How to Have a Successful Vacation as a Freelancer

By on in Free Time, Freelancing

Vacation – it’s a fine dream and one that every freelancer feels like they can make a reality. With all that schedule flexibility, though, come a handful of issues that can make it hard to have a successful vacation without proper planning.

To be fair, I haven’t been on vacation in a couple of years. My son was born the same year my wife went back to school and time has been squeezed to its breaking point ever since. Vacations have been on hold as a result, but before Jack was born (and very soon in the future), vacations worked.

Here are some of the things I did to ensure every vacation was as successful as possible, without an excessive burden being placed on me to maintain income levels.… Read More

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5 Tips for Taking Notes While Researching

By on in Entrepreneurship

As a freelance writer, I’ve researched hundreds of books in my career. When I write one eBook, for example, I usually read anywhere between three and ten books just for background research, not to mention the dozens of websites I visit, articles I read and email lists I subscribe to.

This can be very time consuming and can make meeting short deadlines very difficult. So over the years I’ve developed a handful of strategies for streamlining my research processes and extracting only what I need from any one book as fast as possible.

Tip #1 – Use an Organizational Tool with Cloud Backup

I use Evernote for all of my note taking.… Read More

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How to Make the World’s Worst Website

By on in Sales & Marketing

Most of the time, when writing new content for a site or evaluating a site for a client, I focus on how to make it GREAT. This is the best mindset to have. Accentuate the positive, avoid the negative.

But sometimes it can be fun (and more than a little productive) to look at what DOES NOT work in a website.

So today I want to talk about what it would take to create the world’s worst website. Something like this:

Or this:

But not necessarily so over the top bad.

Step 1 – Forget Aesthetics

The first step in creating a truly awful website is to avoid anything aesthetically pleasing.… Read More

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How Good Content Generates Leads on a Website

By on in Sales & Marketing

A few days ago, my business partner and good friend Micah wrote a truly epic blog post on our company blog entitled: How Hard Is It to Compete in Pest Control Marketing? 

The post goes through the process of analyzing the top five sites in Google for “staten island pest control” and describing exactly what it would take to rank above those five sites using content marketing strategies.

It’s an incredible post – one of the most detailed blog posts I’ve ever seen (and I’ve written thousands myself), so I of course want to plug it.

But I also want to talk a bit about the topic in general and what it means for local service providers who might be reading this blog.… Read More

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How to Gain Expertise Fast

By on in Sales & Marketing

Micah and I are working on a podcast for Great Leap Studios. In fact, by the time this gets published we will probably have already recorded the first episode and I’ll be knee deep in Audition editing it for upload.

We know nothing about creating podcasts, but we both love listening to them and are eager to not only reach out to our audience, but make podcasting a part of our service portfolio for prospective clients. It’s a great medium with incredible potential for optimization.

More importantly, the presence of a finely crafted, well tuned podcast in iTunes and SoundCloud makes you look like an expert in that field, especially if you sound like one in the recording.… Read More

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How to Ghoswrite and Manage a Blog

By on in Blogging, Freelancing

I was at a conference a couple months ago and met a fellow who was investing in online resources. His day job was in real estate and, as is the case with many real estate investors, the next big frontier was online. When I told him some of what I do, he was incredulous.

People hire you to run their blogs? 

A blog is a deeply personal endeavor. It is essentially an online journal or newsletter written by a single (or composite) persona for a specific audience. So a lot of people are surprised when I tell them that myself and my company run blogs for some of our clients.… Read More

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How to Get Recurring Income from Clients

By on in Sales & Marketing

When you work freelance, the biggest thing on your mind from day to day should be the quality and execution of the work already on your plate. But for most freelancers, it quickly turns into where the next payday will come from.

It’s not greed. It’s simple survival. No matter how good of a month you have, the next one can be a dud and the successful freelancers are those that plan for those dud months, or better yet, ensure they never happen.

One of the most effective ways to ensure you can relax and enjoy the work you are doing is to create recurring income streams from clients for monthly work.… Read More

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Three Acceptable Distractions During the Work Day

By on in Work at Home

For most freelancers, a typical work day is filled to the brim with distractions. From family and friends to the toys on your desk, if there is a way to distract yourself from working, you will find it.

And most productivity articles focus on how to avoid these distractions, narrow your focus and get more work done. But today I want to talk about three acceptable distractions – the ones that can help more than they hurt and how to integrate them successfully into your days.

Distraction #1 – Lunch

While certainly not specific to freelancers alone, eating lunch at your desk is a big issue.… Read More

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How to Plan for Time Off

By on in Freelancing

I don’t know that this is necessarily a problem unique to freelancers. Everyone has the same “work, work, work” mentality most days and actually planning for time off is hard.

But for freelancers in particular it can be exceptionally hard for a couple of reasons. First, free time is never guaranteed. Second, planning for free time involves not only planning your trip or days off, but manipulating your schedule and income to support it.

There are a lot of moving parts, which makes it very hard to do, especially when you are already busy, and double especially if you have children or your spouse works a normal day job.… Read More

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Working for Friends and Family

By on in Freelancing

This is a sticky topic. Fortunately I don’t have any (recent) personal experiences to draw on that would require redaction or carefully worded descriptions. I have never worked for family, and have only occasionally worked for friends (always to good effect, thankfully). But due to a recent incident a friend of mine went through in a different industry, I thought this was a perfect topic to fit our work/home balance focus this week.

The Risk of Opportunity

Here’s the situation.

You’re a freelancer or contractor of some kind and a family member or friend hears that you do something that they may need.… Read More

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