6 Effective Tips To Work From Home

In recent years there has been an increase in home based employees and I am among the masses who now call their home their office. I am self employed but whether you work for yourself or an established employer you are likely to face obstacles similar to those that I encountered. Early on as my business was first established I made a few mistakes and fell into the common pitfalls of working from home. I have since learned to overcome those obstacles and I would like to share my tips for working effectively from home with you.

1. Setting up a functional workspace is critical to the success from a work from home employee. Try setting up your space so that it contains all of the necessary equipment that you need. You may decorate your workspace so that it is aesthetically appealing but try to keep distractions to a minimum.

2. Establishing a working schedule is also important. Having regularly scheduled hours when you work will help you to be more efficient during these times. Be sure to schedule work time as well as break times so that you will not become overwhelmed. One of the pitfalls that some work from home employees fall into is working too many hours. In an office there is a clear signal to the end of the day as other employees start to leave the office for the day but at home employees sometimes have difficulty ending their day.

3. Being able to motivate yourself is critical for the work at home employee. In an office situation, you have a supervisor and co-workers who motivate you to complete your work but when you are working at home, you only have yourself to push you to succeed.

4. Maintaining a professional attitude is also important for the work from home employee. If you have frequent client interactions, be careful to answer the phone or respond to their emails in a professional way. A home office may be an informal environment that affords you the luxury of dressing casually but client interactions should always follow certain decorum. Keeping your interactions businesslike will ensure that the client does not begin to doubt the amount or quality of work that is being put into their projects.

5. Considering hiring a day care provider is another tip for working from home. Those who have young children may find it difficult to attend to the needs of their children while fulfilling their job obligations. For this reason it may be worthwhile to have a day care provider care for your child during your working hours.

6. Avoid volunteering for too many activities. Many people will assume that because you work at home you are free to help them run errands, pick up their children from school or be an emergency babysitter if their child has a cold. While you may want to help your friends and family members, it is important to make it clear that your work is just as important as theirs and that you have obligations to take care of each day.

These are the tips that helped me to work effectively from home but you may find other tricks or ideas that help you to improve your efficiency and productivity while working from home. The important thing to remember is that your home based job deserves the same attention and dedication as an office position. Following the tips that I have provided will help you to become a lucrative and productive home based worker.

Retrieved on 16^th September 2009 from http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/six-effective-tips-to-work-from-home.html

5 Reasons Freelancers Cant Ignore Twitter

written by Ritu B. Pant

These days, it seems like Twitter is unstoppable. It’s all over the web, talked about on TV, and lately I’ve even been receiving corporate brochures with company twitter accounts listed.

Twitter is becoming a mainstream business and networking tool, and it can provide power and reach for your freelancing business that can’t be ignored. I have personally been a Twitter user since 2007, and my active presence on twitter has become one of my most valuable business assets.

People are using twitter in many different ways. Some use it to network, some to sell products, and then there are some who even use twitter to turn lights on and off at their homes. Lets quick take a look at a few reasons that every freelancer should be using twitter.

Twitter Is a Great Personal Branding Tool

The ability to easily connect with other like minded people is the core idea behind twitter. If used properly, twitter can help you build a personal brand that can provide a lot of benefits in the long run. If you engage and provide valuable “tweets” to your followers, it is likely they will recommend you to others. The key to using twitter as a freelancer is to be who you are, not as a business, but as a person so that people can see the “personal” aspect of you. If you can develop a trustworthy and personal relationship with your followers on twitter, you can easily establish a “personal brand” that will be hard to ignore.

Of course, if you are shooting for numbers alone, this might not be the case, but if you are shooting for exposure and fame in a certain niche, with continued participation and valuable tweets, you can certainly beat the competition and establish yourself as a powerful brand.

It’s Easy to Start Using Twitter

Twitter is the ultimate platform to build relationship, there is no question about that. The simplicity of Twitter is what makes it one of the most effective networking tools on the web. If you are a web designer, you can easily mix into the circle of web designers on twitter and interact with freelancers who are authorities in your particular field. And if you are an authority, it allows others to gain access to you easily. If utilized properly these "online relationships" can turn into mutually beneficial business connections that can help both parties.

Twitter allows you to become part of that conversation and use it to expand your freelancing business.

Twitter is Your Personal “Information Bank”

I have become quite dependent on twitter whenever I am looking for answers. Before I became really active on Twitter, Google was my savior. However, once I started using twitter I ended up becoming more and more dependent on the real-time information that twitter can provide. Whether it’s related to Wordpress, or helping my kids with homework, I have been known to ask questions on twitter and I often receive great answers.

If you are active on twitter and communicate with your followers, they will come to your rescue when you need a solution. The best part of twitter is the fact that you don’t have to wait for an answer for too long. If you have 500 people following and you are an active user, I can guarantee there will be someone who knows the answer to your question. It’s one of the best platforms to run surveys and ask any other questions where you are having problems coming up with an answer.

The Fastest Way To Make Your Content Go Viral

Anyone who runs a blog wants their content to go viral on social media — the benefits of that are obviously huge. One of the key reasons Twitter is enjoyed by so many is because it carries an element of “instant gratification.” For example, if you write a post that has some “breaking news,” it will take a while for it to spread through platforms such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc., but if it’s a worthy snippet of breaking news, your content will spread in no time via twitter and you won’t have to worry about your article becoming stale.

This doesn’t apply to news alone, either. If you have really good content (and a good headline) then it is bound to go viral on twitter. And of course, all those people who you have been interacting with on twitter will also help you spread your message/content. If you’ve got something that is worthy of being seen/read, twitter is the platform that will help you make it happen, fast.

Twitter Is Great to Find or Outsource Work

When it comes to landing work via Twitter, I can personally vouch for it being effective. I have never really looked for job on Twitter, but I have had quite a few clients who have found me through Twitter. The main thing you need to keep in mind is that active participation is key. If you are active and keep your tweets relevant, there will be someone who will notice and be ready to give you an opportunity.

Another way to find work on Twitter is by using the search feature. Simply type“freelance work” or “freelance writer,” etc. and see what comes up (use other keywords as well while searching for freelance work on twitter). There are thousands of jobs floating around on Twitter each day and I am sure you will find something that is relevant to you. Just as you can use this platform to find jobs, you can also use it to outsource work. All in all, Twitter in my opinion is one of the best freelancing job board and outsourcing platforms.

Ritu is a freelance writer who has been involved in social media for several years. At the moment he is working on a variety of projects, but is always open to new ideas. Contact him at email(at)ritubpant(dot)com or follow @ritubpant on twitter.

Retrieved on 13^th October 2009 from http://freelancefolder.com/5-reasons-freelancers-cant-ignore-twitter/

4 Freelancing Mistakes You Dont Need To Make

written by Glen Allsopp

We rarely like to admit our mistakes, but if we fail to admit them and learn from them then they’re likely to be repeated. In this article I want to admit some of my mistakes to you, and share my experience so that you can avoid making them.

My journey has taken me from the highs of doing what I love every day to the lows of chasing monthly payments and then back again. To say that my journey has followed the typical freelance rollercoaster would be an understatement.

Making mistakes along the way is a big part of freelancing, though, and I’m sure many of you can relate when I say that these failures and mistakes help to make your business successful and teach you a lot along the way.

Today I want to share four that I’ve personally had to learn to avoid, and it is my hope that in sharing these you can avoid them yourself without having to go through them first.

Mistake #1 — Giving Away Too Much Information

In many areas of freelancing there is the potential to give away too much information. On my path, as an internet marketer, I started out by telling clients exactly what I would do to increase their search engine rankings or get them more social media traffic.

There was a slight dilemma with this situation. Some clients loved the approach, understood that I knew what I was talking about, and requested more of my services. Others, however, took my outline and implemented it themselves or hired someone cheaper to follow it as best as they could. In the end, I decided to give prospects a similar outline, but included far less of the details I had previously been handing out.

If you overstretch to land the client, you might end up giving them all they needed in the first place. This could include sample logos, website templates, scripts, or anything else you’re creating. Definitely give them a taste of what you’re about, but don’t give too much before you land the deal.

Mistake #2 — Leaving Jobs Until the Last Minute

I was 17 when I first started freelancing and, just like I did with my school and college work, I ended up leaving a lot of my jobs until the last possible minute. It’s not that I disliked what I did (unlike college and school work) but more that I didn’tneed to do things yet so I didn’t see why I should.

Eventually, of course, this caught up with me. The first place I ran into a problem was when I wanted to go to a party or do something else that happened to be at the end of the month. The second place was when I received extra work from other clients where they offered to pay double to have the work done quickly. If you have the free time to do your work, get on with it. As I’m sure you know, or will quickly find out, it’s far better to have things out of the way than to waste your free time and have a huge backlog to work through later.

Mistake #3 — Wasting Time on Unproductive Work

Just like I would waste my spare time and leave things until the end of the month, I would often spend time working on business activities that just didn’t help my bottom line. I realize now, as I type this, that I’m not painting the best picture of myself (I did change – honest).

I first started doing this because my initial marketing plan was simply to be everywhere at all times. I wanted to cover as much of the relevant web space as possible to try and land new clients. Only later did I realize a lot of these marketing ‘opportunities’ gave me little chance to land my ideal client.

I find it’s a good idea to record every action you take on a typical day (just once) and then review it. You’ll soon find what is working for you and what isn’t.

Mistake #4 — Acting Like Someone I Wasn’t

When I first started out, I never thought anyone would want to hire a 17-year old who was working from their bedroom. Therefore, I kept my age private and I put on what I can only describe as a front. For some reason, I acted and communicated with clients as if I was working in a large corporation.

Of course, I never lied to prospects and said this, but that is the way I was coming across. This front hindered me far more than it helped. It put a wall between myself and the client and we couldn’t really connect. Yet, as soon as I started communicating through my natural voice and in my usual way, I started creating great connections and building my network.

Strong connections are crucial to gaining trust and closing the deal, and pretending to be someone I wasn’t hurt those connections.

Open for Discussion: Let’s be honest, we’ve all made mistakes. What things have you done ‘wrong’ along the way on your freelancing journey? I would love to hear them, and I’m sure your experiences will help other freelancers.

Glen Allsopp writes on the subject of Personal Development at PluginID. His aim is to help you 'Plug into your Identity' and reach your full potential.

Retrieved on 2^nd October 2009 from http://freelancefolder.com/learn-from-freelance-mistakes/

How To Save Money And Draw A Crowd

written by Carol Tice

Feeling shorthanded these days? Wondering if your business is truly meeting your customers' needs? If you answered yes to either of those questions, have you asked all your customers to help you?

Increasingly, companies big and small are doing just that. It's called crowdsourcing--enlisting the help of a large group of people to do company work or shape the company agenda, rather than delegating tasks to an employee or two, or perhaps an ad agency.

The growth of social media has enabled crowdsourcing, making it easy for companies to connect with huge mobs of customers. A couple of the key benefits: saving money and making customers feel more connected to your company.

A great recent example of crowdsourcing came during the Super Bowl earlier this year, when Doritos announced a consumer video contest to create its Super Bowl ads. More than 2,000 applicants made their own proposed 30-second ad spots for Doritos and aired them online. Doritos gave out $5 million in prize money--likely not more than they would have spent having an agency design the campaign.

And do you think any of those customers will ever forget how much fun they had entering the contest?

Netflix has used crowdsourcing to engage the tech-geek crowd (possibly they stay home a lot and rent many movies?). This month they wrapped a contest to design better movie-recommendation technology for them, with a $1 million prize.

Wins for Netflix? More engaged customers, and better movie recommendations for all its customers, without the expense of putting their own dedicated team on the task of improving their software. The company immediately announced another $1 million contest to improve on the company's "taste profile" software.

Crowdsourcing can be as simple as Dell's IdeaStorm website, where customers can leave suggestions for new products or services they'd like to see. Rather than just a few engineers sitting around in a conference room, now they're tapping their entire customer base's brainpower.

Some entrepreneurs are even building small businesses entirely from crowdsourcing. As a reporter, my favorite example has to be Peter Shankman's "Help A Reporter Out", an online service that allows experts and PR people to see a daily feed of sources journalists are seeking. Through HARO, reporters can essentially ask a global crowd to answer their questions. All I can say is--it's beautiful. Experts get the press they want, and reporters get the best available source for their story.

It's free so far, but I've got to believe that at some point, he'll start charging PR people a few dollars a month for these valuable reporter leads--and he'll be rich. For now, he's hooked a huge audience on using his service, and who knows how many ways he might leverage that in the future.

Are you using crowdsourcing in your business? If so leave a comment and let us know about it. If not, consider whether there isn't a way for your business to benefit from crowd power.

Retrieved on 12 October 2009 from http://blog.entrepreneur.com/2009/09/--ways-crowdsourcing-can-help-your-business.php

Why Online Friends Are Important To Freelancers

written by Laura Spencer

“What a total waste of time!”

The sharp words the hung in the air between us. My offline friend had just watched me check in at some of my favorite social sites.

Of course, her sentiment shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. She’d mentioned before that she didn’t see any value in sites like Twitter and Facebook. To say that my friend didn’t get social media would be a complete understatement.

For the freelancer, online friends are not a waste of time. Rather, they are a very valuable part of a freelancer’s networking. While freelancers can always benefit from networking locally, social media sites allow us to connect with individuals and organizations that we might not otherwise have the opportunity to connect with.

Online friends are very important to freelancers.

Connecting the World, One Tweet at a Time

I live in a fairly small town. The odds of there being many like-minded professional writers right where I live is fairly small.

Yes, there are a few freelance writers nearby, but my opportunities for face-to-face networking with colleagues are somewhat limited.

With the power of Twitter (and sites like Twitter), though, I can touch base nearly every day with professional freelance colleagues in distant locations such as Canada, New York, North Carolina, Germany, Singapore, and many others.

Ten or fifteen years ago, before the rise of social media, I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to even meet some of these people — let alone form friendships. Using social media, though, we’re in regular contact with each other.

The Business Benefit To Friendships

I’ve not been shy about the fact that many of my clients come from referrals. While some of these referrals are from offline colleagues, many of them are also from online friends — folks that I have never actually met face-to-face.

In the past month alone I’ve had at least four leads from online friends. Two of these have resulted in paying clients, and I may yet see income from the other two leads.

The truth is that people would rather do business with people they know than with people they don’t know. Relationship marketing works — even for freelancers, and even online.

There is a definite business benefit to having friends. My online friendships are much, much more than just a means of getting jobs, though. Like my offline friends, my online friends are valuable colleagues who I can bounce ideas off of and share thoughts and experiences with.

How NOT to Build an Online Friendship

Too many people these days have lost the real purpose behind networking, which is to get to know people. People do things to online friends that they would never do to a friend face-to-face.

For example, you would probably not introduce yourself to a new person for the first time face-to-face and in the next breath demand that they hire you or buy something from you. You’d want to get to know them a little better first. Yet, this is a mistake that many freelancers and others who are online make.

Here are some other online networking mistakes that freelancers sometimes make:

Spamming your online friends. Have you ever made an online “friend,” only to be spammed through social media and e-mail with constant requests to buy something? While some marketing is natural and can be expected (we all have to make a living), when the purchase requests outweigh the personal interaction the online relationship is in trouble.

Becoming numbers-focused instead of people-focused. The online stats-obsession focus started on blogs (tracking the number of subscribers, Diggs, or comments) and has moved to social media (tracking the number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers). While high numbers aren’t necessarily bad, they aren’t necessarily as good as some people might expect. That’s because they don’t always represent real relationships.

Keeping score. I once heard of a freelancer who kept a list of all his online contacts and what they did for him. When they did something for him, he would try to reciprocate. If they didn’t do anything for him, well… maybe not Not only is this a lot of extra work, it sort of defeats the purpose of a real relationship which is about individuals and not what we can do for each other. Speaking for myself, if I am able to help someone then I will try to do it. If I can’t, then I don’t.

Ignoring the little guy. While you may be tempted to befriend only “big name” freelancers and blogging gurus, these folks are usually inundated with friend requests. Often, they don’t have time to truly interact. However, a freelancer who is just getting started will have more time to interact. Who knows? Today’s “little guy” just may be tomorrow’s “big name.”

Abandoning your online profile. Consistency is an important part of online freelancing relationships. That means that you have multiple interactions over a period of time. Too many freelancers create an online profile and then abandon it when they don’t get instant results.

Not being genuine. If you are phony online you will eventually be discovered. No one likes a fake, so don’t pretend to be someone that you are not.

Why do it wrong, when you can do it right? There are many right ways for a freelancer to build an online friendship.

How to Build Online Friendships

The keys to building a successful online friendship are consistency and time. That means interacting more than once with the same person over time. Most of the job leads that I received in the past month were from colleagues that I’ve known online for several years now.

Here are a few good ways to meet online friends:

• Read blogs AND comment
• Read forums AND comment
• Tweet and respond to tweets
• Participate in other social media events
• Participate in online events such as webinars

What Do You Think?

As a freelancer do you value online friendships? How to you go about making online friends?

About the author: Laura Spencer is a freelance writer from North Central Texas with over 19 years of professional business writing experience. If you liked this post, then you may also enjoy Laura’s blog about her freelance writing experiences, WritingThoughts

Retrieved on 2^nd October 2009 from http://freelancefolder.com/why-online-friends-are-important-to-freelancers/

Why Freelancing Is Freaking Hard?

written by Mason Hipp

Despite how magnificent it can be to work for yourself, there are some things about freelancing that just plain suck. And no matter where you specialize, these vicious drawbacks usually find a way of asserting themselves.

What drawbacks am I talking about?

· Dealing with the feast & famine cycle

· Managing every aspect of business entirely on your own

· Finding time to market yourself, do client work, deal with clients, keep up the administrative stuff, and still grow the business

· Balancing work and life (and often family) while dealing with all of the above

· Getting sick, going on vacation, or otherwise not working 24/7 while still dealing with all of the above

Now if you only look at these negatives, freelancing seems like a pretty bad idea — that’s definitely not the case. It’s important to acknowledge the challenges of freelancing, though, so that you can manage them and learn to free yourself from the usual limitations.

And that’s what we’re going to do in this article.

The Feast and Famine Cycle

This is a problem that most freelancers deal with painfully at the beginning of their career — and usually still manage later on too (hopefully with less pain).

It starts when you have lots of free time and very few clients, when the obvious thing to do is to market a lot. After marketing for a while you’ll get clients and eventually start running out of time — and then you’ll stop marketing (because you’re packed with work and have no time). Finally, when you’ve managed to hammer through those client projects and finish all of the work, you’re left with very few clients again, and the cycle repeats.

What to do about it

The feast and famine cycle is primarily a problem of time. If you can shave a bit of time off of your client work, and automate some of your marketing, you’ll do a lot to alleviate the stress. You can also even things out by building alternate sources of income that are steadier than client work.

Managing Everything Yourself

Like the feast and famine cycle, this is the hardest at the beginning, but the problem never fully goes away. Truth be told, managing every aspect of a growing business is incredibly difficult to do on your own, regardless of how much experience you have.

The root of the issue is that there is simply too much information for any one person to handle. It’s like trying to view an entire atlas at one time — you can’t do it unless you flip to the front and look at the “general” map that doesn’t have all of the details.

It’s the same for freelancing. Very, very, very few people can think about the accounting, legal, marketing, customer support, industry, and strategy/growth aspects of their business at the same time. Trying to plan, manage, and schedule all of these by yourself is a recipe for disaster.

So don’t try to do it alone.

The solution to this problem is an easy one — get help from other people. You shouldn’t do your own accounting, let an accountant do it for you. If you can delegate the less important tasks, and only focus on what’s important to you, then your business is likely to be in much better shape.

Doing Everything Yourself

If thinking about and managing everything is a problem, than actually doing it is much worse.

Let’s say you’ve found help from an accountant, and you’re using some tools to help with the marketing. That still leaves an enormous amount of work to be done by you — enough that you’ll eventually run into an earnings plateau and have a hard time making more than that. How happy you are with that number and how much time it requires to maintain it will depend on how well you’ve handled the other problems.

But what if your income weren’t time limited? What if there were ways to leverage your time so that you get more work done with less effort? There are…

The way to beat these time and earnings limitations by working with other people. You could outsource some of your work, you could work with other freelancers, you could find partnerships. You can create an entire distributed team. With these concepts time is no longer a limiting factor on your income.

Maintaining a Work/Life Balance

The hardest part about all of this is that freelancers don’t work in a vacuum, separated from everything else. We have lives, families, hobbies, and many other things that demand our time. We just can’t work all day and all night.

Not to mention, freelancers who do work all day and all night typically end up burning out in a spectacular ball of flames (yep, I’ve done that).

How to keep a healthy balance

The trick to keeping a good work/life balance is pretty easy, at least in theory. It tends to be very difficult to actually put into practice.

The ’secret’ is to set limits. Only work during set hours. Deal with clients during designated periods. Take breaks at regular intervals throughout the day.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many ways to make it easier, though having more time overall will help. So in a way you’re lucky: dealing with the other problems we’ve mentioned will help alleviate this one too :-)

Planning for emergencies

Perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a freelancer is getting so sick that they can’t work. Losing the only employee of a one-person business is devastating, and it can happen without warning.

So what can you do?

There are a few ways you can deal with this. The first is to have someone ready to answer emails or take phone calls in your absence. It doesn’t have to be a good solution, it just needs to work in an emergency.

The second part is to have someone you can call to take over some of your work if it becomes absolutely necessary. I recommend working with other freelancers on a regular basis anyhow, which makes setting up a situation like this even easier.

If you have those two pieces standing by, unexpected emergencies will be a lot easier to deal with.

So what’s the big answer?

As we hinted at throughout the article, the answer to these problems is to treat your freelancing more like a business and less like a job. Start building systems that save you time, start working with other people where it’s valuable to you, and start to build assets that bring in some steady money.

Of course, doing all of this can be very difficult, and there’s not a lot of information out there. Which is why, I’m happy to say, we’ve been working on a ebook for the past several months that outlines exactly how to do all of these things — in detail. If you find yourself dealing with these problems, I highly recommend you check it out.

About the author: Mason Hipp is an entrepreneur, marketing guru, and writer. He blogs about life and business at FreelanceFolder.com and is co-author of the Book The Unlimited Freelancer. Follow him on twitter @MasonHipp

Retrieved on 2^nd October 2009 from http://freelancefolder.com/why-freelancing-is-hard/