Have you ever done a white paper? Marketing materials? A web site for a small catering company?

What do all of these projects have in common? Not only can they be complex, but more importantly, all of these projects can involve an organization's image. Any time you come anywhere near image, you run into the situation that many different people within the organization (the head, the second in command, the marketing people, the lead designer, and more) all want input. And in fact they often should have input. Just not at the expense of the project. -- Read more

Time is precious, especially in an age where we don't bother to really appreciate it as it passes. Yet, many of us play fast and loose with both our work and personal time by neglecting one very simple but easily overlooked task: making backups.

The most vivid reminder to me of the need for backups is from the days when I worked a computer help desk whie in university. Many times a semester, someone would come in nearly in tears, holding the floppy disk that contained their one and only copy of, say, their Ph.D. or Masters' thesis. The disk had been damaged. The thesis was due next week. Could we get their data back. -- Read more

I'm blessed of late with clients who pay very promptly. Early, for the most part! But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't keep on top of things. To this end, I made sure and to set up a project management and invoice/billing tool so that I could easily create invoices through it, mark them as paid through it, and more importantly be reminded when the invoice came due.

For the first time yesterday I got a reminder that an invoice was overdue. I looked and sure enough, it hadn't been paid, though it was for a client that tends to be early time after time.  -- Read more

On Thursday March 12, 2009, the New York Times published an article about freelancers turning to the Web for work. The sites in particular they refer to are (why can't they put links in the online version of the articles, isn't that what the Web is about?): -- Read more

Yes, this title is a little mercenary, but that's what freelancers are. Mercenaries. We just don't use lances these days (except for freelance Renaissance Faire lancers). We use pens and laptops and video cameras. The being self-employed thing means that sometimes we have to get a bit creative in order to do certain things. -- Read more

Earlier I had posted about my quest to find project management, invoicing, and customer relationship management tools that fit my needs and work style. For a bit I had settled on a pair of open source tools that I installed on my Linux-based Web server: -- Read more

One of the keys to professionalism as a freelancer is the ability to adhere to a style guide and produce work not only of a consistent quality, but in a consistent way, so that it looks like it belongs among the client's other content.

I know this is an area where I can improve, mostly due to being easily distracted by small shiny objects and forgetting what the style guide says for a particular client. Ways I deal with this include keeping their style guide reference open so I can easily consult it, or creating styles in in, say, my word processor so I can just apply the style "Clientname: Subheader 1" and move on. Some clients even send templates so you can just apply their styles--though these templates have the complication of needing to work with your software. -- Read more

No matter what career or method of making some extra cash you choose, one way another you'll have to do the whole "pay your dues" thing. In one way or another, this generally means working the cruddy jobs no one else really wants to do, or that no one who's already gone through that really has the time to do anymore.

Every once in a while someone will pitch the idea to you, with great enthusiasm, that while they don't pay you'll get plenty of "exposure" by creating something for them. -- Read more

Ask a dozen freelancers what business tools they use, and odds are you'll get a dozen different answers. Personally, I've used everything from just a text file, to spreadsheets, to just a paper notebook. Depending on the kind of work you do, any one of these may be sufficient. However, this method doesn't scale when your business grows past a certain point--meaning that one day, if things are going well, you're going to look at your system and and realize that you actually have no idea of if you sent invoices to certain people, or when you sent them, and whether they've paid, and whether you got in touch with Shirley last week. -- Read more

As I've mentioned before, and will mention again, freelancing is a business. Business requires customers, and freelancers who create content (writers, course developers, etc.) essentially have two types of customers: people who pay them to create, and people who read or use what's created. Sometimes both types are in the same entity, such as a company that hires you to create a course for their own people to use in-house around some of their own tasks. -- Read more