I don’t really do link round ups all that often, but I’ve resolved to do them more often (I’m going to try for once a week, but don’t hold me to it). I post a lot of links throughout the week so I figured I’d post the best ones on Sundays. First(ish) one- here goes!
I started freelancing all the way back in 2002, when my church came to me looking for a website (which at the time I didn’t actually do- talk about divine intervention!). I was a junior in high school, I used Frontpage, and GMail had yet to grace me with it’s presence. I had always wanted to run a business and this seemed like a really good opportunity, so I went with it; I freelanced all through high school and college. It was at the end of my senior year in 2007 that I realized I wanted to keep doing it and went to grad school to learn more about my trade, and better prepare myself for freelancing in the real world. That however, turned out to be harder than I thought. I got my Masters Degree in May of 2009 and wasn’t quite prepared for the roll of full time freelancer. I stuck with it though, and am still freelancing full time. With college and high school graduation season coming to an end, I wanted to offer some advice for the student freelancers out there who want to take the post-grad full time plunge.
I do what I consider a good amount of reading (especially since I got my Kindle) and while I do read some fiction, I read mostly non-fiction on business, web development, or politics. I love reading stories of how companies got started and how to deal with certain aspects of business. Several books I’ve read have given me great perspective and advice I can use as a freelancer, and I’d like to share 5 of those books today.
Sam McArdle over at FreelanceFuse was nice enough to interview me about being a freelancer- primarily how I started the business and manage my web development projects. I really enjoyed doing the interview (even if he is a Redsox fan!) and appreciate his interest in my business and freelancing in general.
From his site:
The FreelanceFuse mission is to create a resource for readers (and listeners) to understand where successful freelancers come from, where they are right now and where they are going in the future. The idea is to provide stories that are so powerful they inspire up and coming freelancers to quit procrastinating and start doing.
This is a mission I can get behind 100%. So head on over and check out my interview, along with the others there!
Recently, I made it practice to keep my most important web development resources in my bookmarks bar in Google Chrome (which is awesome, because I also use Bookmark Sync). These aren’t my development tools of course (Coda on Mac, Notepad++ and Filezilla on PC, Photoshop on both), these are online resources I use on a regular basis. Click on to see them!
This year I resolved to be more aggressive in getting clients, my marketing campaign, and my business in general. a few days ago I started compiling a list of business in my target market to reach out to. I decided to choose Google Maps to create a custom map of  those business. Here’s the Why & How.
These are the three sides of the project triangle- Good, Fast, and Cheap- and these three sides are things that every client wants. But, there are trade-offs to each one, and many people outside the development world don’t see that. The catch is you can only pick two.
This week I made several announcements over at Manifest Development:
If you have any questions about my or Manifest Development, feel free to get in touch!
As a freelancer, I don’t have an office, or employees, or all the extra stuff that one might have as a business. I work from home, with my laptop, my cell phone, and if I need to offload some work, I have a group of subcontractors I can call. This of course makes it harder to separate personal and professional life, especially if I’m giving people my cell phone number as a means of contact. That has changed with Google Voice.
Hey everyone- I’m thinking about writing a book targeting student freelancers, but I want to see if there is interest first. Over at Freelancing the Net I’m currently running a poll to see what kind of audience there is for it.
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