How long did it take me to fill my schedule with freelance work?

I’m actually consciously building my freelance business as a part-time venture to allow myself to concentrate on writing and a few other pet projects in my spare time. But, I left employed life about 11 months ago, and I strived to over-deliver and impress the pants off of my first several clients, which has paid off ten-fold in referral business. I’d say that after four or five months of freelancing, the work just started to come in on its own without me having to chase it too much, because I had built a good reputation, a great network, and a quality communications platform for my business.

Who do I consult with and where have I found my business clients?

I work with all kinds of small-to-medium companies and professionals, but my consulting is definitely aimed towards authors, columnists, speakers, coaches, and other thought leaders who already have decent writing skills or something important to say—blogging is a great tool for broadcasting a discussion and maintaining client relations, and particularly for personality-driven businesses where a CEO’s personal brand is tied to the business, for instance.

My first few gigs started with a few mentors of mine and clients who just happened to stumble across me, and I went all-out to deliver the best product to them at a low cost, so that created a lot of word-of-mouth and referral business which still keeps my freelance inbox full to this day! I’ve also found many clients and partners just through interacting with writers and users on existing blogs and social media sites, or just through conversations with other professionals at business conferences for example. But for me, it’s been truly impressive how many interesting people I have been able to connect with virtually through the blogosphere, and how much work one can find globally via the web! I’ve had clients across the States, and now in Canada and even France.

What skills or strengths does it take to be a freelance blog consultant?

Personally, people tell me that my strongest ability is in translating technical information and jargon into business-oriented language. My favorite part of what I do is actually hashing out ideas with my clients—talking directly with authors and business owners and helping them learn how to use their technology or interact with other online writers. So as a consultant, you definitely need some people skills and you need to be able to sell yourself. On the other end of the spectrum though, I currently do every part of this process from finding new clients to customer service to coding, and to be successful at the web design and programming, you just need the patience to sit at a computer screen for 10 hours straight some days, and a hungry desire for continued learning and improvement.

What are some good resources to learn the basic skills necessary for web design?

My college degree was in religious studies and history, so my business and web design skills have been completely self-taught over the last two years, often through lots of trial and error. Some people may not realize that web design and development are actually huge spheres, so there are tons of niche-specific resources and organizations, but the World Wide Web Consortium, W3Schools, and A List Apart are a few good places to start learning to write valid, attractive code. If you work with open-source content management systems like I do, there is usually a large, knowledgeable developer community with lots to offer (see the WordPress Codex, for example), or guidebooks like Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress might be useful.

What surprises have there been working as a web developer? What should other hopeful freelancers know?

As a consultant in any field, some people will expect you to be available at all hours, and some clients will have unreasonable expectations, so you need to learn to establish firm boundaries and you need to learn to say no sometimes. The earlier you learn these things, the less painful your experience will be. Other things to think about are the stigmas and challenges of self-employment and working from home, so I would recommend you do some research on those things before you take the jump, but I also highly recommend it to anyone who’s got the determination to do so.

One other huge tip I’d offer is to establish relationships or partnerships with people who complement your weaknesses or just areas you don’t focus on. So for instance, my niche is blogs, but I can pull in someone who’s a great graphic designer, or a wiki or podcast expert, or a web hosting guy when necessary.

How much have I invested to start my business and what were some of the biggest expenses?

Most of my operation has been budget-free because I work from home and use a lot of tools I already had from school. After I’d had some cash-flow, I did invest about $2k in a new desktop Mac for my development work, but I use all open-source and web-based design and development software, so licenses are almost always free or very inexpensive. My next move will be to put some money into very targeted online ad campaigns, but my research shows that investing even just a few hundred dollars via Google Adwords can be very effective.

Great related resources on the web about freelancing:

• 10 Misconceptions the Self-Employed Deal With Daily
• How to Ensure Working from Home is Not Boring
• How Working from Home Improved My Social Life
• A week of journalism: How to be a freelancer without starving
• Freelance Switch

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Thoughts on Working From Home and Starting Out as a Freelance Web Worker

Bob Glaza (One Reader At a Time) tagged me last week for the Media Diet meme, a discussion that’s been propagating across the web since last year about our media consumption habits, to share with others how we get our information. I tracked this particular thread as far back as James Gordon-Macintosh and a few others at Seventy Seven PR, but I know that Jeremiah Owyang was also talking about it months earlier.

Everyone’s talking about information overload these days, so I figured I’d use this as an opportunity to share both 1) some of my personal interests, but also 2) how I filter through the vast amount of knowledge and media that’s available to us these days through the blogosphere and all the mainstream entertainment and news channels. Being a blogger, I like to follow a tremendous amount of information in this “Age of Conversation.” But, I like what Bob says: “Why NOT bite off more than you can chew?”

photo credit: drspam

Readables

When I was at my desk job, I used to read a few more newspapers and magazines (like the WSJ, Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and BusinessWeek), but I pretty much entirely get my fix through the Internets these days! To be honest, I rarely watch the news or read the papers, let alone visit the sites of any mainstream media directly these days because there’s just too much information, and much of it I find too hyped (fearmonger much?) and unbalanced for my tastes. I do highly enjoy Wired.com, and I’ll pick up a copy of FastCompany now and then. But I concentrate mostly on niches that directly affect me, like the personal development and web design blogs, and I tend to hear all the most important headlines through friends, family, and social media anyway (Robert Scoble was covering the China quakes on Twitter before the USGS reported them).

I get a few Google Alerts sent directly to my email account for certain search terms, so that I get a daily summary and know immediately when someone on the web is talking about me, one of my sites, my business, or a couple of key interests of mine, for instance.

I use Google Reader almost daily to sift through nearly 70 blog subscriptions (and a few other RSS streams like freelancer job feeds). That means there are usually about 250-350 new articles in there daily. How do I keep up with all these? Well, firstly Google Reader makes it easy to organize your feeds into different folders, or categories, so I’ve got them organized by priority and into groups like “friends,” “business opportunities,” “blogging tips,” “web design,” and “personal development.” Some of the feeds I check every day, but others are marked for just occasional perusal when I’ve got the time. I generally browse through the titles in List View to dwindle the number down to just those that seem applicable or interesting to me (I probably read about 10-20% of the updates that come through my RSS reader).

Some of my most frequent reads are blogs like Problogger, Web Worker Daily, Life Beyond Code, Freelance Switch, Real Social Dynamics, Zen Habits, and blogs from the Brazen Careerist network. One big secret: probably 50% of the useful knowledge I share with my friends and blog readers comes from Lifehacker and Tim Ferris’ Experiments in Lifestyle Design Blog (from the author of The 4-Hour Workweek).

Aside from what’s in my feed reader, I find that the social web does a great job of “filtering” the most important/useful/sometimes completely silly news for me, so when I’ve got the time to wander, I frequent aggregators like PopUrls and Guy Kawasaki‘s Alltop network. I’ve been using PopUrls as my landing page for the last several weeks to keep my finger on the pulse of the web, because it is customizable to your tastes (by source or category), and I like to track the most popular articles, recommended articles, and the top hits on del.icio.us, Digg, and StumbleUpon each day. Additionally, the extremely illustrious, bright folks I follow on Twitter are also a renewable resource for awesome content!

If you want to follow some of my favorites, please checkout my Google Shared Items page, or my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I do read a little bit “offline” too! I try to read about a book per month, but these mostly consist of business or personal development books. A few of my favorites have been The 4-Hour Workweek, Vagabonding, The BrandYou50, Now Discover Your Strengths, and Never Eat Alone. A nice, warm book is good for travel, or when I feel like pulling my eyes away from the computer screen for a bit and laying in my hammock outside. Right now I’m reading Blogging Heroes, which has interviews with 30 top bloggers from around the world. Stay tuned for a list of top-recommended books from me and my mentors soon.

Viewables

I do have cable at home, but the only show I’ve watched religiously for the last four years has been to tune in to “Lost” when I visit my folks each week (it’s been slow to answer all our burning questions, but it has the best character development of anything I’ve ever seen on the tube). I use TV more for the very occasional break from work—since I work from home, it’s fun to completely disengage for an hour or two and enjoy some pure entertainment once in a while. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only news/politics I can tolerate these days—faux news with plenty of comedy and satire mixed in for good measure (and Stephen Colbert has the biggest stones of anyone on television!). Otherwise, I’ll watch some pointless drivel on E! or MTV for an escape when the opportunity presents itself.

For trends in technology, entertainment, and design, I’ve enjoyed the inspiring TEDTalks for a long time, which you can subscribe to as video podcasts through iTunes.

And I do enjoy the occasional movie! (Looking forward to seeing Indiana Jones today!)

Audibles

Ah this is key: I pretty much have some sound going at all times! I listen to a tremendous amount of music. I live and breath music! (I even have a sleep playlist!) But I hate the radio (ever notice how ALL the stations go to ads at the same time!?), I always listen to iTunes at home and CDs in the car. I have a huge MP3 library, where a few of my favorites are Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, and Kings of Convenience, but I also listen to a few great online radio stations that you can stream directly into your iTunes, like Soma FM‘s Groove Salad and Beat Blender, Ibiza Sonica, and Ibiza Global Radio.

For good business and personal growth information, I highly recommend several podcasts: Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, Escape from Cubicle Nation, iinnovate, and the FallingFruit.tv podcasts. Listening to podcasts on the iPod is a great way to leverage your time if you’ve got a long commute on the bus/train, or a plane trip somewhere, or if you’re just doing chores around the house.

When I was at this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, I was motivated to buy the first three albums I’ve bought in probably years: Dark Side of the Moon, Kraftwerk’s live Minimum-Maximum, and Portishead’s first CD in a decade, Third. All highly recommended (you can sample below with my fancy new Amazon widget).

Other Resources

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of my interests, and about how I filter through the static. That’s it for me, but here are a few recent posts from other great writers in the blogosphere that might give you a few tips on dealing with information overload and productivity in this high-bandwidth media world we live in.

• Chris Brogan, a huge voice in the blog community, shares his tips for processing information effectively and turning out awesome content in How I Do It
• Maki shares how to get through too much information in too little time on DoshDosh with Managing Information Flow: How Prioritization Will Improve Your Work and Learning Efficiency
• Leo does an Exclusive Interview with Stephen Covey on His Morning Routine, Blogs, Technology, GTD and The Secret at Zen Habits

I’m gonna tag Ryan Healy, Ronnie Nurss, Meg Roberts, Erik Folgate, Jamie Harrop, Susan Johnston, and Holly Hoffman, my fellow bloggers in the Gen-Y conversation, to participate in the Media Diet meme! Anyone else who’s got 2 cents to throw in can jump on board too!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Filtering Through the Static: My Media Consumption Habits

After some intense goal-setting, I set several resolutions for myself in 2007. I told myself, “This is going to be a good year,” and it has been. Nobody has perfect follow-through, but because I got clear on what I wanted to do with my time and focused my energy towards those ends, I achieved 8 out of 10 major goals this year:

1. I stepped up my exercise routine. Unfortunately I didn’t cultivate the running habit, but I did start cycling with friends and at my peak, I’ve been exercising about three times per week.
2. I registered three web domains. One for my personal homepage, one for the Thrilling Heroics blog and community, and one for my web design services, which I have been too busy with referral business to develop a website for!
3. I read 11 personal development book books. A vast improvement over the average of two books per year that I have read in years past, and this number excludes fiction and pleasure reading. My top recommendations include Tom Peters’ The Brand You50, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Penelope Trunk’s awesome guidebook, Brazen Careerist, and of course Tim Ferriss’ life-changing book The 4-Hour Workweek. I’m also right in the middle of Vagabonding, an incredible guide to extended world travel (perfectly suited for my trip to Spain).
4. I started working as a freelancer! I have not incorporated a full-fledged business yet, and I haven’t donated to 1% for the Planet yet, but I have been doing web design for the last four months and am working solely for myself now.
5. I kicked ass at reflecting at the end of each week and planning goals for the next week! I co-founded Career MasterMinds, to meet each week with other students and young professionals and share our accomplishments and goals for the week ahead. It has been a very rewarding experience, knowing that the support system we have all worked to set up has helped a few of our members find new jobs and has helped all of us focus our energy and our direction.
6. I donated about $300 to charity this year, in particular to the Save Darfur Coalition.
7. I became a better networker and public speaker by synergizing with my peers, e-networking via my blog and LinkedIn, and by participating on the leadership team of a new Toastmasters chapter at Sac State.
8. I purchased carbon offsets for my car through TerraPass.

What major goals did you accomplish this year? What notable improvements did you make in 2007? Or what important lessons have you learned that you can apply to your future personal development? Please share!

And start thinking about those New Year’s Resolutions! While resolutions are somewhat cliche, the New Year does offer a great opportunity to set some personal milestones and objectives. Get clear on what you want to do in 2008, and focus your mental energy and your time toward achieving those goals, and you’ll have a more productive year! So next week, we’ll do some goal-setting exercises and I’ll share my 2008 resolutions as an example.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Perform A Year-End Personal Development Review for Continued Success