Frailwords

View full post on The Imgur Gallery

Advertise here with BSA

Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

Creatives need a detailed brief. Without it we are feeling in the dark, with little clue of our destination.

We need targeted information from our clients to deliver high quality finished work that meets the client’s expectations. We want to deliver polished work and we need the right information to do that.

As freelancers, it’s up to us to direct our clients on how to deliver an informed and detailed brief. Often this means putting together a questionnaire that clients fill out. This could be a website form, PDF, or text document, whichever you and your client are comfortable using. Ultimately, you need to collect the information needed for the project brief.

Only experienced clients will be familiar with compiling creative briefs and most clients will need some hand holding through the process. Whether you use a formal questionnaire, or ask questions over the phone, will depend on you and your clients. However, don’t discount the need to collect this project brief information, it’s how every one of your projects should get started.

Depending on your freelance focus, the information you’ll need for a creative brief will differ somewhat. For web design briefs you’ll want to collect competing website information and for graphic design briefs you’ll need an idea of the style your client wants. Though, of course, there are some commonalities in all creative briefs, such as: client background information, target audience, budget, project scope, description of deliverables, and deadlines.

We’ve compiled a bunch of articles that will assist you in creating questionnaires for your new clients and improve the client briefs you have to work from. If you’re not currently collecting creative briefs well from your clients, then these articles will get you on the right path. This will improve your bottom line greatly, as you’ll have much better information to work with to produce your client projects, which will lead to greater results.

continue reading…

View full post on The Imgur Gallery

Advertise here with BSA

Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

As freelancers, our focus is almost always exclusively on getting paying work and getting it done. After all, it’s difficult to pay our bills or buy food with anything other than money. So investing time into a project that isn’t guaranteed to pan out doesn’t always seem to be the best investment of our time.

But there are some contests and challenges that can be worth a great deal to a freelancer if you win — provided you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into ahead of time.

The Benefits of Winning a Contest

When you’re considering whether to enter a contest, a competition or a challenge, there are several benefits that should be your deciding factors. When the benefits outweigh the time you have to take away from searching for new clients and paying work, then it is worth your while. Entry fees also have to be taken into consideration. Personally, I’ll only pay an entry fee for a contest if it’s based on work that I’ve already completed — but there are some challenges in every industry that make an entry fee worthwhile.

• Can you list ‘award-winning’ in your bio and have it mean something? There are many industry competitions that make winners stand out from among the crowd — at least to someone in the know. Such awards can provide a credential that is worth having. As an added bonus, many such competitions look at work you’ve already done, rather than requiring you to put together new work.
• Is the prize money definitely sweet? At a bare minimum, the pot should cover your time in entering a contest. Personally, I prefer to look for contests that at least triple what I’d generally be able to make if I was focused on freelancing. That’s because no one wins every contest they enter. You’ve got to make your entire contest strategy pay off — not just one entry.
• Are you going to be able to put the finished work in your portfolio? If your portfolio is in need of a little strengthening — maybe you’re refocusing your work into a new specialty or maybe you’re just getting out of school — challenges can be a way to create some out-of-the-ordinary portfolio pieces.

Challenges, Not Spec Work

I am absolutely not talking about spec work here. Spec work is, by definition, doing a project and only getting paid if the client likes your work. There are thousands of competitions along the line of ‘design our logo!’ and the end result is usually nothing but tears.

I’m not here to get into an argument about spec work — there are certain situations where the positives outweigh the negatives — but it is important to lay down the fact that spec work is very different from what I’m talking about. By definition, spec work is almost entirely focused on the money, not the prestige that comes from winning a contest, and you’ll often find that spec work contests offer minimal prizes.

There are several crowdsourcing startups that focus on connecting prospective clients with designers and other freelancers. Some of these companies fall more on the spec work end of the spectrum, while others focus on building more beneficial contests. While I’m not so interested in naming names, I’d personally note that if a crowdsourcing site essentially asks you to complete a project as you go up against other freelancers, with no guarantee of money, it’s spec work. If a crowdsourcing site, however, asks you to do a pitch or a few thumbnails and then ensures that you get paid for future stages of work, it’s a competition that can be much healthier for your freelancing work.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Yuri Arcurs.

View full post on FreelanceSwitch

Advertise here with BSA

Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

As freelancers, we tend to want to keep the number of tools we’re using to a minimum. We’ll set up some sort of accounting tool, maybe something to help us handle project management and not much more. But there are reasons that finding a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that you’re comfortable using is worth the added hassle.

• The more you know about your clients and (prospective clients), the better. Good CRM tools help you collect and maintain information about the people you’re working with. Many of the newer tools even go out and pull in information from social media about given people in your CRM database. You can use that information to better tailor your services: perhaps a recent tweet from a customer has given you ideas on how better to design a website for him. Similarly, a well-timed birthday wish can show your client you care about more than his checkbook.
• You can better track the differences between clients. Every client has her quirks: some want you to include a specific purchase order number on every invoice, others need to run revisions past multiple stakeholders. Bringing all those details into one place, such as in your CRM tool, will make it much easier to manage each step of the process. All you have to do is check what quirks you’ve noted as you send out invoices or other communications. 
• You can manage the contact information for the people you’re working with. Have you ever found yourself in a position where you absolutely have to talk to one of your clients right this minute — and you didn’t have anything easily accessible beyond an email address? Using a CRM tool helps in two ways: first, if you know that you want to fill out as many fields in a client’s entry in your database as possible, you have an incentive to actually ask for more information. And many of the more recent additions to the CRM marketplace integrate tools that will pull information about an individual out of their email signature, as well as other places, helping you create a centralized record. 
• CRM software can keep you out of your inbox. Personally, I have a problem that when I head into my inbox to send an email to a client, I can get sucked into dealing with any new email that has arrived — pulling me away from that one email I really ought to be working on. But when my first stop is my CRM tool, it can be asier to stay focused. The tool that I rely on is integrated with my email account so that I can send emails without actually switching into my inbox. 
• You can outsource some of your communications with a little more ease. If you want to bring in a virtual assistant to handle a little bit of your email — maybe something as simple as contacting past clients and offering them a special deal — having all your contacts in a CRM tool makes a lot of sense. You can give an assistant access to your CRM tool without handing over your email password, as well as have him track the communications directly in your CRM tool.
• You can get a reminder to check in with old contacts. It’s easy for people to fall off our radar, especially when we get busy. But a good CRM tool can remind you to stay in touch, with updates on when the last time you communicated with a particular person was. You can also make a habit of going through your database regularly and checking in with a certain number of people. Even brief emails can bring you back in contact with someone who may need your services.

There are a wide variety of CRM tools available online these days, with varying features and varying prices. Some are even at that magical price point for a beginning freelancer — free. Test out any options that look good. Since most tools offer at least a free demo, it makes sense to get a feel for them before you fully commit to moving all your contacts over from your address book or wherever else you keep information.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Yuri Arcurs.

View full post on FreelanceSwitch

View full post on Imgur Gallery

TUTORIAL E GUIDA COMPLETA PER DREAMWEAVER CS5 VERSIONE ITALIANA] Watch the English version here v www.youtube.com A CAUSA DI PROBLEMI SUL PROGRAMMA, NEL VIDEO SONO PRESENTI DEGLI ERRORI FACILMENTE RICONOSCIBILI, NON DATECI PESO, SE I PROBLEMI SONO EVIDENTI, PER FAVORE CONTATTATEMI CHE RIMETTO UN VIDEO PIU’ AGGIORNATO Ciao! A partire dalla Partnership appena portata a casa, vorrei iniziare a fare la versione italiana dei video principali che ho gia’ fatto in lingua inglese, dopo l’elevato numero di persone che mi hanno chiesto questo tipo di favore Spero che questa guida aiutera’ tanti, e non sia di quelle solite che metti e poi viene dimenticata xO ●━━━━━━━≈Descrizione del video≈━━━━━━━━━━● Voi vi chiederete “ma perché ancora non hai iniziato a spiegare come si inizia con il nuovo sito?”.. la risposta è semplice… un sito non è un semplice file di immagini, dove partite da un foglio bianco e via^^ Un sito e’ piu’ complesso, e questo video è una delle ragioni. Prima di iniziare a fare un nuovo sito, occorre create un Sito Dreamweaver, una struttura propria del programma, che una volta creata vi permette di creare più siti in futuro e di salvarli con più facilità. Assicuratevi di crearne uno prima di ogni sito nuovo al 100% che vorrete fare ●━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━● ACCETTO OGNI TIPO DI TUTORIAL PERSONALIZZATO, BASTA INVIARMI UN MESSAGGIO PERSONALE. (ovviamente collegato a questo …

Credit: J Wynia on Flickr

Some great long-term client relationships, for writers, originate from the client’s lack of time rather than their perceived lack of skill. In other words, they bring on writing help because they do not have the time to handle all the internal demands for writing services. This may be a chronic overload, or it may be a short term bulge in demand.

Either way, the more quickly you demonstrate that you can write in the client’s voice – that you can not only “write,” but you can “ghostwrite” — the more likely that you will become a trusted resource for that client.

Hook Up Your Battery

What these clients are looking for, in many instances, is a “jump start.” They want you to draft the bulk of the content, whether it is a speech, an article, or some marketing piece.

And then they will do the final revisions, to ensure it fits with their company’s style, preferred language, history, legal constraints, and other requirements.

This is particularly common if you are preparing material for the company’s leadership. At one time in my writing career, I did quite a bit of work on presentations by executives at major corporations. For instance, they would (in those days) deliver videotaped messages to their employees to launch a major shift in policy or business practices, to correct problems or to grasp new opportunities.

High-level people are surrounded by staff dedicated to making them look good. In that situation, it wasn’t unusual for me to draft a presentation, or even a teleprompter script,  that would get a final edit by someone from the Public Relations department.

And those PR people have to make some changes. They are compelled to demonstrate their contribution to the final product, really, no matter how brilliant a draft they receive.

Now, I have known writers who grumble about this approach, but it never bothered me. They hired me to give them a draft that they expected to tweak. I was paid well, and I was more interested in their money than in getting credit for being a brilliant writer.

On the other hand, being a really good ghostwriter made sure that the next time they needed a “jump start,” they called me.

Becoming the “Go-To” Writer

If you find yourself drafting content for final revision by the client’s own staff, there are several things you can do to make sure that grows into a regular gig:

1. Ask to see the final product after it is edited. Make sure to explain that you are only asking in order to provide a more final version to them in the future: to learn their style, vocabulary, and so on. Never let them feel that you are asking simply to “check up on them,” to see which pearls of wisdom from your original draft did not make the cut.
2. Make explicit notes on changes in key vocabulary and other patterns you see in their final version.
3. When you submit your next project, make sure you review those notes before you turn it in. With each iteration, your drafts should sound more and more like their final products.
4. Accept your role without looking for “credit.” Never, never try to “eliminate the middleman.” In the case of the executive presentations I mentioned, my customer really was the PR person who did the revisions, not the CEO of the company.

Remember that they hired you in the first place to help them manage their time. When your drafts reflect the client’s voice, they find it easier, and much less time-consuming, to “fix” things.

When you listen and learn, you save them more time than do other writers. That puts you at the top of their list, the first person they will call for that next project … and the one after that … and …

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by J Wynia.

View full post on FreelanceSwitch

View full post on Imgur Gallery

[TUTORIAL E GUIDA COMPLETA PER DREAMWEAVER CS5 VERSIONE ITALIANA] Watch the English version here v www.youtube.com Ciao! A partire dalla Partnership appena portata a casa, vorrei iniziare a fare la versione italiana dei video principali che ho gia’ fatto in lingua inglese, dopo l’elevato numero di persone che mi hanno chiesto questo tipo di favore Spero che questa guida aiutera’ tanti, e non sia di quelle solite che metti e poi viene dimenticata xO ●━━━━━━━≈Descrizione del video≈━━━━━━━━━━● In questo video mostro tutti i file che entrano in gioco in un sito web, i file principali ed un primissimo approccio su cosa sono e quali le differenze Nota importante da tenere conto, in modo tale da sapere gia’ di quali file parleremo in futuro ●━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━● ACCETTO OGNI TIPO DI TUTORIAL PERSONALIZZATO, BASTA INVIARMI UN MESSAGGIO PERSONALE. (ovviamente collegato a questo programma O Photoshop) Info video: ╔═════════════════♬♪♩♭ ║Programma usati: Sony Vegas Pro 8.0c (video) ║Dreamweaver CS5 (siti web), Snagit 10.0.0 ║(video del computer) ║Musica: Glide Out, © Zources ╚═════════════════♬♪♩♭ ************************************************** Grazie a tutti per le vostre 87,35o iscrizioni!