This post is inspired by Freelance Folder’s Birthday Contest where they want us to share our best freelancing advice.

So here goes my freelancing advice:

1. Have a plan and write down your goals
Recommended Tool: I love my TadaList.com
2. Create systems to automate as much work as possible
3. Get help. Ffind yourself a reliable, intelligent, talented and proactive virtual assistant. Ask yourself, “What do I suck at or hate doing (accounting and bookkeeping)?” The next step is easy. Outsource that or those tasks.
4. Don’t compete - compliment. Find a network of active participants and find people to partner with in complimentary businesses.
5. Market yourself even while your busy
6. Ask for referrals

Service is a big pet peeve of mine… probably because I’ve done it all - telemarketing, sales assistant, administrative assistant, software support… at one time in my career. What do these type of positions have in common? Constant contact in front or on the phone with customers.

The biggest annoyances in dealing with customer service:

1. They don’t offer a solution.
2. They don’t think of alternatives to make your life easier.
3. They don’t know how to help you.
4. They don’t follow-through with what they promised to do.
5. They don’t plan ahead.
6. They make you do all the work and running around.

The best thing a company can do is train from the bottom up. The secretaries, customer service agents and administrative assistants should know your marketing message, promote the company’s culture and, most of all, know how to deliver knock-your-socks-off customer service. The best case scenario is that you will have more satisfied customers telling others about their great experience. The worst case scenario is that people will absolutely complain and not recommend your services to their friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances (just look at the popularity of such sites as epinions.com or planetfeedback.com)

Exercise:
1. Write down all the bad (business/personal) shopping experiences you’ve had
2. Next to each bad experience write down all the ways your business can promote a good experience. Jot down each step in creating the perfect experience for your customer.

If you’re like me, you work hard strategizing what quality content will educate and inform your target audience on certain topics while promoting your expertise. You might have written an article yourself or paid a professional copywriter to write something fantastic, right? It’s time consuming and costly to create quality content. I feel your frustration. It’s high maintenance to track down these people who need content to make some cash on the side with advertising.

Who are these Copy Thieves?

You can try Yahoo, MSN, or Google and conduct a search using your article title. Then visit each site to make sure you are properly credited for your content.

Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) – Type in the title of your article with quotes for an exact match, then enter your email address to be alerted with relevant Google search results based on your search terms.

Copyscape (www.copyscape.com) – Insert your URL and their service scans the web for similar copy.

How to Fight Back Online Plagiarists

I would like to point to two great resources on this topic:

SubHub Publish For Profits article, “Stop Thief How You Can Fight Back Against Online Plagiarism”

Lorelle on Wordpress article, “What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content”

1. InstantDomainSearch.com

Some of Instant Domain Search features:
• Suggestions - click and takes you to GoDaddy.com where you’ll see ‘More Options’ of alternative domains you may like.
• Acquire Domain - links to Sedo.com, a Domain Acquisition Service
• WhoIs - select this option takes you to http://whois.domaintools.com to learn more about the ownership of the domain
• Hacks - goes to Xona.com which will give you unconventional domain combinations (i.e. delicious.com to del.icio.us)
• Alexa - which will talk about the site’s web traffic rank
• Visit Site

I’ve been using InstantDomainSearch.com for years.

2. Domize.com

3. AjaxWhois.com

Some of AjaxWhoIs features:
• Ability to preselect your preferred extensions (.com, .net, etc.) for your domain search
• Also partners with GoDaddy.com and even includes GoDaddy coupons
• Whois - without leaving the site will display the domain’s ownership information with a bit of added security to make sure you’re human wanting the information (thanks AjaxWhoIs) for not promoting spambots!
• Domain hacks will appear on right-hand column if a combination exists
• Statsaholic - which uses Compete and Quantcast traffic data
• Go to website link

Virtual workers, freelancers and web designers alike: How do you keep your projects organized?

Reminders:
Myself, I use my handy Palm T|X which I usually carry around with me everywhere I go.

Lists:
When brainstorming, having an Ah-ha! moment, need to add/remove things to my to-do or could it be that I’m simply obsessed with writing lists (am I alone here?)… I visit my TaDaList. I highly recommend creating a web-based to-do list using TaDaList.

Digital Filing Cabinet:
Wish you were more thorough about how you organize your projects? Here’s a tip from ActionMethod.com’s Tip Exchange on Creating a Useful Desktop.

“Instead of having an escapist travelogue photo as the desktop pattern, I’ve found it useful over the years to create background images that show discreet “hot” to “cold” areas. This way, before getting involved in any one task, you can arrange files of active projects according to priority and urgency, and move items along the line towards completion and archiving.” Read the rest of the tip at ActionMethod.com

Company: Bill Snyder, Waikiki Real Estate Associate
Business Type: Century 21 All Islands
Website: BillSnyder808.com

Background:
Bill Snyder, BillSnyder808.com asked for help in creating his online marketing presence with a website that best represents his love of Waikiki and new career in real estate… helping others make their dream of moving to paradise a reality.

Services Provided:
We did a complete web design (look & feel) using the Wordpress engine as a Content Management System (CMS). Site features include: RSS feed; Search and Search Results; Flash-based videos to promote the Hawaiian lifestyle; Frameit.cgi script to help visitors get back to the site when clicking external links; CFormsII plugin to prevent spam and manage online forms; Pictobrowser plugin that will link this agent’s Flickr.com photographs to their Listing-related posts; and so much more… Online training videos were created to help client get acclimated with managing his site content.

Client Praises:
" A short while ago, I became a real estate agent after moving to Hawaii. As in most new business endevours, advertising your business and drawing customers to you is critical. I contacted maya, a friend that I met while sharing a passion of ours, surfing. I explained to Maya that i wanted to have a website developed that would accomplish a few simple goals: 1) Share my passion of surfing and of the Hawaiian islands. 2) Aave a simple and user friendly site that potential real estate clients would find both informative and fun at the same time.

In an unbelievably short time, Maya developed a great beach/surf theme for my new site. She provided a great keyword search engine, plus easy to navigate links to interesting and informative sites.

As I watched the site be developed, I was amazed with her talent and expertise. During the development process, Maya constantly contacted me and kept me informed of the progress. When I had questions about anything technical in regards to the management of the site, within minutes, Maya provided me with a video tutorial to help me understand.

In short, I would highly recommend Maya to do work for any family or friends of mine, which is the highest compliment I think a person can give!"

Bill Snyder, Real Estate Associate (RA)
Century 21 All Islands (Waikiki Office)
BillSnyder808.com

Do you have a existing website (www.oldsite.com) and want to move your site to your new domain (www.newsite.com)? Maybe you have two websites you want to merge into one website? If so, you will want to learn more about htaccess which makes sure any visitors to the old website domain will be redirected to your new website domain.

We recently had to do this for an interior design firm who dissolved their partnership and knew people were still being directed to portions of their old website url. Those who had known their original company name would enter it as keywords within search engines like Yahoo and Google and still see old web pages listed. It’s also quite possible that their current clients haven’t caught on to their company’s name change and are still using their bookmarked web address. Also worth mentioning are all those 3rd party sites that have links to their website. They, too, would have no way of knowing that they changed their site domain name.

Solution: URL redirects (also known as URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding) help any incoming links to the old URL be directed to the new URL.

1) Domain Forwarding: Where did you register your existing domain?

Login to the account that manages your domain. Select your old domain and find the option to Forward the domain to another domain URL. If anyone tried to visit the main index page of your old site they will automatically be redirected to your new site

2) Always Backup your .htaccess file

You don’t want to damage your website and you don’t know what default settings your web host installed on your .htaccess file. Backup, Backup, Backup!

If you use FTP software such as CuteFTP or WS FTP, your .htaccess file may be hidden. Access your .htaccess file through your Web Hosting File Manager. You should find it on your website’s main directory (usually within an htdocs, httpdocs, www or public folder).

3) Create a new .htaccess file if one does not exist

You will be creating a plain text document (For PC-users, use Notepad) and name and save it .htaccess (don’t forget the file starts with a period).

4) .htaccess and 301 Redirects

A 301 Redirect sends visitors who may visit an outdated page of your website to the new page… especially helpful for updating search engine bots.

Type the following command in your .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 oldpage.html to newpage.html

In our client’s circumstances, we used the following command line for the .htaccess file on their old website (OldWebsite.com):

Redirect 301 / http://www.NewWebiste.com/

When people try to visit OldWebsite.com/contact.html they would be redirected to NewWebsite.com/profile.html.

On the client’s new/current website (NewWebsite.com), we used the following command line for the .htaccess file so that anyone trying to find a page that no longer exists is redirected to the homepage:

ErrorDocument 404 /home.html

** Make sure to upload your .htaccess files as an Ascii file. Remember, if you upload it using FTP software, the .htaccess file might disappear from view but exists (just hidden).

11th Annual Webby Awards have announced their winners!
Check out the Webby Nominees and Winners for Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video and Mobile content.

Joe Clark of AListApart.com has said, “PDF files on the web are sometimes annoying and very often unnecessary… There are too many PDFs on the web. Most every PDF should be something other than PDF.”

Purist and the practical approach of Andy Wibbel rants about PDFs saying, “I think my big beef is that it always forces the user to open up another application. And often it’s a waste of space like a PowerPoint presentation. I understand PDFs if you’re doing product delivery etc but not for stuff that should be freely available and searchable.”