creative briefing

A few things have caught my attention in recent days from the good guys at FreelanceSwitch. Just thought I’d share the love!

A Guide to Making Passive Income
Who likes making money? And who likes making money without having to do anything active? Thought so. Clearly the FS camp had similar feelings when they were producing notbythehour.com: a guide to making passive income. This goodie outlines the concept of selling stock, making stuff, selling subscriptions, and building a web business all in the name of earning a stream of passive income. The site even has quirky wallpapers (like the one you see above)! 
Check it all out here.

The 2007 Global Freelancer Survey
FS is taking the initiative to gather never-before-compiled statistics on the freelance industry, and leveraging its own massive community to get it done. The survey aims to compile the industry’s collective knowledge for the benefit of freelancers everywhere. This is a great way to benchmark your own standards to those of others sharing the market. Plus, they’re offering the [very valuable] detailed results of the survey to all those who participate, in addition to a random draw for some sweet prizes.
Read about it here.
Take the Global Freelancer Survey here.

Note: this isn’t a sponsored post! I have a great deal of interest invested into the freelance community, and while I’m not exactly a freelancer, I work with them enough to know a thing or two about the industry.

Update: this post has been getting tons of traffic ever since FS shared some link love. To the new visitors, I hope you’ll take some time to explore some of the other articles I’ve written.

Enjoy!

These days, everything is branded. You brand your company, you brand your products, you brand your swag, and you even brand yourself. The purpose of branding? Quite simply, to make it yours, and to make others remember that it’s yours.

Certainly, your website is also no stranger to branding. But when you think of branding your website, you’d likely first think of tailoring the site’s design, the site’s logo, or even the site’s copy to whatever you’ve decided your brand should be. What you’d least likely think of is branding your URL.

But think about it. Half the time, if your visitors aren’t arriving to your site from linked text on another site or from a bookmark, then they’re typing in your URL to get there. The act of reading your URL off your business card, or off the napkin they wrote your URL on, and then typing it into their browser is just about as direct an interaction with your brand your customers can get. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from branding, it’s that you should brand all your touch points.

Thinking about branding your URLs yet? You should be!

Here’s Part 1 of how to brand your website’s URL: to www or not to www?

Read the rest of this entry >

My good friend Derrick from The Music Blogger (www.themusicblogger.com) posted about some recordings him and I did a few weeks back. He’s posted a raw (or ‘unmastered’) recording of Jack Johnson’s Rodeo Clowns done in his basement studio, starring yours struly on the guitar and vocals, and him on the bass and pretty much everything else you can hear.

You can check out Derrick’s post and the song here.

It’s hard to get away from a ‘job’ that doesn’t exactly run on a 9-5 schedule, but I try to step away every now and then and jam a bit. I’m by far an amateur, but it certainly does the trick as an alternative creative outlet. Sometimes it helps to get the ideas flowing too!

I’d be interested in hearing if any of the readers here have any interesting alternative creative outlets of their own. Leave me a comment!

Scratch project management. In the long list of skills that successfully get me from one day to the next, I’d say that people management ranks as one of the most valuable skills anybody can have in any profession. Its significance is no less in the creative field. Designers and developers are definitely, for the most part, an ecentric group. Brimming on creative genius-ness and madness (sometimes all at the same time), managing a creative group can certainly take some extra umph.

While I promise to never depict designers and developers as a breed of mad scientists again, you have to admit that people management plays a big role in helping a creative team channel their energy appropriately into effective deliverables. Throw into the mix the fact that you run a virtual company, and you’ve got yourself the weight that sits on my shoulder every day.

I’m certainly no Atlas, but to keep the creative magic flowing, here are a few tactics and values I subscribe to.

Read the rest of this entry >

Anyone who has ever watched a segment of Chinese television will know that very little money is spent on marketing and advertisements, and that the quality of commercials is almost laughable compared to mainstream North American media (more people would laugh if it wasn’t so sad). Anyone who has ever been to a Chinese restaurant will also know that tea is served in, well, a tea pot.

One marketing genius from what appears to be GEM or GARYA has come up with this clever idea:

Talk about capitalizing on high-reach media.

What I’d like to know is (a) how much was paid for this “prime” spot, and (b) what’s the return on their investment.

Then again, I could be wrong and this could be just be one of those “contents are very hot” warnings. Any translators?