Choosing to switch from full-time to freelancing can be a tough decision and the change will go a lot smoother if you have the help and support of those closest to you. Freelance Advisor, Coach and Consultant Dianne Bown-Wilson continues her series of articles on freelance career development issues for freelancers and contractors.

Nearest and Dearest – Supporters or Saboteurs?

Supporters, as you would expect, provide practical, emotional, and financial assistance – all that you need to help you out and keep you going, particularly when times get tough. Saboteurs do just the opposite. Whether or not they intend to, they can sabotage and ultimately undermine your efforts, willpower, and confidence through distracting you, making unreasonable demands and failing to accommodate the needs of your job.

How can this be when these are the people who love you?

As with many things in life, the answer often comes down to simple lack of communication. Tackle it through addressing the following four points and you will avoid much of the conflict and stress that can arise. If you’re suffering already, it should help improve matters immediately.

Read on for advice on getting your family’s full support for your freelance career…

Help them understand what you do and why

Agree working hours

Negotiate high days and holidays

Avoid becoming a childminder, pet-sitter or concierge

None of these are complex areas and there are no rules that will work for everyone. The route to avoiding conflict and ensuring camaraderie is to work out, with them, what best suits your N&Ds and you.

How about you? Do you have any tips to share? Leave a comment below…

By Dianne Bown-Wilson – consultant, coach, trainer and writer

 Image by Sam_BB

Freelancing: The Choice of Champions

If you’re thinking of starting contracting or going freelance then you need to take a serious look at the opportunites and options available to you. Freelance Advisor and Web Marketing Consultant Leif Kendall tells us that freelancing is not the easy option… but it is the most rewarding option.

Want to become a freelancer? It’s easy; all you have to do is quit your job. Ta-da! Now you’re freelance.

Successful Freelancing

I want to talk about the less enjoyable aspects of freelancing, and the reasons why you shouldn’t go freelance without giving it careful consideration.

Persistent Job-Hunting

And of course, regular job-hunting means regular interviews. Although these will probably be quite informal, and you’ll soon get used to talking about yourself and selling your services, you’ll have to get used to being under regular scrutiny.

Insecurity

It’s Only You!

• When you take a holiday, nothing happens (which might make you reluctant to take holidays)
• If you’re sick and can’t work, there’s no sick pay (unless you get some kind of insurance)
• You only earn money when you work. There are no residual income streams (unless you’re the crafty freelancer I mentioned above)

The Flip-Side of these Challenges

In short, all of the ‘negative’ aspects I listed above have positive flip-sides; it just depends on how you look at them.

By Leif Kendall, freelance copywriter and web marketing consultant

Related:

• Should I or shouldn’t I? Freelance Advisor’s guide to Starting Out
• Go for it: The advantages of being a self-employed contractor or freelancer
• Podcast advice: Things you must do to prepare for freelancing

photo by Tyla’75

Compelling Content – Part 2

Brainstorming: Your ideal reader or customer

A two-part series from freelance copywriter Kath Burke. In part one, Kath explained how you can understand why people buy you. Part two explores how to use brainstorming as an exercise in focusing on the content that really matters before you put pen to paper.

It’s worth running a mini-brainstorm. You could invite in some people who know your business well, including, if possible, a loyal and trusted customer. You might ask to borrow their brains for 1-2 hours over a nice bottle of wine and a few nibbles. You’ll feel exhilarated once you’ve thrashed through some of these questions.

You can do some group exercises focusing on your ideal web visitor (I’m assuming they’re also your ideal offline customer), what they want, how you want to come across to them, and what extra content or tweaks would help your web visitors buy your services more easily.

Brainstorm: who is your dream reader?

If you find it hard conjuring up your ideal reader or customer, then turn it on its head. Who would be your worst nightmare? Maybe think about problem projects and clients you’ve had before. And you can reverse these attributes to discover your ideal reader.

If you have more than one favourite customer, then what do they all have in common? You can use educated guesswork and past experience to build up a pen portrait for them. And if your site must appeal to several groups of distinct audiences, you can repeat this brainstorming exercise for each group.

Here are some questions to get you started:

• Roughly what age range is your ideal customer?
• What’s their life like? E.g. home life, work, leisure? What matters to them?
• Where might they get their weekly shop – are they Aldi goers? Waitrose? Or farmers’ markets? What type of car might they drive? This tells you something about their values and preoccupations.
• If they are visiting your site on business, what’s their likely job title and employer (rough size in terms of turnover or headcount)?
• Where are they based?
• How did they get to your site?
• What do they want from the website visit?
• What problem do they want to solve, or aspiration do they want to satisfy?
• What questions are in their mind when they visit your site?
• What mood are they likely to be in when they visit? E.g. stressed, bored, excited?
• How much do they know about your business area?
• What ballpark budget do they have to spend on your services?

Plan how you talk to this reader

• Who is your target audience?
• Why do they come to your site?
• What key messages do you want to get across?
• What tone of voice you want to speak to them in? eg professional versus friendly, serious versus light hearted.
• How do you want them to feel on your site?
• How technical the language should be – how familiar are they with your industry jargon?
• How content should be organised (your site map)
• What topics to include on your navigation bar(s) and how to label these.
• Ideas for search engine phrases (what people type in to Google to find your site)

Plan each page of content

• What questions in the reader’s mind should you answer?
• What tasks do you want them to complete – what action do you want them to take as a result of reading the page?
• What concerns or misconceptions should you address?
• What key message do you want to get across?
• What other related information do you want to link to?
• Where you will get missing facts from to write up the page?
• How will you check your facts?

Now you’re ready to write

By Kath Burke freelance copywriter and content consultant

Read part 1: Create compelling content your clients will crave >>

Related:

• Winning New Business Kath Burke on How to Build a credible Website
• Marketing Al Welsh on Personal Branding for freelancers Leif Kendall on Marketing yourself as a freelancer or contractor

photos nickgraywfu and tantek 

Create compelling content your clients will crave

In this 2-part series freelance copywriter and content consultant Kath Burke says the secret of writing great web marketing copy is in the preparation. Before you put pen to paper, you need to explore your clients’ deeper concerns and needs.

Am I reading you right?

If so, I’ve followed the first rule of great copy. Know thy reader.

Before I start working on a client’s copy, I first ask the client lots of questions about their business and how they like to work. Not because I’m a nosy git (although, there is that), but because I need to really get to grips with who they are and what they want to achieve.

Really good web copy exudes authenticity. You’re starting a conversation with the reader – and you’re relating to them in such a way that they know you understand them and can help. For your website to work well, you need to discover what’s great about you, who really ‘buys’ you and why.

Useful content: tell the reader what they want to hear

1. Why do your customers buy you?

What do you bring to the party? As a freelancer often this comes down to your personal strengths and specialist skills. The easiest way to answer this is to email a few recent customers and ask them for feedback. Questions you might ask include:

• Why did you pick me for the job – over the competition?
• What results did I achieve for you?
• What special skills and personal qualities did I bring to the job?

When I asked clients for feedback, they told talked about my enthusiasm, and my ability to see things clearly. Compliments like this serve as more than just an ego boost for an isolated freelancer. Getting an independent view of your strengths can help you highlight these in the words, pictures and design you use to express yourself through your website.

2. What concerns do potential customers have?

If you know what might be stopping a web visitor from picking up the phone to call you, you can mould your copy to alleviate their concerns. Consider routinely asking potential clients:

• What concerns do you have about using a [insert your specialism here].
• Have you used my type of service before? And if so, what was your experience?

3. What do buyers need to know about you?

Your web copy can help you look superbly helpful and caring if you can home in on exactly what your readers need to know. A frequently asked questions page closes the doors through which your sales leads may otherwise escape to the competition. Your FAQs also start delivering customer service before your casual visitor has even converted into a customer.

TIP: An easy way to build up material for an FAQs is to create an FAQs folder in your email inbox. Then every time you respond to a client or prospect’s question, save it to the FAQs folder. After a month or two you can look to see what common questions are coming up and tidy up the answers for your website.

By Kath Burke freelance copywriter and content consultant

In part 2, Kath looks at brainstorming your ideal customer >>

Related:

• Winning New Business Kath Burke on How to Build a credible Website
• Marketing Al Welsh on Personal Branding for freelancers Leif Kendall on Marketing yourself as a freelancer or contractor

Life on the road can be tough. The contents of a suitcase are certainly no match for the comforts of home, but if you pick and choose your gear with a little care it doesn’t have to be all bad. We all need cutting-edge technology for the work that we do, but when you’re living in a generic hotel outside the M6 for 8 weeks, you know you need to make that technology work for your down-time too.

Sony make incredible laptops. That’s a fact. As with all Sony products, it looks fabulous, is of excellent build quality, and has absolutely everything you need for life as a freelancing road warrior. It is billed as an “HD and entertainment laptop” on Sony’s web site, and with a 2.8Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB Core 2 Duo processor, it’s certainly no couch potato. This has all the power you need to rule the office by day, while the crystal-clear 18.4”, 1920 x 1080 resolution widescreen ensures that films and games are presented in full glory for the evening wind-down.

This beast of a machine is shipped with 4Gb of RAM, which is essential for keeping the preloaded Windows Vista moving at a good pace. In terms of storage, it sports both a 500Gb magnetic hard drive AND a 128Gb SSD, meaning that you have the double bonus of both swift system speed and high capacity storage for music and HD films. For those of you using high-end graphics applications, you’ll be pleased to hear that it utilises the NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT chipset with a dedicated 512Mb of GDDR3 RAM.

From my experience, this computer handles both top-level 3D and motion graphics applications with ease, which is a rarity amongst laptops. Other than that, it has all the usual high-end computing treats, such as TV tuner, built-in camera, Blu-ray, HDMI output, Wireless-n, and Bluetooth, meaning that there isn’t a device or format on this earth that this beauty cannot interface with… except reel-to-reel tape.

The price? Well, we’re looking at one of the best laptops on Earth at this moment, and that kind of power doesn’t come cheap. If you buy from Sony they’ll charge you £2,500, with the attractive option of paying a little extra to be supplied without all the usual free software that is destined for removal from the word go.

However, you can save a fair few notes by picking one up from dabs.com for just under £2,280, an impressive saving of £220. Yes, either way this is a lot of money, but when other, lesser laptops become obsolete, break or simply lose their sparkle, this will still be standing tall for years to come. I am known to abuse laptops whilst traveling, yet each of my previous VAIO laptops has worked perfectly until it was eventually replaced by a newer model. My last VAIO lasted an unbelievable 5 years of being hauled round the world, until I inevitably dropped it once too often, prompting my latest splurge. When you are getting build quality like that, you can’t afford not to spend the extra.

To put it into perspective, an average workstation-level laptop will cost you at least £1000, but that doesn’t guarantee this level of build quality, and it certainly doesn’t get you the kind of extras that the VAIO carries. I can safely say that this machine will easily last twice as long as cheaper models, and in that time you’ll enjoy both working hard and playing hard on it infinitely more than one of its lesser rivals. Oh, and did I mention that its looks will be the envy of every train, hotel lobby and airport lounge?

By Jim Hatley, Freelance Advisor’s gadget guru

More information:

• AW11XU/Q at Sony.co.uk
• Product details PDF
• Cheapest deal for AW11XU/Q [via dabs.co.uk]

Planning work

Luckily time boxing is tool-agnostic so all week I’ve been using Post-it notes, a much cheaper option. I just scribbled the name of the task on the note and put the time I’d allocated in the bottom right-hand corner.

Keeping time

Stop!

The easiest way of keeping to time (and being reminded to stop!) is to get a timer.

If you are at home a cheap and cheerful kitchen timer will do the job. But if you’re working in front of a computer then there are plenty of free timers available online. I settled for the 3-2-1 dashboard timer widget for Mac because it was simple and unobtrusive, hiding on the dashboard and making a cute ‘ping’ when time was up. If you’d like to keep track of multiple-tasks over a whole day then I’ve found the Slimtimer plugin for Firefox a great way to track tasks and timings right in your browser.

Recommended tools:

 For Mac:

For Firefox:

For everyone everywhere:

Find freelancing advice and support by joining our community of freelancers and contractors on Facebook.

Help us shape the community and, by taking 2 minutes to fill in our short survey, you’ll have a chance to win a year’s free accounting.

We’ve also started a discussion on How Freelancers can use Facebook as we’d really like to explore how we can use our personal profile, pages and posts.

Do you have any tips you’d like to share? Do you use Facebook for personal branding and networking? For contracting? Have you used it to find contacts, work and support?

Join us today by visiting the Freelance Advisor Facebook page and choosing ‘Become a fan‘.

See you there!

“I’m busy earning as a freelancer, but what about all those Pension plans?”

It’s a common freelance problem. You’re hard at work earning money from contracts, but you also know you need to keep an eye out for when you’ll be less busy earning. In this new Financial Management series, Senior Pensions & Retirement Consultant Phil Illingworth will help freelance and contractors navigate the perils of pensions.

Yes? You’re not alone.

There’s such a huge range in fund performance, you need to know what you’re invested in.

This subject is vitally important to most, if not all of us. However, years of negative press and hectic lifestyles has meant that we usually park this for one for another day, month, or even year? Over the coming months, I’d like to take this opportunity to try to dispel much of the misinformation, and actually help you to make the most of the hard earned monies you’ve already saved. Pension savings are for the long term, and so as we all know, just a little improvement early on can make a significant difference when we need it.

Fund performance is key

Go back 10, 20, even 30 years, and the companies you worked for then. You will either have been offered a Final Salary pension scheme (one that links years service with final salary), or one whereby the company and yourself contributed to what’s called a Money Purchase scheme (and the monies were invested in various funds, one of which would have been the dreaded “default” fund).

We’ll look at the Final Salary scheme queries you may have in a future post.

Money Purchase Plans

Even if you received good advice at the time on which funds to invest your money into, very few funds actually perform consistently well year-on-year. That’s because the economy changes and fund managers don’t always get it right. The other issue is that “With-Profit” funds were flavour of the decade 10+ years ago, but many then suffered with the dot com crash and government intervention, making it now very difficult for many of the “With-Profit” funds to deliver the terminal bonuses they wanted to (or some what promised to).

Zombie Funds

How do you improve your chances?

You have a choice here. Do you want to do this yourself, or find an appropriately qualified adviser to help you?

You’ d expect me to recommend the latter, as pensions can get a little complex at times and so some expertise can go a long way.

Do your own initial research

Not all funds are listed, but the following links will get you well on your way:

http://www.trustnet.com/pen/

http://www.ftadviser.com/funds

If you find this in itself a little daunting, you need to speak to your existing adviser (if they specialise in pensions) or ask a friend or colleague if they know of a good pensions adviser.

Using an Adviser

Although pension schemes vary in terms of charges and their flexibility (the range of funds available etc), the performance of the underlying funds is often key to long term returns. Reassessing performance and suitability of these funds on a regular basis helps to give your portfolio the best chance.

You might be concerned about this process taking up too much of your time? Many advisers can work remotely these days if required, and should be able to tell you quite quickly (and without obligation) if they can improve your position.

What next?

If you’ve lost track of any of your previous pensions you can try the Pension Tracing Service on 0845 6002 537 or www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/atoz/atozdetailed/pensiontracing.asp

It’s usually when you get to 55+ the panic starts, but it’s those at 45+ that stand to gain the most by doing something now!

GOOD LUCK, and let me know if you have any further queries.

Look out for more Pension and Investment advice from Phil over the coming months. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to receive the latest freelance and contractor news and articles.

photo credits: soylentgreen23 & A Touch of Glass

If you’re a freelance designer or programmer then attending the i-design 08 Portfolio Clinic Wednesday 17 September in London is a no brainer.

First it’s FREE and secondly if you’re currently looking for work or to expand your future client base then you’ll be able to meet 15 of the capital’s most respected and successful interactive and advertising agencies, including Imagination, TribalDDB, Moving Brands, Digit and Poke in the same afternoon!

There will be informal and relaxed one-to-one sessions, the opportunity to showcase your work and gain greater insight into what the agencies are looking for from freelancers. The venue also boosts a bar so you can rehyderate and/or steady your nerves as well as meet and network with other freelancers while you are there.

The i-design 08 Portfolio Clinic runs between 4-6pm on Wednesday 17 September, after the main i-design 08 Conference, which is exploring the future of interactive design – from 3D to 5D design. Just register to attend at: www.idesignportfolio.eventbrite.com and bring along your laptop, CV, business cards and/or examples of your work.

For more information, venue map and the full list of agencies taking part in the i-design 08 Portfolio Clinic and the conference programme visit:

www.idesign-london.com

Tara Solesbury, Freelance Advisor’s Digital Shepherd

Do you have an event or workshop you think would be useful to the freelance and contractor community? Add to our Upcoming group or email us your event details and we’ll add them for you.

Before you choose an accountant…

Before you choose an accountant you should:

1. Ask about their qualifications – qualified accountants usually have the words “chartered” or “certified” attached to their title. They also usually belong to one of accountancy’s professional associations such as ICAEW, ICAS, ACCA, CIMA, ICAI or CIPFA.
2. Find out how many directors and partners there are in the practice.
3. Investigate whether they are experienced – especially whether they have experience in dealing with freelancers and contractors.
4. Assess whether they understand your business sector - and its needs.
5. Find out who will look after your business on a day-to-day basis – obtaining a managers name will enable you to direct your queries directly to them and they will cost less than a director or partner.
6. Ask about their estimated response times.
7. Ask whether the service you will receive will be proactive – e.g. whether they will remind you when you need to submit accounts, or send you updates on changes in tax law.
8. Find out what additional services they have – e.g. inheritance planning, advice on information systems or cashflow forecasting.
9. Ask whether the practice offers any specialist services for freelancers or contractors – e.g. advice on what is needed to create a start-up or small business, or helping freelancers plan for the future, deal with frozen pensions, etc.
10. Investigate their charges – and what they cover. Find out if a fixed fee can be arranged for the first 12 months

Once you’ve chosen an accountant

1. your responsibilities
2. the accountant’s responsibilities
3. their fees and how they will be charged

1. your passport or photo drivers license
2. a utility bill with your name on and address or
3. national insurance card

photo credit: billypalooza

Today we look at how to identify the unique features of product, you.

Understanding the product – You, Your Abilities, Competencies & Transferable Assets

As previously mentioned you need to demonstrate how you work, your thinking, your competencies.

There is a way to do this effectively. Like most things there is good news and bad news to tell at this point.

Let’s get rid of the bad news first

The good news

• Prepared for every interview/meeting you go to as you will understand the product (you) in full
• Able to decipher job/contract descriptions and answer the real question/s being posed
• Able to write tailored personal pitches in a very short period of time as all the hard work will be done.

There are 3 steps:

Step One

• What were you trying to achieve?
• What was your initial thinking to overcome the issue?
• What you did?
• What was the result?

Step Two

This will tell you the ability you used. When you do it you will realise how easy this is

Step Three

If you do this well you will understand the product and have maybe 10 abilities with about 10 events to prove and evidence each one.

You have created your own personal Career DNA Bank.

Pitch Yourself is available at all good book shops and online at Amazon.co.uk

Part One: The marketing process

Part Three: Understanding the product. You, your abilities competencies & transferable assets