Latest in freelance

One of the things I love about a freelance career is being able to up sticks from my home office and go to a local café, bar or library to work in a different environment. It can prove extremely productive and as they say, a change is as good as a rest. I’ve even used the boot of my MPV as a makeshift office! While I generally have my Windows 8 Acer Iconia W7 series tablet with me in such situations, there are of course times when I’ve been caught out.
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Can you really "kill the man" and make a living on the Internet as a creative professional? I spoke to a quartet of creatives recently, each proudly working for themselves in different ways. Read on to find out more about a freelance writer forced into his dream career through redundancy, a photographer who stumbled upon a means of making money through her ability with Photoshop, an artist who followed her dream instead of processing card payments and a journalist who found himself offered a six book deal by a major publisher!
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Whether you're looking for free stock photos from sites like SXC.hu, or random images to ponder from aggregators like ffffound, finding nice pictures is really not a problem. Finding good talent for creative work, however, is an entirely different proposition. This is where the Behance Network comes in. This beautiful collective showcase lets commercial-level artists showcase their work.
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Working from home might seem like a great idea, but I don’t see it. After more than a year of working from various places of residence I’m thoroughly sick of mixing business with pleasure. Home is where I go to relax, to escape work - and that’s the way I like it. When the lines between downtime and work-time become blurred, home starts to feel a bit like a rabbit hole.
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These days, the idea of transferring money via the Internet is not only accepted, it's often essential. There are many freelancers who nowadays rely on Internet payments in order to carry out business. Most of us currently rely on PayPal to ensure our payments get through. Now there's a new competitor called WePay in town who might make a viable alternative if you're a US-based customer.
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If you're a freelancer who moves about a lot, you probably recognise the value of a good freelancer-friendly workplace. Maybe you have a list of coffee shops and libraries you regularly haunt which have decent Internet, a place to plug in a laptop and hopefully some good coffee to keep you going while you work.
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A couple of months ago, James revealed his home setup and challenged the rest of the MakeUseOf team to do the same. I don't work from a static location, so I don't have a home setup. I adjusted my setup for mobility and have tested and improved my 'system' while traveling across Canada for the past couple of weeks.
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The end of the year’s coming up and while I know I had a great year, I didn’t really journal every day or track where I spent my time, which could have helped me do a end-of-year self-review on what methods in my workflow worked better than others. Since I mostly work on my computer, [...]
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Paypal is the top dog when it comes to online payment services. It is generally easy to use and a relatively secure way to send money while buying products & services online (whether eBay or other online merchants), but it does have its downsides. The web is filled with folks who have had their Paypal [...]
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Are you an entrepreneur, solo business owner or freelancer? Are you keen to get regular business advice but don’t have the time to work out which blogs to subscribe to? Well, we’ve done the research for you. Here’s a collection of business blogs aimed at entrepreneurs and small businesses. These have been chosen for their [...]
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The freelance lifestyle has its perks. You can eat ice cream whenever you want, and you get to set your own hours. There are downsides, however. You only get paid when you do work, and finding work is completely up to you. You also need to be a keen businessman in addition to being talented [...]
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While computers and other forms of technology have replaced many manual labor jobs, that’s not the case in the field of writing. The daily proliferation of websites demands good and consistent content produced by freelance writers, designers, technicians and other web content providers. If you”˜re interested in pursuing work in freelance writing, there are a [...]
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If you are self-employed, or you operate a small business with only a few employees, keeping track of time worked can be an issue. There are many task tracking gadgets available, but they are often simple and meant for amateur using. They often don’t provide a record of the time you have spent, and they [...]
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Last week’s poll was a face-off between iPhone or Android. I thought it would be a much closer race, but the winner shone from the very beginning. Did you guess which it would be? Of course you did. After receiving 618 votes, Android sustained a landslide victory over iPhone. The poll tallied just shy of [...]
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Do you do consulting? Do you work in a freelance capacity from time to time? Well then you know how hard it is to keep track of the time you spend on individual projects and sub-projects. I used to find that a big chunk of my day was devoted to tracking and reporting on my [...]
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