Today, I have the pleasure of lending the controls to Steph Auteri. She takes creative entrepreneurship to whole new levels and has some great thoughts on diversification…and what to do with your paychecks after you earn them.

I’m assuming you’re here because you’re the entrepreneurial sort. The sort who brings in the bucks doing something you love… something fun… something that allows you to access your more creative side. That’s fantastic. It’s why I’m here, too.

But what happens when that thing you do — that thing you do so well — doesn’t pay the bills?

For me, the answer was to diversify. After all, I loved juggling a variety of projects. It made me feel safer to stop relying on one type of client. And I didn’t want to put on pantyhose and go back to the corporate workforce. Now I write about sex. I coach other freelance writers. I sing the occasional funeral mass. I dabble in ghostwriting. And then I roll around naked in my paychecks before blowing it all on Etsy.

So how do you know which areas to diversify into?

First, ask yourself: What do I love to do in my spare time? Where do my talents lie? What have been my greatest achievements? What do I daydream about doing? What do I want to be remembered for?

Use the answers to these questions as jumping-off points. How can you turn your hobby into a business?

Consider the ways in which various interests can overlap. I love my cats in a way that borders on the insane, and I also love writing. Because of that, I should probably be pitching Cat Fancy, and similar publications. Could you possibly tap into one interest by using another skill?

Then, draw up a list of all the possibilities.

This can be the toughest part, so I’m going to present you with a list, just to start you off. You’re welcome.

1. Copy Editing and Other Torturous Activities:
I often neglect my copy editing background to focus on the work I enjoy the most: writing fluff and/or personal essays. But sometimes, I suck it up and do some of the tedious stuff available in the publishing industry. There’s copy editing and proofreading. There’s fact checking and transcribing (ugh). There’s corporate copywriting and ghostwriting. They may not be as much fun, but they usually bring in more money.

2. Coaching/Consulting:
When my husband suggested I do consulting work for one of his clients (who was a complete novice to blogging), I laughed at him. Then I got my coaching certification and began coaching other word nerds. Do you have knowledge or experience that could prove valuable to others? Share the wealth!

3. Teaching:
Like consulting, teaching can be a means to share your knowledge with those desperate for information. If you’re not interested in becoming part of a larger institution, there are other options, including online courses and industry-specific conferences.

4. Try Something Else Entirely:
No one says you have to focus all your efforts on one industry. Looking to mix things up? Use your imagination (and tap into your side hobbies)! You could be a wedding singer. You could teach hula hooping, belly dancing, or yoga. You could lead photo walks. You could start a catering business on the side. You could learn massage therapy, or even do bartending in the evenings. What I love about side jobs like these is that they can provide inspiration for your main endeavor.

5. Part-Time or Permalance It:
There’s no shame in taking on a regular gig in order to collect a steady paycheck. Finding that perfect balance of multiple income streams looks different for everyone. I’ve done permalance gigs several times since going full-time freelance: as a copy editor for a daily newspaper; as a blog manager at an online magazine; as an editor at another online publication. The regular paycheck was nice, but that wasn’t the only benefit. These gigs also opened doors for me, and gave me experiences I may not have found on my own.

Your career will shift many times over the course of your life. Industries will shrink and grow. Your goals and passions will change. You’ll lose clients, but then find new opportunities around the very next corner.
Diversifying will help you navigate your way safely through these ups and downs, yes. But exploring new options will also teach you to roll with the punches. And that’s an important skill to have.

Steph Auteri is a freelance writer, editor, and career coach, and she would be totally down with helping you find your own, perfect income balance. Join her mailing list to receive a free copy of Freelance Awesome: A Starter Kit, an e-workbook containing the five worksheets necessary to jumpstart a freelance writing career.

Sustainability is a big fat buzzword. It gets trotted out anytime someone wants to appear to care for the environment and it’s meaning is becoming diluted.

We’ve added a sense that ‘sustainability’ has to mean we’re talking about the environment. But the word really has much broader roots than that. Sustainability is a question of building something that can repeat and continue, especially in a situation when limited resources are available. That can mean talking about energy efficiency and the like, but it can just as easily be a question of practicing stewardship with our own time or creativity. A business that requires you to put in hundred hour work weeks is just as unsustainable as the current worldwide levels of oil usage.

Getting the Talk About Sustainability Right

While I tend to be contrary when it comes to environmental issues (at the very least, I think our approach to recycling paper is dangerous), I do think it’s incredibly important to talk about sustainability as a part of entrepreneurship. Where I diverge from other people is the idea that the environment is the only resource we need to protect.

So, let’s get the environmental stuff out of the way first: it’s short-sighted to set up a business in such a way that you’re not going to have the resources you need down the road. Choosing ways to reduce the amount of energy your business needs, along with other natural resources, is simply good business. If nothing else, making a resource scarce makes it more expensive for your business to grow in the future. Assuming that you actually want a long-term business, rather than a quick buck, careful management of resources is a must.

The local ecosystem, by the way, falls into that category. I’ve never really understood companies that make choices that lead to contaminated water tables and similar problems: leaving ethics and morality entirely out of the matter, it always makes for one heck of a human resources problem. Sick employees are expensive employees and employees with low morale can do all sorts of harm to the bottom line. It really is cheaper to run a business with an eye to environmental impact in the first place. The only exception is if you plan to be out of business relatively quickly and want to make the absolute most money in the shortest amount of time — that’s still bad business, though, given that the earning potential of a well-run company can extend decades.

Less Obvious Sustainability

In addition to the warm, fuzzy, environmentally-friendly sustainability discussed above, we need to talk about the other resources that need some stewardship.

Human resources are a key component of more advanced sustainability concerns, both in terms of yourself as an entrepreneur and in terms of the people that you work with. As a business owner, I’ve witnessed first hand (and committed) some incredibly stupid moves involving allocating human resources. It’s very tempting, especially when you’re bootstrapping, to tell yourself that sleep is unnecessary for a couple of weeks at a stretch. We do stupid things in terms of our health — particularly concerning, given that many entrepreneurs don’t prioritize health insurance. I’d like to say that’s just the price of admission and that if the business is a good one, things will even out eventually.

But the truth is that it’s not that hard to burn an entrepreneur out. Even successful business owners will close shop and take jobs if they use up their own stamina. I’m not telling you that an entrepreneur should limit herself to a forty-hour work week or anything like that, but we do need to think about sustainability. We need to keep at least some time on the schedule for rest, to make sure we’re healthy and all of that. Depending on your speciality, creative burnout may be a concern, as well — you may need to budget in down time from creative work, at the very least.

We have to think about how hard we push people we work with, too. I keep reading horror stories about Silicon Valley startups that expect coders to sleep at their desks. Let’s be honest: who actually does decent work on a fifteen minute nap caught under a desk? Those companies will have to have that code rewritten at some point, driving up costs. Once again, I have no problem with hard schedules and expecting people to put in the hours, but if you’re working on a timeline that requires every person in the company to work twenty hours a day for the next couple of weeks, you’re simply not going to meet the deadline you’ve set with any kind of quality product.

Playing Buzzword Bingo with Sustainability

Right now, the word ‘sustainability’ is a hot buzzword. If I had another clear term to talk about similar issues that wouldn’t get me funny looks during conversations, I would use it. I don’t, though, and the underlying concept is crucial to business.

Even if the only consideration you give to sustainability is to sit down with your business plan and check that you have the necessary resources — including hours in the day — to succeed for the next year, you’re going to come out ahead. I hope that you go beyond that point: it’s worth considering not just what you need to run your business, but also how available those resources will be in the future. Even if you’re just thinking about how many hours you can really work, day in and day out, you’ll wind up with a business that is easier to sustain in the long term.

Image by XKCD creator Randall Munroe

I fully admit that I hang out with nerds, geeks and so on. I have only a handful of friends who have even undergraduate degrees in business, let alone MBAs. I don’t have a problem with people who pursue an MBA — just as I don’t have a problem with people who pursue a Ph.D. in underwater basket weaving. To each our own.

But when it comes to entrepreneurship, I’m seeing some very interesting trends. In my circle, the more successful entrepreneurs have some impressive technical skills, first and foremost. Just about everyone picks up business skills along the way, but it’s not necessarily what comes first.

The MBA Mindset

Last fall, I had the opportunity to have several conversations with an MBA student who I worked with on a project. Once he realized that I operate a business of my own, he kept wanting to pick my brain (his background was military, followed by a stint with a government contractor). I try not to judge anyone by stereotypes, but I think our conversations highlighted a problem with the mindset of many people who want to have MBAs.

The guy would not shut up about passive income. He worshipped Tim Ferriss, the author of The Four-Hour Workweek. He wanted to find some nice apartment buildings. He wanted to make investments. The man clearly was willing to put some effort into amassing money, but he wasn’t interested in building a business — just income streams. And yet, one of his goals was to be an entrepreneur

This mindset bothers me on a fundamental basis. I was brought up to believe that you make money by offering people something they want: that may be housing, labor or the fanciest new smartphone on the market. Straight up investment can be important, but it’s not the same thing as entrepreneurship on any level.

Technical Skills Change the World

Successful entrepreneurs these days all seem to have at least decent technical skills. At the most basic level, if you can’t figure out the concepts behind ecommerce well enough to hire the right person to work on your website, starting up a new business that will grow is virtually impossible.

But the skills that seem to make a difference — make it much easier to succeed these days with a new business — go a lot deeper.

First off, the ability to program, even just a little bit, is making people stand out. One Java class, or even a few days of playing around with HTML, is enough to get an entrepreneur thinking in the right way. It’s my personal belief that programming forces your mind to work in a slightly different way than it would otherwise. You’ve got to be willing to tinker to create something that works; there’s no expectation that you’ll get it right the first time around. You can get the ability to tinker from other backgrounds, but they’re all at least a little technical, from monkeying around under the hood of a car to sewing your own clothes.

Something as simple as being willing to crack open an HTML file and play around with it also means that you’re far ahead of the game when it come to technology. If you’re reading this blog, it’s probably hard to imagine that most people don’t even know that opening an HTML file in such a way that you can see the code is an option. Technology is just a specific type of black magic, at least to most people out there. Running a search on a search engine isn’t even an easy process to a lot of people. I guarantee that, if you’re here, you live in a magic internet bubble. It’s nice here, isn’t it?

Technical and creative skills go hand in hand. These days, every creative profession has its own required technical skills. Even as a writer, there is technique (from the same root word as ‘technical’) I have to know. To get my writing in front of people, I have to know a lot more.

That’s a good thing. When you’ve got creativity and the technical skills to use it, you can build all sorts of things. As it happens, building new things that people want is an excellent way to become a successful entrepreneur. Sure, you’ll have to iron out the business nuts and bolts, but the simple formula is this: create something cool and trade it for money to the people who want it. Without the skills to build your ‘something cool,’ you’ll never get to the point of doing business.

And before you start pointing out to me that people buy a lot of things that aren’t ‘cool,’ let me point it out for you. It’s true that renting an apartment or buying toilet paper is rarely a case of paying for something you really, really want (though I’d like to point out that there’s plenty of differentiation in those markets — ever tried to rent an apartment in a really popular neighborhood?). Those sorts of markets are catering to needs. It’s hard to break into those markets, especially as a brand new, bootstrapped entrepreneur. The only way to do it is to have something that really sets you apart from the competition. Trying to compete with Band-Aids on cost just ain’t gonna happen, even if you are comfortable tilting at windmills.

Good technical skills mean that you’ve already learned how to learn. Can you name me one skill you’ve picked up entirely through book learning and managed to implement perfectly the first time around? Yeah, me neither — as a general rule, most technical work requires practicing, the ability to hone your skills and a willingness to continuously learn more. If you want to run a business, you’ve got to be able to pick up new skills (including business-oriented skills, like bookkeeping). You’re not going to have time to go get a degree in accounting every time you need to do something new.

Want to Start a Business? Start from the Technical Side

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you will find a use for a business degree at some point, I promise. But it’s not necessary for a starting point. You’ll get a lot more traction if you’re willing to focus on where your technical skills can take you, especially in terms of figuring out what product or service you’re going to sell.

I can think of a million different examples of people who have let their technical expertise lead them to entrepreneurship, but before I go blasting through my list, I’d love to hear who you think of. Share any examples you think really exemplify what a little technical background can do below, if you’d like.

Image by Flickr user Alpha

There are a lot of descriptions of people who work for themselves. If you take on contracts for creative work, you can be a freelancer or an independent contractor. If you’re looking to build something bigger down the road, you might be an entrepreneur — or you might just be a small business owner. Nomenclature can be very important: because most of these titles have fairly common interpretations, people can tell a lot about you depending on which one you choose.

Freelancer: Freelancers are almost always individuals working on their own, usually in a creative field. A freelancer works on projects for clients, either for one client at a time or for multiple clients. In my experience, freelancing is one of the more common ways for people to strike out on their own. That’s at least partially due to the fact that many freelancers started out working on client projects while still also working for an employer.

Permalancer: Permalancers are a relatively new iteration of freelancers. Some companies (usually large — like MTV) rely on creative talent and hire freelancers, who are expected to put in forty hours of work a week indefinitely from the company’s office. On the surface, most of us would consider permalancers to be employees without benefits, but legally a permalancer is usually considered to be self-employed and can do things like write off business expenses as deductions, at least until the IRS decides to reclassify a company’s permalancers and demand payroll taxes.

Independent Contractor: The term ‘independent contractor’ is a broad one and can include freelancers, consultants and more. Usually an IC, as some companies abbreviate the term, is an individual providing a service, although I’ve seen companies refer to small businesses providing services as independent contractors as well. It’s a classification that’s often used to figure out who to send what forms to. If you are asked to submit a W-9 form from a business that has paid you money, you’re probably considered an independent contractor.

Consultant: The plural of ‘consultant’ seems to be ‘consulting firm’ these days. While a consultant may work on her own, she may also be part of a company (or the owner of that company). As far as job descriptions go, a consultant usually goes into someone else’s business and tells the owner how to do a specific thing. It’s less common for the consultant to actually do the work, though not unheard of — a consultant may have a team on tap to implement the course of action she suggests.

Virtual X: In certain fields, virtual workers are fairly common. Virtual assistants are particularly so. A VA may specialize in certain types of work (including creative work that freelancers also do) or handle general administrative tasks. There are also companies that organize groups of employees to act as virtual workers, mostly in countries like India or the Philippines. But there are also plenty of independent VAs. A VA’s client is usually a small business or an independent worker.

Independent Worker: You’ll commonly find ‘independent worker’ used as a catchall for any individual who doesn’t work for an employer and who also doesn’t have any employees of her own. It’s just that plain and simple.

Solopreneur: Just like the name says, a solopreneur works on her own. The big difference between a solopreneur and most of the titles above is that a solopreneur is often offering products rather than services. Because the title has especially caught on in certain online circles, those products are likely to be electronic, such as ebooks. But they can be anything that one person can bring to fruition without hiring employees.

Entrepreneur: Many of the definitions of entrepreneur revolve around a question of risk. An entrepreneur starts a new venture (or more than one), taking on the risk involved, with a goal of building something beyond just herself. She may start as a one-person operation, but most entrepreneurs have visions of bringing in employees and growing a big business.

Small Business Owner: Most small business owners go through a larval stage of entrepreneurship at some point. But this title conjures up an image of something stable. For most of us, it creates the idea of a small office or store with just a few people working. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, though, a small business is anything with less than 500 employees.

Startup Owner: Where a small business owner or an entrepreneur is usually in their business for the long haul, the most successful startups are built with an exit strategy in mind. Whether the startup owner (or owners) want to be bought, bring in a management team and have an IPO or something else entirely, I wouldn’t generally describe them as people who will still be doing the exact same work even five years from now.

The Evolution of Titles

Personally, my choices of how to describe what I do have been shifting. When I first started out on my own, I knew that I was a freelancer down to my bones. But I started freelancing about eight years ago. It’s natural that my own understanding of what I do has evolved. These days, I consider myself an entrepreneur more than anything else — though, within the right context, I will refer to myself as a consultant or a small business owner. That’s a bit of a personal problem: most people aren’t crazy enough to try to run what really amounts to three companies at once.

This sort of evolution is absolutely common. I’ve seen virtual assistants become consultants, freelancers become startup owners and so on. But I also know people who have stuck with one title for twenty years or more. Just like the fact that you have to decide for yourself which of these options works for you, you have to decide if your title is going to change down the road.

Image by Flickr user Vince Welter

If you take a look at the job titles back on your family tree beyond the last hundred years or so, you’re not going to see a lot of company men. You might see a few different job titles, like farmer, sailor, tailor or blacksmith. In the 1800s or so, you might see a few factory workers. But in any period before the Industrial Revolution, you’re probably looking at a family history full of people working for themselves or for marginally wealthier landowners in their area. There simply weren’t big companies the way there are today — there was no infrastructure for them.

But there may be too much infrastructure to make many of those big companies sustainable in the future. I strongly believe that we’re going to see independent workers as a majority portion of the workforce in the near future.

The Trend Towards Contractors

The big trend that will minimize the number of employees that many companies rely on is the move towards contractors: in order to cut costs, many companies have already significantly reduced their workforces, bringing in contractors as necessary to do certain work. The savings are significant. Even if a company pays a contractor a great hourly rate, the fact that there’s no need to pay for downtime, office space, health insurance and so on, means that there’s a significant savings.

Even when big businesses have more money to spend on labor, it’s doubtful that they will hire back the employees that they’ve laid off. A ‘jobless recovery’ is guaranteed.

But that also means a boom time for contractors, especially skilled individuals willing to invest time in finding the right gigs. Some jobs are difficult to hand off to independent contractors (especially those who never set foot in an office), but technology has transformed the majority of work done today.

The (In)Stability of Big Business

The forty-year man is turning out to be a fluke of the 20th century. The idea that a worker could devote his life to a company and expect to be taken care of in return has already been proven to not play out in the long-term — it functioned for less than a century.

In part, that’s because big companies have to be run primarily for profit. If there’s no possible way for the CEO to even meet every employee working at the company, how can we expect that he will make those employees anything resembling a priority? I’m not saying that C-level executives are hard on employees on purpose, but if you can’t picture the people you work with, you automatically dehumanize them. So the folks near the top make out pretty well, because they’re ‘real’ to their bosses and the folks down at the bottom don’t get the same opportunities. It’s going to be harder and harder to find smart people to take on jobs in the lower echelons of big business.

When you add in the fact that layoffs have become a way of life for many employees, going to the office each day doesn’t look particularly good.

Infrastructure Offers Options

Modern technology allows me to manage projects with contractors located around the world. There’s no need for me to hire a local employee and try to keep her busy for a set number of hours a day. When you consider that technology isn’t about to slow down, it evens seems unfair to offer to pay on an hourly basis — a good contractor or entrepreneur may be able to easily find ways to handle certain projects very quickly. Personally, I don’t care how work is done, as long as it meets my requirements as far as due date and quality. Hourly rates punish the best workers, in a way.

Our ancestors worked on individual projects because there just weren’t the tools to make it possible to collaborate well. The biggest organizations — like standing armies — relied on rigid hierarchies to communicate ideas.

As technology evolved, it was possible to grow larger organizations without having to structure them quite so rigidly. Good communication tools and improved processes made it possible for huge organizations to function without quite as thick of a management layer as an old-school army might require. Think about the bigger companies you’ve seen in action: it isn’t necessary to have a squad leader for every eight employees, plus the chain of command for platoons, companies and so forth. Depending on the type of work employees are handling, there may be one manager for anywhere from ten to one hundred employees.

Today, as long as you’ve got decent infrastructure in place (good project management software, communication tools and so on), one person can orchestrate a hundred contractors completing projects for a single company without many difficulties. That makes independent workers the obvious answer to most labor needs, especially as the infrastructure continues to improve.

There’s a certain mindset that you’re likely to encounter in the fast-paced worlds of internet marketing, start-ups and other specialized types of entrepreneurship that if you want to be in business, you absolutely have to ‘crush it.’

Gary Vaynerchuk is the mascot of this point of view and, boy howdy, has it worked for him. The man turned a single liquor store into a media empire.

But just because something works well for Vaynerchuk doesn’t mean that it’s definitely going to work for you. Not all of us have the same mindset, motivations or energy levels. Vanyerchuk does well at ‘crushing it’ because — and I say this with respect, awe and positivity — he has the energy of a toddler who’s been mainlining Pixie Sticks. Personally, I have to sleep occasionally.

Are the War Metaphors Not Cutting It For You?

Business doesn’t have to be a battle. Sure, you’re not going to get anywhere if you aren’t putting in the hours and the effort, but that doesn’t mean that you have to ‘destroy the competition,’ ‘shock and awe your target market’ and generally declare war to build a viable company. There are other options. The reason that we don’t hear too much about them is that those options are quieter and used by entrepreneurs who are, in turn, operating with a mindset that’s a little quieter.

But Kelly Kingman and Pace Smith — two entrepreneurs who I respect just as much as Gary Vaynerchuk — have set out to change the situation. Rather than offering business advice that requires you to stockpile your own set of Pixie Sticks, they’re talking about the Way of the Peaceful Entrepreneur.

Yesterday, Kelly wrote a huge post breaking down the differences between the peaceful approach to business and the more gung-ho alternative that we’ve heard so much about, and how they play into operating a business online. It’s a great read and I encourage you to go over the whole thing, but there is one section in particular that I want to point out:

When I started my business, I struggled to get my mind around how people were making money online — and it was even more difficult to explain to my friends and family. When you’re starting out, online business models can blur together because you’re drowning in advice. Too often, everything gets lumped into the category of “blogging,” simply because most websites also function as blogs. Blogging is one business model among many options that are open to you.

The drawback to blogging as a beginning business model is that it’s what I call a high traffic strategy — the amount of money you make is directly connected to how many people visit your site. For new entrepreneurs who can’t wait two years to make money, it’s far more effective to start with a service based-business, because it’s a low traffic strategy. You need far fewer individual clients than blog visitors in order to make a living.

Blogging for a living requires aggressive tactics. It’s one of the reasons that, when I started blogging, I didn’t actually try to make money from it. I used my blog as a showcase to land clients. I had a blog that worked for me, but I also had a business that didn’t kill me with 90 hour work weeks.

More Good Stuff to Come

On Monday, Pace is the main attraction in a ‘peaceful cage match’ with Johnny B. Truant to debate the merits of the opposing view points. Johnny is a firm proponent of aggressive entrepreneurship, so this is a match well worth tuning in for. Best of all, it’s free. Make sure to get in on the live call.

Of course, all of this is a build up to something bigger — a seven week ecourse on building your business as a peaceful entrepreneur. Personally, I think that Pace and Kelly are fantastic instructors. They also teamed up to create Engaging eCourses which I go back through about once every three months because it’s such a great resource. But even if you aren’t ready to commit seven weeks to The Way of the Peaceful Entrepreneur, make sure you don’t miss any of the free materials they’re offering.

(D)

What makes a question a ‘frequently asked question’? Is there a certain number of times you have to hear it before you know it’s a standard question in your particular topic area?

Jen Stakes Roberts and I made a series of videos answering common questions as a promotional piece for EnhancedFreelance.com. We knew that we wanted to answer common questions that freelancers regularly face in a way we could easily link back to our site. But picking out the questions to answer was not the simple matter you might think.

We’ve chosen a very targeted audience: freelancers who have been in business for a while but have somewhat stalled in going forward. There are definitely common questions that we hear a lot, but not all really tied in with what we’re working on for the site. For instance, it’s not unusual for someone in the market we’re targeting to have some very important questions about tax laws — but that’s not a big focus for the site. Since we work with an international group of members, a video about taxes would have been hours long to cover anyone and I would live in fear of giving someone the wrong advice for their locale.

We also wanted interesting questions: it’s not always that easy to keep a viewer’s interest for the entire length of a video, at least online where there are so many other options. Interesting, at least in this context, means something that the audience wants to hear about. While sex and drugs seem to work for tabloids, things don’t have to be quite that exciting to still be interesting to a particular audience.

The questions we chose are ones that we’ve gotten in several different contexts. I have a bit of a leg up on this particular situation: I’ve done numerous agony aunt columns for freelancing sites, giving me a very clear picture of not only the types of questions that freelancers have, but what stages of a freelance career bring those questions into focus. If you don’t have a stock pile of questions sitting in a dusty corner, however, there are two starting points that I would suggest: Quora and LinkedIn Answers. Just read through the questions that appear regularly in the category you’re considering writing or talking about. You’ll get a quick snapshot of what people find confusing right away. It would be ideal to do more research, of course, but that isn’t always possible.

For our promotional piece, we chose five questions:

1. How much time does a freelancer need to spend on social media?
2. What should you do a client asks you why your rates are so much higher than an automated service or a freelancer based overseas?
3. What should you do about protecting projects from people who might steal them?
4. What should you do when you’ve got more work than you can handle?
5. How can you find ways to keep earning more money as a freelancer?

I’ll admit that at least a couple of these are what I would consider personal soap box issues — I have strong feelings about the answers and data to back them up. That makes it a lot easier to write up a script and film a response that sounds natural. But that’s only a last-step filter for choosing what questions to use when you’ve already got several options. And, hopefully, you’re working on a topic that you’re pretty passionate about in general and have lots of opinions anyway. If you aren’t and you’re trying to establish yourself as at least enough of an expert to answer standard questions, you’re probably going to have some problems.

In Short:

If you want to find the big questions in your niche (for marketing efforts or otherwise), start by eliminating topics that you can’t easily answer in the format you’ve chosen. Look for interesting topics that can hold attention. Look at places that regularly post questions for a starting point.

And enjoy our first video:

You can sign up to receive notifications when the others go live at EnhancedFreelance.com.

It’s two days into 2012 and I’ve already heard many suggestions about what’s to come: The UN has named 2012 the year of sustainable energy. The Chinese lunar calendar lists 2012 as the year of the dragon. I’ve even read a physics article suggesting that 2012 may just be the year of cold fusion.

I’m not about to suggest that you plan your schedule around these grand pronouncements, but I do have one of my own. I firmly believe that 2012 is a year for entrepreneurs. The trends are certainly in our favor, at the very least.

Where We Are Now

The current economic situation, to put it bluntly, continues to suck. Phrases like ‘jobless recovery’ seem to be in every other article, making it feel like there’s no end in sight. It feels like there are no jobs out there, and more people are looking every day.

But business isn’t so bad for a lot of us. Freelancers, start ups and small businesses are making money right now. More people are realizing that there are still plenty of ways to make money, beyond finding one of those elusive nine-to-five jobs.

That fact shouldn’t be newsworthy, either: during the Great Depression, a lot of new businesses opened their doors. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, got its start with just a little bit more than $500 at the end of the Great Depression. So did Allstate Insurance, Converse and Revlon. Starting a new business during a depression doesn’t guarantee success, of course, but if you can start a business with an ingrained culture of doing everything as lean as you possibly can, you’ve got a head start for growing that same business in the future.

Less to Lose

There are a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs right now. Whether you’ve been freelancing, working for the man or are just getting out of school, think long and hard before hunting for a job. A lot of big companies aren’t hiring, after all, but many are working with contractors and freelancers. They still need help to make sure that they keep earning money. Since contractors can handle short-term projects, don’t need office space and are generally less expensive to work with, it’s a win for companies using contractors instead of employees.

It’s not such a bad deal for contractors, either. Rather than working on salary, a contractor who does things right can walk away with a high hourly rate and avoid unpaid overtime entirely. It’s also relatively easy for someone to start out as a freelancer and turn her work into a much larger business, with sub-contractors or even employees of her own.

Right now, entrepreneurship can be particularly appealing because it’s just not as risky ask when times are good. When you have no guarantee that an employer will be able to offer you health insurance or a steady paycheck, employment looks a lot less secure.

A lot of people are suggesting that big businesses will not be interested in going back to working with full-time employees even when hiring a larger staff is more financially feasible. But I think that a lot of former employees will also be uninterested in going back to nine-to-five gigs after building up a higher income and figuring out that they can cover benefits themselves.

Earning Money the Hard Way

Personally, starting up a new business always seems like the easy option to me. I’m aware that there are people out there who are just better equipped to work for an employer than I am and perhaps even enjoy it. That’s cool; it takes all kinds. But entrepreneurship does really seem like an easier option than some of the ways that people are scraping by right now.

I have friends who put together these patchwork livings, trading sorting out storage units for housing, picking up a little freelance work online, selling craft projects here and there, and taking odd office jobs and temp positions to keep the money rolling in. These aren’t people who wouldn’t normally be able to find jobs — it’s just that they’re living in places where even the position of cashier at the local fast food joint has no turnover. It’s the hardest sort of existence I can imagine. We really are talking about earning money the hard way.

Some of those patchwork pieces could very easily make for decent businesses. It’s an opportunity that at least a few are exploring. With the low cost of starting a new service-based business (ten dollars for a domain name and a few dollars a month for hosting), these people are a driving force behind the entrepreneurship trend.

Where We’re Going

Looking back, I’m pretty comfortable calling the 20th century the Century of Big Business. Big corporations flourished in a way that they never have before. But the 21st century will be the era of the individual and small business — the century of the entrepreneur.

We’ve already seen the start of this particular trend. Big companies that we rely on every day start in garages with two co-founders and a few hundred dollars. Some of the tools I use for running my business have millions of users and less than a dozen staff members.

2012 is just one more building block for this trend. I’m not expecting anything particularly momentous this year — I’m a lousy fortuneteller at the best of times — but the trend is there and it’s going to keep growing.

Image by Flickr user Sally Mahoney

“I can’t start a business without money! I may be able to bootstrap the company, but I still have to pay for advertising.”

I have heard variations on this theme for years. I even heard a version from a family member attempting to convince another family member to invest in her business when I was about ten. Maybe it was true fifteen years ago, although I don’t remember enough about the pre-web world to say.

But a marketing budget isn’t all that necessary these days. It’s rare that paying for marketing is the only way to get a product or service in front of the right customer. Odds are good that a single honest review on the right website will get you a lot more business these days.

A Short Case Study: reddit*

I had the pleasure of hearing Alexis Ohanian speak about entrepreneurship last month. Ohanian, who co-founded reddit, noted that the company’s entire marketing budget when starting up was $500. That was spent exclusively on stickers. He notes,

After we were acquired, Condé Nast funded an openbar meetup tour (Drankkit) for redditors and also prize money for a build-a-subreddit contest I ran early on to encourage folks to create & grow subreddits.

That’s been the extent of any marketing dollars we spent on growing reddit and they all came post-acquisition.

To give you an idea of the enormity of that statement, here are some figures.

• In February 2011, the site received one billion page views.
• I found conflicting reports of the number of active reddit users at this point (ranging from 8 million to 20 million), but that same announcement in February showed over 13.7 million unique visitors.
• Condé Nast, the company that bought reddit in 2006, is also the publisher of The New Yorker, Vogue, Wired Magazine and a bunch of other big name publications. (For the record, earlier this year, reddit was split off from Condé Nast and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications).

But What About Viral Videos and All the Rest?

There’s a certain sense that we’re living in an age of amazing marketing: Old Spice can create a series of amazing videos that become a part of our culture overnight. Social media, content marketing and all the rest make it possible for marketing materials to rival the winners of Pulitzers, Emmys and other creative awards.

I’m a fan.

But this age of amazing marketing also has opened up opportunities for new businesses to get by without spending any money. It seems counter-intuitive, I know, but hear me out. Marketing is no longer wholesale. If you can slide an absolutely fabulous product in front of one right person, you’ll get the right coverage on social media, through word of mouth or wherever else you need it. You just need to think retail — making that one perfect sale or, rather, connection.

The Old Spice videos were fairly retail, when you get down to it. Here, watch one:

I promise: this post did not start out as an excuse for me to go watch Isaiah Mustafa. But the fact that I enjoy watching these videos over and over again is interesting. I’m right in the group that Old Spice was reaching out to with these videos. I’m nerdy enough that I can navigate my way through a throng of response videos on YouTube. My sense of humor is just a tad quirky. I’m firmly in favor of Isaiah Mustafa walking around without his shirt on. I’m not an Old Spice user, but I encouraged my husband to try out Old Spice after seeing this series of ads.

I’m certainly not the only person who meets that criteria, or the video above wouldn’t have reached 37 million odd views on YouTube. But it’s still not everyone. My dad doesn’t fall into that description, despite being a potential Old Spice customer. My granddad certainly doesn’t, either. Old Spice went retail, in targeting younger consumers who meet a certain set of qualifications. They have other promotions to get their products in front of other demographics.

Don’t Worry About the Marketing Budget

If you have a trust fund or other giant pile of money that you’re just itching to spend, I’m all in favor of devoting some of it to marketing. That is, of course, assuming that you have something great to market.

For those of us starting with a little less backing, coming up with a little cash for a marketing budget is not going to offer any sort of safety net. Rather, you need to build something fabulous. Write the best book possible. Design the best web app on the face of the plant. Whatever you want to sell, knock it all the way out of the park. When you know you’ve got a home run on your hands, start thinking in terms of specific connections you can reach out to or build.

For the best children’s books ever, start reaching out to big name mommy bloggers and book reviewers. Send them emails, follow them on Twitter and — preferably without being a suck up or pain in the posterior — build a standing connection with them. When you’re ready to start selling, then it’s just a question of asking to send such folks a review copy. If you’re shooting for a small business web app, a sports shoe, a non-profit fundraiser or anything else, the type of person you’re looking for changes, but the strategy does not. Think of the individuals who are going to be interested in what you’re offering and go from there.

*reddit is uncapitalized. I’ve got some great editors in the audience and I don’t want to give anyone a heart attack when you see how many times I’ve left this business name uncapitalized.

Image by Flickr user Freddie Brown

It seems like high school teachers spend a lot of time trying to keep their students off of Facebook, avoiding Wikipedia and generally preparing for careers in the ‘real’ world. But considering how many employers are looking for at least a minimal level of technical literacy these days, it seems crucial to get those same students using computers more, rather than less.
Students learn how to write resumes at most schools.

Why aren’t they learning how to handle their Facebook pages to avoid problems with a later boss?

Students learn how to type and handle other clerical tasks. Why aren’t they learning about some of the software that will let them provide administrative support to those businesses who don’t keep paper records anymore?

Students learn how to create artwork. Why aren’t they learning how to create an online portfolio of their work?

Social Media Literacy is Important to the Bigger Picture

For those students lucky enough to get any computer class at all in high school, the options tend to be learning how to use a very specific software package (such as Microsoft Office) or to program in an introductory level language. There’s very little middle ground. And these classes aren’t what’s needed. Most kids don’t need to know how to program and there are more user-friendly software options than Microsoft Office.

Instead, technology needs to be integrated into each class. Think about what a high school journalism class could turn out if each student had a blog. How would their writing and critical thinking skills evolve if their readers (and teachers) could instantly comment on what they had written. If those students plan to go into a field involving any writing at all, they’d have a heck of a head start.

With the growing demand for capable writers online, there are already some signs that the existing number of writers won’t be able to keep up — but many of the students currently in high school don’t have the skills necessary to step into the field. Adding opportunities to improve technical literacy to curricula will get those students up to speed much faster.

Education Has to Change — and It Had Better Do It Now

The modern education system is geared towards preparing students for the cubical farms, along with other regimented jobs. But if this economy should teach us anything, it’s that the very nature of work is changing. A lot of businesses have cut staff, bringing in contractors only when necessary and turning to automated and outsourced options wherever possible.

At the bare minimum, students today need to know how to operate as contractors, including a little bit of the marketing that goes along with working for multiple clients. Social media really is just a starting point.

Image by Flickr user Marie