Best Practices

Mar 26th, 2008

We vs. I

When I was first starting this company, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I had the technical chops to build web sites, but I didn’t know much about running a business. Sales? Budgeting? I was just proud that I had completed the paperwork so that the state of Indiana recognized me as a [...]

Mar 12th, 2008

Offer Email Templates as an Ancillary Service

As a web developer you have the necessary set of skills to create HTML email formats. I was never that crazy about them because creating a design that will be effective in all major email clients is even more taxing than creating one for the major web browsers. You really have to keep the styling [...]

Mar 5th, 2008

Tracking Your Activities with a Free Online Tool

Not too long ago I took a training course for business owners. The focus was on intelligently developing relationships with other business owners with whom you can refer business back and forth. The key to making this work is to appropriately feed and water these relationships. If you take the right actions, you can have [...]

Jan 17th, 2008

Leveraging Fresh, Original Content

One of the most difficult and valuable things to create on a web site is original content that is regularly updated. You can design a stylized layout that will draw visitors in, but if there isn’t relevant content that is regularly updated, visitors aren’t going to stay long. Yet most business owners did not start [...]

Dec 5th, 2007

Should You Use Job Boards To Grow Your Freelance Business?

This morning I looked in my RSS reader and saw there is an article at FreelanceSwitch on getting the winning bid on a freelance job auction. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that niche job boards have started showing up more frequently on some of the sites I frequent. 37Signals has one. [...]

Nov 7th, 2007

Is It Easy To Do Business With You?

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed I was running low on business cards. When I first started my business, I threw together a simple card design and went with the cheapest printer I could find on the Internet. (VistaPrint is what I found, if you’re curious.) My business has grown quite a bit since [...]

Oct 31st, 2007

What To Look For In Competitor Collaboration

I suppose I should start with explaining what I mean by competitor collaboration. You have competitors. There are other people out there offering goods and services that are similar to what you do. That’s your competition. As I’ve discussed before, though, the more you focus on a specific niche, the more your “competitors” become complementary [...]

Aug 1st, 2007

Finding a Niche Allows You to Collaborate

If you are a freelancer or even a small business, one of the first ideas you have to get used to is that you can’t be everything to everyone. If you want to be a database guru, you may not have time to learn everything there is to know about Flash. If you want to [...]

May 16th, 2007

New Business From Existing Customers

Conventional marketing wisdom tells us that it is cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to find new customers. For businesses with products and recurring services, it’s usually obvious how to generate new income from past customers: they buy another box or another haircut or whatever. While there are exceptions, a lot of web [...]

Sep 20th, 2006

The “Bargain” Marketing Model Applied To Web Design

While not every marketing technique found in other industries can be applied directly to web development, there are a few that can. Case in point: the bargain. The idea is to promote something that’s a great deal to get people in the door. Once there, these customers are likely to notice other products and services [...]

Finding Work