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I recently received a box full of books. They weren’t ordinary books, though—they were the first copies of my new book. After the package arrived I eagerly ripped through layers of packing tape, and I first glimpsed publication. I was in shock—I had written a book.

It’s the oddest feeling when something you’ve been working towards finally comes to fruition. For me, I had read and revised my own words for so long, so seeing it in its final form seemed surreal. Success can be surreal like that.

It got me thinking about victories. So often on this website, freelancer talk about struggling to get clients, having problems completing projects or trying to make sure they get paid. Seldom do we talk about success. When success happens to us, sometimes we aren’t sure how to embrace it because we’ve been struggling for so long. Or we overlook our achievements.

Many of us undermine the good things that happen in our lives. So it is vital to learn how to let the positive things really sink in and benefit us. Here are three tips to help you get the most out of your achievements!

Visualize your achievements. For me, holding my book was similar to the way that parents cuddle a newborn child. Soon after the book came, though, I put it down and moved on to other things I had to do during the day. But then I picked the book back up. Too often, we don’t let the good stuff sink in—so I felt and touched and saw this book for what is was. I now look at it every day and keep it in a prominent place where I can see it and relive the good feelings each day. Did you create a website that a client loved? Display their thank-you note in your office. Set your browser to open up to their website so you can see what you created each time you open a browser. These are simple ways to be reminded constantly that you’ve done well.

Mention, don’t brag. You may not want to talk up your accomplishments out of fear that others will think you’re bragging. If you have this mindset, you probably aren’t a bragger anyway. So go ahead and tell your friend that you’ve landed a big account. Tell your family members about all of the interesting magazine articles you’ve written. Tell them about your good news and listen to theirs. I would be careful of the way you talk to others in your industry, though. Only my close writing friends know that when I share good news I’m not boasting—others may not have the capacity to understand. But it’s good to discuss your successes, and listen to others’ accomplishments. It shows support and a sound relationship with someone that you can mention successes and not be jealous or vindictive. Find friends that support you and share the goodness.

Publicize your career bonuses. When you complete a project to a client’s utmost satisfaction, this is the kind of thing that you should publicize. And remember that publicizing doesn’t mean bragging: it’s more about using a success as a stepping stone toward more accomplishments. Use a knockout clip in your portfolio. Send out a press release announcing your client’s new website that you’ve built. These are simple things to do that will help you leverage one success into more achievements. I always add links of websites I’ve written, for example, to my online portfolio. The more clips the better. In a similar sense, it’s okay to mention that you’re an “award-winning” professional if you’ve won an award in your industry. It’s not boasting—it’s marketing your professional status and all of us need to celebrate the good.

Good happens. Let’s all try focusing on the good things, too. Securing a new client, creating a masterpiece…these are things that you should celebrate in your own way. And if you’re lucky enough to have a support system, you can raise a glass to yourself every once in a while.

Kristen Fischer is a freelance writer living at the Jersey Shore. Her new book, Ramen Noodles, Rent and Resumes: An After-College Guide to Life is in stores now. For more, visit www.kristenfischer.com.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

This post is part 2 of 10 in our groundbreaking series on how freelancers can use social media and the principles of simplicity to build their business.

Day 2 - The Second Law of Simplicity: Organize

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

Because there are so many different things you can do on social media, and because there are so many new sites launching daily, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Of course you can decide not to participate at all, but where’s the fun in that? You’d be surprised how far a little organization can take you in terms of simplifying your social media life and enabling you to better use all the tools at your disposal.

Organize By Purpose

As we mentioned earlier, it is of utmost importance that before we dive head first into social media, that we determine what our goals are and research which social media tools can help us achieve those goals and how. Rather than thinking purely laterally, let’s take the following approach. Imagine your life as a business owner who wants to do three things:

1. Create a platform that allows you to then create and share content, giving a potential audience insight into your business.
2. Leverage a platform that enables you to easily share the content you have created with a mass audience and establish yourself as an authority.
3. Network with others in your niche and build lasting relationships your peers.

Once you have your goals clearly set, they will naturally give way to tools that you should be using. First of all, you need a blog where you put down your thoughts, then you need a socially driven content site that allows you to share these thoughts with a much larger audience (studying the various sites can help narrow down which one is most appropriate for you), and finally, a social or professional networking site that allows you to meet people with similar interests and network with them.

When you start organizing by purpose, you can actually increase the limits you have placed on yourself in terms of the number of outlets you want to use, without overwhelming yourself or becoming inefficient. Here’s one way to break things down:

Create a message:

1. Feed reader: Use a feed reader and feeds to aggregate content and come up with potential ideas.
2. Search Tools: Research all the information you need.
3. Publishing Platform: Create and publish content.

Share the message:

1. Determine the kind of message you have created.
2. Share the message on the appropriate socially driven or social bookmarking site.

Network with peers:

1. Social networking: use Facebook.
2. Professional networking: use LinkedIn.
3. Conversation management: use Technorati and/or Techmeme.

Organize by Importance

What I have outlined above are the most basic tools you need for success. These are by no means all the tools you may want to use — that decision depends on which tools provide a superior value proposition for your business and whether the time costs are worth the potential benefit you stand to get. For example, here is a set of tools not mentioned above, but which can easily help you stand out from the crowd.

• Micro-blogging sites. Sites like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku help you stay in touch with your network while you’re on the go. You can share thoughts that are too minor to warrant a blog post, but you can also share links of interest or content that you have created on your own blog.
• Podcasting/Videocasting. A podcast can help you better connect with your audience and can often be a good tool to supplement the ongoing conversation on your blog.
• Wikis/Forums - Wikis or forums can provide an excellent outlet for collaborative projects or to get more feedback/participation from your community (as a more permanent extension of a blog’s comments).

While the three tools mentioned previously help you build a solid base, organizing your goals by importance can help you realize what steps you need to take next, or determine the most efficient order in which to take the steps (and eliminate any steps that seem superfluous). For example, if you have a blog that centers around conversations, you may want to work on building a forum before you start working on a podcast. However, if you rely more on delivering weekly content (i.e. week in review) then a Podcast or Videocast will ideally supplement your work.

Organizing by importance can also help you answer questions like: Do I need to maintain a social networking profile (as on Facebook) and a professional networking profile (as on LinkedIn), or is there sufficient overlap that I can use one site to serve both needs?

Organize for Optimal Consumption

Once you have determined what tools you need to use based on your goals, and how (or how often) you want to use these tools based on your priorities, you can customize these tools to minimize information overload and accomplish your goals most efficiently. The great thing about the social web is that the tools are what you make of them, and their use is open to your interpretation.

For example, a blogging platform can be as minimalist or complex as you want. You can maintain a very simple blog where you post your thoughts and the community participation/feedback is limited to comments. Or you can create a site where people can comment, help you tag and categorize your content, post their responses as blog posts of their own (like the Daily Kos model), share your content with other people using social tools or widgets embedded in your site, and so on.

Similarly, the feeds you subscribe to can be manipulated so that you receive only relevant content. Rather than subscribing to a site’s main feed, subscribe to a particular author’s content or content published under a specific category (or with specific tags) and a socially driven news site or social bookmarking site can be customized so that you only see and participate in categories that are relevant to you and that you enjoy. (For example, I have no use for the American Football category on Digg).

You can choose what groups you want to be a part of on a social networking site, what content others are allowed to share with you (and what content from you is visible to them), and you can decide under what circumstances these sites (or the users of these sites) can contact you.

Ultimately, the number of tools you are able to efficiently use and the degree to which you interact with these tools (and the communities interact with you) depends on parameters that you define. It often helps to have clear goals in mind, and stepping away from what you’re doing to perform a rudimentary cost benefit analysis based on your priorities, to determine what works best for you.

How you organize your life can make the difference between utilizing 10 tools and reaching 40,000 people or utilizing 5 tools and reaching 100,000 people.

For simplifying the rest of your life, check out John Maeda’s Blog.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Looking to make some more money, I checked out a bunch of the more popular freelance bidding sites a few weeks back and subscribed to the RSS feeds to see who was looking for a writer.

Now, I’ve known a few designers and coders who’ve found work through these sites but for me, I haven’t even seen a single project I wanted to bid on, let alone gotten any work.

It’s not that none of the work seemed interesting. The problem is that the majority of the postings I read were flat out horrifying!

One example:

I need someone to write 100 articles for a web site. I can only afford to pay $1 per article but this may lead to more work later. Also, all articles you submit will be checked through Copyscape.

I’m not sure I even need to say anything about the rate being offered, but “may lead to more work later”?

So, a hundred articles meet the client’s approval, they might let me write a few more for a dollar a piece? Plus, beyond the stingy rate, the notification that everyone will be run through Copyscape is like being accused of plagiarism before I’ve even considered the gig.

Maybe if the poster was offering a reasonable rate, they’d be able to attract higher caliber writers who already have a good reputation and worrying about plagiarism won’t be a problem.

I was so offended by that one I read the post out loud, which led my roommate to suggest I go for it and submit a hundred 10-word “articles.”

I’m looking for someone to write 10 product reviews of (insert product type here). They need to be done quickly and I’ll pay $30. Just to be clear, that’s $30 for all 10, not per review.

Oooh, this is better. A whole three dollars per article. That’s triple what the last guy was offering…

And my absolute favorite reoccurring type of posting:

Hi, I need someone to write a university level essay that examines existential desire as paralleled to the empty desperation of modern life as shown in The Great Gatsby.

Wait… is this some student trying to pay someone to do their homework for them? I guess it’s better than the old day when I’d get my head submerged in a toilet until I agreed to write some oaf’s English class essay for him, but still. I mean, I’ve been turned down for jobs on the grounds that I attended community college instead of university, I’m hardly going to help some brat coast through the process and end up beating me for a better gig, no matter how much money they have.

You get what you pay for!

I really wish more people looking to hire a freelancer would keep that in mind. Of course you’re at risk of hiring a plagiarist if you’re only offering a dollar an article: spending a few hours copying and pasting into a Wordpress back-end probably is worth $100. Days of research and writing is not.

All this said, one thing does give me hope. The low-ball job postings seem to get reposted every week, meaning that no one is actually going for them. Which is a good thing — maybe the posters will either offer more money or just go away.

In the meantime though, my RSS reader needs to go on a diet and I think I know exactly which pounds it’s going to shed.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

This post is part 1 of 10 in our groundbreaking series on how freelancers can use social media and the principles of simplicity to build their business.

We as human beings are always striving for efficiency. However, the harder we try, we somehow manage to complicate things for ourselves.

Just as we’re getting a foothold in the offline world, we have to compete in the online world.

Just as we think we have a fair presence, we’re rudely awakened by newer technologies that help new entrants propel themselves forward faster than we imagine.

Making changes and embracing new ideas and technologies can be difficult. Especially considering the prevailing notion that once you get sucked into the world of new media (i.e. the social web or web 2.0) that it will consume you and all your time and that there will be no turning back.

The idea behind this 10-part series is very simple. First, we want to disprove the notion that it’s either your business or the new web by providing a set of “tricks” that help you separate the signal from the noise and integrate useful technologies in your daily workflow. The tools that various social media sites provide us are revolutionizing how we conduct our business and our relationships online, and there is no reason that anyone should be left out.

You can be a freelancer or any other kind of web worker and still enjoy web 2.0, or even freelance through social media or use it to supplement your existing business. Second, we want to instill in you certain principles that help you work most efficiently with the tools you have and within the time you have, without getting bogged down by constraints.

Day 1 - The First Law of Simplicity: Reduce

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

People often have misconceptions about integrating new media into their business portfolio or day-to-day workflow. That’s because there are so many different mediums within social media, and within each one there’s an abundance of sites that do virtually similar things. It is incredibly easy to get lost, confused, or waste time with something that may end up being inapplicable. What we want to do is limit ourselves to only the most important and most relevant, without compromising on any functionality or losing a potentially viable outlet for exposure.

Reduce ‘Medium’ Participation

Social media is somewhat difficult to define. It can include anything from a forum or a message board, to a blog, and of course services that have come to embody web 2.0, such as Wikis, social news sites, social networking sites, and photo/video hosting and sharing sites. Right away, the plethora of options can be confusing and can sound unnecessarily complicated to the point where it actually creates a barrier to entry for newcomers.

The first thing to keep in mind is that while it may not be impossible for you to dabble in all these different mediums, it is important that you ignore most of them.

By having clear goals in mind with respect to your existing business (or your freelance career) you can determine which of these sites provides most synergy for you. In doing so, you can reduce the number of different mediums you participate in and leverage.

For example, as an online marketing consultant, while I find it important to understand and keep in touch with what’s going on in the social news and social networking spheres, for the most part there is little reason for me to spend time on virtual world systems or look into video life-casting tools like Justin.tv. Pick 2-3 mediums that are most relevant and ignore the rest. A little research can go a long way in determining these mediums.

Reduce ‘Site’ Participation:

A problem that plagues social media (or Web 2.0) is that since it is so easy to emulate an existing platform, too many people have created me-too sites that accomplish nothing more than dividing the community across multiple platforms. For example, within social networking there is MySpace, Facebook, Classmates, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Spaces, Xanga, Orkut, and the list keeps going on and on!

The best advice I can give you is to determine not just the site that most of your friends use, but also the site that provides the best unique value proposition for you as a professional, and stick to that site. As for friends or professionals who use different networks, you’re much better off trying to convince them to switch than having to maintain profiles on multiple sites. As the number of networks you participate in increases, the marginal value you get out of this participation diminishes significantly.

Another thing that works like a charm for some platforms — for example, micro-blogging sites — is using third-party services that consistently maintain your profiles across sites. One such site, hellotxt, which saves you the trouble of updating your status messages on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Tumblr, and several others. Just type what you’re doing into hellotxt and it will update your profiles with that message across the board. If you absolutely have to join all these virtually similar sites, don’t worry yourself with maintaining each of them individually. Just go third-party!

Reduce Your Scope

For most of us, there are three major social media platforms that we can make work for us. The first is social news sites, the second is social networking sites, and the third, and my personal favorite (and the one I consider most important) is blogging. The bloggers among us already know this very well: a blog’s identity is tightly connected to your identity. If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, your blog can very easily lose its identity. A blog about everything is just as easily a blog about nothing (in particular). Know what you have and want to share with the world — your specialized knowledge gained from your experiences — choose a topic, and brand yourself accordingly.

As a great example, rather than focusing on online marketing in general, choose a specific focus like search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, blog marketing, viral marketing, or any of the other subcategories within online marketing. The same principle can be applied to the rest of your social web participation. Why participate on Reddit when you have Sphinn (”Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.”) By reducing your scope, you instantly increase your focus and rid yourself of unnecessary complexity.

Remember, there are no secrets. Less is often more, and the key is in creating and sharing value. As we said in the beginning, step 1 in achieving simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. If you don’t feel it’s right for you, get rid of it, and focus on an alternative that works for you.

For simplifying the rest of your life, check out John Maeda’s Blog.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

In the next few hours we’ll be publishing part 1 in a revolutionary 10 part series authored by one of the web’s most influential figures, Muhammed Saleem. Muhammad is a freelancer, social media power user (which includes being the #2 ranked user on Digg.com), social media consultant at the esteemed Pronet Advertising and someone with an unsurpassed knowledge of social media and web 2.0.

If you’ve ever wondered about how you can use the web’s newest communities to promote and grow your freelancing business, this ‘Social Media and Simplicity’ series will serve as a definitive guide.

Posts in the series will be published every second day, to provide a healthy balance between the type of FSw content you know and love and this cutting-edge guide.

We’re excited to bring this series to you. For your convenience, you’ll be able to navigate through the entire series from this post as new installments are published.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Danny Wen at Harvest, a popular time-tracking tool for freelancers, has offered a $10 discount on subscriptions to the service and its new integrated invoicing tool — for Freelance Switchers only. The code FSHARVESTSPRING08 will take $10 off the first month for anyone who upgrades to a paying plan, which should prove a nifty saving for anyone who was considering making the switch.

Creative Briefing is a new-ish blog producing some very fine content for the self-employed: 13 ways to liven up your work-at-home routine and 10 things you can learn from Gordon Ramsay about running a business are standouts.

For those of us who like to save pennies on every aspect of our business (it all counts!), Lifehacker has a DIY guide to printing your own business cards.

Our very own Samuel Ryan recommends that every freelancer set guidelines for turning down work.

On a productivity tip, Geekpreneur shares 42 ways to meet your deadlines and make your goals.

Kick-butt freelance designer Edwin Toffslie shares tips on how a designer’s resume/CV layout can help score them a job. This guide also comes with some very slick templates you can use.

Freelance Finance is a new blog covering personal finance for freelancers, and they’re responsible for this highly practical guide: 10 ways freelancers can save money on cell phones.

Graphic designers ahoy! Michael Huggins shares his top six tips on how to get the most money out of your design projects.

Super-freelancer Jon Phillips prepares us for anywhere freelancing by telling us what to do before you take your business on the road.

If you’re looking for some new reading/procrastination material, Bootstrapper has amassed a list of the top 100 freelancing blogs. It’s no surprise that most of the blogs fall into the ‘useful for freelancers’ rather than for freelancers category, but there are a few worthwhile finds here.

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