You have a lot of information locked up in your skull. Think about it. How often do you come across a web site and think to yourself the person in charge of this could make it 500% better if they just made a few simple changes? That’s unique information that you have and they don’t. It’s valuable. You should give it to them for free.
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 pretty vanilla.
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 very profitable relationships.
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. I think Lifehacker has one. I started wondering if these are good places for a freelancer to get work.
Sure, you’ve got a lot to complain about. Let’s start with the ups and downs of work coming in. One week you spend so much time on client projects, you barely have time to eat. The next week you twiddle your thumbs and set a new high score on minesweeper… on all three difficulty levels.
That’s not the only tribulation for you, though. When you get in over your head on a project, there’s no one to bail you out. You can’t call in someone from another department. Your take home pay from month-to-month is inconsistent. When you have a day off, there’s no one to answer the phone and respond to emails. You don’t have anyone in the office with you to bounce ideas off of. No focusing on the best parts of the business for you. You’re personally accountable for everything.
Suck it up, freelancer. You could always be working in a cubicle.
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 service providers. If you are a programmer, you can work with designers, and vice versa.
I was recently pointed to a blog post (via Freelance Switch) that proposes some of the most important things you can spring for in your home office. The logic on all of these is that you are spending a lot of time here and need to be able to work comfortably and efficiently.
I recently did a redesign of my web design business site. Early in the process I visited the portfolio sites of a lot of other web designers. It was very inspiring to see so many different approaches to displaying examples of one’s work. I did notice one trend that was a little disturbing. Happily the majority of sites did not go down this path, but I saw it more than I expected.
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