I’ve just published my second e-book Running A Web Design Business.

How to run a web design business from home

It’s not easy to explain everything I’ve learned in the last few years but here are some main tips:

• The first thing and last thing you need to concentrate on is your site. You need to work on your main site almost everyday. The site needs a great looking portfolio. With a portfolio less is more, in my opinion – better to show 5 or 6 really great examples of your work than many average ones.
• You also need to create a blog. You will get much more work through a great blog than with a fantastic looking portfolio. Because a good blog will bring in targeted traffic to your site, whereas a fantastic portfolio will only interest a very few people – and most of them will be other web designers!
• Once you start getting clients you need to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff. Concentrate on well-paying high quality clients so you can bring in recurring revenue and avoid wasting time on people with small budgets.
• Encourage your clients to use email so you have a record of everything. Detail exactly the expected scope and remuneration of a project so that both parties know what is happening and benefit from the execution of the job.
• Expand into offering greater services for your clients only when you are sure you can perform them. And make sure you are charging the premium rates for these services as they are being completed to the highest standard: compete in terms of quality; never compete on price.
• Specialise into areas you enjoy and create systems and packages of services you can supply to multiple clients. Document and iterate these systems as much as you can as this will save you time and facilitate outsourcing.

Why did I write the e-book?

As always, I was getting a lot of emails from folks who wanted to set up their own design business and had questions about it, and from people who had started a business but wanted to expand. The questions lead to emails, the emails lead to blog posts, the blog posts lead to an e-book.

Sounds simple. Although the whole process took a little less than a year!

So, what’s in the e-book?

Everything you’ll need to know to set up and run and web design company. Wait, that’s a bit of a boast! Let me explain.

A few years ago I was commuting on an underground train to do very menial work in boring offices. In fact, my sense of professional self-worth was very low.

Now, I’ve been working from home for the last three years making money from my own clients designing websites.

I’m not going to say it was easy. But it isn’t prohibitively difficult either. You can do it!

You need hardware, software, back-up; you’ll need to start a proper company with accounts; you’ll need to find clients – not just any clients but the quality clients that are going to give you repeat business; you’ll need to bill them properly and the right amount; you’ll need to know what to tell a client and what not to tell a client; you’ll need to know how to diversify and specialize; and a lot more besides.

Also, I surveyed over 35 independent designers to ask them their take on getting clients, billing, equipment, etc., so that I was sure what worked for me, worked for others as well. The results are in the e-book.

Here’s the video from the sales page – I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Feedback from those who’ve bought it

I have been absolutely delighted by the feedback that I’ve got about the e-book so far. One of my subscribers, Tia Azulay, wrote to me to say:

“I’ve just bought and read your book and I wanted to say thank you! It covers several things that I know already, but many of which I haven’t put into practice yet, and I’m so grateful for the nudge to focus on them again. It also contains really useful links.

However, the best thing about it is that it is feels enabling and empowering – the honesty and joy of your own journey in design really shines through and it has re-energized me.”

And another subscriber, Edward Craig, said:

“I have been in the website design and hosting business for over ten years and in the first 10-minutes with your book I was shocked at how many things I’d missed.”

I’m really grateful for all the positive messages.

How well is it selling?

So far I have only offered it at a discounted price to my subscribers and it has been selling much better than my last e-book How To Get Clients. I will publish all the sales figures on or around July 1st – the half year point that I have set passive income targets for.

Why is it selling better? Possibly because this is more specific to web design business owners and How To Get Clients was more general, I don’t know. Both e-books are the same number of words, the same price point and of the same high quality (in my humble opinion!)

What do you think?

Is this a good idea for a premium e-book? Do you think I’m wrong to be asking for money for this?

What would prompt you to buy this or is there anything that would ward you off purchasing it?

I’m always keen to hear your comments about this, and everything else!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have a challenge for you: perform one of these five minute tasks now. If you hit a road block, leave a comment here and I’ll help you. These little marketing tasks (some for beginners; others for “experts”) only take a few minutes to finish and just seem more complicated than they are.

Set up WordPress

If you don’t yet have a self-hosted WordPress site: Shame on you, you should! (Only joking!) But seriously, the world’s most effective way to market your business can be set up in 5 minutes.

• Purchase a domain name at GoDaddy (affiliate link)
• Get some hosting at Hostgator (affiliate link)
• Install WordPress manually (advised); or through a one-click installation (not advised but OK)

The above is the best piece of online business advice – no exaggeration! This may take slightly longer than 5 minutes if you’re doing a manual install for the first time.

If you already have a self-hosted WordPress website: then set up a WordPress.com site! You can use this WordPress.com site as a “feeder site” to provide links for your main sites. WordPress.com is great for experimenting. Plus you can test out new features before they’re rolled out to the WordPress.org platform!

Set up your Gravatar

One of the most important features of increasing awareness of your business online is having a universally recognised “face” to the business. So, no matter where you are, be it YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, etc., always have the same smiling, happy profile pic accompanying your output.

I would rather use a face than a logo. People are more likely to recognise a face than remember a name so this is very useful to your brand. Go to Gravatar and set up your profile. In five minutes most of your blog comments will have the same image next to them.

YouTube

If you don’t have a YouTube account: Set one up. Try to get a username that is the same as your website domain or brand name as possible. This will take you less than 5 minutes.

If you do have a YouTube account: Customize your YouTube channel. Make use of the links in the sidebar (add as many as possible – you can even link to different pages in the same site!) Make sure there is a link back to your site on the first line of the descriptions of the videos.

Twitter

If you don’t have a Twitter account: Set one up. Try to get a username that is the same as your website domain or brand name as possible (yes, I copied that from the above paragraph, glad you’re paying attention!) For God’s sake, at least change the profile photo from that boring default egg image. Write a decent description with a link to your site.

If you do have a Twitter account: Customize your Twitter profile with a background image that is in keeping with your brand and shows your web address and other important information.

Facebook

If you don’t have a Facebook account: You are the last person in the world not to have one. Set one up.

If you don’t have a Facebook page: You must get a Facebook page for your brand, website or business. Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/ and Create Page. Follow the directions in this video (3 minutes 10 seconds – even less than our 5 minute rule!)

The above video also shows you how to put a Like Box on your WordPress website’s sidebar. This will slowly increase your fan base as the weeks go by and then if you regularly, manually post to your Facebook page you’ll see a steady stream of engaged traffic coming to your site from Facebook.

If you do have a Facebook page(s): Then ready them for the timeline changes and the end of this month (March 2012). Pat Flynn gives a complete Facebook page guide to show you want to do and Louise Myers tells us how to create custom tab images for the Facebook timeline. Just 5 minutes, honest!

Google+

OMG, is it me, or does Google+ seem so boring nowadays? Pinterest is piquing our interest but Google+ is Google so we’ve got to go along with it. I can guarantee that each of these five minute marketing tasks will help your business but, I’ve got to be honest, I haven’t seen any benefit from Google+ at all! I was very positive about it initially but recently I haven’t been feeling it.

If you don’t have a Google+ account: Get one.

If you don’t have a Google+ Page: You can set up a Google+ Page and add a Google+ badge to the sidebar – similar to the Like Box for Facebook. Again, I haven’t seen any benefit in doing this so far but, this is Google, so if you have good social signals from their network is probably going to be beneficial.

Set up Google Authorship

This is more important than Google+: Sort out your Google Authorship.

This does take a bit of doing, but once you have set this up correctly (and it is just about possible to do it in 5 minutes), your face will appear in the Google search results. The benefits of this are obvious, it’ll draw people’s eye to your link in the search results meaning more traffic. It’ll also mean further recognition of your brand.

General Social Media

The whole point of these five minute tasks is to work effectively so you save time instead of wasting time on tasks that have little benefit. Unfortunately the rise of social media has made business owners prone to doing just that.

We all know you need to engage with Twitter, Google+, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn for these sites to become effective tools. But we simply don’t have the time to do this.

But, even if you don’t have hours to spend on Facebook, at least make it easy for others to share your pages on social media. Do you have your social media buttons in the best places to enable sharing? Spend five minutes looking at this. Move them around or change the plugin you use and see if you get a different response.

Advanced social media

With the help of Melbourne Designer Andrew Keir, I have recently changed my Tweet, Like, Google+, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon buttons from plugin to hard code. This has meant I’ve been able to do two things:

• My Twitter button now recommends you follow me if you don’t already (this really increases your Twitter followers)
• With a bit of extra code I can now track Tweets, Facebook Likes and more with Google Analytics

Only do the above if you’re happy adding code to your theme but it only takes five minutes and the results are awesome!

Google Webmaster Tools

You must add all your sites on Google Webmaster Tools. All you have to do is prove you have access to the site by uploading a file to the site’s root.

You’ll get the following from Google Webmaster Tools:

• Search Query Impressions vs. Clicks will show you your average position for a search term and how many impressions vs. clicks you get. So you can work out which terms are more relevant to your audience so that greater work on these terms will result in more targeted traffic.
• Incoming Links to Your Site will show you which sites link to you the most.
• The Keywords section will tell you what Google thinks your site is about.
• The Malware section will hopefully tell you that your site is virus-free, if not, do something about it now!
• The Crawl Errors section is very useful as it will show up any broken links on your site which you can fix to improve user experience.
• Be sure to notify Google of your Sitemap here as you can see how many pages in the sitemap are indexed (hopefully most of them).
• And more!

It’s always worth spending five minutes in Google Webmaster Tools, keeping an eye on your site’s performance and its SEO footprint.

Mailing list

Lastly, you’re not really doing marketing properly if you haven’t got a mailing list. And I know a lot of you procrastinate terribly with this all-important task.

But it is possible to set up a MailChimp mailing list and sign up form in five minutes. Alternatively you can set up an Aweber list and sign up form with an incentive.

What you can do

There should be some tasks above for beginner online business-owners as well as those who’ve been at it for years. Pick one task and complete it in five minutes! I would love to hear which task you picked and how you got on.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

As children we are told that we are worthless until we are taught properly and then we can be let out into the world. Then after education we, most likely, find ourselves working in an organisation for a very modest wage. At this point we have a value put on our time – and it’s extremely low.

But it’s not the real value. It is only a proportion of the value that the organisation and others place on that work. Your hourly rate at a creative company could be charged tenfold to the client.

So why don’t you charge higher prices to the client?

Fear

Fear is single most important factor that is holding us back.

• We don’t give our ideas an airing from fear of being laughed at
• We don’t follow our dreams from fear of failure
• We don’t ask for higher rates from fear of losing work, being laughed at, and failure!

Fear stop us from getting to where we want to be.

Also, there is a self-depreciating devil within most of us – a feeling that “higher rates and a higher levels of success are not for me“. We think that the real triumphs are for other people.

What to do about it

I am a great believer that design companies should diversify their business in order give their clients an all-round service.

But if you are worried that your clients may not require this you could offer them a choice

These prices don’t include domain name registration, hosting, maintenance or off-site SEO.

The above is a good example of how to give your clients choice when it comes to charging. The descriptions for the various services need to be fleshed out according to the client’s needs. But in each of the three above cases you can be sure that you can provide a valuable service to the client while getting paid your true worth.

Other important points about charging

• Always have an end in sight: In each of the three examples above there is a specific task which, when delivered according to the client’s expectations, will be the conclusion of the job.
• Charging: If it is a new client, I would usually charge 50% before and 50% after the task has been completed. Clients should pay within a week of invoicing.
• Over deliver: I usually give my clients a free complimentary copy of my premium e-book which will help them with blogging, SEO, social media and driving traffic and interest to their new website.
• Contracts: Try to keep the contract light but make sure it covers the basics (remember to include that you have the the right to bill pro rata for work completed in the unusual case of early termination).
• Do everything by email: Other than the contract, be sure to keep everything on email so you can refer to it later. Some jobs can grow from the original brief and, when this happens, it’s essential you can refer to something written down in order to ensure you will get paid fairly.
• Set a fixed price: Set the fixed price according to a “nightmare scenario” of how the job could progress. Make sure all the deliverables are agreed and written down. If the job proceeds swimmingly you could always offer your client money back.

Recently I surveyed over 35 online business owners about charging and billing and these were my findings: how graphic designers get paid.

What you can do

Do you perform a service that can be charged out to multiple clients? If so, write down details of service packages that can be provided, similar to the “bronze”, “silver” and “gold” packages in the table above. And then think of the price it would be considering the “nightmare scenario” of how the job could progress. The benefit of writing down these packages is that they can easily be copied and pasted to potential clients when you get enquiries.

More info about how graphic designers charge clients and make their money in my e-book.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So, what do you do? Purchase a Hostgator Reseller Account (affiliate link), charge your clients, sit back and watch the money come in? Right? Wrong!

I’ve been offering hosting services to my clients for years and this is NOT an easy way of making passive income. However, with the right systems, contracts, pricing and billing in place, it can be a mutually beneficial operation for you and your client.

Choose the right host

As you will be reselling the servers of an existing host you must choose a long-established host with a great reputation. Personally, I use one shared host to resell from: the Hostgator Reseller Account and one VPS host: Dreamhost VPS (both affiliate links). My shared hosting packages are cheaper as the hosting can be slower although, with Hostgator, I haven’t had many problems.

Read my articles on the best shared hosts for WordPress and best VPS for WordPress for other reliable hosts whose services you can resell.

Once you have the hosting set up it is extremely important that you put one of your own websites on the host you are reselling. See how you get on with this host. If you are using WordPress, see how it handles WordPress, plugins, caching, etc. If you are using this host adequately yourself you can then sell their hosting services.

Be clear to your client about the service you are offering

Remember, if something goes wrong with the hosting, you will be expected to put it right. Potential pitfalls can be avoided by perfect prior communication and hosting best practices.

Here are some of the many lessons I’ve learned while providing hosting services to clients:

• Downtime. All hosts have downtime and it’s important that your clients realise this. Thankfully, most downtime last for a few minutes but it’s important to choose a good host with good support so that you supply information about the downtime if it occurs. Use Pingdom to monitor this.
• Scale. A set amount of disc space and bandwidth should be discussed and agreed upon.
• Email. Use Google Apps for Business to route the email. You can charge a set-up fee for this and make sure your client understands that there will be ongoing fees if they exceed the 7.5 GB storage ceiling or require more than 10 email accounts.
• Maintenance. Bundle in your website maintenance with the hosting fees. It is in your interest to keep backing up and updating WordPress installs and plugins. If this is all done regularly there will be less problems. If you leave this to the client, it might not get done.
• Termination. Tell the client that they can terminate the contract or agreement at any time. But if this happens, either they arrange for the site to be moved or they pay for you to do so. Liaising with another host and moving a website can be a time-consuming process.

Domain name registration

I usually prefer the client to arrange the domain name registration but, if they prefer me to do this, I will.

Pricing and Charging

The price should be charged monthly or annually and should be paid by the client in advance, preferably via automatic transfer.

You should charge the client at least double what you are paying the host. So, if the reseller hosting costs you $30/month, you should charge the client at least $60/month for hosting and maintenance. This is regardless of how many other clients you have on the same server.

What you can do

Put together a plan for potential clients and what you could offer them. Remember to set the price with the worst case scenario in mind. Always use a hosting service that you have had lots of experience with. Find out more about how to run your own web design business from home in my e-book.

Do you resell hosting services for your clients? What are your experiences? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Keyword research and competitor analysis

Don’t stop reading just because it’s a boring subheading!!! This is actually very exciting, because you can find out how many people search for particular phrases on Google! I was amazed when I discovered this, but maybe that’s just me. Watch this video:

The above video shows you how to use Google’s keyword tool and SEOquake to find the best phrases to attract the most visitors. What do you think of the new video intro? Cheesy, eh?

The Google keyword tool

When it comes to SEO, the first thing you need to do is keyword research. This is an absolutely essential stage in the early lifecycle of an online business.

Don’t just guess what people are looking for – research it! Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to tell you how many people make certain searches every month.

This tool can help you analyse the demand for your products or services. Also, this tool can tell you the exact words your potential customers are using to search for businesses like yours.

So, in the example of the video, let’s say I’m a web designer in London, I should see how many searches are being made every month for those exact words.

As you can see from the image below, the exact words “web designer london” are searched for 880 times every month in Google. I’m always amazed by how accurate these results are! You can guarantee that there will be around 880 people searching for “web designer London” this March, this April, this May… etc.

How do I know how accurate this is? Because, if you hit the top spot you can guarantee about 30%-60% of that traffic, and when that happens the same amount of traffic comes in every month – almost as regularly as clockwork! (Of course, not if it’s a seasonal search term like “halloween costumes”.)

So, now that you understand exactly how powerful this tool is, there are some Google Keyword Tool tips:

• Always use [Exact] Match Type, not Broad (annoyingly the default) nor “Phrase”
• Choose the country you’re interested in for the Local Monthly Searches, otherwise just look at Global Monthly Searches
• Look for the “low hanging fruit”, monthly visitors in between 250 and 1250 (or ideally between 500 and 1000) because they have a decent search volume and are unlikely to have high competition
• Whilst looking at the suggestions for other keywords, you can order them by number of searches by clicking on the top of the search columns

Now that you, hopefully, have a few keyword ideas to target, it’s time to checkout the competition.

Keyword competitor analysis

The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t already, is to download the SEOquake add-on for Firefox. I would add here that I personally don’t use it on my main browser. This is because it does slow browsing down while it gets all the juicy information. After installing it go Tools > SEOquake > Preferences > and cut down the number of Parameters it shows – this’ll speed things up.

Look for the first parameter – the Google PageRank. If you’re looking down the top ten Google results and you see a load of PageRanks of 2′s, 1′s and 0′s, then bingo! You’ve got a keyphrase you can target!

Please be aware that Google PageRank isn’t the be-all-and-end-all measurement of the importance of pages. Try to look at other parameters such as how many links competitors’ sites have going into them. And, some results will be there because their on-page SEO is better for that particular search. This isn’t an exact science, but it’ll give you a good start when analysing your main competitors online.

You are looking for two things: first, a decent number of monthly searches with the Google Keyword Tool, and second, nice easy competition.

If you have found a few keyphrases you’d like to target you can move onto the next stage.

On page SEO

If you want your home page to get to the top of Google for “web designer London” then you have to optimize that page for the words “web designer London”.

You can do this by adding the phrase to the heading, title, first paragraph and body text of the page. More about on-page optimization in WordPress here.

Build links to the page with the keywords in the anchor text

Of course, we all know the value of getting links to our site. But when targeting certain keyphrases, it’s necessary to get some of those links pointing to you with the keywords in the anchor text. Like this (where “web designer London” is our targeted keyphrase):

<a href="http://robcubbon.com">web designer London</a>

But, don’t over do this! Don’t get hundreds of links pointing to your site with the same anchor text as that looks unnatural. Mix up the wording of the anchor text and be sure to include links with anchor text “click here” and “find out more about”. Include links with the domain as the anchor text. Link to the internal pages not just the home page. With new sites be especially careful not to “over-optimize” both the on-page and off-page SEO.

The above has been re-written to accommodate the changes made in April 24th to Google’s algorithm, call “Penguin”. This advice still holds out but avoid building too many links and make them look “natural” in terms of anchor text.

How to get links? Well, there’s a big topic! Here’s an article with some WordPress and SEO Tips to Get Links and Google Traffic.

Blogging, Relationships and Content Marketing

Obviously I can’t cover all the good practices needed in content creation and link building in this one post. I would always advise anyone with a website to start a WordPress blog as it is good marketing for your brand. Set up WordPress with SEO in mind. Make you sure write your blog posts in an SEO-friendly manner.

Form relationships with other bloggers in your niche. Help them promote their posts and they will help you promote yours.

All this blogging activity together with the above targeting strategy will pull in massive long tail search traffic connected to your target keywords.

I should mention at this point that good content will get you good links and good search engine rankings. It’s the ultimate technique that pretty much trumps all of the above!

You can do it!

Do you have a set of keywords you target for your home page? If you don’t, head over to the Google Keyword Tool to find some low hanging fruit!

Are you aware of your competition? If not, get the SEOquake add-on and check out the competition on a search term that describes your business. Can you beat ‘em? If so optimize the page and build some links to it. It’s surprisingly easy – just a few good links can make a lot of difference. But don’t over-egg the pudding. Find out more about how to get great clients for your business in my e-book.

Now, this is a thorny subject and I’m bound to have rubbed some SEO-types up the wrong way. So, I would love to hear you opinions in the comments. Be nice! Oh, and vote for the article if you liked it!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Asian economies comprise more than 4 billion people (60% of the world population) and you would have to have been living under a stone for the last 15 years not to have noticed the growing economic weight of the region.

I’m glad to see the rise of emerging markets and hope it restores some much needed balance to the world.

I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Asia. I’ve warmed to Asian philosophies, attitudes, diets, religions and medicines more than I have to those from the West. And, despite this being an English language blog, nearly a third of the readers here are Asian!

Don’t take the title of this article to mean that I see Asia as a “threat” or an “enemy” to my business or that Asian outsourcing is somehow a bad thing. It’s completely the opposite.

Interesting times

We’re living in an interesting time of commerce. The rise of internet technology has meant that Asian firms and individuals can compete much more freely with their European and North American counterparts. There has never before been a time when two people of equal abilities at opposite ends of the world – one who may need to charge $50/hour; the other $5/hour – are competing on an almost level playing field.

Not only are factory jobs being moved from the West to the East, but also middle class engineering jobs are going to Asia. Apple makes iPhones in China, for example, and we are only just beginning to see how these changes will affect all our lives.

A western design consultancy could charge $500+ for a logo to go on a website which can be bought from a designer in Malaysia for $5. Some sales copy could be charged at $500+ for 500 words in the US could also be written in the Philippines for $5. There will always be an argument about quality, of course, I’ll come back to that later.

While those of us in the West need to know how to compete against these prices, my readers from the East need to know how to get good Western clients.

Play to your strengths

At the moment work that’s outsourced most successfully to Asia is call center work, help desk/IT support, etc. However the quality of this work will continue to rise in the future.

Many people consider back-end developers from the Indian subcontinent to be of a very high standard but consider their front-end ability lacking. So, while Asian companies improve this side (and that won’t take them long!), you can point out to potential clients your front-end expertise.

The peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of the English language can work in favor of a native speaker. Sometimes only someone with total command of English can construct an English interface properly.

Whether your strengths include language, design or user experience, put these qualities at the forefront of your unique selling point.

Communicate to your clients that you understand the “why” of the job. This will increase the confidence the client has in you.

“Own” the whole job

Whatever your business does, it operates as a small part of a larger picture.

You may only be building web pages but, ultimately, these web pages are going to need SEO, social interactivity and all sorts of marketing if they’re going to be successful. Try to explain to your client that the best person to market a website is the person that built it. You may be designing some business cards. So, offer the client printing and delivery.

Try to branch out from your core business to the neighboring offshoots of the ecosystem so that you can “own” bigger processes and contracts.

Diversify your business so that you can offer your clients the whole package instead of
small bits of a larger job.

Always use clear and precise language when dealing with a client, as this shows you can be trusted with larger and larger processes.

Specialize

This may sound like a contradiction, advising you to specialize right after advising you to diversify. But I think you can do both.

It’s great for your clients to hear that you specialize in something that they want. Specialize in what you enjoy doing and provide these services to clients. Also, make sure you compete in terms of quality and not price.

Compete

You will never win when competing with price. Never put your prices as low as possible. You are much more likely to score big when competing on quality.

Think how your product is better than the next one. How there is a greater attention to detail with your work, how your years of experience produces better outcomes, how your client communication provides a better solution everytime.

This is how you can compete.

What to do now

Think of all the effects of outsourcing on your business now and double them. That’ll be reality very soon. Think of ways to embrace this new reality and how you can use it to your advantage to provide better products and services for your clients.

Think of what other companies are doing in the East and West in your sector now. What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong? Sometimes you can stand out from the crowd by providing just a little extra service. Read more about what you can to do get more clients in my book “How To Get Clients”.

I would love to hear what you think about this interesting subject.

And, if you enjoyed this article, please vote for it by way of a Tweet, a Like or a +1! Cheers!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I’ve been reading my post from year ago on my business plan for 2011 and it was very interesting although a bit general. However, in my business plan for 2012, I’m going to be much more specific about my objectives.

My business in 2011 – what did I achieve?

In all, 2011 was a good year. My client work carried on as usual although I was hoping to increase my passive income by more than I actually did. Earning money by providing design and marketing services to clients remains 95-98% of my business’s annual income.

Anyway, I’d like to go through my very general objectives of last year and see where I was successful and where I wasn’t.

1. Describing what I’m doing as a process – and outsourcing

As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, I’m a big fan of The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber (affiliate links).

These books really impressed upon me the need to see my business as a collection of processes that can be improved, documented and ultimately outsourced. Through excluding yourself from some of these processes you can free yourself to do other tasks to improve your business rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of client-based work.

While this is a beautiful theory, I’ve found putting it into practice in a design business like mine a challenge. Some of the design tasks I do for my clients are one-offs and are simply impractical to outsource. However, once you get your outsourcing hat on the opportunities to use oDesk and Elance present themselves more often (affiliate links). A tracing in Illustrator here; a bit of PHP code there; a bit of typing here; some PSD to HTML there – it all adds up. It can save you money, and more importantly, time.

I have found video an incredibly important tool to help me describe the processes behind my businesses. I have recently recorded a series of videos describing exactly how I create a WordPress website from scratch by using Genesis. You can view these videos at my YouTube channel and I have also written several blog posts about how to create your own WordPress theme.

Nowadays, whenever I perform any task that I know can be repeated by someone else, I make a video of it and put it on my YouTube channel. This way I’ve got documentation that will help me to outsource the task in the future as well as a video that can help other people.

2. Building relationships with other graphic design business owners

An extremely important part of business is forming mutually beneficial relationships and I have been fairly successful at this. One of the best things I did on the blog last year was a survey of other independent graphic designers who ran their own businesses like me. The results of this survey are here:

• What Designers Do, How They Make Money and Where They Find Clients
• How Graphic Designers Get Paid
• Graphic Designers’ Hardware, Software and Back-up

I contacted over 30 designers to do this and many of them were kind enough to tweet out and share the findings of the survey. Communicating with this group of business people has been hugely educational and if I have a question about any aspect of the business I can call on the shared expertise of these fellow professionals.

Also, this year I resolved to meet with more business-people face-to-face. This has been a very successful tactic. It’s always good to get out from behind your iMac and go and talk to people about your business in person. I have found several groups online that meet in London and I have secured some good clients this way as well!

3. Increase my passive income

This is the part of the business plan for which I had the highest hopes although, if I’m honest, had the most disappointing results. Having said that I’m certainly not downhearted and I will continue with this aim for many years to come.

My attempts at securing passive income from sales of my products as well as from affiliate commissions have been many and various. But the most successful have been sales of my own e-book How To Get Clients, and my affiliate promotions of my host Dreamhost and the WordPress theme I use Genesis.

Even so, I estimate my passive earnings for the year have been less than $1000.

However, this year I’m going to be much more specific with my objectives and more systematic with my approach to this side of the business.

4. Continuing to do what I’m doing at the moment – just better

It was very important that I didn’t let my eye off the ball and disregard my core business. I have continued to provide an excellent design and marketing service to my existing clients and gained some very good new ones. Not only have I increased my portfolio of clients I have also taken on bigger projects thanks to increased outsourcing.

My objectives for 2012

As promised my objectives for 2012 are going to be much more SMART, that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. And, instead of only setting annual goals, I’m going to review these goals half way through the year with a view to eventually making this a quarterly process.

SMART goals for 2012

So here are my specific, measurable, attainable, realistic objectives to be achieved by July 1st 2012:

• Passive income in the 6 months to July 1st 2012: $2000
• Monthly site visitors by July 1st 2012: 35,000 unique visitors per month
• Number of meetings attended with groups of business-people or “mastermind” groups by July 1st 2012: 5
• Number of new clients securing revenue of over $1000 by July 1st 2012: 4

I’ve set these goals deliberately very high. The passive income will basically need to quadruple. Monthly unique visitors to this site needs to increase from 27,500 to 35,000 – quite a leap. I need to get myself out to 5 group meetings with business people – that’s nearly one a month (certainly achievable). And 4 new clients securing revenue of over $1000 by July 1st 2012 is a tough one – I had 6 such new clients in the whole of 2011!

More goals for 2012

And there are a number of specific actions that I hope will benefit my business and I want to achieve these very soon.

• Create another free e-book similar in size to How to Market Yourself Online about running a design business
• Release another premium e-book similar in size to How To Get Clients about running a design business
• Create one, possibly two, membership sites
• Create 10-15 new websites
• Start Skype-based interviews and podcasting

Creating free and premium e-books won’t be too difficult as I’ve nearly finished writing the text and creating an interactive PDF e-books and selling digital products is something I’ve done before. I have also made a membership site before, however creating the content will be time consuming. I will need to employ all my outsourcing skills to create 10-15 new websites! Plus, I’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from other people’s interviews and podcasts so it’s time for me to do this – I already have some great people lined up.

Further metrics for 2012

So, now that I’ve got the important goals and objectives assigned, I thought it might be a bit of fun to see how some other metrics will be on July 1st 2012:

• My Twitter followers: 950. Although I have undeniably learned loads and been introduced to amazing people at Twitter I have taken a step back from daily engagement with it as it was becoming a severe time-killer. Having said that, I’m still getting traffic from Tweets and my followers are increasing slowly but steadily although I’ve never tried to attract followers by following loads of people and hoping that they follow back. So, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.
• My YouTube Channel, subscribers: 50; video views: 33,000. As I’ve already said above, I’m finding video an increasingly useful medium for explaining the processes behind our business. The YouTube Channel has really taken off in the last few weeks so this is something I’ll be putting more time and effort in to.
• LinkedIn connections: 350. LinkedIn is a social network that I have found incredibly useful for getting pertinent advice – I have also started a group there called Niche Site Marketing. I’m not sure if the number of connections you have there matters a great deal but I thought I’d include it here anyway.
• Facebook page Likes/Fans: 138. Facebook has been the social network I’ve struggled with the most but I do seem to be getting a bit more traction and traffic from my Facebook page now.
• Subscribers to RobCubbon.com: 3,016. One of the most satisfying things I have been doing this last year is communicating with the readers here via the emails I send out. I find I’m getting some great and encouraging feedback from people and it’s a great privilege that so many people have signed up to receive these emails.
• My Google+ Profile: 744. And lastly, this may be the most important metric of all. If Google is going to be using the Google+ data in SEO the number of people that have you in circles in Google+ will be extremely important!

Feel free to join me in any of the above places! I’m not going to set any goals for these particular metrics but if would be great if I could get 5,000 subscribers by July 1st, 2012!

Thank you!

Most importantly, I have to thank you for everything. Because, this site or any of my other sites are nothing without the visitors. So I would like to thank you all for reading, commenting, subscribing to the newsletter and writing me emails – as I have received some lovely, encouraging messages this year and I really appreciate them.

What you can do

Get a pen and paper and write down specific, measurable and realistic goals you would like to achieve this year and put it somewhere special that you won’t forget. I promise you that doing this will help you achieve your dreams this year!

I wish you a happy and successful 2012!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

There is certainly no need to be daunted by a financial barrier to entry when starting your own web design company. Don’t be put off by the price of Photoshop or the whole Creative Suite – there’s loads of free software for web designers that can help you keep costs down.

Online image editors

Photoshop is the application that is potentially the biggest financial outlay for a web designer. But there are a few online image editors out there. Pixlr is one of the best. FotoFlexer is also worth a try.

Open source alternatives to Creative Suite

There are free open sources versions of Creative Suite applications. GIMP has been around for a long time and boasts plugins, brushes and tools to extend the basic functionality of the software. Pixelmator is not free but is cheap compared to Photoshop.

Inkscape, which is popular with the Linux community, is a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator. This free vector graphics manipulator produces SVG files without unnecessary code to a reduced file size.

Text and code editors

Aside from an image editor, a web designer will always be in need of a good code editor. There are cheap alternatives to Dreamweaver such as Textmate and Coda.

Obviously there are the free text editors available with the operating systems such as Notepad which comes with Windows and TextEdit which comes with OS-X. I’ve been really impressed with Text Wrangler which has a multi-file search & replace feature that is really handy.

FTP

For me, it’s Filezilla all the way. Easy to use and quick. It used to not be available for Mac so in the old days I used Cyberduck. I miss that yellow duck icon!

If you don’t want to download an app there’s net2ftp which gives you an FTP client in your browser. There’s even a skin designed for the iPhone.

File Sharing

If you want to deliver large files to a client there are a host of free services, I use YouSendIt. And to store files on the cloud to access from multiple devices you can use DropBox. For downloading torrents there’s µTorrent for Mac and BitTorrent.

Images

There are lots of places to get great free stock photography, stock.xchage and Flickr Creative Comms search are two of my favorites.

There are lots of great free vector resources but, instead of searching through these resources, I find a Google image search for “free vector” does the trick. Likewise, it’s not always necessary to get a free vector logo from Brands of the World but just Google the logo you want with “vector” in the search query.

Fonts

You can pick up free fonts at DaFont and a host of other places. WhatTheFont can identify a font from an image.

Google Fonts now has a catalog of around 300 excellent fonts that will work across most browsers with just a line of code in the head and a CSS declaration.

Compare and contrast the fonts with TypeTester.

Grids

If you like to use grids in your web design (or even if you don’t) then check out 960 Grid System where you can download grid templates in HTML & CSS, Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, etc. All these grids are for websites that are 960 pixels wide.

Web developer tools

These are a standard fare for most web designers with many of us using these tools many times a day:

• Firebug – awesome Firefox add-on that will inspect and change HTML and CSS and help you de-bug JavaScript.
• Developer Tools for Chrome and Internet Explorer – these do about the same as Firebug and are bundled with their respective browsers. Handy for working out IE hacks.
• Web Developer add-on for Firefox and Chrome – ultra handy add-on that can disable styles, disable browser default styles (handy for cross-browser compatibility), show alt text for images, resize window, validate, etc. The list is endless.

Web design online “must-haves”

The above mentioned HTML and, to a lesser extent, CSS Validators that can be reached with one click using the Web Developer add-on are services that most web designers will use all the time.

Other online services of huge importance to the web designer are Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Docs.

Cross browser checks

You can check websites across different browsers at BrowserShots and Adobe BrowserLab. ViewLikeUs allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats.

Speed

In order to analyse your page speed, use Google’s PageSpeed (try to get your score up to 100) and Yahoo!’s Y!slow.

Downtime

Use Pingdom‘s free service to be instantly informed of any downtime on your site so you can contact your host and sort it out asap!

Email marketing

I’m not sure if this really comes under the heading of “web designing” but with 2,000 subscribers for free, MailChimp is an awesome free email sending service.

Color

Color Scheme Designer can help you choose complimentary colors for your website designs.

Billing

Freshbooks tracks your time and invoices your clients automatically, saving you time and getting you paid quicker. Mint tracks all your business finances and transactions and has a free mobile app. Square will accept credit card payment off you mobile phone.

CMSs

The best things in life are free – but then again you tend to forget how amazing they are because you don’t have to pay for them! The best ones are, obviously, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla but there are loads of incredible free Content Management Systems that power most of the web.

Video

Also going under the title of “Been around so long I almost forgot about them” are the free video storage services YouTube and Vimeo, etc. If it wasn’t for these services we’d spend ages uploading our video to servers or paying services like Amazon S3 to host them for us.

Give me your suggestions!

Is there any free software you use that I have missed out? Please give me your suggestions in the comments section below. And, if you enjoyed this article, please vote for it by Tweeting, Facebook Liking or Google +1′ing it!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

How much should graphic designers or design companies specialize? Should they hone their skills and expertise to a particular niche? Or should they provide a range of services for their clients?

Starting out

When a graphic designer first starts out as a freelancer or when a new graphic design company has just set up, the temptation is to take any work that is offered. This is only natural, especially in a flat economy.

However, a lot of the designers I have spoken to about this say that pretty soon afterwards they were drawn to an area of design that they enjoyed the most.

If I asked you to think of a designer that does logos and brand identity you may well think of David Airey. David urges caution at first, “I think when you’re learning, it’s important not to limit yourself to a niche. The more you know about design in general, the better equipped you are when it comes to specialising.”

Knowing more about design and the experience of designing helps you to choose your speciality but, as Karen McDade points out, experience teaches you to choose your clients carefully as well:

“When I started freelancing a few years ago I took any work that came my way in an effort to build my business. After a while I had a lot of clients but, because I wasn’t selective, some of them were less than desirable. I ended up working long hours for all these clients who wouldn’t pay me on time (or at all). I was quite naïve and trusted in their word that they would eventually pay up. It came to ahead one night when, at about 3am, I realised I was working way too hard for the level of income I was actually bringing in.”

Having streamlined her clients, Karen now provides a better service to them and her portfolio has improved as a result. I can certainly attest to the importance of keeping good clients and letting the low quality, late paying clients go.

How do I specialize?

How do you choose the area of design to specialize in? Most designers say that this happens naturally as you are drawn to a particular area as it is particularly interesting or enjoyable for you.

Chris Spooner says, “I think it’s important to find a specialism, but it’s up to the designer to figure out how wide or narrow their specialism will be. For instance some designers might only offer design services in a very specific niche, which can establish them as the go-to expert in that field, whereas other designers might offer a wider range of services under the umbrella of a particular aspect of design, which obviously increases their potential client base. It all boils down to the designer’s interests and what kind of work they enjoy creating.”

I think Chris is absolutely right here. Seek out what you enjoy doing.

What do I specialize in?

An example of a particular niche would be WordPress websites and themes.

Mike Smith explains this: “I was someone who did a bit of everything when starting out. Ad Banners, CD covers, Flyers, Website headers (yes, just he headers lol), etc. I stumbled on WordPress and started building sites for myself and just learned the ins and outs of it so much that it only seemed right to offer WordPress themes as a service. Once that took off and started doing well, I started doing less and less of the other stuff. Nowadays I spend 90% of my days working with WordPress: Designing themes, coding my own themes, PSD to WP for other people, etc. I like specializing because it gives me the ability to focus on one thing and do it really well – people like that ”

Your speciality can be any aspect of design: logos, brand identity, WordPress themes, WordPress and SEO, print collateral, anything!

However, designers tend to specialize in one aspect of design. Not in any particular industry. None of the designers who I spoke to specialized in a specific niche industry like education, retail or pharmaceuticals, for example. This may have happened with larger design companies in the recent past but not, it seems, with smaller design companies and independent designers now.

Taking it to the next level

So, you’ve specialized in your favorite aspect of design, what next? This isn’t the end of the story.

For instance, Adii Rockstar (I’m not sure if that’s his real name), specialized in creating WordPress themes and then hooked up with a couple of other guys and created WooThemes – a hugely successful theme company that have sold over 80,000 themes. Both Chris Pearson, the creator of the Thesis Theme and Brian Gardner, the creator of the Genesis Theme, have taken design to the next level by creating scalable businesses.

Here, Douglas Bonneville describes how he was able to turn his “active” design skills into “passive income”: “I really started to think about a product, and how I could step back from the crowd and say, ‘how can I help graphic designers and not so much clients anymore?’ I focused on treating myself as a client, producing my eBook and a few apps focused on typography. Things have gone extremely well since then, and I’d never go back!”

So, it is also possible to find a speciality that is beyond the client work and focusses on selling products.

And finally…

I hope this has given you a few ideas about how you can develop, specialize and grow your business – whether it’s to do with design or not. Are you specializing in anything at the moment? Can you think of an area you particular enjoy that you would like to move into? What can you do to make sure you can get more work and specialize in that area?

As always, I would love to hear your opinions in the comments below. And, I would appreciate a tweet or a vote.

Thank you to all the designers who participated in this that weren’t mentioned above, for example Derek Kirk from Web Designers London, Randa Clay from Randa Clay WordPress Design, Lynne Venart from The Art Monkey, Kyle Richardson and Craig Wilson.

Read more about running your own design business from home in my e-book “Running a Web Design Business.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

There has never been a better time to start an online business.

Many people ask me what skills and abilities you need to do this. Obviously you need the technical skills necessary to create the product or perform the service you are selling. But that isn’t even half the story.

Here are the skills that I have found to be indispensable:

The ability to write articles

If you ask me to give you one piece of advice that will earn you the most money when starting an online business it would be to blog for business.

The trick is to make the articles as useful as possible because the best SEO for a website is good content. These articles will draw in organic interest in you – some of this interest will be from potential clients.

Everyone can do this. A blog is a great way to find out what works and what doesn’t. If you keep on writing you will improve.

The ability to spell korektli

This may sound obvious but I have found that people will not want to employ someone who makes spelling, grammar or punctuation errors.

The ability to touch type

This is something you don’t hear a lot about but I think it’s an indispensable skill. I’m going to show my age here but I missed the first few matches of the 1990 World Cup to go to evening classes to learn touch typing on an electric typewriter!

You can do this online for free now – so no need to miss important sporting events. Just do a few hours of exercises learning where the keys are so you don’t have to look down at the keyboard when typing. After that it’s practice.

The ability to listen

I know I probably shouldn’t say this but I’m really not the best designer in the world. There, I said it! But I have great clients that come back to me again and again. And the reason for this is that I listen to them properly and give them what they want.

You need to put yourself in the client’s shoes and see things from their point of view. This isn’t only true with graphic design. It’s true with any online business. Put yourself in your client’s, your customer’s or your visitor’s shoes and see your service, your product or your website from their point of view.

The ability to manage client and customer expectations

“Under promise, over deliver.” OK, we’ve heard this one a million times but I try to build this into every project I do and I know it works. Try to surprise the client by giving them something that they didn’t ask for but really appreciate and they’ll keep on coming back to you.

Of course, allied to this is the necessity of keeping your client and yourself in complete agreement of the price and extent of the project at every stage. And you need to have a written record of this.

The ability to cross sell

Cross selling is the practice of selling to established clients or customers. So, when you’re buying from Amazon you will always be offered other relevant items.

This doesn’t only apply to products but I apply this to graphic design services as well. For example, if someone wants website design I will offer them hosting and maintenance.

The ability to contribute to the community

When you are starting an online business it’s easy to get a bit isolated but there is a great solution for this.

Use forums, blog commenting and social media to communicate with other people in your business niche. This means helping people and learning from people. It’s a two way exchange and this is the best way to form partnerships and alliances that will help grow your business.

This is not just online. Contribute face-to-face with local business people as much as you can, as well.

The more you help people; the more people will help you.

The ability to systematize

Systematize – ugly word, beautiful concept.

This means the skill in developing systems in your daily work that can be written down or recorded in order to speed up or outsource the process. There are only so many hours in the day for you to grow your business so your success will be determined by your ability to create systems that can be learned and replicated.

In the business of graphic design people will say: “I can’t do that – every client is different, every design is different – there’s no way I can replicate or outsource design.” Maybe not for the extremely creative aspects of the job but for everything else you can!

The ability to organize your time

Like many business owners, I have never found it difficult to get out of bed in the morning and start working. But, like many business owners, I have found it difficult to stop working!

You have to be able to organize and block off your time to perform certain tasks (many people find 25 minute “Pomodoros” useful). Continually review the important parts of your business machine – what needs to be done now and what needs to be done to speed things up in the future.

Read books

Well, you need to gather information from wherever you can get it but the two books that have been in my mind whilst writing this article are:

• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber

The ability to take action

Matthew Ogbourne just told me through Google+. All the above are luxuries compared to the core requirement – action.

He’s absolutely right. Yes, in order to start an online business you need action. Just do it!

What about you?

Do you run an online business? Are there any skills you have needed (other than your technical skills) that have surprised you? Let me know in the comments below.

More info about this subject in my Running A Web Design Business e-book.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

There has never been a better time to start a web design business. Although the western world’s economy is stagnant and demand flat the opportunities for entrepreneurs are enormous. If you have a passion and love for the internet, you can do it.

You don’t need a lot (in fact you just need a laptop, phone, electrical supply and decent internet connection) but here’s what I’ve learned in the last few years.

Business

In order to have a successful web design business you need to attract good clients. Trust me, the attitude of “any client is a good client” will not get you very far. By all means, give the same great service to all clients both big and small, but you will need regular and quality work and you are more likely to get this from quality clients. And “quality clients” are usually – but not always – from quality companies.

Either way, you need to look, talk and act professionally at all times. You will never get anywhere by being “cheap and cheerful”.

• Open your own business bank account with your business’s name. If you set yourself up as a freelance, you’ll earn a freelance wage. The bigger and more professional your company looks, the better it will be for you.
• Design your own logo. I’ve found designing my own logo to be one of the hardest jobs ever but it has to be done. Put this logo everywhere: on your invoices; your contracts; in your email signature.
• Purchase a domain and use it for your website and email address. If you want to be taken seriously you must purchase you own domain (from GoDaddy or NameCheap, for example) and then have an email address which is you@yourdomain.com.
• Build your own website advertising your services. You will need to spend a lot of time on this. I would advocate using WordPress for your business website and use a blog to attract business.

The paint is never dry on a designer’s logo or website. You should be continually looking for ways to improve your website as it is the hub of your brand. If you haven’t started blogging then start now. Write about what you do – it’s a fantastic way to get clients from long tail keyword searches.

How to get clients

Getting clients and establishing a steady work flow is the hardest and most important challenge your web design business will face. Your best clients are your current clients as you will find people will come back to you after you’ve done a good job for them. But, how do you start the ball rolling?

• Attract clients through your website. This is the best way to do it. Work hard on SEO and building links to your website with “web designer” in the anchor text. Make sure all your online activity points back to your website. Nurture your relationships with other designers as well as with potential clients online.
• Get work through social media. To be honest, I have never got much work from Twitter or LinkedIn, however I have found developing relationships on social media with designers and other professionals indispensable in terms of what it’s taught me.
• Meet potential clients offline by joining professional groups. As much as I’ve had great success getting clients online, you can never beat face-to-face interaction. It may take you a while to find out which where your potential clients will be hanging out but the Meetup website can help.
• 3rd party sites. I’ve never been a big fan of these sites and I certainly don’t use them myself but other people do so I will mention a few here. Try PeoplePerHour, oDesk and Elance.

The best network is your network. Most business comes from contacts you already have. But constantly strive to attract potential clients by performing well in the search engines for certain keywords.

You may like to read my survey on how designers work, how they find clients and how they get paid.

Skills

I can’t tell you here how to design a website. You do need technical and creative skills. But, surprisingly, these are NOT the most important skills you need.

• Listening to and understanding clients. The most important skill is your ability to master client relationships. You need to put yourself in the client’s shoes and deliver exactly want the client wants and no more and no less. Lots of designers suffer as they think they know what’s best for the client. The first rule of graphic design is to listen. Don’t ever get carried away with your talent and think that you know everything.
• Understanding the web and UI. The reason you are doing this job is because you have a love of the internet. Make sure you harness that love correctly. Always think of the users as well as the client when you are designing.
• Creativity. You shouldn’t only be creative in your designs to develop your style. You should be creative in your relationships, your marketing and every possible area of your business life. Don’t get stale and always look for fresh challenges.
• Ability to write well for the web. Another skill that is not often mentioned is the ability to touch type and write well for the web. Your clients will thank you if you re-write areas of their website so that they work better and you need to always write good English with correct spelling and grammar in your emails.
• Technical skills. At the very least you will need to master HTML and CSS as well as a graphics program such as Photoshop or Fireworks. HTML shouldn’t take you long to master. CSS will take a little longer. Use Firebug in Firefox and Developer Tools in Chrome and Internet Explorer to give you a start. You may like to progress onto JavaScript, PHP, or whatever you are interested in. Try W3Schools for tutorials. The trick is to keep learning. And not just about website design – it’s about designing email, mobile sites and apps for iPhone, Android and iPad.

Tools

I did a survey recently and discovered some interesting facts about the hardware, software and backup graphic designers use. Certainly everyone’s different. Don’t worry, you don’t have to use Macs but unfortunately most of them use Creative Suite.

• Hardware – The type of computer you get is largely up to you. I’ve been very happy using iMacs for the last few years. I also need a PC for testing. I would urge you to max out your RAM, disc space and broadband connection, but … we all have our budgets!
• Software – Although it is perfectly possible to run a design business with no software at all I wouldn’t recommend it. Most of us use some sort of text editor (Dreamweaver, TextMate), some sort of graphics program (Photoshop) and some sort of FTP client (Filezilla).
• Backup – Not strictly necessary, but incredibly handy. I would advise backing up onsite with an external drive and offsite with something like Dropbox.

Self motivation

Personally, I couldn’t think of anything better than working for yourself at home so I’ve never found motivation a problem.

However, for some people it is and you can learn how to work from home successfully by exercising and organising your time properly.

Collaboration

Since you are working in splendid isolation it’s always great to meet up with other web designers. You can moan about Microsoft together (very therapeutic), exchange jobs and help each other out with bugs and other problems. I have this relationship with Derek Kirk who lives near me in north London. Derek runs a couple of great sites called creative web design and web designers London.

It’s also good to form partnerships with all sorts of professionals and experts. These are great as a sounding board for ideas and to exchange advice and work. Try to network on behalf of your clients as well as on behalf of your other contacts.

Payment

Don’t forget at the end of the day you are running a web design business to get money. Whether you are charging fixed-rate fees or hourly/daily/weekly rates you should be charging at least twice as much as you would earn in a normal job to complete the same task. You will never be able to do web design for 8 hours a day so the charging structure should reflect this.

Make sure the price as well as the nature and extent of a web design job is properly recorded in emails or in a contract. You may like to insist on half the fee upfront with new clients.

Finding and developing your niche

As with most design work you may want to specialise into a certain type of client or a certain type of web work. This may come as a result of your passions or you may be moved in a certain direction by the tide of work that comes your way. Whilst it’s good to specialise you should always be alert to the new developments and opportunities within the industry.

Diversify and outsource

There are many ways to diversify your design business. You can offer your clients hosting, social media packages, email marketing, website maintenance, SEO services, copy writing, etc. you can branch out into a host of different directions. If you are asked to do something by a client it is usually a good idea to say “yes”. This way you can get paid to learn a new skill. Sometimes it may be possible to outsource new services.

You can do it!

I’ve wanted to write this article for ages and I’m very glad I’ve written it. I would really love to see you, the person who is reading this, try to earn money this way because it certainly beats working for somebody else.

You can start anywhere, anytime, anyhow. You just need a website. Even if you have a fulltime job at the moment or if not, you can start this work in your spare time (as I did) and take it from there.

I don’t want to make out that it’s easy. Of course, you have to work hard. But I have been getting paid to do something I really love so it would be great to see other people benefitting from this unique opportunity of our times.

If you have any experiences or you would like some help in this area, please leave a comment down below.

And don’t forget to click one of those nice sharing buttons too!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the best time ever to start and grow your own business. Lack of demand forces businesses to get creative. During the good times when the phone rings off the hook and orders are flooding in, energies are directed towards coping with work flow.

I have found diversification has increased my revenue substantially. The online landscape is constantly changing and clients need a helping hand to negotiate their way.

Graphic designers are incredibly lucky to have so many allied skills and services branching out from the core discipline.

People who start websites will want SEO services. Businesses who are having promotional materials printed will want copy checking, writing and editing services. And if you are at all interested in marketing, then there is social media to negotiate.

Here are some new ways where you can make more money whilst whilst you deliver core design services.

Text editing / Copy checking

Design clients are often busy people. They know what they want to say but they sometimes don’t have the time to say it properly. Very often text supplied by the client can be modified quickly and easily.

This is a service you can provide to any client quite cheaply. An extra pair of eyes can check for spelling and punctuation errors as well as keep a provide a consistent tone to the text. I have found clients to be very happy to pay a little extra for this service.

Writing

Sometimes the customers I work with can’t afford to get their text written by a professional copywriter. When I can see they are struggling with poorly worded copy I will always offer my copywriting services.

If you spend everyday writing you get better at it and I’m a much better writer than I was even 2 years ago. So, write, and keep writing! You will develop skills that your clients will be only too happy to pay for.

SEO

When designing and developing a website for a client, it’s usually sensible to think about SEO right from the get-go.

As always, you’ll need to understand your client’s market and products properly and research what keywords will work best for them and build this into their optimised website. I offer this as part of my basic website package.

Once you know what keywords your client needs to target and which pages are optimised for which subject, you use this information to offer your client an effective link building campaign.

If you would like to outsource link building there are some great low cost companies that will do this for you. Try oDesk and search for link-builders and SEO specialists. You can also find some great deals at Warrior Forum classifieds, BackLinkForum and Fiverr.

Whether you are choosing someone on oDesk or a service on a forum it is essential that you read carefully all the reviews on these sites and only choose those with positive recent comments.

Social media

OK, I know the world doesn’t need any more “social media experts” but you can offer your clients some useful packages. If your client is setting up a new website you could easily offer a social media package that could include:

• Setting up a Twitter profile with background image and colors in keeping with the client’s identity
• Automating some features of the Twitter feed using services like SocialOomph and Dlvr.it
• Creating a Facebook landing page that prompts people to “Like”, sign up to a newsletter or has a jQuery image slider
• Automating your client’s Facebook wall to display their blog posts as soon as they are published by using Networked Blogs or RSS Grafitti apps
• Starting a YouTube channel with color and background image in keeping with their website

Use productivity techniques that you have learned syncing social media for yourself on your clients and they will love you for it!

Offer different types of web service

People are looking beyond the traditional blog being the hub of their online presence. iPhone and Android apps are a huge growth area you can move into. In addition, there are plenty of other website types you can specialise in:

• e-Commerce sites – Although there are some solid WordPress plug-ins you can use for e-Commerce sites, a large shopping cart would probably be better handled by a dedicated shopping CMS like Magento
• Membership sites – Offer your clients the ability to build a membership site with WordPress and WishList Member
• Multi-lingual sites – Give you clients the option of adding a multi-lingual WordPress site with WPML
• Social sites – You can even offer clients their own social network with Buddy Press
• Forums – Forums can be a lot of work to get going but are fantastically easy to set up with phpBB, BBpress, or vBulletin

In addition to offering different types of website you can offer complete domain registration, web hosting and email hosting packages.

• Domain registration – this is a service you can offer your client that will actually save you time. I have sometimes found it very difficult to get a client to change the name servers on a domain. By taking charge of the domain registration using a company like Namecheap you have control over everything
• Web hosting – when you host the client’s website on your own server it is easier to maintain and you can receive almost passive income for hosting and maintenance
• Email hosting – use Google Apps for Business to host your client’s email
• Email marketing – offer email marketing and list building services by using MailChimp and Aweber

There are a host of other internet services you can offer your client within the basic design and development package. Also, you will learn how to provide some of these services by being asked to do them for the first time by a client. As your knowledge and ability increases the more you can offer to clients. This is huge!

Offer packages

Your client sometimes doesn’t want you to do one little task in their big project. There are enormous economies of scale and consistency benefits to be had if one company handles as many things as possible. Be that company! Offer your client complete packages so they receive a portfolio of services at a reasonable price.

Tell us what you do?

Do you run a graphic design business, any other type of online business or do freelance work on the side? How have you diversified to earn extra money? Have you outsourced? Is there another area of business you’d like to move into soon?

Find out more about how to run your own design business from home in my e-book.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

WordPress is the best CMS (Content Management System) for business websites. There are many successful business websites that use WordPress, for example Ford, The Wall Street Journal and Sony. WordPress is usually chosen to power a company’s website because

• it creates websites that are well-structured for SEO and can rank highly in search engines
• it can be easily updated by multiple individuals with no knowledge of HTML
• it is the most popular CMS on the planet creating a community of users and developers that can help you out if ever in need

A business site should have a home page that explains the USP of the company in a few words. From this page users can easily navigate to other areas of the site to find out further information about products and services.

Every website should fulfil a purpose. The point of many business websites is to generate leads or get people to contact the business so that they might purchase something.

I try to get business owners to condense their pages in the top navigation down to 5 or 6. These will include, typically, a Home page, an About page, a Blog and a Contact page as you can see below on a site I designed recently for an IT company.

The static pages are the “shop window on the world” that should be endlessly tested, updated and improved. However, the more important pages are in the blog which should include compelling content that prospects will value. This will be the content that draws in traffic and converts visitors into clients.

Here are some tips and techniques that I’ve used for many company’s websites.

Put keywords in the site’s title

In the WordPress administration section go Settings > General and, instead of putting your company’s name (for example, “Harrison and Sons”), put some words about what the company does (for example, “Widget Manufacturers, Harrison and Sons”). This will increase your chances of being found in Google by people searching for “Widget Manufacturers”.

Create a static page for your home page and a separate section for your blog

Still in the WordPress back end, go to Pages > Add New and create a new page. With our example you would maybe entitle that page “Widget Manufacturers, Harrison and Sons” and create an eye-catching and succinct synopsis of what value you give to your clients with links to other pages in the site for further information.

Again, go to Pages > Add New and create a new page with the title “Blog” and publish it.

Then go to Settings > Reading and select your static page (as per our example “Widget Manufacturers, Harrison and Sons”) for the Front Page and select the “Blog” page for Posts Page.

This way visitors to the home page will see a well-presented business website. But the blog will eventually draw in new visitors as fresh content does better in search engines.

Contact page

If getting visitors to contact the company through the website is the main objective of the site, then you should have a clear call-to-action on the Contact page. Mention how contacting your business will result in a quick benefit for the visitor. You may wish to offer a 10 minute free consultation, this would increase the number of contacts.

Offer as many ways to contact you as possible:

• Phone (with international code)
• Mobile
• Contact Form
• Email address

With the email address, don’t just give out your email address or even present it in the mailto: tag. This will attract spam. Instead you can cloak it with this bit of JavaScript which will open your prospect’s email client and start an email with the word “Enquiry” as the subject. This will help you track the effectiveness of this page.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var username = "rob";
var hostname = "robcubbon.com";
var linktext = username + "@" + hostname;
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + username +
"@" + hostname + "?subject=Enquiry" + ">" + linktext + "</a>")
//--></script>

Replace “rob” and “robcubbon.com” above with your email name and domain. Here is how the above JavaScript appears in the browser:

Always use an email address with the same domain as the company, never use a free email service like Gmail for a business website.

The best techniques to use in business websites

Company websites need to walk the line between being professional enough to attract big businesses and down-to-earth enough to build a community that will comment and promote the site. There are various things you can do to achieve this:

• Turn off comments on pages but keep them on the blog posts
• Have a call-to-action in the sidebar with further reasons for prospect to contact you. For example: “we can either help or be able to recommend other companies for you”
• Other “Hire Us” links in the top navigation bar or in a Hello Bar. These extra calls-to-action should be subtle, well thought out and continuously tested. You shouldn’t put them everywhere and look too desperate!
• Do not have any ads on the site! Particularly not on the home or static pages.
• Use WordPress page templates to get rid of the blog-like sidebar from the home or portfolio pages.
• Social proof. Create a testimonial page including quotes from other companies that have used your services and have positive thing to say.

What about you?

Do you WordPress as a straightforward blogging tool. Or do you get clients to contact you through your WordPress website?

Do you employ any tips or techniques to get prospects to contact you?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Your time is so precious and you have big plans. Here are 10 things you can do that will, hopefully, get you where you want to be … quicker! These tips will:

• improve your online presence
• improve the professionalism of your companies, and
• improve your network and create better relationships

These tasks will take only a short amount of time but, if initiated correctly, can work for you in the months and years ahead.

The following list is not meant to be a substitute for the basic principles of listening, providing value, developing relationships, diversifying, protecting against weaknesses and threats, evaluating strengths and opportunities and pursuing SMART objectives.

These are, however, specific actionable tasks that can help you build your online empire and none of them should take much more than 10 minutes.

1. Email signature

Make sure your email signature contains

• your company logo
• what your company does (website design, SEO, print, email, etc.) maybe some people don’t know the extent of what you do – this is a non hasslely way of telling them
• links to your website (maybe your Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever links are important to you)

Make sure the whole thing looks good and that the colors are consistent with your website. They can be tricky things to sort out and can appear differently in different email clients but it’s worth spending 10 minutes sorting this out. It could get you new work and thousands of dollars!

2. Press release

If you are about to start your online business or have done recently, you can do no better than write a compelling and newsworthy press release and submit it to PRLog, PressReleasePoint, i-Newswire and other free online press services. If you haven’t just started, you can write one about the developments in your business or site.

Your press release along with it’s nofollow links back to your site will be available to tens of thousands of media professionals and, more importantly, Google.

3. Automate social bookmarking

Are you spending ages submitting your links to social bookmarking sites, Twitter and Facebook? Automate this process with Ping.fm, OnlyWire and Bookmarking Demon.

These services may be a hassle to set up but an automated bookmarking service will save you countless hours in the future.

4. Leave blog comments

You should always leave a few comments every week on other sites in your niche to cement your authority and visibility. However, why not get a little extra juice with the search engines while doing this? On CommentLuv sites you can get a dofollow link and choose the anchor text. Google this plus your keywords to find them:

“Enter YourName@YourKeywords” [+ your keywords]

Always leave a comment that asks a question and/or adds something to the debate.

5. Get your YouTube channel in search engine results

Have you made loads of great videos and your disappointed with the viewing figures? You can improve the PageRank of your video channel by adding comments to those that have a high PageRank. To start with install the SEO Quake plug-in (you may like to install this on your “secondary” browser). This shows you PageRank and other information for the links provided by Google in a search.

Then Google this to find the YouTube channels that allow comments:

“channel comments” site:youtube.com [+ your keywords]

Select, with the aid of SEO Quake the channels with PageRank of 4 or more and get commenting on channels in your niche.

6. Ask a customer why (s)he chose your service/product

Has someone contacted you through a search engine? Ask them what they entered to find you and write more blog posts with those keywords.

So simple. So effective. So do it.

7. Think up some great blog post titles

Head over to StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious and see what’s top of the pops. Can you steal the titles and change the words around to make them original. Where do you think I got “10 Ways To Improve Your Online Business” from?

8. Write an email to a blogger/competitor/industry expert you admire

The higher up you go; the nicer people get. If you write an intelligent, thought-provoking, precise email to a successful person, 9/10 times you’ll get a reply. Don’t ask for anything, just do it.

9. Brainstorm/Mind map/Notebook/Whiteboard

Always carry a pad of paper and pen around with you so if you get a killer idea (a idea for a great article or a great concept for your business) you can write it down before you forget it.

Before you start a project, spend 10 minutes to mind map your ideas on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard. Don’t know what a mind map is?

Here’s one (above) for this article.

10. Upload documents to Docstoc and SlideShare

Have you got old content, or early drafts of articles, sitting around on your hard drive? You can recycle this content by converting it to PDF or even keep it as a Word document and upload it to sites like Docstoc or make it into a Powerpoint document and upload it to SlideShare.

Change the titles, change the text around a bit and make sure it has links in it to your other articles. This content will piggyback of the site’s reputation and send deep backlinks to your site.

What do you think?

Are any of these things helpful? Can you offer your own tip to improve an online business that’ll only take 10 minutes! I would love to hear some more suggestions so pop them down in the comments area beneath this post. Or help me out by Tweeting, Facebook Liking or Google +1′ing this article!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

We have many dreams when we were young. Some want to be rich. Some want to create great things. Some want to make a difference and do work that they enjoy.

However, many of us find ourselves disillusioned by corporate structures when we start to work. If this has happened to you then, don’t worry, you’re not alone. It’s happened to many designers. And more and more of them are starting their own companies.

Advice for Running a Graphic Design Business from the Experts

I sent off a quick questionnaire to a few freelance or independent graphic designers to see if there were any “rules” or common practices involved in running a graphic design business from home. The answers were fascinating, we found out, for example, that most of us charge 50% up front, only 50% of us always use contracts and that we spend on average 1.6 hours a day indulging in personal social media unrelated to work. More results here:

• Graphic Designers’ Hardware, Software and Back-up
• Survey Results: How Graphic Designers Get Paid
• What Designers Do, How They Make Money and Where They Find Clients

At the end of the questionnaire there was space for the designers to write a few more words of advice to up-and-coming designers who want to “go it alone”. When I put these all together I thought they comprised a great “how-to” for mastering the design industry. I agree with all of them 100%. Follow these words closely and you can’t go wrong.

David Airey

David Airey is a brand identity designer or the “go-to logo guy” who’s clients include the Yellow Pages (Canada), Giacom (England) and Berthier Associates (Japan). His graphic design blogs Logo Design Love, DavidAirey.com and brand identity showcase Identity Designed attract more than one million monthly page views. His successful book Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Czech, German, Polish, Korean, and Russian.

I’ve been reading’s David’s blogs for years, in fact, I almost use David as a “yardstick” to judge my site against as he is that much of a shining example of a graphic designer in business. Interesting that David, a man who doesn’t seem to make mistakes, chose this quote as one to advise designers with:

“Don’t be afraid of mistakes. Everyone makes them. The important part is accepting responsibility and learning from your errors.”

Douglas Bonneville

Douglas Bonneville runs a “small and nimble” graphic design firm in Rhode Island and has serviced Providence, Boston and the world since 1992. Doug began his blog and moved his site over to WordPress two years ago and quickly became established as a typography expert. He has been published on Smashing Magazine and other industry blogs on the subject of font combinations and now offers The Big Book Of Font Combinations eBook as well as the Font Combinations iPhone app on his site.

This strategy of finding what you’re good at and sticking at it is reflected in this piece of advice:

“Find a niche and fill it. You may have to start broad but narrow your skill set and master some specialty niches. If you don’t, you will join the nameless ranks of generalists who were also afraid to specialize, and now pay the price of flipping burgers with most of their time. Generalists have little definable expertise and thus little definable value.”

Randa Clay

Randa Clay is an awesome designer and WordPress expert. She seeks to help her clients become successful, utilising a complete package of services that includes custom logo design, print design and production, custom web site and blog design and customization. So like me she considers herself a marketing consultant as well as a graphic designer.

Randa came up with a couple of things. The first was a link to this rather fantastic image created by Ben Crick:

“Do not work for free under the guise of good exposure. It is bad exposure. If you don’t value your own work, neither will anyone else.”

I’m not going to disagree with that! As soon as a potential client asks for free work from me, they’re 5 seconds away from the end of the conversation! Her second piece of advice is just as good. This goes along with something I’ve been saying here for years: start your own blog and forge partnerships with others in your field. Read every word of it:

“If you want to get business you must have an awesome website, showing your best work and a nice, friendly picture of yourself. People prefer to hire someone who looks friendly rather than a faceless internet presence. Include a blog on the site (for the SEO value if nothing else). Find successful designers in the same niche and get to know them by commenting on their blogs, Twitter, etc. Once you’ve established a relationship, send them a nice note, complementing their work, and let them know you do similar work.Tell them if they ever have pass-along work they don’t have time for, you’d appreciate a referral.”

Chris Spooner

Chris Spooner doesn’t just sit in front of his shiny Apple computer all day long creating snazzy designs for cool folks from around the world, he blogs about it as well. His first blog contains beautiful tutorials for designers on Photoshop, Illustrator and the like as well as fantastic video advice for designers. And in March 2009 he launched Line25, an equally excellent blog covering all aspects of web design. He also has a labrador called Jake and goes on a lot about Black Ops which I believe is some sort of computer game.

Chris’s advice is pure Chris. Read it carefully as it basically summarises his success in the last few years in only a few words:

“I always advise up-and-coming designers to just keep practicing and experimenting. Use things that capture your interest in everyday life as material for personal projects, then share your thoughts, processes and the things you learn with others. This is essentially what I do on a daily basis and has seemed to land me some great opportunities so far!”

Ryan Scherf

Ryan Scherf is an designer, developer, author, teacher and entrepreneur from Minneapolis, MN, USA. You just have to look at some of the work featured on his homepage to see that Ryan produces some of the most beautiful and creative websites you will ever see. When he’s not slaving away at night for his clients, he’s working on his healthcare startup Bloom Health. Although Ryan has only had 5 hours sleep in the last 3 weeks due to a new addition to his family, he still found time to contribute to this project. Thanks and congratulations, Ryan.

Ryan sent two, equally useful pieces of advice. The first one I agree with wholeheartedly. I’ve said many times on my blog it’s far easier to get clients to come to you rather than the other way round.

“Always be promoting yourself. The best way to find new leads is let them come to you.”

And secondly, he echoes the advice we found from our survey results about how designers get paid:

“Require 50% upfront, and don’t accept payment on monthly plans. It never works out how you intended.”

Mike Smith

Mike Smith runs Made By Guerrilla a WordPress design studio from Knoxville, Tennessee, USA as well as a hugely interesting freelance design blog. Since he started working online in 2007, he has worked with over 200 clients, built hundreds of websites and wrote and published over 200 articles on various blogs, with topics ranging from freelance tips, design resources, showcase, tutorials and to “Guerrilla Marketing”. Mike describes guerilla marketing as “any of a number of unconventional methods of marketing with minimal resources for maximum results; any marketing campaign that uses non-mainstream tactics and locations”.

“Advice for other designers looking to start a freelance business – it’s not always going to be fun (invoicing, accounting, etc) but at the end of the day, it beats the hell out of going to someone else’s building and working to make someone else rich while we receive a small pay check ”

Karen McDade

Karen McDade is a South African freelance graphic designer currently working in Ireland. She has a blog where she writes about graphic design, mac stuff, software, games, books, etc., and displays her portfolio at OmegaRed.

Karen’s advice is right on the money for me where she stresses the importance of distinguishing between clients and time wasters:

“I would advise people to not take on just any client – if they hassle you about your price, or give you a lot of uphill then don’t bother with them. Nurture the relationships you have with your good clients, they are hard to find. Be prompt when corresponding with them and always give them your best work.”

John O’Nolan

John o’Nolan is a designer, entrepreneur, speaker, author, photographer but has taken to using the phrase “creative professional” to describe himself. He is the Deputy Head of the UI group for WordPress, founder and owner of Lyrical Media and avid twitterer.

It’s a little surprise then that this man of many words chose comparatively few to advise people in the business of graphic design:

“Under-promise, over-deliver, over-charge. If you fail to do any of these, you will make a loss.”

Now it’s your turn

Did we leave anything out? Is there anything you’d like to add to these words of wisdom? Which was your favorite?

I’ll leave you with this limerick from Douglas Bonneville:

There once was a graphic designer
Who could not draw a straight liner
Fresh out of school
She thought she was cool
And soon was a cook in a diner!

Download my e-book on how to run your own design business!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The continually changing nature of all things is central to Buddhist traditions. Everything will change.

Great civilisations rise and fall. Great leaders eventually lose power. Even the philosophies and ideologies that people live their lives by change over time. So, the one thing that is certain in life is that nothing’s certain.

Forget everything you were taught

Consider these contentions: the sun goes round the earth, the existence of mermaids, Saturn having only three rings. Antiquated ways of thinking? The last one I was taught at school.

This isn’t only true about scientific breakthroughs.

During the mid-1990s, when I was a struggling print artworker who spent his days typesetting company reports using Quark 3 on MacOS System 7 (afraid so), I remember buying a copy of Wired. The magazine cover showed the Apple logo and the headline read “Pray.” The article recognised the potential that Macs had but bemoaned the company’s products and lack of direction. Look at Apple now.

But that’s not the whole story. I’ll never forget the last line of the article, it said “Never mind Microsoft, the real competitor is Netscape”!

Remember Google’s position in internet advertising a few years ago? It seemed unassailable. Now look at Facebook!

Or, at least, treat with suspicion everything you are told

This is something that helps me run my own business from home.

It should also help any of the many people who were told they weren’t good enough to succeed. There must be literally millions of people who were told or led to believe that they weren’t ever going to add up to much. I know I was told that. I think I must have believed it at one point.

Let’s try to think of what might be the next big sea change. We should be there. A web phenomenon to eclipse Facebook? The next big thing in mobile? Will there be a WordPress killer?

I hope there isn’t a WordPress killer. It would have to be quite something! But I know I shouldn’t get too attached to WordPress even though it’s been the most important tool for my business.

I was working for newspapers here in London when Quark/Macs/Photoshop replaced paste-up and traditional typesetting skills. I remember some of the old guys there bemoaning the changes. I felt sorry for them but I secretly told myself to never get like that. Never box myself in to an archaic method of working that could be superseded so I started to teach myself skills that I thought would be needed in the coming years – Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript – the list goes on.

Outsource

Another lesson we can learn from the “everything changes” rule is to outsource. One of the faults entrepreneurs or independent business people have is their desire to do everything. We love our business, we love what we do but we spend so long each day with our heads down doing the weeding, so to speak, that we don’t realise we’re in the wrong garden!

As Michael Gerber says in The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It we need to work at our business rather than in it.

Sometimes the entrepreneurial skill of being able to delegate and know enough about systems and processes to be able to outsource them correctly is ten times more important than actually having those skills yourself.

I have seen fantastic results outsourcing certain work to Elance, oDesk and crowdSPRING, particularly oDesk. Whenever a client asks me for a website function that I know can be created with a mind-bogglingly complicated mixture of PHP, JavaScript, CSS and HTML, I can get someone at oDesk to do it at $4/hour. By setting the maximum at 2 hours, I know I can get a solution for $8 that might have otherwise taken me hours to sort out.

I appreciate that some people may find this ethically difficult. I am in the process of employing people full time and always treat VAs and outsourcing assistants really well, paying over the odds most of the time.

Looking to the future

One of the best things about working for yourself / freelancing / being an entrepreneur is that everyday is different and when you wake up in the morning you never really know what the day will bring.

Let’s keep on challenging ourselves each day to have a look at the bigger picture. See if we’ve got caught in an out-dated practice that could cause us problems in the future.

The last century witnessed incredible political, economic, and technological transformation. During that time, the human population went from about 1.5 billion to over 6 billion. We can look forward to phenomenal breakthroughs in the fields of biotech, computing power, health, nanotech, architecture, etc., whilst experiencing cultural changes of more people living in cities, more people working from home, huge geopolitical power shifts, not to mention climate change.

Either you defend the status quo or you create the future – Seth Godin. Defending the status quo is not an option.

What about you?

Do you run your own business or are you thinking of doing so? What potential changes do you think will impact your business? What you are doing to future-proof yourself?

Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Being an independent graphic designer and running your own business from home is the best life ever – at least that’s what we think. Here is a guide to the hardware, software and back-up used based on the answers from my representative sample of graphic designers.

Further fascinating results from this survey can be found in these two recent posts:

• What Designers Do, How They Make Money and Where They Find Clients
• How Graphic Designers Get Paid

So, let’s get going. Remember, this sample of graphic designers were taken from every continent of the world and included hugely successful designers as well as people who were just starting out.

Graphic Designer’s Hardware

Hardware-wise, our designers came from both Mac and PC denominations of computer worship with the majority being Apple fans.

Macs

Designers have to regularly update both their hardware and software so the answers I got depended on where the designers were in their update cycle. For example, I had been struggling along with an old 21″ white iMac with a 2.16 GHz processor, 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard disc. And I’ve recently purchased a 27″ iMac with a 3.2 GHz, 4GB RAM and a 1TB hard disc – and I’m loving the extra speed and power.

For example, here is Steven Tiano‘s set-up: “I currently work on a 24-inch iMac with a second 23-inch Apple CInema Display. The iMac is a 2.93 GHz Intl Core 2 Duo machine with 4GB of RAM and a 640 GB hard drive.”

Having multiple screens or machines is quite popular. For example, Jon Phillips uses a 13inch Mac Book Pro (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM) and with an external Samsung monitor. David Airey has a 27″ iMac and a 15″ MacBook Pro.

Many Mac people have PC laptops and vice versa!

PCs

The designers who have PCs really know how to get the most out of them. Take Andrew Keir for example, who has a 2.6GHz Quad Core CPU with 12GB of RAM. This beast is security cabled to his desk. Another set up belongs to Carmia Cronje who has an Intel Celeron CPU 2.6GHz Dual-core with 2GB RAM and a Samsung 17″ TFT LCD monitor.

Lucas Tetrault, however, built his own PC running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with an Intel i7 processor, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, Nvidia GTX Video Card and a 1TB hard drive.

Mice/Mouses

Many designers, including myself, use the Mac Magic Mouse. However, tablets are popular, for example the Wacom Bamboo tablet. Also, Logitech mice and Microsoft Arc Mouse were mentioned.

Phones & Tablets

Many designers listed smart phones, iPhones and iPads as part of their hardware arsenal as they dip their toes into app development. Xcode is being used to develop Mac apps.

Graphic Designer’s Software

Adobe Creative Suite & graphics programs

No surprise which was the common suite of programs that designers used! Adobe’s Creative Suite was being used by all of our designers in some incarnation, the most popular being the Design Premium CS5. But Quark, CorelDRAW X5 and Sketchbook Pro 2 were also mentioned.

Photoshop was the most popular graphics/image editor although some web designers much preferred Fireworks. One of our designers used Pixelmator a Mac image editor that’s much cheaper than Photoshop. Another alternative is GraphicConverter. Downsize is a utility that can batch resize images in bulk.

Other applications

Some of us splash out on the MS Office so as to read and create Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. Whereas some of us make do with the open source OpenOffice.

Free text editors used were Notepad for PCs and TextEdit on the Mac. However, some designers preferred the following premium text editors: Textmate and Coda.

For font management Suitcase Fusion was the most popular.

And FTP-wise, the favorite open source solution was Filezilla, with many preferring to pay for either Fetch or Transmit.

Back-up

On-site

Many of our Mac users utilised Time Machine with some sort of external disc drive (usually 500GB or 1TB). For those of you that aren’t familiar with this utility it automatically saves up-to-date copies of everything on your Mac. Plus, if you ever delete or save over a file you can’t retrive, you can easily “go back in time” to recover it using one of the most exciting interfaces I’ve ever seen!

One of our designers had a Time Capsule which is an automatic wireless backup for your files. Available in 1TB and 2TB models.

Off-site

Not all of our designers had off-site back-up as a precaution against fire or theft. But the ones who did use the following:

• Dropbox Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically. Ideal for cloud living!
• Mozy Founded in 2005, Mozy is “the world’s most trusted online backup service with more than 1 million customers backing up 70 petabytes of information to multiple data centres around the globe” according to their website.
• Backblaze Only $5 a month per computer for unlimited storage.

Thank you

A huge thank you to everyone who participated. I learned a lot from this. So, as ever, heartfelt thanks to the following:

Lucas Tetrault from Phoenix Wave Portfolio
Lynne Venart from The Art Monkey
Matthew Harpin from Freelance Web & Logo Design
Michael King from Black Swan Image Works
Mike Smith from GUERRILLA
Randa Clay from Randa Clay WordPress Design
Ryan Scherf from Ryan Scherf
Stephen Tiano from Freelance book designer, page compositor & layout artist
Derek Kirk from creative web design
Andrew Keir from Melbourne graphic designer, Andrew Keir
Andrew Kelsall from Andrew Kelsall Design
Anne Swanson from Anne Swanson Graphic Design
Bob Raynor from Bob Raynor – Graphic Designer
Carmia Cronje from Clementine Creative
Chris Metzner from data visualization graphic designer
Craig Wilson from Craig Wilson
David Airey from David Airey, graphic designer
Douglas Bonneville from freelance graphic designer
Hernan Valencia from The Construct Creative
John O’Nolan from John O’Nolan
Jon Phillips from SpyreStudios
Justin Miller from Magnum Creative Group
Karen McDade from Omega Red
Kyle Richardson from Enrich Design
Lauren Krause from Creative Curio
Liam Swift from Attract Love to Your Brand

More to come

So that’s it … well not quite, there is one more entry in the questionnaire that I haven’t published. I left a “final thoughts” section at the end where I got some great entries. I’ll put them in a blog post together with a few more I can lay my hands on.

What do you think?

Are you a graphic designer who runs their own business or thinking of becoming a self-employed work-from-home type? What did you think of this survey? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

More info about independent graphic designers’ set-up and how they make their money in my e-book.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the second part of my survey of independent graphic designers working from all corners of the globe and it throws up some interesting results about how they charge. The first survey results concentrated on what designers do and how they make money.

Questions about charging are the most common I get in my inbox. Here’s how my trusty designer respondents answered…

Do you typically charge clients fixed-rate fees or hourly/daily rates?

Clients and designers are most comfortable with fixed rate fees. Here, if both parties agree on the parameters of the task, the designer and the client know exactly how much it’s going to cost or pay before starting the project. Larger jobs are especially likely to be charged this way; whereas smaller jobs may be charged out at hourly rates.

Do you typically charge clients before or after project is completed?

But when can the designers expect to get their grubby hands on the wonga? Half of it up front and the rest on completion is the most common arrangement, although many designers mentioned that this was only normal with new clients. When there is a good working relationship, a more lax attitude to payment can be adopted.

How quickly do you expect your clients to pay you after you invoice?

I was pleasantly surprised to see that many designers get paid straight away. Especially as the law in my country, the UK, permits 30 days to elapse between billing and receiving the money.

Do you bill manually or use billing software?

Nearly half of our designers use billing software. Here’s what they use:

• Freshbooks helps you send and manage invoices online, allows auto-billing to automatically charge your client’s credit card and gives your clients online access to their invoices and account history.
• Harvest Set up takes seconds. Invoices created in minutes and in different currencies.
• FreeAgent builds professional estimates and proposals which can be tracked through to approval and converted to invoices.
• Billings 3 for Mac combines powerful features with stylish designs so you can send elegant invoices right out of the box.

Further information about charging

Our designers gave these further points of clarification about their charging – some excellent advice here:

• “For publishing companies I usually get paid at the end of a project, within 15-30 days. For individual clients, typically self-publishers, I get 1/3 paid up-front, and the remaining 2/3 on completion of the project.”
• “I have an Access program that will create invoices as well as estimates.”
• “You can use PayPal to create invoices for you and you can also send W9′s electronically thanks to the good ol’ IRS.”
• “I charge per project on everything except for maintenance work. For that, I charge by the hour, with a minimum charge of 15 minutes. But for projects, the way I figure my fee is to calculate the number of hours and then add 50% for communication (emails, phone calls, NOT including face to face meetings. Because those can easily get long, I charge extra if I know a client will want any) and unforeseen problems that always crop up.”
• “If the client is a new client I usually ask for payment upfront (100% if it’s a small project or 50% upfront for bigger projects and the remaining 50% once completed). With my standard clients I invoice them monthly.”
• “New clients are fixed rate. Established clients are hourly.”
• “I tend to take a 20-30% deposit”
• “In regards to receiving payment after billing a client, it depends on the client. My biggest client takes literally weeks to pay, as all invoices are dealt with by people further up the chain, so-to-speak. However, for most work for regular clients, about 1-2 weeks appears to be the norm. I sometimes offer clients the change to pay in full before the project starts for a 5% discount. A fair few clients take this option, too.”

As ever, there are some interesting ideas there, especially the offer of a 5% discount in exchange for an upfront payment.

Do you have contracts with your clients?

These were perhaps the most surprising results of the whole survey. I have often read that designers should always, always, always have contracts and it seems that this is not the case. I personally believe that 99% of people are honest and therefore it is much more important to be clear about the nature of the job and the payment than it is to sign contracts. However, some designers will disagree with me and, as you can see, 50% use contracts for every job.

Do you have written email exchanges where the price and extent of the job is discussed?

For me, leaving a “paper trail” of exchanges between you and the client can be even more important than a contract. Briefs can change during the course of a job so, in order that everyone understands the extent of the job and the payment, it’s advisable that conversations are recorded textually.

Do you discuss price and extent of the job with the client and leave it at that?

So, similarly, it’s not often that designers accept a brief on a phone without anything in writing. However, it’s possible that this can happen with a trusted client.

Further information on agreements and contracts

Here are some more helpful comments left by some designers about agreements and contracts:

• “I’ve only once had difficulty with – let’s call it – project creep. The project really got off the tracks and took far too long to complete. However, I was compensated fairly for the extra time; but it drove me crazy!”
• “I’ve never had a payment problem. I work a lot on referral these days. If I have a new client I always get the 50% up front (or if it’s a large project), but otherwise I’ll let that slide with someone I’ve worked with before.”
• “For new clients and larger projects I use a project agreement (contract just sounds so intimidating!) where I spell out the scope of the project, deliverables, timetable and payment schedule. I sign it and have the client sign it and return it with their deposit. Once I get to know a client well and we work on many projects together, I generally just use written agreements via email for small jobs and maintenance work. I always make sure to have something written in email that we’ve both agreed on, just in case I need to go back and reference it. I’ve been very fortunate to work with some great people and I’ve never had a problem with clients not paying (knock on wood!!).”
• “I used to have lots of clients but it became too much to manage, and some of them weren’t good with paying on time. I whittled my client base down to a select few clients which I’ve worked with for many years and have a good relationship with. Although I don’t have standard contracts with some of them, everything that is discussed is recorded in some fashion in chat logs or emails.”
• “Moderate to light detail contracts but lots of email trail. You don’t want to refer to contracts to resolve a problem when referring to a simple email does the trick and gets the project moving again. In the end you want to get paid, not go to court.”
• “I have learnt the hard way so from now on I will get every thing written down.”
• “Job specifications are recorded through email exchanges. I haven’t had payment problems for some time now because my work commences upon receipt of 50%, and the remaining 50% is received prior to supply of digital artwork.”
• “I have a contract attached to the quotation. They have to pay 50% up-front,  and the rest when the project is finished. What causes payment problems? When the client doesn’t check his/her email after I have sent them the invoice!”

I tried to whittle those quotes down but they were all so interesting and echo the general success of the 50% before 50% after formula for payment.

Thank you

A huge thank you to everyone who participated. I learned a lot from this. So, heartfelt thanks to the following:

Lucas Tetrault from Phoenix Wave Portfolio
Lynne Venart from The Art Monkey
Matthew Harpin from Freelance Web & Logo Design
Michael King from Black Swan Image Works
Mike Smith from GUERRILLA
Randa Clay from Randa Clay WordPress Design
Ryan Scherf from Ryan Scherf
Stephen Tiano from Freelance book designer, page compositor & layout artist
Derek Kirk from creative web design
Andrew Keir from Melbourne graphic designer, Andrew Keir
Andrew Kelsall from Andrew Kelsall Design
Anne Swanson from Anne Swanson Graphic Design
Bob Raynor from Bob Raynor – Graphic Designer
Carmia Cronje from Clementine Creative
Chris Metzner from data visualization graphic designer
Craig Wilson from Craig Wilson
David Airey from David Airey, graphic designer
Douglas Bonneville from freelance graphic designer
Hernan Valencia from The Construct Creative
John O’Nolan from John O’Nolan
Jon Phillips from SpyreStudios
Justin Miller from Magnum Creative Group
Karen McDade from Omega Red
Kyle Richardson from Enrich Design
Lauren Krause from Creative Curio
Liam Swift from Attract Love to Your Brand

More to come

That’s not it! More questions about our designers’ equipment, software, and more great advice to come!

What do you think?

Are you a graphic designer who runs their own business or thinking of becoming a self-employed work-from-home type? What did you think of this survey? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And, if you enjoyed the article, please consider tweeting or voting for it on your social network of choice!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This guest article was written by Stefanie Kahls of twago, an outsourcing provider based in Berlin, Germany. I’ve written about outsourcing here before and I have used asian developers from time to time with great success. But there are right ways and wrong ways of doing it and here Stefanie lays out her modus operandi.

More and more, the big, wide world is not that wide anymore. Distances remain the same, but the speed and ease in overcoming them increases constantly. The internet is connecting nearly every single point of the world. People living on different continents can communicate without any time delay. The age of working across borders without moving physically has begun – the age of Outsourcing and Offshoring.

Internet and globalization have changed the job market. Flexible working hours, freelancing and international cooperation are all features of the present not the future. Working together with people you have never met and you never will meet sounds absurd but is reality. Big companies, small firms and even the normal person in the street can delegate tasks to people outside their normal work-area. “Do what you do best, outsource the rest”. In short, concentrate on ones expertise and delegate other duties to increase speed, efficiency and profits. That’s what outsourcing is about.

Adam Smith knew about the efficiency of the division of labour. And nowadays the online-market is taking advantage of this phenomenon more and more. Online platforms that act as an agent to bring employer and employees together are being established all over the world. One example for such a platform is twago. It is the biggest German online-platform for global outsourcing and offshoring. Graphic and web designers, programmers and translators can find employers who are searching worldwide for experts for temporary project work. In the future the outsourcing and offshoring market will not just grow but nearly explode. McKinsey published a study which says that by 2020 the outsourcing and offshoring market will reach a market share of more than 500 billion US$ -up from roughly 80 billion US$ in 2008.

To jump on the bandwagon of outsourcing and offshoring there are a few things you should keep in mind to make it a successful process.

1. Communication, communication, communication

It doesn’t matter if you like to be engaged in national outsourcing or international offshoring, communication is the one key to success. Virtual working relationships require intense communication. Make sure that the employer and employee understand what they want and how they want to have it done. Otherwise, there could be misunderstandings and at least one side of the party will be disappointed and unhappy. Communicate often to avoid conflicts and to ensure a smooth working-process.

2. Make new media your new best friend

Communication is usually done via modern forms of communication. Skype, MSN, or Dropbox shouldn’t be foreign words for you. Make yourself familiar with all necessary communication media for the internet. They are easy, fast, and efficient.

3. Open up your mind

Working across borders includes working together with people from various cultural backgrounds. You have to keep in mind, that people have different attitudes and understandings of work. Be open to new ideas and welcome them as an inspiration. Be tolerant without insisting on things being done your way. Be open and patient as Rome wasn’t built in a day and your way may not necessarily be the best course of action.

4. Control and be controlled

Besides communication, virtual teams need close supervision and constant control. When working “normally”, which means on site, control happens automatically. You come to the office in the morning, everybody around you is working, your boss drops in and out. All these things create a pressure to work. However, when having a team based around the globe, it is much harder to motivate everybody. Therefore it is advisable to create milestones and goals that need to be achieved within a certain timeframe. With milestones you will be able to identify problems or time delays immediately.

Keeping in mind the above mentioned tips and tricks, outsourcing and offshoring can help you to profit from a changing work market. Regardless of whether you are a service provider or an employer, outsourcing and offshoring can mean real money and advancement for you. On the one hand you can access a job from all over the world whilst staying at home, and on the other hand you can find experts for your project worldwide. Through outsourcing and offshoring you can be sure to have the best experts for all of your jobs, and all for a reasonable price.

If you would like to find out more about outsourcing and offshoring check out twagos’ magazine. If you are interested in finding freelancers from all over the globe, or to find jobs as an expert, see twagos’ job page.

Thank you, Stefanie, and I would like to echo Stefanie’s ideas on creating “milestones” within certain projects. Outsource little pockets of work at first and build them up as your experience and offshore contact list grows.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Here are the first results from my graphic designer’s business survey. I am so grateful to everybody that participated.

I surveyed designers that were mostly working from home and running their own businesses. Participants were from every continent and were spread over different design disciplines. They represented every level of experience – from people who were just starting out to people like John O’Nolan, Deputy Head of the UI group for WordPress, and David Airey, the author of Logo Design Love, a designer whose blogs attract over a million monthly page views.

What exactly do graphic designers do all day?

You may well ask. Well, one thing’s for sure, they don’t spend all the day designing. In most cases, they don’t even spend half the day designing…

On average, how many hours a day do you spend actually designing?

Bear in mind the question didn’t specify the separate stages of the design process. For web design there’s the visual stage and the development stage, for print design there’s the design stage and the artworking stage. So even the designing hours may not be spent doing creative work.

So what are we doing if not designing? My next two questions were about social media. And I got some unbelievably honest answers…

How many hours a day do you spend on social media/web browsing unrelated to your marketing (Facebook, Twitter, networking with friends and family, and general web surfing)?

Yes, you saw it right, the designers surveyed spent an average of 1.6 hours a day on social networks unrelated to work (above) and only 1 hour a day on social networks related to their work (below). Naughty, naughty!

How many hours a day do you spend on social media/web browsing specifically related to marketing yourself (Facebook, Twitter, voting for your blog posts, forums, liaising/networking with designers)?

I was expecting designers to spend a lot of time tweeting, etc., I know a lot of us get work that way. But, even I was surprised that we averaged at 2.6 hours a day on social networks!

How many hours a day do you spend writing blog posts, responding to comments on your blog(s) or general work on your website?

Bear in mind these are mainly designers that have a website (usually with a blog) and run their companies. For us, the website is the hub of our professional world. So, no surprise that they spend an average of an hour a day on it.

How may hours a day do you spend liaising, meeting, talking or writing emails to clients?

We all know how the most simple client job can involve much time in communication. Look how much time is spent in client communication and remember it next time you give a quote!

So is there anything else you spend time on? A few designers added these comments:

• “Parenting! ”
• “Travel to and from meetings.”
• “It seems as if I spend a lot of time e-mailing and talking with clients as I design. The automatic feedback is great!”
• “I didn’t include coding/debugging websites in the “hours actually designing.” Maybe I should have? That would bring the total up.”
• “I spend a lot of time doing research for clients in order to come up with the best solutions.”
• “Accounting, emails, consulting, freelance writing, ad management, SEO.”
• “Market and Trend Research. Learning new techniques online.”
• “I do spend quite a bit of time educating clients. I do small spot seminars by phone or in person for SEO basics, CMS overview, etc.”
• “Studying – 2 hours a day.”
• “Bookkeeping, live networking, professional groups.”
• “Some other aspects of running a freelance business, for me, are also compiling quotations, sorting invoice and statements in Billings 3 for Mac and continually tidying up my desk!”
• “An hour a week on accounts maybe?”

Graphic designers and their income

I wondered how our designers were earning their money. Asking about the income source split brought some interesting results.

What percentage of your annual income do you receive from clients from the country you operate in?

I wanted to know how much our home-based designers worked internationally. It seems despite the global nature of what we do many clients still prefer to employ local designers. Some US-based designers worked only with clients from their home country. However, others had a totally international clientele.

Roughly how much of your annual income do you receive for something other than client work (product sales, advertising, affiliate links, etc.)?

Here I wanted to see how many were employing tactics from The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and earning money while they slept. It seems, though a lot of us have other sources of income, these are still a very small in comparison with client work.

Roughly how much of your annual income do you receive from your single biggest client?

According to the Pareto Principle or 80:20 rule, you will receive 80% of your income from 20% of your clients. With this in mind the answers here came as no surprise.

Graphic designers and their clients

How much client work do you outsource to others?

Graphic designers live on their reputation and can not afford to outsource too much so that the quality of work or personal interaction with the client suffers. I suspect our designers only outsource to companies like oDesk and crowdSPRING when they don’t have the skills necessary to complete a particular job.

Over the last year what percentage of income did you receive from clients you had worked for before?

Your best clients are your current clients…

Over the last year what percentage of income did you receive from recommendations?

Doing a good work results in recommendations. I’ve seen this again and again.

Over the last year what percentage of income did you receive from new clients that weren’t recommended to you from someone or some company?

Given that a lot of the designers questioned have only been in their current roles for 1, 2 or 3 years this is a staggering statistic. Only just over 20% of our designers’ income is from new business.

Where did you get most of those new clients from?

This is something I get asked again and again – “how do you get new clients?” I suspected the website would be the best source but I had some great other answers. There’s some fantastic advice here:

• “I get my clients from a combination of cold emailing twice yearly, one print postcard mailed per year, my website, my blog, social media (LinkedIn and Twitter, particularly the latter), and commenting on others’ blogs and on various online forums.” Stephen Tiano
• “Cold calling, but to people who are past or present colleagues of current clients in similar fields.” Lynne Venart
• “Person to person marketing in associations and leads groups.” Michael King
• “Through my blog I’ve made connections with other designers and developers and I receive work from them many times. Some of my best clients have come to me because other designers are too busy and hand off their new contacts to me!” Lauren Krause
• “Recommendations from friends.” Kyle Richardson
• “90% of my clients I get from word of mouth referrals. I occasionally get queries for work through my website. I don’t advertise.” Karen McDade
• “Most of my business comes from referrals and business contacts. I market my design services through networking groups and I do a quartely mail peice to current and potential clients. When I finish a job for a client I ask them if they are happy with the results and the service. If they are, I ask them to keep me in mind for future projects and ask for 2 or 3 names of people I might contact for more work.” Justin Miller
• “Word of mouth recommendations” Carmia Cronje
• “I meet most of my clients through attending networking events, or attending classes at my local Small Business Development Center” Anne Swanson
• “I get most new clients from my website, with much of new work coming from churches, as my site ranks highly for the term Christian graphic designer in Google. I also produce work directly from client recommendations, too.” Andrew Kelsall
• “I would estimate a roughly even mix of via my website, recommendations and repeat business.” Andrew Keir

Thank you

A huge thank you to everyone who participated. I learned a lot from this. I know some of the questions were difficult to answer – it’s hard to guess how much time you spend doing certain tasks in a day, especially when no two days are ever the same. So, heartfelt thanks to the following:

Lucas Tetrault from Phoenix Wave Portfolio
Lynne Venart from The Art Monkey
Matthew Harpin from Freelance Web & Logo Design
Michael King from Black Swan Image Works
Mike Smith from GUERRILLA
Randa Clay from Randa Clay WordPress Design
Ryan Scherf from Ryan Scherf
Stephen Tiano from Freelance book designer, page compositor & layout artist
Derek Kirk from creative web design
Andrew Keir from Melbourne graphic designer, Andrew Keir
Andrew Kelsall from Andrew Kelsall Design
Anne Swanson from Anne Swanson Graphic Design
Bob Raynor from Bob Raynor – Graphic Designer
Carmia Cronje from Clementine Creative
Chris Metzner from data visualization graphic designer
Craig Wilson from Craig Wilson
David Airey from David Airey, graphic designer
Douglas Bonneville from freelance graphic designer
Hernan Valencia from The Construct Creative
John O’Nolan from John O’Nolan
Jon Phillips from SpyreStudios
Justin Miller from Magnum Creative Group
Karen McDade from Omega Red
Kyle Richardson from Enrich Design
Lauren Krause from Creative Curio
Liam Swift from Attract Love to Your Brand

More to come

That’s not it! More questions about our designers’ equipment, software, billing, contracting and more great advice to come!

What do you think?

Are you a graphic designer who runs their own business or thinking of becoming a self-employed work-from-home type? What did you think of this survey? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And, if you enjoyed the article, please consider tweeting or voting for it on your social network of choice!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

For me, blogging isn’t about making money from advertising, affiliate marketing and selling products. It’s not about that for the majority of bloggers either.

But it is about business. All of my current clients have either contacted me through my website or are a result of a recommendation through my website.

I advise most of my clients to see a blog as a marketing tool.

How should I use my blog?

A blog is the hub of your online presence. There is no better way to constantly distribute content so that it can be easily found.

You may love getting stuff out there using Facebook, Flickr or YouTube. But all these social sharing sites should point back to your blog as that is where your brand is under your complete control.

I have had many fantastic people contact me through my website and I ask them what search terms did they use? What was it about the site that attracted them? In what way was I better than the alternatives? The interesting thing is that I’ve never had the same answer twice.

In the early days of this blog, I tried to rank highly for the keywords “graphic designer”. I didn’t even think of researching the keywords which I should have but I thought it was a no-brainer that people looking for graphic design work would type “graphic design” into a search engine.

Was I right? Well, yes and no. Some of my clients used the obvious words to find me. Most, however, and most of the best ones, used the obvious words in combination with others.

The long tail

What is the long tail? Imagine a graph of your search terms on the x axis in relation to traffic provided on the y axis. That graph would have a peak for your most popular term (“design”, 55,600,000 searches a month) and then get shorter for the less popular terms (“graphic design”, 1,830,000 searches a month) and shorter down to the least trafficked terms. Maybe terms like “freelance graphic designer london” or “graphic design inspiration” will get only a few thousand searches a month. These low traffic, more descriptive phrases are known as the long tail.

The most fascinating thing about the long tail is that the total volume of searches are actually more than the highly competitive single and double word phrases. What’s even more amazing is that these long-tail searches convert better. That is, visitors that arrive at your site from long tail searches are more likely to make a purchase or sign up to a mailing list.

The more words you type into a search engine; the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for. So a person who finds you having searched for a more specific subject is more likely to form a positive attachment to your brand.

A great example of how the long tail can work for you

I have a well-known classical music publisher client who has given me thousands and thousands of dollars of business over the last few years. Just this week I was talking to the person at the company who first contacted me. I asked her how she’d found me. She’d actually searched for “rates that graphic designers charge” and found my blog post about freelance design prices. I couldn’t believe it! I’d written that article as a response to the many questions I’d received from designers asking this question. It was a post written for other designers rather than for prospective clients. By trying to help other people I was helping myself!

The fantastic thing that this story teaches us is to forget about keyword density, meta tags, internal PageRank sculpting and other boring practices the “SEO gurus” bang on about. Forget about all the claptrap and create good content! If you write about what you know best you will attract the right people to you.

Don’t forget about social media and backlinks!

There is a flipside to creating content and that is getting links to it which isn’t always easy. When I first started blogging I spent ages getting my site in directory sites and setting up reciprocal link exchanges. Nowadays, Google and other search engines are counting social media links more than they used to and they lead to links on other sites. So follow up your blogging with participation in your social media platforms of choice (be they Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook) and by forming alliances with other bloggers in your niche.

Follow the same basic rules when engaging in social media and blogging relationships as you do with your blog. Create good content on the social media sites and pass on useful information to your blogging buddies in the same way as you help people with your blog.

What about you?

Do you use a blog to solicit responses from potential clients? Do you have any specific “hire me” links on your site? Actually a specific call to action on the site was one thing I purposely didn’t talk about in this article as I don’t have any evidence as to their effectiveness. As always, I’m dying to hear your responses! And, if you enjoyed the article, please consider tweeting or voting for it on your social network of choice!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I’ve created a survey about graphic designers who run their own businesses – whether they work at home or have employees, outsource and run much larger companies.

There are many design and business sites in the blogosphere. However, design sites tend to focus on tutorials and inspiration whereas there isn’t a great deal of information on how to run the business side of things as an independent graphic designer.

So this survey is about the practicalities, eg. equipment, charging procedures, marketing, income sources, etc., asking questions such as:

• How much client work do you outsource to others?
• Do you work from home or elsewhere?
• Roughly how much of your annual income do you receive from your single biggest client?
• Do you have contracts with your clients?

The questionnaire took 5-10 minutes to fill out.

It was great to get the feedback from everyone out there.

I have had a great response from people I’ve sent it to (including some really great designers that I admire very much) as well as from others who simply wanted to help.

The results are in my e-book Running a Web Design Business.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Blindingly obvious opening statement: clients are very important to your business.

Not only are they your number one source of income, but also more than half of your new business will come from existing clients and recommendations from them.

I disagree with a lot of advice about client relationship management: “phone them up all the time and ask them how they are, invite them out, go to meet them, make yourself available at all times”. That is definitely not my approach.

The most important way to build a good client relationships is to work with really great people in the first place.

1. Choose your clients

Now, this doesn’t mean “I’d like to work with Richard Branson, I’ll give him a ring”. (But, it wouldn’t hurt, would it?) I still advocate getting your clients to find you through your blog.

What I mean by “choose your clients” is to be very aware of the sort of people you want to work with first. I like to work with clients that are demanding, exacting and dynamic and I don’t want to work with people who are unclear, lazy and dishonest.

Here are a set of “red flags” to listen out for during the initial contact:

• “This won’t take you long”
• “If you do this for free / at a low price, there’s guarantee of future work”
• “Can you come and meet me to discuss this potential project?”

Relationships with the client should be based on mutual respect. If someone is happy to waste your time before they’ve even hired you, they’ll continue to do so.

It’s not a pleasant analogy but a pertinent one: nobody respects a girl who’s been with every member of the football team before she leaves school. So don’t fall over yourself trying to please every client at a reduced price. They’re not going to respect you in the morning – or at any time!

2. Choose the companies you work with

Just as important as choosing the client is choosing the companies. As a graphic designer and marketer I often work for lone entrepreneurs who are starting something up. These are great people to work for.

However, I also get work from larger organizations, for example Accenture (225,000 employees), and these organizations are definitely better for repeat business.

Large organizations are understandably more cumbersome and bureaucratic so take this into account when dealing with them. So, when dealing with large organizations, don’t apply the “red flags” of my previous point so strictly.

3. Treat everyone equally – from post room boy to CEO

This may sound contradictory as I’ve just said to favor some clients over others, but it isn’t. Even when I turn potential clients down, I always try to treat everybody with the same respect and politeness.

Every interaction you have with people – be they clients, prospects, students, suppliers, members of the public – reflects on your business. Make sure everything you say and everything you write in emails follows your core values.

4. Have a written philosophy

If you don’t know what your core values are then it might be an idea to write them down. Here’s mine:

At Rob Cubbon Ltd we aim to provide the best possible design and marketing solutions and put the client in the center of everything we do.

5. Don’t say “no”

Well, if you’re a pig farmer and a client asks you to fly them to the moon then you may wish to decline. However, some of my best work for clients has been in areas I have had little or no experience in.

People will always want to work with people they’ve already worked with. And for this reason, you will get asked to do things that you’re not sure how to do. When this happens say, “Yes!” It’s a win-win situation. The client gets the job done; you get experience. If one person asks you to do something, you can guarantee that someone else will ask you to do that task in the future.

6. Never say anything negative

When discussing projects with clients never say anything negative. If the client suggests a course of action that appears counter-intuitive to you, meet the suggestion with positivity pointing out the advantages as well as the disadvantages.

There’s two reasons for this: Firstly, people don’t like negativity and don’t want to hear words like “difficult”, “delay”, “complicated”, etc., and that negative association will rub off on you. Secondly, I am constantly amazed by how good my clients ideas are. Even if you’re the expert and they aren’t, they are coming at the job from a different angle and will see things you can’t see. And vice versa. That’s what a relationship is.

7. Approach all of your issues with a smile

As Stephen Covey says in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, be proactive.

The key to being proactive is remembering that between stimulus and response there is a space. That space represents our choice — how we will choose to respond to any given situation, person, thought or event. Imagine a pause button between stimulus and response — a button you can engage to pause and think.

From Stephen Covey’s blog.

If a situation comes along that looks “bad”, don’t approach it as such. If you approach situations whilst thinking how bad they could be, they invariably get worse.

8. Listen to the client

This shouldn’t be hidden away in eighth position even though these tips are in no particular order! Listening to the client is the most important thing you’ll ever do. It is essential that you understand what they are trying to achieve. 99% of all client dissatisfaction is caused by bad communication.

Sometimes, a client can be very good at telling you what they want the website to look like and forget to tell you what the actual purpose behind it. Work out which questions you should ask so you can deliver exactly what they want.

Constantly refer back to written communication with them. I always have in writing exactly the nature of the job and the agreed price.

9. Know their knowledge

Related to the point above, it is necessary to understand what they know and what they don’t know technically. In web design, clients have all sorts of prior technical knowledge but it is important not to assume they even know how to fire up a browser and surf the web. In order to make a website that can be easily edited by the client it is essential to understand their technical know-how.

10. Balance

With all the above points it is necessary to achieve a certain equilibrium between being helpful and available on one hand and not spreading yourself too thin on the other; between working with the right people on one hand and not being too fussy on the other; between being positive on one hand and realistic on the other.

Put the client in the center of everything you do. Understand what the client wants. And be 100% real about it.

I hate to see people slagging their clients off on Twitter. If you’re doing that, you’re doing it wrong!

Conclusion

As always, I would love to hear your comments. Do you think I’ve hit the balance right with clients? Please enter your comments below or Tweet or vote for the post using the buttons below!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”

from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The economy is barely recovering. Here in the UK there was an actual contraction of the economy in the last quarter of 2010. However, like Dickens’ description of late eighteenth century revolutionary Europe, this period remains paradoxically promising for those of us who have turned our backs on corporate structures and elected instead to work on our small business at home.

You notice I said “work on” our businesses, not “work at” our businesses – because that’s the point.

Why you should grow your business

It is even more important than it usually is to expand and systematize your small business. Here are some reasons:

• As a designer, for example,  you are only capable of earning so much money per hour. We get tired, we get sick – dare I say it – one day, we’ll get old. We need to find ways of accruing income separately from hours worked. Systematizing work will enable you to explain to partners and freelancers more effectively what you do and what to expect.
• Market structures tend towards an oligopoly. I mean – all sectors of industry are eventually controlled by a few (3, 4, 5, 6, 7-ish) key players. Look at the banking, energy, manufacturing and retail industries! Some of the few exceptions to this rule are sectors like internet marketing and web design. It’s no coincidence that all the opportunities for small players are online – the internet is in it’s infancy and there’s lots up for grabs. Already internet search and advertising has defaulted to an oligopoly. It’s time to move fast before the big boys swallow us up!
• So while there’s a threat from up above; there’s problems down below. There are job boards, contest sites, crowdsourcing and people willing to work for free. Sure, if you’re experienced this form of competition won’t harm you. But it is a growing phenomenon and you should arm yourself against it.

If you want to grow your business you have three options:

1. You get lucky (not going to happen)
2. You invent some original and revolutionary product or service (possible but unlikely)
3. Take what you already have, perfect it, enhance it and expand it in every way you can (do this!)

How to grow your design business

Wealth is most often linked with exclusive ownership or control. You may make a living with someone’s idea or product, but you stand a much better chance with your own. If your product saves the client time, then you can make a fortune.

Listen to your customers – first and foremost

As a website designer/developer you may start out by supplying HTML and CSS files for someone else to create a site with. This way you are just a small cog in a larger machine.

But, maybe there’s more you can do? I have found again and again that clients would rather I do as much as possible. So a small design job can become much bigger with domain name registration, web hosting, website maintenance and email all coming into play.

So, I have prepared “packages” or, more accurately, produced whole systems of web marketing that clients can purchase in one go. Added to these packages are further annual fees for website and email hosting and maintenance.

The benefits of offering these packages are many but there are two main ones:

• The client gets peace of mind that their web presence will be professionally designed, developed and maintained with all the various benefits (on site optimization, analytics, speed) clearly itemized.
• The designer/developer gets the benefit of annual fees coming in plus the website in a safe, optimized and monitored environment keeping the chances of problems or downtime down to a minimum.

People will pay a premium price for a service that takes away hard work and confusion.

Here are some ideas of one design and marketing package that could be offered to a client:

• Logo and identity design.
• Business stationery: 500 business cards, letterheads, compliment slips printed and delivered).
• Website and blog designed, developed and hosted.
• Social media: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts set up and profile pages designed to fit in with identity.
• SEO: on site optimization plus review of search engine indexing and performance.
• Mailing list: Aweber mailing list set up and email template designed.
• Email set up.

Make sure you like it

Are you interested in offering these extra services? Or are you only interested in website design and that’s it? Personally, the whole area of marketing really interests me so I’m happy offering these services. But, if you only like creating beautiful websites, maybe this isn’t for you.

One thing’s for sure – don’t concentrate on just making money. Concentrate on delivering a better product or service. You’ll never win competing on price … so go for quality!

Conclusion

As I’ve said, I know this isn’t for everybody. What about you? Are you expanding or specializing? Have you any further ideas for other services a web designer can offer?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is a guest post from Bailey Digger about the realities of web design in challenging economic times.

Some jobs are recession-proof while others suffer more when the economy is bad. Web design is not an essential service but there are several reasons why it can be considered recession-proof:

• Web designers can seek work in related fields. You can find openings in print media, advertising agencies and many other organizations where design plays a role.
• When businesses are not doing well, they look for ways to boost their income and popularity, and the best way to do this is by paying attention to their websites. Web usage continues to increase, irrespective of the recession. So web designers are going to be in demand to design new sites or tweak existing ones.
• Organizations are moving to the web anyway as it offers significant advantages to customers – they don’t have to waste time or money in getting to and from retail outlets. So web designers are sought after to create the shopping sites.
• Web designers that know how to manage entire projects are always in demand, no matter how the economy is doing. So, think of branching out and doing much more than just web design; when you’re a designer of many talents, it’s easier to find a job when the going gets tough.

According to the BLS, the job outlook for graphic designers is expected to grow 13 percent, and even though the competition is expected to be fierce, web designers and animation experts have the most opportunities. So if you love anything to do with design, have a creative mind and want to work as a web designer, it makes sense to choose a degree in graphic design so that you have options in economic downturns. When you’re multi-faceted and hold more than one skill, you can switch between graphic and web design, and find jobs in any field related to design.

This guest post is contributed by Bailey Digger, she writes on the topic of web design degree programs . She welcomes your comments at her email: baileydigger189(@)gmail(.)com.

Thank you, Bailey. Speaking as a freelancer that does web and print design, I have definitely seen a shift to the web since this recession took hold. Although how much of this shift was due to the recession is debatable.

Web designers (and all sorts of creative professionals) are now being hit by the recession as well as by competition from job boards, contests, crowdsourcing and spec work. Bailey is right when she says we need to get creative with our businesses – offering multiple services (web design, SEO and SM) and marketing these products effectively.

Finally, I couldn’t agree more with Bailey that people with skills prosper. You’re nothing without skills – work on them throughout your professional life!

Conclusion

As ever, I’m always fascinated to hear your thoughts on this subject. Are you a designer who has felt the force of the recession? What are the best ways to deal with it?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I swapped the office cubicle for the spare room two years ago and I’ve never looked back. However, working from home isn’t as simple or as easy as it sounds. It certainly helped that I’d spent two years “easing myself in” – working at home temporarily whilst freelancing at other offices part time.

Exercise

Dog-owners walk their dogs everyday and yet you never hear of people who take themselves out for a walk. If it’s good enough for our pets, it’s good enough for us!

I used to take public transport to work which involved a fair amount of walking – not great physical exercise but physical exercise none the less. After exclusively working from home for a few months I was literally piling on the pounds. Not good!

So, my first advice to home workers is to … get out of your home! Spend 30-60 minutes of the day exercising. You should at least enjoy the benefits of this amazing lifestyle revolution as there will be days where the benefits won’t be so apparent.

Sir Richard Branson (the British entrepreneur, best known for his Virgin Group of over 400 companies) always says that the single most important trick to increasing productivity is exercise.

Getting work

Maybe the most important thing about working from home is to make money. Of course, we can all dream of earning a passive income (like The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss) but this takes time to set up and in the meantime you need to pay the bills.

I would always advocate having a certain amount of income already planned before you give up your 9-5. This is why I found it so useful to do a bit of freelancing for other companies part time while I made the switch to home working. You can always take your personal work to your job with you and work on it during downtime!

The best work comes from personal relationships. The closer these relationships are the better the work. Let me explain. If a top executive at a top company knows you and recommends you to work for a colleague it will be 100 times better and more profitable work than if you get a job from a 3rd party site such as Elance or PeoplePerHour.

So focus on your business relationships. Good clients will get you more good clients. Avoid bad clients like the plague.

How do you get good clients like the top executive at a top company? It’s much better to write about what you do in your blog and get good clients to contact you rather than to look for them.

Outsourcing

“Focus on what you do best and outsource the rest”. Why spend hours on a fiddly bit of JavaScript, PHP or CSS, when someone can do it for you for $5 or $10. I have had incredibly good experiences offshoring some technical work to Asia. Use Elance, oDesk and crowdSPRING. Easy to set up an account and set maximums to ensure you never pay more than a few dollars.

Self-discipline

This is a difficult one because everybody’s different.

Personally, I don’t have an alarm clock – I can usually rely on myself to wake up and start working before 9.30am but I know that is too lax for some people. I know one person who needs to wake up at a certain time and dress into their suit in order to “go” to work at home.

That may be important for them but for me it is more important to avoid distractions at certain periods of the day to concentrate on the most taxing jobs. These are key client tasks (designing, coding or preparing a document for a client) or other work that takes a similar amount of brain power (writing blog posts and newsletters). Similarly, there are times in the day when I’m less able to concentrate, at these times I do less demanding work such as social media, invoicing, accounting and certain email tasks.

So if I had a normal day – which I never do but if I did – it would go something like this:

So, you can see, even though I’m a naturally disorganised and spontaneous person, I have identified and isolated times in the day where I’m at my most productive.

However, I do stray from my self-imposed rules. Another thing I do is to flit between two client jobs. No book on productivity would ever recommend that but it works for me!

Family life

I hardly need to say that the family is the most important thing and the reason why you are doing all this. For this reason it is always necessary to have slack and time in your routine for family time both planned and emergency!

Increased quality time with your loved ones will, like exercise, increase your productivity.

Equipment

Your chosen profession will obviously dictate the sort of equipment you will need to buy in for your home office. So all I will say here is don’t buy anything until there comes a day when you actually need it.

You wouldn’t believe how many home workers say to themselves: “Right, I’m running a business from home, I simply must go out and buy a fax machine!” It may well turn out, once you start working, that you don’t need a fax machine. Wait before making purchases!

Charging

I’m not a fan of charging clients per hour. But in order to get an hourly rate, calculate what you need to make if you were only working for 4 hours a day. In order words, make sure that you charge at least two times more than would like to earn if you’d had a traditional job.

Conclusion

I believe that working from home and pursuing a “DIY Career” provides an incredible opportunity to improve your health, carbon footprint, quality of life and can have a positive effect on the world! After a period of travelling to work and being told what to do I have found staying at home and pursuing my own dreams incredibly empowering.

Here are a couple of books that may help you on your way:

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
• Getting Things Done by David Allen

Do you work from home either part time or all the time? What problems and solutions do you have? I am really interested in this subject and I would be incredibly grateful for any tips you could give me.

As always, if you enjoyed this article, you could register you thanks by Tweeting, Liking or voting for it using any of the links below.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This time last year I resolved to get more involved in social media. So in 2010, I opened a Twitter account, a YouTube channel and engaged in many other sharing and social activities online. This has been a great success. It brings traffic to this site, wins me more clients and is making me better at my job as I continue to learn from the great people I’m connected with.

Next year I aim to make my business more automated. I hope to identify and systemize my design and marketing processes as I believe this will enable me to run a more successful and streamlined business.

I have noticed increasingly that, as a designer, you can only design for so many hours in the day – in fact you may find there are as few as maybe 5 hours in a day that you will spend designing as there are so many other demands on your time.

W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant, who made a significant contribution to Japan’s reputation for innovative high-quality products and economic power, said:

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

This quote has really struck me.

Now I believe it is essential to organize your business into processes that can be automated and outsourced. This is the only way I’ll will be able to carry on expanding my client services whilst also having time to get on with pursuing other interests.

All my following business plans for 2011 will come from this central idea.

1. Describing what I’m doing as a process – and outsourcing

I will be creating more blog posts and video about how to design and create WordPress websites, how to design and set up projects for print, how to design and code HTML email, plus general internet marketing tutorials.

These will not only be useful for my site’s visitors as general “how to” tutorials but I will also be able to use them as ways to explain my processes when outsourcing work.

2. Building relationships with other graphic design business owners

I have an idea for a series of blog posts and possibly podcasts. Blogging and business gurus tell you to build partnerships with others in your field and, obviously, I have met many great designers online. But I haven’t thought of a way to meaningfully engage with the community.

So, I’m planning on creating a questionnaire online which I will encourage graphic designers who run their own business to fill out.

There is a lot of information about the creative side of graphic design (how to design, how to find inspiration, etc.) but there is less practical information about how to run a design business (how to get clients, contact arrangements, equipment used, etc.)

3. Increase my passive income

As explained earlier, a freelance designer can only charge for a certain amount of hours in the day. This makes increasing demands on your time as your business grows. So, I wish to increase my passive income as my active income can only increase by so much.

Passive income is income that you can earn when you’re sleeping. So this can be affiliate sales, product sales, site advertising, etc. I have already made a few affiliate sales, I’m a little unsure of placing advertising on this site at the moment but I do mean to release a premium eBook through this site next year.

4. Continuing to do what I’m doing at the moment – just better

Of course, it’s crucial that I don’t forget my core business. Most of my company’s revenue this year has been through the amazing clients I already had at the beginning of the year! I will not forget this and I will continue to improve the service I provide for them.

Conclusion

So, I will keep you informed of my progress in these areas over the coming year. What do you think of my plans? Have I forgotten anything? I would love to hear if anybody has made similar resolutions.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

“If you are successful at school; you will be successful in life”

I wasn’t a great success at school. Even though I was sent to good schools, in order to get me to work hard, I was told “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life”.

As hard as I tried my exam results were below average and in the other arena for school success – the sports field – my performance was even worse! The mantra I’d been hearing  “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life” caused me to come to an uncomfortable conclusion. I consoled myself by thinking that I would be a successful rock star and prove them all wrong.

I soldiered on into the lower end of higher education establishments and eventually found employment working on picture desks of newspapers and magazines.

My dreams of becoming a rock star eventually faded away as my group split and I was left to ponder my future as a London-based wage slave commuting to work on the train with everybody else. Hardly rock and roll!

Eventually, after a few stints teaching English abroad, I became a freelance artworker and occasional graphic designer as I had a basic understanding of Photoshop and QuarkXpress.

Not only did my professional life seem to be going nowhere but also, as most of my friends were getting married and settling down, I was increasingly at a loose end at evenings and weekends with too much time on my hands to think about my lack of success.

I had been an under-achiever at school and it was looking the prediction “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life” was coming true in a negative way!

Everything changes

So, I was heading towards a dead end. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if I’d carried on in this direction. I don’t think about this too much because, I’m afraid, it wasn’t going to be very pretty.

I can’t say exactly what happened to turn things around but something did. It started with a passing interest in Neuro-Linguistic Programming but then I began reading books about psychology, meditation, Buddhism and other eastern philosophies.

I stopped seeing myself as an individual who was tossed and turned by the events of life and began feeling at one with the universe and more responsible for my thoughts. Somehow the thought processes within my brain that would turn towards negative thoughts suddenly turned to positive ones.

A number of other changes happened to me around this time – I woke up one morning and gave up smoking “cold turkey” without any side effects. I started to exercise more. I further indulged my creative hobbies of photography and music.

At this point I could earn about $60,000 a year from freelance artworking and designing in London (these were still economically stable times!) But I was frustrated by working in the design agency environment – the client’s wishes were filtered down by the chinese whispers in the line of command and there was a lack of creativity.

I had always wondered what it would be like to run my own design company.

Company director

But did I have the courage and ability to do it? There were a number of questions weighing heavily on my mind:

• Could I leave the relative security of the in-house freelance design work I was doing? The storm clouds of the current financial crisis were gathering.
• Did I have the self-discipline to be able to work from home on my own? Would I spend all day watching Oprah?
• Did I have the ability do run my own business? The phrase “if you are successful at school; you will be successful in life” was chipping away at my confidence.
• Did I have the talent to design? I had never been to design school and I was totally self-taught.
• Could I handle clients? I didn’t have much experience of this.

I’d also had a very stupid prejudice, thinking that in order to run my own business I’d have to be selfish and mean. I know now that it is perfectly possible to be a successful business owner whilst keeping my principals of honestly and kindness.

But, as you can see, despite a history of negative vibes about my abilities, I have started and run a successful design and marketing business in these trying times!

Don’t let anyone tell you you’re stupid!

Don’t let anyone make you believe you can’t do something! If my experience has taught me anything at all it would be this: don’t believe everything you’re told by the “experts”. By “experts” I mean teachers, careers advisors or traditional authority figures.

Business requires a certain creativity of thinking which can actually be a disadvantage in the classroom but a positive bonus in later life.

The future is bright

Now I am looking to expand my business by modeling my processes, outsourcing and increasing my passive income. I still have to fight negativity from people criticizing my business model for being too simplistic. But I will continue to learn from my experience and pass on as much as I can to others who wish to embark on a similar journey.

So what do you think?

I really interested in hearing from others who have started a business. Did your journey have any similarities or differences to mine? Or, if you are thinking of starting a business, has this helped in any way?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

It pains me to think of the $3000 I spent on a Mac Performa 6400 complete with a huge monitor and in-built 28K dial-up modem in the mid-90s. The machine chugged along like an aging donkey and the information super-highway felt more like a traffic jam. I wish I was starting now with readily available broadband connections and quality computers at affordable prices!

The most important thing when setting up a home business is to not spend money. Try, wherever possible, to utilize the equipment and communication infrastructure you already have rather than rushing out to the stores. We’re trying to get the money coming in here, not the other way round!

Computer

Whether you are a Mac or PC person, you will need a fairly decent computer with large disc space, fast processor and bags of RAM. If I was starting out today I would buy something like an Apple iMac 21.5-Inch Desktop for around $1140/£730. With a 3.06 GHz Intel i3 dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM you’ll have all the computing power and speed needed to get you going and 500GB hard drive will be more than enough to store your work at first.

Software

In order to do some design work, you’re going to have to get some software. There’s a lot of great free and open source tools out there that in some cases do the job as well as the expensive stuff. But, for graphics, unfortunately, you pretty much have to get the Adobe Creative Suite.

You have four options of Adobe graphics packages:

• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Standard $1,239.00 – Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat Pro
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium $1,613.18 – Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium $1,774.96 – Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection $2,448.99 – Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and video editing products such as Premier, After Effects, Soundbooth

The good news is, you can probably run a graphics business quite well with the cheapest option: Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Standard. The 3 applications I use the most are Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Dreamweaver is not essential for creating websites (although, it does speed things up) you can use a text editor and an FTP client. You can advise your clients against using Flash, but, I’m afraid I find I still need it from time to time.

If the above purchases are too much for you, you can look on Ebay for a computer with CS5 already installed.

You may already have Microsoft Office but, if not, don’t rush out and buy it. See how you get on with OpenOffice first.

After you’ve had a few jobs you may want to purchase a font management program. I use Suitcase Fusion3.

If you have too many fonts open that you are using for different projects it can cause decreased performance in your machine. Font management software will open and close fonts for you optimizing your computer’s speed.

As with everything else, don’t go and purchase a load of fonts first. Wait until the work comes in first and then, if you can’t find any good free fonts, purchase a few of your tried and tested favorites.

Other hardware

Further down the line, you’ll have your hard drive stuffed with client work, software and not to mention your own personal photos and movies. What happens if something should go wrong with the machine. You need back up and a portable alternative.

The cost of external discs keeps going down and down. Here’s a 1TB (yes, that’s 1000GB) Western Digital USB external drive for only $67.00. And to think I spent over £100 on a zip drive once – and probably another £10 for the 100MB zip disc. If you don’t know what a zip disc is, don’t worry, you don’t need to know!

If you run a Mac, all you have to do is to set up Time Machine and all your work will be backed up so that if you deleted something a few days ago you can ride the cyber HG Wells machine back to get it.

Once you get more clients and more money, you will probably want to buy a laptop so you can work when out and about. There’s nothing like working on a MacBook Air whilst sipping coffee and watching the world hurry by.

Other things to think about

I will be returning to the subject of setting up a home office soon. I have written an article with more general advice about rates, clients, accounting and networking for graphic designers. And, the most important thing, I have also written about how to get clients and how to market your business’s website.

Of course there are always things to think about. But I am a great believer in just starting. Accountants can be sorted out later; the company name and stationery (if any) can be sorted out later; the business plan can be thought about and sorted out later. If you’ve got a full time job or if you’ve just been made redundant – now is the best time to start a new business and designing at home is a brilliant way to make money. You only need software, a computer and a broadband connection in order to undercut the big boys and provide grateful clients from all over the world with your fresh and original ideas.

Everyday you’ll wake up excited about the day ahead never knowing what it will bring. Once you start working, one job will lead to more jobs and pretty soon it’ll be a full-time occupation. I was working for other people during the day and then working on my own business during the evenings and weekends for about a year and a half.

Now I’m running the design business full time and I absolutely love it! Would you like to be a web or graphic designer and work from home? You can. Download my e-book about Running A Web Design Business now!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

If investment banks can break the economy; small businesses can start the healing process. Now that start up costs are lower than ever, thousands of talented and skilled individuals who are frustrated by lack of corporate opportunity will do what they’ve always wanted and become their own boss.

However, many small businesses are using old methods of marketing – leaflet drops, advertising in trade magazines and cold calling. All of these methods are expensive, unfocussed and, ultimately, soul-destroying. Old marketing techniques fire their message from a splatter-gun hoping that something might hit home. New marketing starts a conversation with the customer. Oh, and the good news is it’s cheap!

So, let’s say you want to start a project management company. This is what you do:

Keyword research

So you want to be the first in Google for “project management”? That’s not going to happen. But you can research what other words are commonly used with those terms and target these phrases. Here are some of the most common search terms used with “project management”.

• project management software
• project management vacancies
• project management jobs
• project management exam
• project management courses
• project management tools
• online project management
• project management system
• project management training
• project management templates
• project management certification

This not only shows you clues as to what’s being searched for but also can give you great ideas for blog posts. But it doesn’t end there. Try all other words you can think of that are related to “project management” and see what people are searching for. These people are your customers! You need to understand them.

And search these terms in the ordinary Google search engine. Are there search advertisements running along the top and right-hand side of the organic results? If there are this means they’re lucrative terms. But, don’t get too obsessed with what’s popular, it may be easier to rank highly with phrases that only have a few thousand searches a month.

Pay particular attention to the long tail. These are long groups of keywords that are searched for only a few times a day, but when taken together, comprise the majority of the world’s searches.

Blog

I would advise all small businesses to start blogging. Why? Because a blog provides you with an easy way to create new content. The search engines love new content and it will drive targeted traffic right where you want it – to your site.

If you haven’t already got a blog, don’t worry about the design, SEO, domain name or hosting, just start one now and begin your database of quality articles because they will be your main currency in marketing your business.

Try to write at least one blog post every week of no less than 350 words. Here are some I quickly thought up for our project management case study.

• What to look for in a project manager
• How to find work in project management
• 5 do’s and don’t's of running a project
• 10 classic project management mistakes
• 7 reasons to hire a project manager
• 5 golden rules of good project management
• How to start a project
• How to define your project strategy
• Basics of writing a project brief
• The place of project management within the company
• Why everyone needs a good project manager

Remember, you need quality as well as quantity and you don’t want to run out of ideas after only a few months (as many, many bloggers do). So divide up the subject matter of your articles so that each can be covered quickly and concisely.

Usually we are too busy to write 1,000 words on advanced techniques. So start with the basic information which may be obvious to you but like gold to other people. The interest these posts generate will result in good links, good traffic and interest in your organization.

Make your posts interesting and easy to read. Here is an incredibly useful guide to writing well. Have fun writing your posts! If you have fun writing them, your visitors will have fun reading them.

SEO

Once you have your WordPress blog up and running it is necessary to perform a few SEO tweaks so it performs well in search engine results. However, remember, the best SEO is writing regular quality content.

• Put keywords in your blog title and make your post titles precede your blog title
• Put keywords in your URLs – not a load of numbers
• Create meaningful categories for your posts and write meaningful descriptions for them
• Put <h2> or <h3> subheadings in your posts
• Give your images meaningful titles (not “image01.jpg”) and descriptive alt texts
• Create an XML Sitemap and register it at Google Webmaster Tools and point to it with robots.txt
• Make sure HTML and CSS code is standards compliant.

Getting links

There are many ways to get links to your website. Here are a few:

• Adding links to signatures in forums
• Commenting on other blogs related to your niche
• Submitting to directories
• Writing guest articles for other blogs and articles sites

Social Media

Every different person from every different niche will have their own particular blend of social media. I can’t say to definitely do Twitter and LinkedIn – even though they have been of enormous benefit to me – because they may not be right for some people.

• Automate and sync up all your various social media in as many ways as possible. Putting as much stuff “out there” without having to waste your time doing it.
• Always answer all your serious comments both in your blog and on social media.

Conclusion

Use these methods in an honest, respectful and “white hat” way. Whether you are writing a comment on a blog or tweeting or leaving a message on any particular social site, make sure you are saying something useful. And keep having fun! There is no quick and easy solution to any of the above. It takes time to do and time to see the results.

As ever, I’m always eager to learn off you guys, what other small business marketing tips do you have?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.