show the seller is genuine and reliable, an hourly rate and a quick list of services. Freelancers can also add a slideshow (useful for designers), a map that shows the location of their offices and even a video. But it’s the mini-interview that really stands out. It acts as a kind of FAQ that gives freelancers a chance to squish objections and push sales points.

It’s also possible though to promote the profile away from the site itself. Judy Musgrove’s profile, like that of Mahal Ramos, is one of the first to be returned by people browsing the site for writers. She puts that success down to a combination of a complete profile and a close link with her social media networking. As she’s fine-tunes her LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, she makes sure that her posts correspond to the information on her Thumbtack page.  She also places posts directly on Thumbtack and feeds them into Twitter so that her Thumbtack page both looks active and delivers valuable information to leads.

“Know your keywords,” Musgrove advises, “and use them throughout your networks. People want to see that there is relevancy. Provide links that take people to examples of your work, your websites, your social networks. Show them that you are active on the Internet and that you participate.”

Of course, all of that will only attract attention. You’ll still have to win the job — and impress the client enough to pass your name on to friends and colleagues.

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

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

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

Feedback, Peers and Job Offers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Landing an Invitation

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

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

• Gaining Popularity

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

• Privacy and Confidentiality

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

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

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

iPad screenshot of OnLive.

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

1. Fill Your Desk

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

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

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

a)    JobSeeking Apps

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

iFreelancer

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

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

b)    Note-Taking Apps

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

Evernote

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

NoteShelf

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

c)     Work Apps

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

For serious productivity, you’ve got two options:

i. Download a standalone app:

Pages

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

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

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

ii. Use a cloud app.

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

CloudOn

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

2. Connect Your iPad to Your Computer

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

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

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

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

Download the Splashtop’s free desktop streamer.

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

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

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

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

Mixing Regular Work with Fresh Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nine Qualities of a Successful Freelancer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing the Work

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

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

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

All Designers Are Pre-Selected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s Plenty of Work for Freelance Illustrators

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shoeboxed

Start freelancing and not everything in life gets better. We do get to work from home and set our own schedules. We’re around when the kids finish school and we’re free to hunt down the jobs we want to do. All of those things are a big improvement over the 9-to-5. But some things get considerably worse. The income is unstable. We have to find our own work. And there are taxes.

Of course, there are always taxes, but when your income changes from month to month and when every receipt has to be kept and filed in case it’s deductible and an auditor wants to see it, the paperwork involved in freelancing can be horrendous. The bookkeeping takes organization and it takes time. It’s not only dull, tedious and a long way from fun, it takes valuable hours away from the work we’re actually being paid to do. Do your booking badly and it will cost you money; do it properly and it will still cost you money. It was to give freelancers and entrepreneurs those billable hours back that when Taylor Mingos graduated from Duke University in 2007, he launched Shoeboxed.

“Shoeboxed set out to be (and has become) the bridge between the pile of physical receipts on your desk and an organized and online IRS-accepted archive of your financial information that is accessible at your fingertips anytime, anywhere,” explains Jake Brereton, Shoeboxed’s Marketing Manager. “At the end of the day we strive to take the work out of paperwork so that our customers have more time to spend doing what they love to do.”

The service works a little like a taxman’s Netflix. Shoeboxed sends members prepaid envelopes into which they can place their receipts. The envelopes are then mailed back to the company which scans the invoices and extracts the information they contain into the member’s account. Although OCR technology is used to ensure accuracy, each receipt is also hand-checked to make sure that users aren’t accidentally claiming more than they should or leaving money behind. Users can then view the data online, edit and annotate it and incorporate the tables into most tax preparation software, including QuickBooks, Quicken and Outright.

The envelopes are the most popular way that users get their physical receipts off their desks and into their desktops but Shoeboxed makes a point of accepting just about any method that works. Free uploaders both online and on the computer make it possible to scan receipts and drop them into the account; electronic receipts can be forwarded to a personal Shoeboxed email address; and it’s even possible to snap a picture of an invoice with a smartphone and move the data immediately into your records. Users can choose whether they want to receive the invoices back (for storage in a real shoebox) or let Shoeboxed shred and recycle them.

The system has proved remarkably popular. The company serves over 100,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Although it can’t say how many invoices that represents, the number of small pieces of paper that have been scanned, checked and added to databases reaches “well in the millions.”

Most of the company’s customers are owners of small businesses, professionals and, in particular, freelancers whose businesses are too small to hire bookkeepers or assistants but would like to outsource the paperwork to someone else.

The benefits can certainly be impressive. In a video testimonial, videographer Chad Owen paints a familiar picture of chaotic receipt keeping, lost bits of paper and deductions that could have been made but which were left behind the desk or at the bottom of the drawer. Jake Brereton recalls a conversation with a freelance client who said that using Shoeboxed put as much as two entire workdays back into the month.

“I spoke to someone last week who said that he thought our service was literally saving him three to five hours a week,” he says. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t want to put three to five hours back in their week, especially if they’re a freelancer and these three to five hours could be billable hours of quality work time.”

Services like these aren’t entirely original. Bookkeepers have long existed to offload the pain of keeping an orderly desk on which receipts are filed and easily retrieved instead of chucked and lost. But few bookkeepers are willing to work for $29.95 a month and when they do work, only they — and not their clients  — have access to their files.

That does sound like Shoeboxed is bad news for at least one kind of freelancer: those who keep the books for other freelancers. In fact though, according to Jake Brereton, the service is popular with bookkeepers too, saving them the hassle of data entry while letting them keep an eye on their clients year round and making sure that everything is ready at tax time.

There’s no question then that services like Shoeboxed’s have value. In allowing freelancers and other professionals to outsource one aspect of their work to an automated service, they’re able to remove a giant headache from their business and free up more time to spend on the tasks that really do bring in money. The question that freelancers should be asking though is what else could they be outsourcing?

It’s a question that Shoeboxed has been asking too. The company is expanding from invoices to business cards, bills and just about any other document that users want to send it. But freelancers should be looking at their own activities and counting up the hours not spent producing billable work.

Outsourcing client acquisition might be difficult. Pitches should really be tailored and hand-made rather than cut and pasted into every advert. But newsletters could be replaced by an autoresponder or written by a copywriter instead of crafted yourself at the end of every month. Blog posts can be bought in and online advertising could be managed by an assistant instead of tracked every morning when you could be making headway on a new project.

Starting with a service like Shoeboxed might be valuable. But the biggest benefit might come when you keep going.

Image: OrderPipe

When you’re supplementing your freelance income with direct sales, watching the numbers can become addictive. Whether you’re looking to track orders of your self-published Kindle books on Amazon or using Magento to process purchases of your own design fashion items, it’s hard not to keep clicking back to see whether someone just gave you a pile of money while you were busy doing something else. One company now wants to make that constant stat-watching even easier.

OrderPipe is a mobile sales dashboard that tracks sales across a range of e-commerce platforms including Amazon, Magento and Shopify. The service collates information allowing sellers to see immediately how their sales are developing, their total sales across all channels and which items are currently most popular with customers. There’s nothing to install and nothing to download; registration is made using a Google ID after which it’s just a matter of plugging the platform into your sales channels. You’ll then be able to browse graphs and figures that are easy to read and simple to follow.

You’ll be told today’s revenues and the total number of sales and orders. You’ll be given a list of the day’s top-sellers and highest-earners, shown a map of sales locations and offered graphs of daily revenues, daily sales and each day’s average order value. According to the service’s beta users, the killer feature is the “sales worm,” a graph that overlays sales so far on top an average of each day’s hourly takings so that users can compare actual progress with expected results. The service works best with sellers that take in at least 20 orders a day.

When Your Sales Spike, You Can Act

At least some of that might sound familiar. Each sales platform provides some sales statistics, including product orders, but none combines figures across different channels, and the data isn’t released as soon it comes in.

“Take Amazon Seller Central, for example. It gives you an order list showing your latest orders. But it doesn’t show dollar amounts, it doesn’t show total sales for the day or tell you which products are selling most today,” explains Paul Grey, OrderPipe’s founder. “Amazon does provide a portfolio of reports which include sales statistics by day and product, but those are always a few days out of date, not even close to real time.”

That lack of real time information, Gray argues, removes vital information. Being able to see that sales have taken a jump in the middle of the day lets sellers track the source of that spike. You can see if someone recommended a product on your site on Twitter, check whether a clearance sale price just kicked in (or was accidently priced too low) or realize that you’ve just been highlighted on Amazon’s Buy Box.

“You’re finding out as it happens, in time to do something about it,” says Paul Grey.

You’re also finding out wherever you are. OrderPipe has been formatted specifically for mobile devices so that users can check their stats in any place as well as all the time. For freelancers heading to a café or stuck on the metro on their way to a meeting with a client, that can be particularly helpful. You might not be able to create a new design or write another ebook while you’re sitting in traffic, but you can pull up your latest sales figures and start wondering why tote-bags or self-help books are suddenly racing off your virtual shelves.

Freelancer or Entrepreneur?

In general, constant stat-watching can be more of a problem than a solution. Selling products is a good idea for freelancers because it adds a passive revenue stream to the active money-generator involved in servicing clients. Take a few days off freelancing — a free choice that freelancing is supposed to deliver —  and your revenues stop. You’re not running up billable hours so you’re not making any money. Create an online store or sell through Amazon however, and that passive revenue has enough momentum to keep the cash coming in even when you’re exercising your free choice not to work.

But if you’re constantly checking your stats, at what point do you stop being a freelancer and start being an entrepreneur — even just a wannabe entrepreneur? Self-definition isn’t just a matter of the percentage of your income that comes from freelancing or even the amount of time you spend doing it. It also has a lot to do with the extent to which you spend your thinking time trying to dream up new ways to increase your earnings and push up those daily revenues.

Even if OrderPipe, which is opening up its beta now after a year of testing, won’t lift your revenues themselves, there’s a good chance that the ever-present access to real time sales figures will increase the amount of time you spend planning new ways to develop the retail side of your freelance business.

The presence of OrderPipe, which is currently free, is yet another reason to think about creating a passive revenue stream.

The good news is that’s easier than it sounds. You can start by embedding affiliate links to your blog posts; as a freelance professional, you’re an expert, so reviews and recommendations of the tools you use carry some weight. Designers can put their illustrations and designs on t-shirts, hats and bags and sell them automatically on a platform that’s more unique than an Etsy store or a Zazzle shop. And freelance writers always have a book in their head that could be sold straight to Kindle if they’re willing to put in the effort to build up an audience.

OrderPipe isn’t going to make those products any more commercial or popular. But if it motivates us to create revenue streams that are more stable than those of our freelance clients, that can only be a good thing.

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

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

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

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

Sharing the Workload

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

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

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

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

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

No Cut-and-Paste Bids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Build a Joint Project

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

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

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

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

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

• Take a Course

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

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

• Attend a Conference

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

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

• Co-Working

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

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

Drag your laptop to a café and you’ll always be carrying a bit of guilt. It’s great to get away from the home office, and when you’re freelancing by yourself, seeing other people — even if they’re just waiters and other digital nomads — can be a real social boost. At the very least, it gets you out of your pajamas. But you also know that you’re going to be taking up valuable table space with your computer while trying to keep your expenses to minimum. Often, that means ordering a single coffee and using that $2.50 (plus tip) as rent for two to three hours of office space.

Do café owners mind? If they’re supplying the Internet, surely not. But there must be times when they wish the table-hogger would either order more than a cappuccino or get a room. We hit the forums to find out when digital nomads outstay their welcome.

What we found was surprising. Most of the discussions focused not on the space that café workers take up but whether a café should be charging for Internet access. One café owner raised eyebrows (and envy) by describing how his venue focuses on fantastic coffee but installed computers with Internet access at the request of his customers. Charging $7 per hour, those computers generate $6,000 a month and the owner struggles to understand how other venues aren’t doing the same thing.

Competition probably has something to do with it. That café is on a military base. It’s hard to imagine a café that charges $7 per hour for Internet access making much money in Silicon Valley.

So some café owners are looking at your Internet access and wondering whether you shouldn’t be paying for it, but sometimes they’re also wondering whether you shouldn’t just leave. There are a few times that happens.

1. When You Don’t Eat

Not all cafes put an emphasis on the food they serve. Even though it’s usually the dishes rather than the drinks that bring in the largest profit, running a kitchen also has the biggest expenses. But when a café’s service merges it into a restaurant then your table isn’t worth the price of a brew and a croissant; it represents the cost of a meal, with drinks, times two (because people rarely eat alone.) According to one café owner, it wouldn’t take too many freelancers with laptops taking those tables that to kill his business:

“I do a brisk lunch a dinner business (full menu) on top of my coffee service and roasting so having a single person (why bring friends when you can bring a pc?) take up a table for 3+ hours, regardless if he/she spent for lunch, doesn’t work for me. 7 soloists taking up 7 tables with their laptops would sink me!”

If you’re in a café during the lunchtime rush, and you don’t want to get dirty looks from the owner or end his firm, then you should be either prepared to eat and with a friend or change your work hours.

2. When You Play with the Electrics

Finding an outlet is one of the toughest aspects of working in a café, most of which were designed before people started to expect more from their local Java bar than a mug of beans. Usually, if you can’t find a place to plug in, you’ll have to make do with battery power — a natural limit on the amount of time you can keep the table.

Sometimes though, the odd digital nomad will go a bit further. We were referred to a post on CoffeeForums published by the owner of a café in Atlantic City. He was pleading for help dealing with a customer who would not only sit a table for four hours with a single cup of coffee (and pick his nose while he was there), but unplug the café’s sign to make sure he had enough electricity to stay around.

“I don’t know what to do,” said the owner. “I want to have some policy in place before this balloons into a bigger problem. My husband says to hang a sign that reads the wi-fi is free, but the electric is not.”

The café’s solution was to put up a notice saying that the electricity wasn’t free and to run the sign’s cord down the wall so that it comes out immediately above the socket. Even that wasn’t enough to deter this customer though. He unplugged the sign again and used an adaptor to siphon off more electricity before being told in no uncertain terms to leave the outlet alone.

Few digital nomads are that inconsiderate and most ask before they unplug anything in a café. But the post did raise a number of interesting issues. The forum’s administrator noted that big laptops drain lots of power. A Dell XPS, the administrator calculates, uses 150 watts an hour.

“At 450 watts a day, 5 days a week that 1 person racks up 2250 watts/week. The US average kilowatts/hour is around $0.10.”

Sit in a café with your Dell XPS for three hours a day, every day, and you’re adding about a quarter a week to the café’s expenses. That’s something to consider next time the price of your coffee goes up.

Among the responses to that post though, there were also plenty of posts worried about liability if the customer electrocuted himself while plugging in his laptop.

While it’s easy to understand café owners’ concerns, it’s a harder to imagine a freelancer suing the café unless the socket was obviously dangerous. But what about if a power surge fried your computer’s insides or the waitress spilled coffee all over your keyboard? The issue of responsibility when you take a thousand-dollar machine loaded with even more valuable contents into someone else’s property isn’t so simple.

3. When You Abuse the Wifi

Even when café owners don’t mind you sitting at a table, even when they like the idea of some tables being occupied in quiet times, generating regular revenue, bringing occasional friends and attracting customers, they will mind you abusing their free Internet.

One café owner on CoffeeForums revealed that he checks his network systematically to track usage. Sometimes, he’ll find few people in the café but the bandwidth completely utilized. One of those customers will be using his wifi not for working but for file-sharing.

“I simply banned that person’s mac address,” the café owner said. “I will in a month or so delete it but until then they can go somewhere else.”

Incredibly, that café owner said he gets two or three people like that a month.

Most freelancers, like most café owners, are pretty considerate. We understand that we bring some business to a café but that we also squeeze as much space and time out of that purchase as we can. Try to avoid peak hours, don’t play with the infrastructure without authorization and keep your torrents for when you’re home, and you shouldn’t give any proprietor a reason to dislike you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Get What You Pay For

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

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

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

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

Russia Versus India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four Blog Posts a Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swapping a Blog for a Microblog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Work a Network?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Join LinkedIn Because We Have To

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective Bargaining

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

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

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

Kelly Blue Book for Graphic Design Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Spill the Beans

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

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

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

2. Create Your Own — Earlier — Deadline

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

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

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

3. Deliver as You Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Prepare Properly By Screening Clients

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

Elance’s Review System

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

Business Beware!

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

2. Protect Yourself With a Contract

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

Milestones

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

Copyright

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

3. Send a Reminder

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

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

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

4. Negotiate Changes and Terms

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

The problems really begin when it’s not enough.

When the Client Isn’t Happy

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

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

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

When the Client Can’t Pay

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

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

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

5. Take Legal Action

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

6. Take Them Down

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

7. Write it Off

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

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

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

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

Amazon WebPay

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

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

Pros: Free for service providers, trusted by clients.

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

Dwolla

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

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

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

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

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

Moneybookers

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

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

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

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

2Checkout

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

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

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

Disadvantages: High transaction fees and limited freelancer services.

Square

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

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

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

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

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

There are five common reasons:

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

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

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

How to Keep Your Client

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

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

2. The Client is Cutting Back

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

How to Keep Your Client

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

3. You’ve Become Complacent

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

How to Keep Your Client

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

4. The Client Has Outgrown You

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

How to Keep Your Client

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

5. The Client Has Stopped Working

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

How to Keep Your Client

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

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

1. Pitch Big

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

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

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

2. Build Your Experience

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

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

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

3. Build Your Own Big Projects

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

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

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

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

4. Grow with the Client

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

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

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

Photography: hartman045

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

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

Hit the Freelance Sites

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

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

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

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

Hunt the Search Engines

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

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

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

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

1. Pricing

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

2. Background and Experience

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

3. Skills

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

4. Marketing

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

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

When Randall Ryder, a consumer rights lawyer and blogger, decided to spend a day working from home last spring he had a pleasant surprise. Usually, Ryder wrote on his blog, his day would be bookmarked by his blogging which he would do first thing in the morning or last thing before he left the office. His legal work he would do in the middle of the day when, he claimed, he would be most productive and his brain had “warmed up.” This time he started the day by leaping straight into his cases. The result, he says, was a fresh perspective, a jolt of energy and a number of new strategies.

“Arguments that were not fully realized reached their potential. Things that I dreaded because they were scheduled for later in the day, were actually fun to work on.”

Ryder put his improved productivity down to the confines of a rigid schedule that can “lull your brain to sleep” and prompt you to think about the next task on the list rather than the task currently under way. Whatever the reason, Ryder isn’t the only to have found that a change in the routine can be enough to boost productivity. Premed student Ryan Nguyen found that the importance of changing a workout routine to maintain muscle-build efficiency can also be applied to study routines.  Studying in the same way, in the same environment and with the same people, he argues, leads to a steady decline the more you do it.

Nguyen’s tips for routine-breaking apply specifically to students — use flashcards, learn in the park, deliver a faux lecture — but there are also a number of things that freelancers can do to break their routines and increase their productivity:

1. Change Your Tasks

The easiest way to change a routine is to follow Randall Ryder. His break came when he chose to work from home — something that many freelancers do anyway — but swapping around the usual order of the day is both simple and refreshing, and it can even lead to long-term habits of greater efficiency. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, for example, recommends checking email no more than twice a day: once in the morning and once in the evening. Whatever you think of his system as a whole — and the complex new routines that have to be created to use them — getting into the habit of not being disturbed by non-urgent messages during the day can be helpful.

If you tend to check email regularly and answer immediately, then create a new schedule that sets time to deal with messages and leaves the rest of the day clear for more urgent tasks.

But in the short term, you can also swap the order of the day. A writer accustomed to blogging in the morning and writing sales copy in the afternoon, for example, should do the opposite. A website designer who first creates the icons then plans out the page, could try the reverse. As Randall Ryder discovered, sometimes a change as small as the reversal of a traditional work pattern can have unexpected benefits.

2.     Change Your Location

The change in Randall Ryder’s routine was prompted by a change in his location. That’s something even easier for freelancers to do. While employees with offices or cubicles always have to work between the same four walls, freelancers are free to drag their computer to a different room in the house, a different co-working space, or a different café to break their routines.

It’s worth knowing not just that your nearest coffee bar has free wireless and plenty of electricity outlets but that the library is available too, that there’s an open network accessible from a bench in the park and that co-working spaces have plans based on usage that allow freelancers to visit no more than once a week — and to come on different days.

The challenge with changing your location is to ensure that the increase in productivity outweighs the extra time it takes to reach the site. If you have to travel an extra half-hour to reach the library then you’ll need to improve your output by a whole hour to get the full benefit. Sometimes the best change of location is not to change your location at all: instead of dragging your computer to a café, keep it in the office and stay at home all day.

3.     Take a Different View of Time

Freelancers are free not just choose the order of their day and the places in which they spend it but the times in which they work. Night owls can, if they want, work when the sun goes down while morning people can clock on first thing and finish their shift by lunch. Most don’t however, not just because few people find that way of working comfortable but because it puts them out of sync with friends, family and clients.

If you’re not willing to radically change your work hours, you can radically change the way you think about your work hours. Muji, a design store, sells a scheduler it calls a Chronotebook. Instead of dividing the day into hourly rectangles that start at the top of the page and finish at the bottom (the kind of visualization that might just have you thinking about the next task on the list), it places a clock in the middle of the page with one page for morning and the opposite page for the afternoon. Tasks are then listed in a circular fashion instead of vertically.

The notebook’s design is also minimal; there are no lines dividing one hour or one task from another, unless you draw them yourself. That gives the day a more fluid feel, with one task flowing freely into the next.

It’s a creative idea but it’s not perfect. You’ll still have to complete the tasks, of course. You’ll still have to decide where you’re going to complete them. And you’ll still have to change that routine if you’re going to keep your productivity rising.

Photography: colodio

When D’Espresso, a small New York espresso bar, approached design firm Nema Workshops to lay out the interior of its second outlet, the café asked for something unique, a look that would enable the small bar to stand out and be noticed by both tourists and locals alike. Inspired by the nearby Bryant Library, the design company covered one wall with wooden floorboards and lined the ceiling, floor and back wall with prints of filled bookshelves. They took the library and turned it sideways. The result was a design that’s certainly distinctive but it’s also a look that ignores digital nomads, the kind of people now filling cafes and topping up tip jars. The handful of seats are arranged in a row directly opposite the bar, in front of small, round tables and, crucially, far from any electricity outlets. It’s a place designed to bring in a steady flow of traffic rather than attract laptop owners and their regular business. So what does it take to design a café that suits today’s information workers, the people who pack up their computers and spend hours each day working in cafes?

1.     The Right Location

Location is critical for any retail outlet, including cafes, but different places create different atmospheres. Starbucks branches look the same from Seattle to Shanghai but the atmosphere in two branches on the same street can feel completely different if the businesses around them differ. A café on a street surrounded by stores tends to fill up with shoppers resting their feet. They take up seats, stick around and talk loudly. A branch that sits at the bottom of an office tower, however, tends to have a flow of suited types buying take-outs to drink in their cubicles. Tables stay empty so there’s always a good choice of seats and the people who do sit tend to be other workers holding meetings or working their own keyboards. It’s a corporate atmosphere that keeps nomads focused on their own work.

2.     Cozy Corners

For cafes, like D’Espresso, long benches ensure that every inch of wall space is used. The remaining floor space can then be stuffed with square tables, the most efficient way to fill a rectangular room. But that’s not the most comfortable way for digital nomads to work.

Open screens and wide viewing angles mean that it’s possible for anyone sitting behind you to see the project on the screen. There’s no getting around the fact that cafes are public spaces, and therefore inappropriate places to work on truly confidential information, but there’s still a reason that even big offices put walls around cubicles: workers like to have their own space.

In a café, that translates into a design that makes use of corners, interior walls and curved space rather than open areas. Bookshelves and pillars can break lines of vision, and even armchairs can create an impression of enclosure when the worker leans back from the screen.

3.     Canteen Service

Digital nomads always work with one eye on the clock. Stay too long and they’ll feel a need to buy another coffee, increasing their expenses. It’s a sense of pressure that increases every time the waitress walks past, glances in their direction and unconsciously reminds them that they’ve been occupying a table on a single latte for almost three hours.

The best solution is canteen-style service. Line up once, collect your drink and the only staff you’ll have to worry about are the ones cleaning the tables. Instead of feeling that it’s time you should be moving, you can enjoy the self-satisfaction that comes from knowing that you haven’t made a mess for them to collect. Canteen-style cafes divide space so that the staff get the bar and the laptop warriors get the floor.

4.     Low Music

Music is always a personal choice when it comes to work. For freelance writers, any genre with words can put them off their stride; for designers, a steady beat can keep them focused and their colors vibrant and alive. In a café, though, it’s the manager or the baristas who set the tunes, not the customers, which always leaves open the risk that you’ll get the wrong sounds for the wrong project. Packing headphones can be a solution, especially the expensive, noise-reducing type, but even for them, the music has to be low enough for the earphones to blot out the beats. And sometimes you want a noise level as close as possible to no music at all.

Café staff often like loud music because it takes their mind off the job, but a venue with sounds that drown out speech is one that doesn’t care about its customers. That’s bad for every customer, not just those with laptops. Music should be quiet enough to ignore and low enough to work.

5.     Electricity Outlets

This should be a no-brainer: cafes should have at least one electricity outlet for every chair. At least one, because in addition to plugging in your laptop, you might also want to charge your phone. That’s harder for cafes with chairs far from walls, but not impossible. Trailing wires are always a scare but a café that supplements its meager wall sockets with expansion strips shows it cares. A café that forces its customers to stay only as long as their batteries can last says that it doesn’t welcome digital nomads at all.

6.     Free Wifi

An Internet connection is, of course, a non-negotiable. It doesn’t have to be superfast but it should be easily accessible (ideally, without having to pass through a splash page or ask a staff member for a password that’s given out to everyone). Although there is something be said for productivity levels when working in cafes that are Internet-free, usually you’re going to want the Web — even if you don’t want it all the time, you’ll want to know it’s there.

The good news is that there’s no shortage of cafes that offer these essential elements. And all of them also sell coffee and food.

The iPad has blown away the opposition. The device’s share of the tablet market is now more than 61 percent. All the Android tablets together barely make up 30 percent while only 4.6 percent of tablet owners are using Windows-based devices (and it’s likely that 100 percent of them live in Richmond.) RIM’s share of the market is a pretty negligible 3.3 percent. It’s hardly surprising then that HP has already pulled the plug and is getting out of the hardware business altogether. According to one theory though, the secret of the iPad’s strength isn’t Jony Ive’s design or Apple’s A5 processor. It’s the App Store. They’re wrong; it’s the iPad.

Sure, developers have already made more than 90,000 of the store’s 475,000 iPhone applications compatible with the iPad’s bigger screen and greater processing power. Of Android’s 300,000 apps, only 300 have been optimized for the tablets’ Honeycomb operating system, a pretty big difference. But there’s more to it than that. The iPad is just a great device. Even out of the box — without downloading any more apps and certainly without jailbreaking it  — the iPad can do some amazing things. In fact, in the rush to download apps and fire up the videos those incredible little tricks and techniques often get overlooked.

That’s why we sat down with our iPads and — using just the apps that came with it — tried to figure out all of the things that Apple’s tablet could do. We were pretty stunned.

Some of the things we discovered were just neat little tricks that we’d heard of but never really explored, like the ability to make the battery last longer or squeeze more content into the device’s meager memory. Some, such as the ability to add ready-made dates to the Calendar have been incredibly useful additions that we wished we’d known about earlier. And others, such as a workaround that lets international users not just access but actually buy content from the US iTunes store, have felt so much like additional features that they’ve opened up whole new areas of usage for the tablet.

We drew up a list of twenty of what we thought were the iPad’s most powerful, useful and little-used functions and put them together in a new book called iPad Advanced Manual that you can now find on Apple’s iBookStore. Each technique includes step-by-step instructions and lots of screenshots to make sure that you get the trick exactly right. There’s also a quick, little summary at the end of each chapter in case you need to go back and start again, and just need some quick prompts.

Some of the techniques (such as the iPad’s keyboard shortcuts) are straightforward and simple, but are little-known and rarely used, even though they make the device much more efficient. Others can be fairly complex but add the kind of new features to your iPad (such as the ability to search on Safari pages) that are so valuable you’ll wonder how you managed to get along without them until now.

If you’ve got an iPad, either a first or a second generation, you will want to know these techniques — and once you know them, you will be using them!

We’ve included below just one small example of a little-known but surprisingly useful technique that your iPad can do. This is one that didn’t make it into the book. The tricks that you’ll find there are even more valuable and even more useful than this technique that connects your iPad’s Notes app to Gmail to create instant cloud-based, document storage.

Keep Up with Your iPad Notes Anywhere

The iPad’s Notes app can be a very convenient way to create lists and jot down spontaneous ideas. But once you’ve made notes, you want to be able to access them on other devices, including your desktop, laptop and mobile phone.

Fortunately, the iPad, as well as third generation and later iPod touches and iPhones from the 3GS model onwards, can automatically sync content placed in Notes with IMAP accounts. They can also sync them with MobileMe Accounts.

How To Do It

1. To sync Notes with your IMAP account.

i. On the iPad, open Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

The IMAP account also syncs calendars and notes.

ii. Select your IMAP account. Gmail works well.

iii. Slide the Notes slider to On.

Just slide to sync your notes.

2. To move a note into your IMAP folder.

i. Open Notes and press the Plus button to create a new note.

With note-syncing on, write your note….

ii. When you’ve finished writing, close the Notes application.

iii. Open your IMAP account.

Your list of labels should now include a label marked Notes.

…then open Gmail.

iv. Open the Notes label to find your new note.

While you can see your synced note in Gmail or another IMAP mail client, you won’t be able to make changes to those notes or create new ones in the program itself. You can, however, reply to the note, sending the amended version back to your iPad Mail app so that you can paste it into Notes.

This is just a simple technique that lets you continue working on the content you’ve written in your Notes application even when you’re away from your iPad. But the iPad can do so much more, including:

• Allow GPS usage even on a wifi-only iPad.
• Read image files from a standard USB flash drive.
• And even turn books bought from the iBookStore into audiobooks that are read to you automatically.

Sure, the App Store with its giant amount of content optimized for the iPad’s large screen and powerful processor is a good reason to buy an iPad. But when Apple created the device, the company packed so much into the hardware and the iOS itself that it’s hardly surprising that many of the iPad’s in-built features have been overlooked. That’s a shame. If you already own an iPad you need to pick up the iPad Advanced Manual and understand exactly what your device should — and can — be doing for you. (You can also get the kindle or the nook version.)

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

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

The brand is clear.

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

The brand is memorable.

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

The brand communicates.

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

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

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

It’s All About You

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

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

Defending Your Brand

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

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

Photography: Fevi Yu

There was a time when a good golf game was a necessity for any budding business executive. A salesman who couldn’t close a deal after spending half a day in an electric buggy with a prospect was barely worth his salt. And the introductions those golf games generated couldn’t have been picked up any other way. These days, basic networking can be done online from the comfort of an office chair, and the endless rounds of conferences can go a long way towards making up for eighteen rounds with a small ball. But even if golf isn’t always the game of choice for today’s younger and geekier set, who are more likely to be playing Angry Birds or forming a guild in an MMORPG, it should be. There are good reasons that executives like golf and the sport can still teach rising entrepreneurs, even technical types, a thing or two about business success.

Technology Changes Everything

The basics of golf have remained the same. Players still whack a ball with a stick until it lands in a hole. But technology has now changed the way the game works. The dimpled ball has been around since the nineteenth century but a number of professional players, including Sergio Garcia, Darren Clarke and Sean O’Hair, are now using Low Drag Performance (LDP) balls. The technology was introduced three years ago by TaylorMade and is intended to keep the ball in the air longer by maintaining lift and reducing drag. On iron and woods, LDP is said to increase the sweet spots, while the multilayering in modern balls delivers different reactions depending on the speed with which the ball is struck.

And that’s just the ball. Changes in driver design have produced some strange-looking objects while professionals are now able to call up a host of stats for each hole they play. The result is that people who might have struggled to get halfway up the fairway can now smack the ball further and more accurately than ever before — and companies that might have been content to stick a few dents in a ball need to rely on detailed research if they’re to keep their place in the market.

For smaller businesses, the lessons from both sides should be clear: when small advances in technology can produce significant improvements in efficiency, they need to be familiar with the newest tools (even if they decide they don’t need them) — and even businesses in fields as leisured as golf still need to employ engineers and look for ways to add improvement.

Failure Brings Success

In Mentored by the King: Arnold Palmer’s Success Lessons for Business, Golf and Life, Brad Brewer, co-founder with Palmer of the Arnold Palmer Golf Academies, extracted 35 life lessons from the time he spent with the first golfer to earn a million dollars on the PGA tour. Some of those lessons are fairly bland. “Remember your Roots” we’re told in the first lesson. “Always Play for the Love of the Game,” we’re reminded in lesson eight. But perhaps the most surprising lesson to learn from one of the most successful players to swing a stick at a ball is the value of failure.

 “A lot of people think that the tournaments I lost as a result of aggressive play were a real downer for me. They weren’t. The experience was all just a continuation of the things I felt I had to do personally,” Palmer is quoted as saying in the book. “I think I was learning by what I was doing, turning a negative into a positive. And in doing so, it often inspired me to work harder so that the next time, I was confident and ready to go for it and win.”

It’s an approach that goes without saying in golf. No one expects to win every game or shoot a perfect hole every time. They start each match knowing that not only is there a good chance that they’ll fail — and ready to accept that failure — but understanding that even if they do fail, they’ll be back to try again. They’ll also expect that when they do come back, they’ll be a little  better than they were the last time they played.

That’s easier to do on the golf course, where the price of failure is low (at least for amateurs), than in the business world where failure isn’t shaken off with a handshake but takes with it years of work and giant investment sums. But for young entrepreneurs, the type most likely to expect that their start-up will be bringing them fame and fortune within a couple of years, it’s worth remembering that even the best fail sometimes — and that failure can deliver the kinds of lessons that lead to the next success.

Practice… All the Time

But that’s only going to work if you take the time to learn and absorb those lessons. It might seem strange that someone who plays golf for a living would need a coach or have much of a reason to practice beyond keeping their swinging muscles loose. But in a telling 2009 interview with PGATour.com, Tiger Woods, explained how his leg injury had affected his practice routine.

“We usually practice after the round, warm up, play, then practice,” he said. “And I haven’t been able to do that. One, my leg wasn’t very good for a long period of time. And then when I was coming back this year I didn’t do it just because you just want to get off of it, ice it, elevate it, make sure everything is okay for the next day.”

At the end of each round then, when most golfers would be expected to head for the bar and talk about the one they missed, Tiger Woods would head back out and shoot some more, correcting the mistakes he’d made that day.

In business terms, that’s the equivalent of ending a day of important business meetings with a role-playing workshop instead of a long drink. Few entrepreneurs are willing to go that far but the ones looking for success do tend to see the end of the workday as the moment they start preparing for the next day.

Golf then might be about hitting a small ball into a small hole, but executives like it for more than the occasional feeling of success or the chance to meet new partners. The sport delivers valuable lessons about life and business — and those lessons are valuable for today’s entrepreneurs too.

Start your own small business, especially online, and you’ll quickly need to develop a range of brand new skills: a little bit of HTML; a touch of Web design; some knowledge of usability; a grounding in marketing channels. But the skill you’re likely to be drawing on most is a version of a technique you’ve known since you were a child: the ability to write. Whether you’re creating sales copy, writing a blog or even just sending an email, you’ll need to do more than just put one letter after another. You’ll need to craft copy that persuades.

That’s a very different kind of writing skill and it’s one that depends entirely on context. Writing headlines is different from writing email subject lines and crafting a newsletter demands a different approach from that used when keeping a blog up to date. Even if you’re planning to outsource the writing to a professional at some point, you should still have enough basic knowledge to know what to ask for and to judge the work you’re buying.

Headline Writing

Copywriting experts will tell you that the headline is the most important aspect of any piece of marketing copy. They’re not wrong. The headline is always the first thing that the reader sees and it determines whether he reads on or looks away. But the role of headlines has changed. Sales letters, ruined by hard-pushing, online, long-form versions are giving way to softer versions, free even of sub-headings, such as those promoted by Darren Rowse’s Third Tribe Marketing, and to video marketing. The most important use of an online headline is fading away while its traditional use, in billboards and ads, isn’t relevant on the Web.

Where headlines do remain important though is on Web copy. Even here though, the semi-pro business owner has one advantage over a professional copywriter: non-professional writers just want to get to the point; professional copywriters can be tempted to want to show how clever they can be, as though they’re writing as much for their portfolio as for their client’s bottom line. When Robert Bly reminds readers in The Copywriter’s Handbook that “The goal of advertising is not to be liked, to entertain, or to win advertising awards; it is to sell products,” he’s telling copywriters something that clients already need know.

That simple approach is always the best, especially on current website designs which use a large headline and an equally bold button to bring readers in.

Best approach: Don’t use Web copy headlines to persuade; use them to inform.

Email Subject lines

You can think of email subject lines as a kind of subset of headlines. They serve the same purpose, turning readers into curious leads. But unlike headlines, email subject lines reach readers unsolicited — they come to the user — so they have to work harder. And they do that by being simple, friendly and often non-salesy. According to email marketing expert Stephanie Miller, the best subject lines are deceptively simple. Like a good headline, they tell readers what to expect inside the message. That usually means keeping the text short but relevant, and avoiding spam words such as “free” and “buy now” while still keeping the value of the content clear. Numbers, like list posts, have been shown to improve read rates, she argues together with co-authors Matt Blumberg and Tami Forman in Sign Me Up!: A Marketer’s Guide to Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales.

One important difference between subject lines and headlines though is that email marketers can draw on knowledge of the subscriber gained at sign-up to send targeted messages to different readers. By segmenting lists, a business can send one subject line to a subscriber who provided an email address in return for a booklet of dessert recipes, for example, and another to someone who downloaded soup recipes.

Best approach: Send different subject lines to different subscribers. Keep the writing simple and personal, and avoid messages with subject lines that contain offer words such as “free” and “download now.”

Blog Content

Where your writing skills are going to be most in demand is in keeping your business blog up to date. That’s more crucial than it sounds. Google weighs dynamic sites, those with frequently refreshed content, more heavily than sites with static content, forcing serious business owners to keep adding new pages if they want to stay visible in search results.

According to Matt Cutts though, Google’s SEO expert best known for enforcing Webmaster guidelines, frequency of posts is less important than quality of posts. Frequent posting might bring in traffic by giving readers a reason to return each day but it’s the discussions and back links generated on high quality posts that attract the search engine’s interest. Cutts cites Mike Masnick of Techdirt, a technology blog, as an example of a blogger who maintains a high search engine ranking despite infrequent posting because his posts generate discussion, comments and links.

In terms of style and the content itself, blogs are flexible enough to provide room for a variety of different approaches, and the type of content they contain will depend on the kind of business they’re trying to promote. Photographers’ blogs can load up on images with just enough text to keep the search engines happy; blogs written to support software firms aimed at developers might contain plenty of jargon to keep its readership happy.

The length of posts can vary too. A quick update can be as short as a couple of hundred words.  A long exploratory post can run into a few thousand. Which of those you use depends as much on your relationship with your audience, as your own writing preferences. The more valuable and usable your content, the more likely readers are to continue investing their time in reading it.

Best approach: Think before you write and blog when you have something valuable to say. Short posts might keep regular readers checking in but long posts that promote discussions will attract the search engines. Write naturally and clearly, but drop unnecessary colloquial interjections such as “okay” and sentences that start with “Well…” The key is to write as though you’re writing to a friend but not as though you’re talking to one.

Owners of new businesses always make the same mistake. They begin by doing everything themselves. They build their own websites — often using a template service that produces a site that’s effective but not particularly attractive. They handle the production themselves, even to the point of packing the boxes and handing them to the mailman. They spend hours each month writing the invoices and doing the books. And they do all of that dull stuff while still holding on to their full-time job and trying to build a secondary business that they’re supposed to love. Owners of successful businesses, however, do none of those things. Instead of handling every part of the business themselves, they look for people they can trust and outsource the mundane tasks while they focus on the enjoyable, profitable bits. So what should you be outsourcing and what aspects of your new business should you be keeping for yourself?

For some experts, the answer is simple: everything that could be outsourced should be outsourced. For Tim Ferriss, for example, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, the aim is to reduce the work week to less than an hour a day, while spending the rest of the time traveling around the world, dancing in competitions and living a million-dollar lifestyle without the hard work involved in making a million dollars. That outsourcing even extends as far as dating: Ferriss famously outsourced the task of answering the emails he received on a singles site to an Indian call center.

More usually though, growing businesses outsource two kinds of tasks and they do it with an aim that’s less precise than the creation of a four-hour work week. Owners of small businesses want to make more money and have a better time doing it. That tends to mean outsourcing two kinds of work:

1. Outsource the Dull Stuff

The first is the kind of tasks that make eyes glaze and fingers ache. They’re the chores that persuade people to leave day jobs and look for something — anything — that requires more creativity, more thought, more rewards and less routine.

In a small business, that might mean the production process. Factory work is no one’s idea of a dream job, even when the items that you’re putting together in your garage factory are products that you’ve designed yourself. Designing is always fun and creation is a thrill the first time. But when you’re fulfilling your 353^rd order, you’d really like someone else to be doing the sticking and soldering.

Paola Navarro, an enthusiast of amigurumi, a kind of crocheted dollmaking, took a unique approach to outsourcing production when she created her website DeliciousCrochet.com. Instead of outsourcing the crocheting and stuffing to other crafters or doing the work herself, she sells the plans and outsources the work to the customers. It’s the same principle involved in the sale of kit cars: when there’s a pleasure to be drawn from some small scale production, letting the customer do it will both save work and allow you to focus on the more enjoyable design tasks.

Other mundane chores that are easily farmed out can include the shipping and packing, as well as the day-to-day administrative tasks. Virtual Assistants, for example, help small entrepreneurs by doing things that range from planning sales trips and writing social media posts to converting documents and even personal shopping. If it’s something you don’t enjoy and someone easy to find is willing to do it for a small fee, then it’s worth passing the work on so that you can focus on the work you do enjoy.

2. Outsource the Specialized Work

Putting products in boxes or booking plane tickets isn’t difficult but it is dull and time-consuming, and the costs of finding someone to do it for you are usually fairly small; virtual assistants charge around $25 per hour and can be hired for just a few hours each month. A bigger challenge though is outsourcing the specialized work. Web design, for example, requires both skill and talent. Cold calling leads is a horror for many small business owners but a thrill for sales types who know how to keep a lead on the phone and batter down the objections. Copywriting can keep a business owner staring at a blank page for hours while a professional writer would know how to produce a headline and fill in the narrative before the coffee gets cold.

But that kind of outsourcing is expensive. Web designers charge more than $100 an hour; professional copywriters about the same. Hiring anyone whose skills would have required undergoing a course or building up professional experience is not going to be cheap.

The alternative though isn’t cheap either. Learning even basic Web design will take time, and that time would be more lucratively spent on your specialization. The result, too, is usually sub-standard, a level that could cost you customers.

The good news though is that this kind of outsourcing doesn’t always have to be done all the time. Once the site is up, it can stay up. And as many of these tasks become less specialized and more routine, so the price is falling too. Virtual assistants now offer search engine optimization as part of their package, alongside social media and mailing.

Choosing what to outsource then shouldn’t be too big a problem: if it’s time-consuming, dull, prevents you from making your own unique contribution to the growth of your business and someone else can do it better, then you should be looking to hire them to do it for you. A tougher question is when you should hire them. Although the easy answer is “as early as possible,” in practice, outsourcing happens when the business owner is confident enough in his ability to pay the staff and believes that he’s going to see that money coming back.

Outsourcing then isn’t just a good  business practice. It’s also a sign that you feel you’ve got a good business.

By now, we’re all supposed to be at home. Not sitting in front of the television but working, making use of email, VOIP, video chats and conference calls to turn the spare bedroom into an office and the company into a virtual entity. When you can achieve everything you need to accomplish in a day with nothing more than a keyboard, a monitor and an Internet connection, location is no longer a barrier and rented office space is an unnecessary expense. Business districts should be emptying and office buildings should be turning into malls and residential skyscrapers. It hasn’t quite worked out that way — and it may be the importance of face-to-face meetings that’s responsible.

According to a recent report by the Telework Research Network, a research firm, 45 percent of US workers hold a job that is compatible with at least part-time telework yet only 2.3 percent of the workforce considers the home their primary workplace. While the numbers of home-workers are expected to rise by 69 percent by 2018, those predictions are still far lower than earlier forecasts when virtual companies looked like the wave of the future.

The report cites mistrust and fear on the part of management as one reason for the unexpected slow growth of virtual working. Another reason though may be the persistent importance of face-to-face meetings as a way of deepening relationships both between suppliers and clients, and between virtual colleagues.

The benefits of real meetings with buyers is perhaps the clearest. In a white paper for the Hilton Group, a company with a reason to encourage executives to fly long distances for real meetings, Professor Peter Carey of the University of Singapore notes that face-to-face business meetings provide a number of advantages:

• Meetings improve communication.

Non-verbal cues lost even in video conferences can be seen and interpreted in face-to-face meetings, including the facial expressions of participants when someone else is speaking.

• Meetings occur in real time.

Email communication requires waiting for replies and even phone calls put participants at different times of day.

• Meetings create exchange relationships.

When people meet face-to-face, they make promises, exchange gifts, do favors and enter into all sorts of informal commitments and debts that are hard to walk away from.

• Meetings build trust.

Participants have a chance to judge the integrity, transparency and general likeability of the people they’re dealing with

• Meetings can develop sideline conversations.

Not all talk during face-to-face meetings is about business. Some of the less formal conversations that take place around the meeting can yield valuable information and new ideas.

Some experts have even estimated that real meetings have the highest ROI of any marketing tool — although the costs of travel and accommodation mean that they’re also likely to demand the highest investments. A 2009 study by Oxford Economics found that every dollar invested in business travel produced $12.50 in revenue while conversion rates in face-to-face meetings were as high as 40 percent. A survey by the Harvard Business Review and sponsored by British Airways, another company keen on promoting business travel, reported that 79 percent of the publication’s readers thought that face-to-face meetings were the “most effective way to meet new clients to sell business”; 89 percent said that in-person meetings “are essential for sealing the deal.”

Real meetings might not always be necessary though. According to Peter Carey, virtual communication can be sufficient when there’s little pressure, consensus is unnecessary and the goal is simply to exchange information. But they are important when participants need to persuade, co-ordinate and reach agreements.

Meeting Your Co-Workers

But what about employees? Do virtual companies need to bring their workers together, even if the benefits are unlikely to take the form of a signed contract or a new sale? For many of the most successful virtual companies the answer still seems to be yes.

Automattic, for example, the firm behind WordPress, was started in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg. The company now employs more than 50 staff who live as far apart as the United States, Australia and Europe. They communicate over P2, a kind of private microblogging service developed in-house, and also use instant messaging and email. Phone and video chats are relatively rare.

Each year though, all of the employees get together in person. They split into teams of three and work on new projects and in new teams.

“The idea is to get some cross-pollination and to get people to make personal connections,” Mullenweg told Inc Magazine last year. “In some ways, seeing your co-workers once a year is better than seeing them every day, because if you’re only going to see someone for a week, you try to be nice, even if you don’t like him or her. We don’t get the passive-aggressive stuff that builds in an office.”

It’s a strategy that’s also followed by Fire Engine RED, an education technology company that’s based in Philadelphia but employs a team throughout the United States and Canada. According to president and co-founder Shelly Spiegel, employees stay in touch using Skype, instant messaging and email, spending as much as three to four hours every day in some form of virtual chat. Like Automattic though, they also get together every year in Philadelphia when they combine business meetings with socializing.

“It helps us make sure that everyone’s on the same page,” said Spiegel in an interview.

Even small companies have found that a real life meeting can make a big difference. When the three members of Leading Virtually had their first meeting in 2008, one member described the strengthened bonds, shared experience and “reinforcement of the importance of one’s work-related roles and their implications on ‘real’ people and other team members.” Deadlines no longer felt arbitrary but had a real effect on colleagues’ lives which makes them both harder to impose and tougher to ignore.

It may be possible then to work at a distance and even build a company without ever meeting your colleagues or your clients. But if you do get a chance to meet them, it’s worth taking.

Image: TZA

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

Smarter Time Management

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

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

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

• Cutting back on café-working

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

• Changing Your Schedule to Match the Task

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

• Go Mobile

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

Find and Keep Your Leads

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

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

Smarter Paperwork

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

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

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

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

Writing a blog requires commitment. New content has to be posted regularly – at least once a week. But producing a minimum of 52 new blog post ideas every year isn’t easy. There will always be times when you’re searching for topics and hunting for an interesting topic to keep your readers and the search engines happy. Here’s a bunch of suggestions that should make the brainstorming easier while keeping your blog content at the highest level.

1.     Report the News

News happens every day providing regular opportunities to take a topical event and explain the effect it might have on your industry. These are topics that professional editors have already decided the public will find interesting, so trust their judgment and adapt those topics to your blog.

2.     Pore Over Press Releases

If the headlines yield little, turn to businesses that want to be in the headlines. Sites like PRNewswire.com contain long lists of story ideas that companies are trying to push into the news. Not all of them are newsworthy – or blog-worthy – but occasionally you can dig up a good release and even contact the sender for more information.

3.     Read Your Blog Comments

Your readers are knowledgeable about your industry and have ideas of their own. Often, they leave their ideas at the bottom of your posts. Encourage them to leave more and pick them up on their suggestions.

4.     Take a Poll

Another way to ask your readers what they think is to present a number of options and ask them to click the answers of their choice. You could either publish the results or write a blog post explaining why they’re wrong, right or should know better.

5.     Share Stats

Polls can yield one kind of statistics but you don’t have to rely on your own audience sample. Companies like Gallup release poll data all the time. Make them the centerpiece of a new blog post or just publish the figures as a graph with a short comment.

6.     Trawl Social Media

Facebook and Twitter are filled with industry insiders discussing topics, asking questions and reposting links. Follow your niche’s biggest insiders and use their comments to inspire your own. You can hunt on the walls, browse business pages or just ask your followers what they’d like to read. They might just tell you.

7.     Hunt on Quora

Quora is a question and answer site but one in which the people answering are often leading professionals in the field. Look at the questions for topic ideas, but read the answers from former CEOs, engineers and experts for new information that you can include in your posts. Quora can be a great source for top quality intelligence.

8.     Read the Real Media

You only get to think about story ideas when you come to update your blog. Mainstream media outlets have to do it all the time. Pick up a newspaper or a magazine, see what they’re writing about – and no less importantly, how they’re writing about it – and copy their ideas. It’s where their own ideas came from.

9.     Join Forums

Online forums are buzzing with information, questions, answers and expert knowledge. Browse the posts for detail and use the threads to inspire new topics.

10.  Express Your Frustration

No industry is ever perfect, and there will always be tasks you struggle to complete and goals you have difficulty meeting. So tell the world. Explain what doesn’t work and describe the work-arounds you use to solve the problem.

11.  Update Older Posts

Once you’ve been blogging for a while you’ll quickly build up a stock of old posts on great topics that are now slightly out of date. Dig them back up, discover what’s changed and give an old story a new lease of life.

12.  Write a List Post

List posts, like this one, take time to research and write, but they make for good link bait and even if the research is tricky, the format is friendly. You don’t want to do them too often but a long list can make a good stand-by every two or three months.

13.  Teach How-To

The easiest way to help your readers is to take them by the hand and guide them one step at a time through a solution. Show them how to do something they couldn’t do before and you’ll have given them some valuable knowledge.

14.  Go Green

Green issues affect every industry, from giant corporations to home-based businesses. If you’re struggling for an idea, explaining how to lower carbon emissions or use less electricity in your niche is always a good stand-by.

15.  Write a Review

Reviews are the mainstay of many blogs. They make for great keyword SEO and they’re useful for readers. Either write a real review of a product you own and use or produce a “write-up” and  opinion piece about a new product hitting the market.

16.  Conduct an Interview

Interviews provide original content and yield new information. Either arrange a phone call with a leader in your industry or send a short list of questions by email. Write it up as a blog post or edit the answers into a Q-and-A.

17.  Profile Influencers

Interviews have to be planned so when time is short, just write a profile. Pick a leader in your field and explain why he or she is important. An interview will be unique but a profile is fast and should still give you a valuable return link.

18.  Describe a Trend

In the media, three events are a trend. You can find three examples to identify any trend whether it’s a new marketing technique, an original use of a product or the end of an idea. Tell people what’s happening so they’re not left out.

19.  Take a Stand

Controversy always attracts readers and generates blog comments. Take a position on an issue, defend it to the hilt, attack the other side, then step back and watch the fur fly.

20.  Write a Case Study

When you’re recommending a course of action, find someone whose work illustrates your techniques and describe how they’re doing it. It’s an easy way to show not tell.

21.  Conduct Original Research

Getting to the bottom of a complex story will take time and plenty of planning but the result might well be the kind of readership and respect that can catapult a blog into the A-list.

22.  Write Someone Else’s Blog Post Better

You won’t be the only one writing a blog about your topic. Reading other blogs in your field should be a regular part of your day but if you see a post with an interesting title but dull content, pick it up and do it better.

23.  Pick a Calendar Event

Every month is punctuated with a special occasion whether it’s a holiday, an anniversary or a special day like Mother’s Day, Presidents’ Day or Tax Day. Open your calendar, find your month’s occasion and work it into your blog.

24.  Expose a Myth

Every industry has myths and misconceptions about its products, its companies and the way that it works. Pick one and pick it apart.

25.  Fight the Law

And every industry has laws, regulations and guidelines that make it harder for professionals to do their job. Describe the rules that get in your way and explain why they should be removed.

26.  Mark an Industry Milestone

The release of the first iPod, the day Etsy was launched, Facebook’s 500 million mark… pick an important moment in the history of your industry and mark the anniversary.

27.  Draw on Your Personal Experience

Blogs are supposed to be about personal experience so when you’re stuck for an idea, look for something that happened to you recently, something that you’ve done or a goal you’ve achieved. It’s your blog; write a post about you.

28.  Shoot a Video Post

Creating a video post should be easier than writing one. Just turn on your webcam and talk. Of course, you’ll still need something to talk about but for some people just speaking can trigger ideas in a way that a blank page can’t.

29.  Round up Your Tech Tools

You have a host of tools, apps and gadgets that you use every day in your professional life. New entrants to the industry won’t know how valuable they are. So lay them out and tell them.

30.  Pick an Outrageous Example

A good idea isn’t always enough. Some people will come up with outrageous ideas whether they’re baking giant pizzas, proposing creatively or giving away samples. Find someone breaking boundaries in your industry.

31.  Get Others Started

Some of your readers will be old hands but others will be curious newbies wondering how to take their first steps. Get them moving and you’ll win their gratitude – and a new audience.

YouTube might have been created as a place to share home movies but it’s now become a platform dominated by professional production companies. The most popular clips tend to be movie previews, television shows, sports segments and even ads that first aired on networks. Joe Public might be uploading the largest number of videos to the site, but it’s the professionals who, not surprisingly, are winning the views. But that doesn’t mean that a few amateurs haven’t managed to turn their YouTube appearance into the beginning of a beautiful career. Michelle Phan’s make-up tips have turned her into a spokeswoman for Lancome while a number of other talented amateurs have also managed to use a video camera to build an audience. Sometimes though, there’s a little more to even those self-starters than meets the eye.

Justin Bieber

YouTube’s biggest success story has to be Justin Bieber, now a mainstream pop idol. The teen star was discovered on the video-sharing site in 2007 when Scooter Braun, a former marketing executive at record label So So Def, stumbled upon one of Bieber’s videos while searching for a different artist. Braun tracked him down, contacted his mother and invited the then-13-year-old to record a demo tape in Atlanta, Georgia. A month later he was picked up by Usher, who outbid Justin Timberlake, and eventually signed with Island Records. After a strange haircut and a big marketing push, Bieber has gone on to become one of the world’s biggest pop stars.

This really was a rare YouTube success story. Although Bieber had taken part in a singing contest the year before, there’s little evidence that he had had any professional training before being picked up by a music company.  The only promotional efforts appears to have been limited to his mother’s prayers for a Christian company to sign him.

Rebecca Black

That isn’t true of Rebecca Black who has now picked up even more YouTube “dislikes” than Bieber. Both Bieber and Black were blessed with pushy parents who helped to shove them up the video charts but while Bieber had to make do with a home movie to accompany a mediocre song, Black’s mother shelled out $4,000 to vanity label Ark Music Factory to produce and promote her daughter’s song “Friday.”

For better or worse, it worked. The song might have become infamous for being bad, but it’s also picked up more than 167 million views and was covered in an episode of Glee. In March, 2011, Forbes estimated that advertising revenues from YouTube alone would have brought in more than  $20,000 and sales on iTunes could have generated another $26,700.

How long the success will last though is a different matter, and the use of a professional company to produce and promote the video has caused its own problems. At the beginning of June, Ark tried charging $2.99 to watch the video and by the middle of the month the original clip had been taken down pending a copyright claim by Rebecca Black.

Shane Dawson

Fortunately, YouTube isn’t only producing the world’s worst songwriters. The site’s biggest earning star is believed to be Shane Dawson, a wannabe comedian and actor whose channel has picked up more than 110 million views and with over 2.5 million subscribers is the most popular on YouTube.

Dawson’s first videos are believed to have been video homework assignments but he’s since gone on to produce a series of spoofs and parodies populated by a host of comedy characters. His channel now lists a professional entourage that includes a film and television agent (supplied by William Morris), a film and television manager, and a merchandising and branding agent. In 2009, advertising income from his YouTube videos was estimated at more than $300,000, and he’s now working on a pilot for a television show based on his characters.

Lucas Cruikshank

Like Shane Dawson, Lucas Cruikshank is another young comic actor who has managed to use YouTube to build an audience, this time for his Fred channel which shows sketches in the life of a fictional six-year-old called Fred Figglehorn. In April 2009, the channel became the first to pick up more than a million subscribers. Cruikshank has since gone on to film Fred: The Movie which aired on Nickelodeon in September 2010. The television station has now created a franchise for the character and has started work on a sequel.

Cruikshank’s rise hasn’t been completely smooth though. His first channel, JKL Productions, was set up with cousins Jon and Katie Smet. That channel now states that Lucas has left the group and deleted all his videos. “We didn’t get in a fight,” his cousins add.

MyKeepon

All of these YouTube stars are selling themselves. MyKeepon, a small robot that dances and responds to touch, has been developed and sold by Wow! Stuff, a marketing company that uses social media sites to look for new ideas. The device, which originally cost $20,000, had been developed by scientists to help autistic children communicate. The UK marketing firm contacted the US developers and is working on a £35 toy version to be released by Christmas. The company’s use of social media sites, including YouTube has won it a National Business Award, fourteen of its products have picked up global distribution through Toys R Us and according to the Daily Telegraph, it also been invited to work with the retailer on product development.

So even if you can’t sing, tell jokes or act like a six-year-old with anger management issues you can still become a success on YouTube.

It’s been just over a year since Facebook spread its Like button across the Internet and it’s hard to argue with the numbers. The average media site integrated with Facebook is said to have enjoyed a 300 percent rise in traffic; some major retailers have reported that sales increased as much as tenfold since adding Like buttons to their pages; Eventbrite has said that each click on its Like buttons is worth $2.52 in ticket sales, a figure beaten by Ticketmaster which says that its Like clicks bring $5.30 each. There’s no question that the Like button has been a boon for publishers and a moneymaker for marketers. It’s made sharing easier and provided an easy way for customers to spread personal recommendations — the best way for businesses to build their brand. But while the Like button has been good for some, it doesn’t work for everyone.

Part of the problem with Like is its public nature. Clicking the button is easy, and it’s easy, too, to forget that every time you do hit the button you tell the world about your personal tastes. That confession can have a real effect. Announce on a whim that you like a particular band, for example, and the next time you start up… say, Pandora… you might well find that the radio station knows more about you than you thought. Similarly, a quick browse of the profile of someone you barely know can turn up all sorts of personal preferences that might have been better kept personal. Liking is easy; Facebook’s privacy controls, which can block APIs and acquaintances from seeing your recommendations when used properly, are a lot more complex.

Like is too Much Like Love

The privacy issues surrounding Like are well-known and, with a bit of effort, can be dealt with. But Facebook isn’t just a commercial service that helps businesses to spread their message virally or a site on which users struggle to protect their privacy while chatting to friends, family acquaintances and people they might have spoken to once at a conference. It’s also become known as a platform on which activists can plan demonstrations and bring together like-minded people for campaigns. It’s here that the Like button is particularly inappropriate.

The problem is that Like is positive while campaigns can be negative. Campaigners who fail to name their pages carefully can end up asking people to support something that they oppose. One page, for example, has been set up to raise awareness of Henry Kissinger’s actions during his time as Secretary of State. The page is entitled simply: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal. Next to the title is the thumbs-up icon and an invitation to Like it.

So if you click the button, are you saying that you “like” Henry Kissinger, War Criminal or that you don’t like him because you think he’s a war criminal? Of course, the context makes the intention clear and the Like refers to the group not the title, but there’s no question that the position of the button and the choice of word make for a incongruous mix. If someone were to create a page to support Henry Kissinger as a war criminal it would look pretty similar.

Even more unusual is the presence of Like next to pages set up specifically to encourage dislike — or worse. A Page entitled “I Hate Racist People” has managed to pick up over 22,000 people who have indicated that they like hating haters. That’s confusing enough. Even worse though is that many of the people who pressed Like to say that they hate racist people only did so to bait the people who really do like hating racist people. It turns out that they not only like being racist, they also like lying about not being racist.

The heart of the problem is the choice of the work “Like.” Not everything we want to bring to the attention of others is something we like. The interest page about Global Warming, for example, also carries the Like button, suggesting that anyone who clicks it likes the idea of the world getting hotter. It’s not surprising that while this page has a little over 15,000 supporters, the Stop Global Warming page on Causes.com, a phrase that’s easier to support, has picked up more than 320,000 likes.

Like Versus Recommend

Nor does Facebook provide a “dislike” button that could function in the same way as a vote down can work on Digg. The site does allow “unlike” as a way of removing a vote from something you’ve already liked (and perhaps regain a little privacy) but that’s not quite the same as the disapproval that a “dislike” button would bring. (Although at least “unlike” is a fair use of the word. As linguist Gabe Doyle explains “unlike” can be the right term despite its alternative meaning as “not resembling.”)

But perhaps the most important point about Facebook’s choice of “like” as its term of approval is that while it doesn’t work sometimes, it does work most of the time. It’s shorter, snappier and more personal than “recommend” which feels very business-like (and which would make a terrible first name.) It’s taken off in a way that Google’s “Plus One” really hasn’t and it’s more about the user, rather than the recipient, than the bland “share.” Click Like and you’re saying something about you and your tastes; hit “Share” and you’re saying something about the people you’re hoping to share the article with. It’s certainly better than Wikipedia’s plan to show appreciation to editors by sending them virtual gifts.

For companies struggling with the right terms and copy for their services then perhaps the best option isn’t to choose the words that everyone can like all the time but to pick the words that do the job. “Like” for all its weaknesses, occasional inappropriateness and odd ungrammatical situations has had an effect. It’s created a new zeitgeist, built traffic, helped businesses improve their revenues and spread across the Web. That’s something any new venture would like.

According to one story, YouTube was born six years ago when early Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim needed a way to share video footage shot at a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco apartment. But it isn’t true. Karim has denied that the site was born out of a meal at his friend’s place, and Hurley has said that the tale “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible.” In other words, even the origins of a site supposedly created to enable amateur video-sharing are now buried beneath a layer of professional marketing. It’s the kind of subtle professionalism that can be seen most clearly on the site itself where, despite the occasional popularity of finger-biting babies and toilet-trained cats, the most popular footage is produced and distributed not by enthusiasts but by professional content companies. YouTube’s first video might have been of Jawed Karim’s trip to the San Diego zoo, but its number one slots have now mostly been taken over by large media companies using the service to reach audiences directly.

Even many of the videos that appear to be amateur — and many of the clips that were uploaded by amateurs – have professionals behind them or rely on professionals for their popularity. Susan Boyle’s famous rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” for example, which has now picked up almost 70 million views, isn’t a clip of an amateur with a surprisingly good voice singing one of her own songs in the bathroom. It’s a cover from a top musical that appeared in a 2009 episode of Britain’s Got Talent, one of the UK’s most popular television shows. Nor was Gary Brolsma, the YouTube sensation who shot to fame with his lip sync of the Numa Numa song, uploading an original creation to the Web. In fact, by distributing a song he didn’t own, he was breaching copyright. (Not that the copyright owners would have had much reason to complain.) The site’s top performers at time of writing include Amy Winehouse’s flop in Belgrade, a Britney Spears video and an interview with an NBA player. There are precious few entirely amateur videos on the site’s Most Viewed list.

Ten Thousand Professional Partners

There are no reliable figures that compare the ratio of professional content on YouTube to amateur content but the site receives 35 hours of video every minute and says it has 7,000 hours of full-length movies and shows, most of which is presumably professional. The site’s 10,000 partners include Disney, Turner, Univision, Channel 4 and Channel 5. And the 94 percent of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers who have run campaigns on YouTube aren’t uploading footage of their pets or their children. They’re offering ads and footage created with giant production budgets and often featuring well-known stars. The site’s ten-minute upload restriction (now increased to fifteen minutes) was introduced primarily to stop users from uploading entire shows that they didn’t own.

That doesn’t mean that most of the videos submitted to YouTube are sent in by content companies or published by amateurs ripping off content companies. But it should surprise no one that the bulk of the most successful clips on the site have professionals behind them.

In part, that’s because professional content is likely to be better. A large budget buys talent and equipment that produces content that people want to see. But the marketing matters too, another area in which professionals have an advantage. While anyone can create and upload a video to YouTube, that film has to be seen even as thousands of other clips are being put on the site at the same time.

The Marketing Needs Professionals Too

In a 2007 expose of how YouTube marketing really works, Dan Ackerman Greenberg told TechCrunch how he was hired by firms to promote their videos. His methods then included:

• Opening forum discussions, sometimes with multiple identities to create false conversations and attract attention.
• Sending the video link to opted-in email lists.
• Paying bloggers to embed the videos on their pages.
• And using word-of-mouth marketing to help spread awareness of the video.

Today, those methods would likely include social media as well. When Wieden + Kennedy created the Old Spice ads, the company’s promotion strategy included using Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They even pushed it through hacking community 4chan.

It might seem then that YouTube has effectively become an open distribution channel for production studios and advertisers. Instead of going through cable and satellite companies to put their content on screens, they can now go directly to audiences by managing their own YouTube channels — and their efforts are overwhelming the submissions of well-meaning (and attention-seeking amateurs).

But the victory of the professionals on YouTube is neither complete nor necessarily a bad thing. Not only does it mean that viewers aren’t restricted to lolcats and teenage crooners but some YouTube contributors have been paying attention to the best videos on the site and raising their own game to compete. Make-up artist Michelle Phan’s 150 videos, for example, were all created using iMovie on a Macbook Pro. They’ve now been viewed more than 390 million times, winning her sponsorship from Lancôme for whom she is now a spokesperson and whose products now appear in her videos.

The influence flows the other way too. Roger Federer’s trick shot, in which he hits a bottle from the head of a stage hand during a shoot for Gillette, is clearly a piece of advertising created for the cosmetics company. But it’s shot to look like a piece of amateur footage, as though the idea had been spontaneous and captured by chance by another stage hand with a camera.

YouTube then has become an odd mixture of things. The site might have started with amateurs in mind but even as professionals have taken it over, some amateurs have managed to join them — and many professionals are trying to look like amateurs.

If people are a company’s most important asset, the most successful firms will be those that are able to generate the largest possible returns from those resources. Increasing productivity is one way to do that but an even more valuable method is to mine team members for ideas. Tap into your team’s thoughts and you might well find that your firm, however small, already has what it takes to zoom ahead of the competition. The trick though is to extract that creativity. Here are five ways to squeeze big ideas out of your team members.

1. Understand the Value of the Team in Fostering Creativity

Great ideas rarely come out of one person fully-formed and waiting for the rest of the team to pick up and start building. As leadership theorist John Eric Adair points out in his book Leadership for Innovation: How to Organize Creativity and Harvest Ideas, new ideas are more likely to be half-formed, full of mistakes and problems, and need plenty of tweaking before they’re ready to roll.

An individual might have the germ of an idea but it’s the team’s job to find the positive aspects of that idea and to build on its framework with creative contributions of their own. It’s that participation that turns a creative concept into an innovative team  — and a successful company.

The first step to fostering team creativity then is to make sure that the attitude is right: to reward creative individuals but encourage the rest of the team to co-operate with that creativity and not just compete with it.

2. Brainstorm Effectively with Pattern-Breaking

The usual way to generate ideas in teams is to gather everyone in one place, have them throw out their thoughts and write them down for everyone else to see and judge. It’s rarely effective, usually resulting in a full whiteboard, a list of unworkable ideas and a lot of confusion. Brainstorming doesn’t usually work, and it doesn’t work for a couple of reasons.

The first is that when ideas are being shot down as soon as they’re born, team members learn to keep quiet to avoid criticism. Brainstorming sessions tend to be negative rather than productive. The second reason though is that brainstorming keeps people thinking within their usual patterns. As Dr. Charles Prather, author of The Manager’s Guide to Fostering Innovation writes:

“Brainstorming as usually practiced just empties our mental box of all the usual ideas. It is not engineered to break our patterns of thought.”

The solution, he argues, is to create a standard brainstorming session that uses a structure first proposed by Alex Osborn, founder of advertising form BBDO, in Applied Imagination: generate lots of ideas; avoid judgment; build on ideas that others have contributed: and stack the deck with wild cards who know little about the project or what’s usually considered possible. (IBM’s Smarter Planet Initiative is said to have been proposed at one of the company’s “jams,” brainstorming sessions at which even employees’ relatives can take part.)

Once the brainstorming session has ended though, and the expected ideas presented, the team members can start looking for the truly innovative, out-of-the-box concepts. One way to do that, Dr. Prather argues, is to reverse assumptions. A taxi firm, for example, assumes that passengers know where they want to go. If the reverse were true and only the driver knew the destination, the cab firm would have created the idea of adding a tour service to its range.

3. Create Five Building Blocks for Virtual Teams

Generating creativity from a team in one location is hard enough. Squeezing out ideas from virtual teams is a challenge on a whole different scale. Jill Nemiro, a researcher at California State Polytechnic University, has identified five building blocks which she says are necessary for creative virtual teams: design; climate; resources; norms; and continual assessment.

Some of those blocks are more obvious than others. While ideas always seem to require resources to become real, and continual assessment is necessary to ensure the team is on the right track, “design” refers to the process by which a creative idea is developed. That might be modular, in which each team member is given a specific task; or it could be iterative in which team members are in regular contact and report constantly on progress and problems. To successfully encourage creativity in virtual teams, Nemiro argues, team members have to choose the right creative process design for them and their task.

4. Be a Creative Leader

Kimberly Douglas’s book The Firefly Effect: Build Teams that Capture Creativity and Catapult Results compares hunting down an idea to chasing fireflies. Although the book emphasizes the team aspect of a firefly hunt — a group of children working together for a specific goal, inspired and yet still in competition — many of the chapters are really about leadership. Creative firms, she says, need a new kind of leader, one who will:

“create a fertile environment that will allow creativity to be unleashed.”

That mostly comes down to building an atmosphere in which ideas can be shared instead of stored, and knowing what to do with a good idea when you see one.

5. Reward Creative Thinkers

Perhaps the best way to encourage creative thinking though is to make clear that people who have good ideas are rewarded for sharing them. That doesn’t have to take the form of cash compensation. Glory can be a good reward too. Make the person who had the idea responsible for seeing it through, and they’ll get all the kudos when it all comes together.

Except that sometimes it doesn’t work. The idea for Twitter came from employee Jack Dorsey during a brainstorming session at Odeo. Dorsey was given the position of Twitter CEO but soon made way in a reportedly acrimonious move in favor of former Odeo CEO Evan Williams. Part of smart creative team leadership is knowing how to give out the prizes for a good idea — and who is the best person to build the concept.

When we were putting together our new book, Internet Marketing Hype, we often found ourselves returning to the first chapter and debating whether the assertion that “Content is King” can really be counted as a myth. It’s certainly a cliché, repeated endlessly on sites around the Web, but for good reason. The pre-eminence of content makes publishers feel that what they’re doing is worthwhile. All of that research, writing, persuading and audience-building is what publishing is all about. But as anyone who has ever set up a website, written posts, then reviewed their Google Analytics stats knows, good content isn’t enough. You also need the search engine juice, the marketing and the promotion to bring in readers.

In the book, we stressed the importance of good content but argued that distribution should stand alongside it as an equal partner in a site’s success. The two though don’t always complement each other. In fact, the most common arena for the conflict between good content and good marketing is the Web page itself and the words it contains. For content producers, Web pages should be well-written, carefully researched and thoughtful enough to build an audience, create trust and produce sales. For search engine experts, sites are meant to be read by robots. They should be filled with keywords that push them up in the search results and bring in masses of traffic in the hope that enough visitors will convert to bring in revenue even if they don’t enjoy what they read.

Turning off the Keyword Firehose

That keyword-based firehose approach may now be under threat. Internet marketing expert John Schwartz’s plea for pages written for humans not search engine rankings is one symptom of a backlash against websites that sacrifice quality for quantity. Google’s own Farmer update, which penalized content farms like Answerbag and ArticlesBase that produce large amounts of keyword-based articles, could suggest that the days of keyword-stuffing are now as much a part of Internet history as Lycos and AskJeeves.

In fact though, the picture is more complex. Although some keyword sites took a major hit from Farmer (eZineArticles fell 90 percent; AssociatedContent dropped 93 percent) others did surprisingly well. The Huffington Post saw a sharp rise in rankings after Farmer was rolled out and even eHow saw an improvement. As Jim Edwards of Bnet explained, Google appeared to have targeted the Web’s bottom-feeders, striking down sites that offer no value at all while allowing sites like Huffington Post that offer a little value from unpaid contributors to benefit.

The difference between those two classes of website isn’t big. eZineArticles has plenty of poor content written to gain links and exposure but buried in its piles are some worthwhile posts with real value. The Huffington Post has lots of well-known writers but it also publishes plenty of posts written by people who are best ignored. Perhaps the clearest difference is in the intent. Article banks exist to promote websites; bloggers, even on content platforms, write to be read.

JC Penney’s Black Hat Link-Buying

One option could be to skip the SEO on the Web page altogether and turn to more black-hat techniques. Even giant companies do this. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported on JC Penney’s link-buying strategy that had netted it the top spot on search results for terms ranging from “dresses” to “grommet top curtains.” The company’s SEO firm had been paying for links on unrelated websites in a successful attempt to push it up the rankings. Once the scheme was discovered, Google dropped JC Penney down the rankings and the catalog firm fired its SEO team. Although the company is likely to have made plenty of short-term sales as a result of its link-buying the long-term effect of Google’s punishment may well end up costing it more.

So what stand should a website publisher take in the battle between key words and meaningful words?

One solution might to be separate the two elements of a successful Web page. Even large commercial sites like Match.com draw a distinction between the user-side of a Web page and the search engine side. The top of the company’s home page is dominated by a search box that pulls visitors in and quickly gives them faces to browse. The bottom of the page though, written in a grey font that’s difficult to read, is standard, keyword-stuffed SEO copy targeted at robots. It’s not a practice that can work easily on a content page like a blog but it might be possible to squeeze a few extra keywords into an author bio at the end of the post.

A better approach though may be more nuanced. Google’s own definition of “good quality content” is vague and while the rules on link-trading and false linking are clear enough, the differences between sites like ArticleBase and Huffington Post aren’t always obvious.

The best solution then is likely to be a mixture of:

• Write the best possible content in the clearest possible way;
• Work in natural keywords at a rate of about 1-3 percent, sacrificing keywords for clarity where necessary;
• Give the page time to build an audience and develop links naturally. (Google, apparently, becomes suspicious of sites that suddenly develop a rash of backlinks).

That last point is really key. Mark Schwartz’s argument against posts written for robots wasn’t based on the fear that Google penalizes sites that stuff their pages with keywords. It was based on the fear that keyword rich posts fail to engage audiences. Good content, he argues, doesn’t just do well in search engine, it also resonates with readers, building the trust necessary to create sales. As he puts it:

“Rankings are great, but they don’t buy anything. PEOPLE do.”

The usual reason that people turn to black-hat methods, whether it’s keyword stuffing or link-buying isn’t that they want success but that they want success now. Winning a top ranking though takes time — as does building the trust with an audience necessary to turn readers into buyers, something that can only be done with good content.

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

Skipping the Personal Stuff

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

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

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

How to Personalize Your Office

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

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

Poor Organization

Conquer your stuff before it conquers you. Photography: FunnyBiz

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

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

How to Organize Your Office

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

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

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

The Wrong Location

A kitchen isn’t an office… Photography: Garethjmsaunders

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

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

How to Find Your Office

… but a closet can be. Photography: typefiend

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

Tools and Resources

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

One of the most obvious differences between LinkedIn and its social media rivals, Facebook and Twitter, is its reach. It’s not easy these days to wander onto a Web page that doesn’t invite you to send a link to your Twitter followers or share the page with your Facebook friends. LinkedIn buttons? Not so much.

That might seem surprising. LinkedIn is popular both with users, who now number more than 100 million worldwide, and with investors. (The company’s stock finished up 109 percent on its first day of trading recently, the fifth-largest opening rise since the bursting of the dotcom bubble.) But it also has a lot to do with LinkedIn’s own slowness to make easy site integration available.

That, at least, is now changing. The relaunch of the site’s developer platform with an open set of APIs and the adoption of OAuth has now made integrating LinkedIn easier than ever for developers. “In Share” buttons are now beginning to appear on Web pages, competing for space and clicks with Facebook’s Like and Twitter’s Tweet. (You can see one in action at the top of this page on a blog about recruitment).

LinkedIn Beats Facebook on Mashable

Mashable has been one site quick to make use of the buttons. The tech blog places a Facebook Like button next to its articles, as well as icons for Twitter, StumbleUpon, Tumblr and, on some pages, LinkedIn. A quick look at the frequency with which those buttons are used shows that pages typically pick up more Tweets than LinkedIn Shares, and more Shares than Likes. This post about Groupon, for example, had picked up 1,209 tweets eleven hours after it went up, compared to 55 Likes and 210 LinkedIn Shares. This post about marketing on Facebook, however, generated 256 Shares in less than half an hour, which might suggest that users like to show potential employers that they’re up to date with social media marketing techniques.

The site’s use of LinkedIn though isn’t limited to sharing buttons. Mashable has also integrated LinkedIn with Mashable Follow, its “social sharing and content curation platform,” a move only made possible by LinkedIn’s recent adoption of OAuth.

“We are able to authenticate users using our existing OAuth support framework,” Chris Heald, Follow’s lead developer told readers. “Once users are authenticated, we can use their authorization tokens to make calls to the LinkedIn API to easily conduct the shares.”

Mashable though isn’t the only site to make use of LinkedIn’s new openness. Other sites are lining up to do the same, and in various ways. Behance, a portfolio platform for creative professionals, declares that having uploaded their work, members can “at the touch of a button” broadcast their work on Facebook and Twitter, “as well as sync with LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn Sells Expertise by the Minute

Elegant.ly is also aimed at creatives, this time focusing on new designers. The service hopes to match starting designers with new start-up companies in a kind of pauper’s marriage. It uses LinkedIn’s OAuth integration to enable new members to sign in without having to complete pages of registration forms.

Both of those sites though only make use of LinkedIn’s smart new API to help the networking service do what it’s supposed to do more efficiently. LinkedIn’s main role has always been to help people find work; both Behance and Elegant.ly make job-seeking a little easier by focusing on one niche industry and making the information available on the site readily accessible to people who might be looking to hire professionals in those industries.

MinuteBox is a little more creative. This service also mines LinkedIn’s database to bring professional help to people who need it, but it offers not skills but knowledge. That’s a fairly unique approach and an interesting twist on the usual way in which professionals market themselves. Instead of pitching for full-time or freelance jobs, MinuteBox allows LinkedIn’s members to offer professional advice for which they can charge on a minute-by-minute basis. The information is delivered through video, audio or text chat and the interaction conducted through MinuteBox but the trust is built through an impressive portfolio on LinkedIn.

Move away from LinkedIn’s main function as a way for people with skills and knowledge to sell their expertise, and things start to get a little murkier, even with LinkedIn’s new API. SociallyApp is a smartphone app that tries to integrate a phone’s functions with all of the information streaming through multiple social networks. Those networks include Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also draw on Foursquare and LinkedIn. The app collates the data, adding the latest Facebook picture to contact lists, for example, or placing birthdays on calendars.

But it’s not easy to see what the benefits might be for users of LinkedIn, beyond adding loose connections to a contact list and forcing the phone user to scroll through more names than he’d like before he can call home.

The challenge for LinkedIn — and for developers hoping to make use of its API — is that the site is not the kind of news streaming service that has made Facebook and Twitter so valuable. (The former for news about friends and family; the latter for updates and chat from industry insiders.) It’s too formal for casual browsing and the reasons for networking on the site are too obviously commercial for the kinds of loose chat that can make even Twitter so much fun. While Facebook is like chatting with friends and Twitter is hanging out at the watercooler, LinkedIn still feels like the kind of professional networking occasion at which everyone wears name tags and tries not to eat with mouth full of canapés.

None of that is to say that LinkedIn isn’t useful. It clearly is as its 100 million users and happy investors will tell you. It’s a valuable service that can help match the career-minded to new opportunities and businesses to talented individuals. Whether it can compete with the flexibility of Twitter and Facebook, even with its new API, remains to be seen.