STARTING a career as a creative freelance is always a challenge, but restarting can be just as tough. It’s not unusual for freelances to have a period of absence; maybe you’ve taken parental leave; or maybe you’re semi-retired and have decided to explore ways of...
It is a fact of life that not everyone you approach will want your services. If, for example, you have an email list of 100 potential clients and send each one a short, punchy overview of your talents and experience, you would be very lucky to receive 20 replies, most...
Every freelance knows that self-marketing is the key to winning new commissions. Although emails and phone calls sometimes appear out of the blue, it is usually your own efforts that generate the most interest. The problem is, however, that most other freelances use...
What is crowdfunding? Crowdfunding is based on the principle of raising relatively small amounts of money from a large number of people. So, for example, if you needed £10,000 to start a new project, instead of borrowing the whole amount from one bank, a thousand...
So, how do we make our own luck? Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is through personal experience: In mid-1997 I had been a self-employed journalist and PR consultant for five years but I needed a break. Thankfully, I’d made enough money to take a year out and I...
Napoleon Bonaparte is widely recognised as a military genius but in recent years, he has become a role model for people who are intent on getting rich and building corporate empires. To authors of business self-help books, Napoleon offers plenty of material: he was a...
The previous blog entry listed nine basic principles and general rules of effective writing. If you can master punctuation, and erase text talk and the inappropriate use of capital letters, you will be taken much more seriously by your readers. And, if you...
The letters on your computer keyboard can be used in an almost infinite number of permutations and combinations to create just about anything. From the works of Shakespeare to a dense scientific tome; from a heart-warming love song to the instruction manual of a...
