Hey folks, I recently read an Interview With Adrian Diaconescu of Rubiqube. I would like to share part of the interview which talked about essential tools that Adrian used for his freelance work. If you don’t know who is Adrian, here is a short introduction on him:-

My name is Adrian Diaconescu and I’m a freelance designer based in Bucharest, Romania.

Professionally speaking, I tried pretty much everything: the 9 to 5 job, the entrepreneurship,the corporate world. I took the plunge and quit my last day job in March 2007. Since then, I made a lot of new friends and worked on many cool projects.

Freelance design is an exciting form of freelance work, which can be of great fun, creativeness and challenging . However, to successful, modern day designers must use various kinds of available tools. Here is the essential tools to help you success :-

Adobe Fireworks CS3

It is a product from Adobe, which is widely in use for creating and optimising images for the web and rapidly prototyping websites. The primary advantages the software renders are its ability to integrate between Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, improved layer organisation, improved scaling, integrating Adobe Bridge, customisable asset, integration between Flash and Dreamweaver and multi-page support. I guess most of the freelance designers should know about this tool. Personally, I am using Adobe Photoshop to edit some simple images on this blog. Perhaps, I should try out Fireworks as well.

Skype

Well-known application to make phone calls over Internet. It is actually free when the called person is also using Skype, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a pretty low affordable cost. All in all it’s a one-stop shop when it comes to communication with your clients. Personally, I’ve been using it to call my customers from oversea in a very low rate. I guess, the rate is cheaper than the rate offered by any of the local telco such as Maxis, Celcom or Digi.

Thunderbird/FireFox

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. It has number of features that makes it arguably one of the most efficient products in its field. Personally, I would recommend you to Add-On the FireBug to help on website designing. Another good add-on is the color picker which you simply capture a color from any nice website.

Pymo

It is a web portal aimed at the freelancer and managers who are looking for solution to manage, schedule time allocation and adjustments for the involved projects. It has a central database with all employee timesheets in one place, generate the detailed timesheet reports for each employee (in fact reports on employee performance can also be generated). It is ideal for geographically distributed teams. Use this tool to keep track on your project management.

Wordpress

Software that furnishes a way to manage your website is commonly called a CMS or "Content Management System". Wordpress is such kind of web based blogging tool. It has various useful and necessary features. Now, blogging is part of the lifestyle for Freelance Designer. Most of them use blog as the platform to showcase their freelance portfolio just like what Adrian did. Perhaps, you should have a good showcase to show off your previous works. It helps in gaining confident from your client.

These were few of the most reputed and useful tools for freelance Designers. Effective use of these tools can really make your freelance life a lot easier.

In freelance business, invoicing is requires a great and meticulous treatment in a regular basis. One mistake in this regard can cause significant damage as far as loosing the client. Invoicing means the tasks related to financial aspects of your business. Such as record keeping of your earnings, expenses and profit. Then comes the part of billings, in fact all these are grouped together to be termed as invoicing in a freelance work.

The steps regarding a sound processing of invoicing should encompass easiness in invoicing, securing important data, having effective backup policies etc. This article will illustrate a tool to fulfill these objectives.

The tool is a web portal naming Freshbooks.com. This site has been launched to effectively address the drudgery of billing and many other shortcomings regarding creating invoices in few other softwares. The objective is to save your time, user friendliness, offering a secure and encrypted environment to store the data and accessibility for 24/7.

There are several advantages for which this service has gained popularity in more than 100 countries worldwide:-

• Creating and managing invoices with extreme ease and enjoyable manner.
• Time tracking for expenses.
• Propagating invoices through both snail mail and email.
• Secure acceptance of your payment through Authorize.NET, PayPal, etc.
• Auto-Send capability regarding forwarding invoices and late payment notices.
• Preparing robust reports through an effective report generation module and exporting/importing securely and reliably.

The portal is actually not limited to freelancers only, any other work that requires time management and invoicing can use this product. In the blog section, you can find plenty of useful articles such as Digital Security Practices and Programming Issues.

All in all, it is a great tool. An effective use of it can reap great benefit for individuals and company as a whole.

In modern times, blogging has become an effective source of Online Money Making for those who are effective enough to know how to use this tool. There are examples where one people is seen making a highly decent revenue while the other is not earning that much. The difference lies in the strategy that has been employed in the business. Not all kinds of blogs are suitable or fully profitable for everyone.

This article will list out some of best known options to utilize in your blogging in order to turn it as powerful as you can:-

Pay per Post Technique

This is a rather common but important and tested strategy. The basic idea is to develop a lot of blogs preferably with their own domain and in various sides of contemporary issues. And then add content to it in a regular manner (Minimum 3 times/week). Once the site is developed enough, you can submit it to Review Me, Loudlaunch, and PayPerPost . You are also required to type out a decent sponsored reviews to earn some fast cash. Check out our previous post on How To Make USD840/month by Blogging.

Selling Text Links

Selling out text links to various web owners, who are looking to enhance their Google PageRank is one of the surefire way around to make money from your blog. However, you must make sure that your site itself is on the top list of Google with High PageRank. Moreover, the contents of the site must justifies its title. If you interested to buy some Text Links from this blog, Feel Free to Contact us. Currently, we are at Page Rank 3.

Adopting Adsense/Affliate Marketing Policy

This is one of the finest opportunities of making money from Blog these days. However, contrary to the expectation, not much of the bloggers around have managed to effectively utilize this technique. The foremost requirement of this tactic is to design your blog with some high frequency key phrases and make the blog flourish around a specific topic. Check out JohnChow and ProBlogger on how they earn USD20K++ / month but utilize this opportunity.

Corporate Blogging Opportunity

The main objective is to promote the business. Thus direct income from this strategy is not always achievable. However, the benefit is there, in the form of increased marketing and exposure that the blog will churn out for your business.

Being a Professional Blogger

When you are a professional blogger, you are paid to create content. And sometimes are also given a share of the earnings from Blog’s advertisements.

Thus implementing the aforementioned opportunities guarantees you a smooth and an effectual progress of your blog towards increased profit and exposure.

This post is summarized from 5 Ways to Make Money from Blogging. Photo by WetherChange.com.

This post is summarized from the Daily Blogging Tips. Photo by Depts.

Stashing away from full time job for blogging is an active bait for many of the starter blogger. Unfortunately, very few actually end up reaching that level, and that too after much privation. The cardinal key is consistency and patience. The pressure of incessantly churning out new content must be dealt with equally fortified persistence.

To really earn a range of full scale income, you have to build up the momentum and this article will discuss some points to show you the way:-

Organizing multiple sources of Income

This is vital to realize that by just advertising in your blog, you’ll not be able to really power up your income stream unless your blog is hugely popular for some reason. For example, talk about some niche topic in your blog just like what ProBlogger talk about making money by blogging.

Thus, the best deal is to develop some other source of income using your blog. For example, introducing some affiliate programs in your blog. You may earn up to 5 digits income just depends on affiliate sales. Check out How JohnChow achieve that with his blog. You can also sell premium contents as another way to add some extra income flow. All these together if effectively combined, can generate some good money over the time flow.

Dealing it as a Business

To generate a consistent financial stream, you must treat your blog as a business instead of a hobby where you can invest your time in an irregular fashion. Save plenty of time for your blog to work on it, you may feel a problematic at first but with time everything will take off smoothly.  Beside these, you must be willing to reinvest some part of the money back into improving your blog. It will open more opportunity for higher revenue. This a crucial part and you must take this step into high consideration.

Managing Multiple Blogs

If you have more than one blog, then you can naturally generate more cash flow. However, having said that, it may sometimes become too onerous to manage all the blogs at a time, in that case, you should concrete the position of one blog and then concentrate more on the other blogs.

A Different Approach

In this approach, you will blog for another blogging side. The advantage is not only you can get the extra income. If your contents are good, you can actively make friends with other bloggers and gradually build a network of contacts, which is indeed very important.

So these are few of the tips to give your blogging dream-start.

This post is summarized from the Embracing the Status of Part-Time Blogger: 5 Practical Tips. Photo by ZNET.

Earning a full-time income through blogging has become a popular discussion topic among active bloggers. However, even blogging on part-time basis can also bring an amount that can be considered as a sufficient or  more than your full-time income. This article will propose some tips to maximise your chances of making the full out of part-time blogging.

Develop A Plan

A plan is a baseline for anything that is ever to become a successful attempt. Blogging part-time is also no different. You must have a plan about your end target, like, are you happy with just part-time income or you want to build it up over the months to churn out some real good amounts? Whatever it may be, it is always appreciable to work around on a fixed and logical plan.

Frame A Schedule

As you are working part-time, you are not going to have the whole day, so you must fix a proper schedule. Then, you must follow the schedule to make sure that the time you are spending on blogging is fruitful. You are rightly focusing on something beneficial, other than letting that few hours slipping through on futile activities. Try to shut down your MSN, Yahoo, Skype. It will distract you from blogging. 

Never Over Do

If you see some success from blogging part-time in one specific blog, you may feel the incitement to involve yourself in some other or may try to spawn some other fancy idea straightaway. However, this might bring more pain in the back rather than bliss, as you may lost track of all these as you will then have to work much more in a short span of time; and you may also end up messing with your full-time work which will surely can bring about some tough times. So, carefully decide how much you can afford in one shot without being exposed to some misfortunes.

Branding

Building the blogging up can work well into the advantages of your asset department. You can hoard it up to sell it off later on or keep it as an asset that you can later use for your benefit. Besides these, blogging part-time you also can build your reputation gradually. Look at Kenny Sia. He is becoming a celebrity because of his blog.

Revise Your Objective

As you go along with your blogging, and gain more and more experience, you are likely to have already altered some future direction from the original standings when you initiated the blogging. This deviation is natural and in fact it is a good advise to occasionally cogitate about the present status and what tactic can bring about the best profitable outcome for you; and step up accordingly.

So these are the few important points that can greatly refurbish your approach in part-time blogging which will only be of benefit to you.