We’ve all been there before — no clients, no work for our portfolio and nobody giving us the proper direction to move forward. Potential full-time freelancers are often scared because of this instability and not knowing where they’ll find those first portfolio-building jobs (if they aren’t allowed to pull their work from their previous employers [...]
Written by Samuel Ryan When I graduated from college 4 years ago, many of my programming and design peers spoke of starting their own business/studio. The idea seemed simple: work at home, charge the masses for your work, sleep in every day. However, I only know of one guy who pulled it off, mainly because [...]
Written by Samuel When I first started freelancing as a college student, I was eager to do any website and would say “Yes” to anything, regardless of my skill set or the time involved. It was just nice to know that someone needed me for a skilled task. Unfortunately, I quickly found myself working all [...]
Written by Samuel Just so I don’t invoke bad karma from the client gods that be, I’ve decided I should follow up on my previous post, ’10 Absolute “No’s!” for Freelancers.’ I’ve been fortunate enough to usually fill up my freelance hours, and I think the following answers have played a big part in this [...]
Written by Samuel One of the tougher aspects of freelancing is making sure you get paid a fair amount for your work. I’m sure every freelancer has at least one story of either getting grossly underpaid or not getting paid at all. So here are seven tips to help you improve your quoting. “Discover” the [...]
Written by Samuel Designing websites, building applications, and writing content can be very draining activities requiring as many “breaks” as your schedule or boss allows. These breaks are even more frequent for freelancers, who can often justify taking a nap or watching the tube in the middle of the day. But before you turn on [...]
Written by Samuel William James, the 19th century philosopher and Pragmatist, rightly noted that “nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” So in the spirit of the new year and getting things done, here are a few tasks you should stop putting off. 1. Placing Your Portfolio/Blog Online I [...]
Written by Samuel There are many popular mega-lists out there nowadays (75 Ways to Boost your Self-Esteem, 101 Ways to Open Firefox, 503 Ways to Make Your List Longer). But often, these lists have too many “filler” items, and many items have such diminuitive returns that I’d rather just have a list of their ten [...]
Written by Samuel From friends who think I make easy money to my mother who (lovingly) admonishes me to get a real job, everybody seems to have their own idea of what freelancing is all about. Many of these ideas come from misconceptions of the freelancing life, and here are eight of the most popular: [...]
Written by Samuel There were about five years between the Dot-com bubble (which had officially “burst” by 2001) and the ubiquity of Web 2.0 (whose roots began earlier but really came into mainstream by 2006). During those five years, people realized true strength of the internet as they utilized standardized formats like XML and RSS, [...]
