Guest Blogger Ben Brown is the Creative Director and founder of Citizen Design. He has worked with the likes of Apple, The BBC and Universal Records; and he has kindly agreed to add us to that list, taking up a regular slot here on the PPH blog.

Have you got a spare hour today? What am I talking about, if you read the title of this post and want to get started then of course you have! You’ll be surprised just how much I’m gonna help you cram in an hour and believe me it will be one extremely invaluable hour.

Now sometimes talking to a Developer is like being in the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars, they perhaps look a bit odd, the words coming out of their mouth are all a bit weird, and behind them it’s more than likely someone is playing with a light saber. So getting your site plans, messages, tone of voice and customer journey down on paper before you start, means you know what you want, and it’s their job to make it happen.

Let’s put the kettle on, arrange some biscuits nicely on the plate, sit down and take an hour to think about how this is going to work, and what you want it to do for you.

1. What should the site do?

Every site needs to have a goal, you need to get something back from every visitor, a ‘Like’, a sale, or a contact. You’re not building this to show off, it has to work hard as an extra arm for your business, so consider these points:

• Am I selling a product or a service, myself or an image of larger company?

• Who do I want to look at this site? What are these people like, and what do they engage with?

• What tone of voice should the site have, corporate and serious, or lively and chatty, sounding like me?

• Do we need to collect visitor data from the site? Newsletter subscriptions, ask a question box or commenting are all ways to get something back.

• How do I best showcase my business, do you need a movie, nice photography, a slideshow, or something more interactive?

2. Structure

Now consider how to break down your offering into something like a logical structure, imagine you’re Mork from Mork and Mindy. You know nothing, then for some reason you land on your site for the first time, is it obvious what you do? Is it clear how to find out more information? Do you have a simple navigation structure?

Your business (hopefully) is second nature to you, you know it inside and out, but you can never assume that anyone else has got the time or energy to weave their way through pages of data to find what they’re looking for. Keep it simple, and if you’ve got a large technical site, include a search function so customers can find exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Site plan

Right, get your crayons out and a fresh sheet of paper, draw a box that says ‘HOME’ at the top and underneath this create all the main links to your services that will come off the home page, and then the sub pages that will come off of these. Think about how pages can link together and how you can condense pages and merge them together wherever possible.

“Getting your site down to as few clicks and pages as possible is the key here, the slicker the experience for the customer, the more likely they are to engage and digest the content.”

4. Content

Web copy is very different to print copy, these days people have about 8 seconds before they switch off, so selling your messages quickly is super important.

• Use

• Bullet

• Points

• Wherever

• Possible

And break up your copy with pull-out quotes and short punchy statements. Make sure you plan the copy for each page, don’t send massive Word docs over to your developer and expect them to edit it all down into a nice neat piece of web copy. Save everyone time, and do it yourself, less is more.

5. Future proofing

The last thing to consider is how you’re going to keep the site alive, building a site full of great content is brilliant, leaving it untouched for a year is unthinkable. Consider how you want to keep the site up-to-date right from the start, here are 3 options for you and your Developer to consider:

• Build a bespoke content management system (CMS) that allows you to go into a back office and change copy and images.

• Build the site on a platform like WordPress. Using the standard WordPress back office you can edit posts and keep your site alive.

• Build a static site and engage with your developer periodically to update parts of the site. This is a cheaper build cost, but then you’ll incur costs going forward.

OK, reading that didn’t count as part of your hour, but the clock is now ticking. So use an hour today and plan your web strategy. When that’s in place you’ll have all the ammunition you need to put together a brief that you can take to a Developer and start building.

Martina Mercer has years of experience as a Freelance Copywriter, Journalist & Editor who has used PPH on numerous occasions to build up a team of assistants. We suspect that Martina could write with her eyes closed & still produce something compelling!

Working from home for most sounds like a dream come true. However, to be able to do it effectively, you need to implement a few grounds rules. When I started with a home office over ten years ago, it wasn’t my own determination that was lacking, but the attitudes of friends and family that failed to see it as a “proper job”.

This led to a build-up of frustration on my part, and in a bid to please everyone, I’d often give into demands during the day and then work through the night when I could be guaranteed peace and quiet.

A single mum at the time, my mother was the worst. As she worked in a 9-6 office, she would constantly ring and ask for favors, needing errands running that couldn’t be done during normal office hours. On top of this, friends would drop off their toddlers assuming that as the lights were on and someone was home, I had the free time to babysit.

Unfortunately, I tackled it the wrong way; letting it build until I eventually cracked, offending everyone with my long rant of “how do you expect me to work under these conditions?”

Now married with three children, I find that although I’m often diplomatic and my family understand, I frequently have to remind them that writing with constant interruptions (no matter how much I adore their company) is not an ideal situation.

Although I’ve learned the hard way, knowing that without spelling it out, a day would be wasted sat in the office starting a myriad of jobs but not completing any.

Now I choose the assertive route and quite simply say NO.

It may be pedantic but I follow a set of rules and ask others to respect them too. So far it has worked, as instead of blowing my lid, I simply point to the board.

These are:

Pretend I’ve left for work at 8am:

This helps with my own motivation too as I mentally train myself to do nothing but work between the hours of 8 and 6. Only through being thoroughly assertive have I encouraged family and friends to adopt this philosophy too.

If you have a question email me:

It may seem silly as we’re in the same house, however, I can answer an email when I’m ready rather than being interrupted during a video call or an important piece of copy. I was once in the middle of a group video call when my family burst in with the news that Banana, our dog, had pinched the sausages for dinner.

Spotting the group of men on the screen, they all peered closely at the monitor asking loudly, “why are you watching a video of a bunch of funny looking men on your computer?”

Other Changes: 

I’ve also made some changes to ensure little interruption, such as an extra phone line for personal calls that my husband can answer and take messages. I have a designated office that does not allow children, toys, or any other family paraphernalia.

I turn off all social networking and outside influences and use my imagination to pretend my clients are sat behind me assessing my work ethic.

In the beginning it was quite easy to spend longer over breakfast and do a little housework, however, as regular clients returned and my workload increased significantly – I realized that these hourly indulgences would mean I’d be working into the night just to catch up.

Of course some evenings I do work through, as nothing beats the satisfaction of a job well done. However, I do try to leave the office behind at 6 most evenings as I tell the children:

“If you let me work, the sooner I’ll finish and be all yours!”

Last night the members of the PPH team and the CEO, joined a whole host of movers and shakers at the TechCrunch Mini Meetup in New York. PPH were on the list of proud sponsors for the evening and met so many interesting people. The TechCrunch editorial team kept us all entertained, fed and watered with pizza’s, beers and karaoke! If you have images of our CEO up on the mic, sorry to disappoint you but on this occasion, he left that up to the “braver” individuals among the crowd!

What was the night about?

First and foremost, having some fun, was top of the agenda, but the event was also held in preparation of a much larger forth coming event; which is annually hosted by TechCruch called Disrupt. Disrupt launches the hottest start-ups in tech, so naturally it is a pleasure for us to be a part of that. Back to the evening, there was a lot of card swapping as one would do at these sorts of affairs and we thoroughly enjoyed the general exchange of ideas among a crowd of professionals from all industries.

Key takeaways!

Get out there meet new people, it’s always worth while; you’ll be surprised at what you discover and how it can help you. The PPH team are out and about in NYC at the moment and hope to meet as many of you guys as possible…TONIGHT (9th May 12) we are hosting our very own meetup and doing it all again (so to speak!). This time it’s exclusively so we can get to know you all better and share our exciting plans for the future, please register here to attend or just pop your head round and grab a drink with the team, why not join us and some of your fellow PPHers.

Guest Blogger Ben Brown is the Creative Director and founder of Citizen Design. He has worked with the likes of Apple, The BBC and Universal Records; and he has kindly agreed to add us to that list, taking up a regular slot here on the PPH blog.

Do have a Social Media Strategy? If you do then well done, I mean it’s 2012 it doesn’t take a genius to work out that promoting your business through a massive integrated network of free tools, with a potential reach of millions at the simple cost of a little bit of creativity, and some of your time is a good idea, so well done to you. If you don’t, then WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING FOR THE LAST 3 YEARS? Placing adverts in telephone directories, and sending out mail shots? OK, listen, it’s never too late, we can fix this.

Here’s part one of a bottom-line, basic, Social Media Strategy that operates across the 3 main platforms, and can give you some really good results, if you make the time to get it right, and put your heart and soul into the process. In part 1 we’re going to look at getting the tools in place, in part 2 we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of how it all works together.

1. Open you mind.

The first step is to open up, you need to become a living embodiment of your brand, you need to exude your Social Media, and integrate it into your working day wherever it fits. It can’t be an after thought, it has to work along side you, all the time. Imagine you’re an FBI agent handcuffed to a prisoner, if you take a leak, they take a leak, actually that’s one of the best time to post updates (ladies only).

2. Establish your goals.

What do you want to get out of this? Establishing who you want to aim your content at is vital, for example, if you’re a designer looking for new customers there’s no point in writing a blog post about design that only designers read! Designers aren’t going to ring you, for design work. Think about who you want to connect with, what they want to read, and how to package your content in a way that they’re going to engage with.

3. Set Up the Sites.

The first thing you’re going to need to do is set up and populate your suite of sites. For this first-steps approach we’re going to focus on 3 key building blocks and they are;

• A Blog – Using Blogger, or WordPress
• A Facebook Page for Business
• A Twitter Feed

All of these are free to set up, and easy to customise, and each one is going to play a key role in how the strategy operates, so it’s essential that you get all three in place as they’re all going to lean on each other to drive your goals.

Your Blog….Blogger vs WordPress?

You can use either, it’s your preference, Blogger is probably easier to set up and use, but WordPress has a slicker look to it, more templates, and more in-depth options for customisations, and there are probably more plug-ins for Blogger that can offer better integration into other platforms.

Your blog is the keystone of this strategy, this is where the content is going to come from that captures people’s attention, and draws them into your corporate site. The Blog is the bass drum in your Social Media band, it’s rhythm drives the other platforms and keeps the momentum.

Your blog content needs to be engaging, controversial, incendiary, interesting, unignorable and relevant. You need to write short focussed posts that identify potential problems and demonstrate that you know how to fix them, talk about how things should be done correctly and exude the confidence and experience that you want your customers to know you have.

Don’t be overwhelmed by this, take down ideas for posts as they come to you, don’t force them and don’t write something when you’ve got nothing to say. Forget about people reading it, keep it to the point, avoid cliches, and always sign off with a link to you site, and email for direct action.

Your Facebook Page

Assuming you already have a personal Facebook Page, your business needs to have a separate space. This is somewhere you can promote your blog content directly to the people that follow you, and the purpose of this Page is to showcase your blog and give people quick easy access to company information that will eventually drive people back to your main site.

Keep the information consistent with the copy on your main site, and make sure you’re using good quality imagery, the new Timeline feature gives you space to create a really beautiful design in the masthead and populate your page with large expansive imagery, make sure you take full advantage of the Milestones and Highlighting features.

For now we’re going to let your Facebook page harvest ‘Likes’ based on your blog content, but to really drive traffic you’re going to need to master Facebook advertising, more on this in part 2.

Twitter Feed

Twitter is the third pillar of your Social Media Strategy, and you have to be prepared to integrate it into your life, Twitter isn’t something you assign 30 minutes at the end of your working day to, Twitter is for your mini-down-times, so when a document is PDFing, you’re on the train, the toilet or just waiting around in a cafe, it’s something that you have to bring into your life, and make second nature to your communications.

If you don’t have any graphics experience keep your page simple, use colours from your main site, and your logo as your icon, make sure you biography outlines clearly what you do, and points people to your main site. Don’t try to do too much here, keep it simple, neat and reflect the basic corporate values of your main site.

We’ll be using Twitter to target approach and engage new audiences, find new contacts, and drive all of these people back to the blog.

So that’s part one, if you’ve followed that through you’ll have in place the first steps towards building an effective Social Media Strategy and here’s some other PR tips from a fellow PPher Aimee Carmicheal, PR & Social Media Consultant. In part 2 I’ll talk about how all these things fit together, and how you can use some simple ideas to boost your audiences.

Martina Mercer has years of experience as a Freelance Copywriter, Journalist & Editor who has used PPH on numerous occasions to build up a team of assistants. We suspect that Martina could write with her eyes closed & still produce something compelling!

I’m sure that many of you as business professionals will be aware that this month Google once again updated their algorithm to incorporate “spam bots”.

In simple terms, Google can now recognise a web page or article that has been produced purely with rankings through keyword integration in mind. Now, if an article or blog doesn’t add information and value to the visitor Google will simply bypass it regardless of the backlinks and keywords involved.

This one tiny shift has seen my own business boom and I’m sure all copywriters and journalists are experiencing the same success. As my previous clients return to ask me to write quality copy to replace the cheaply acquired articles they thought would do the job, I’ve been quite simply out of breath whilst sat at a keyboard.

My fingers are definitely the fittest part of my body and I’m keen to not take this surge for granted, as in the life of a freelancer one busy week may be followed by a few deathly quiet ones as Google changes its requirements all over again.

However, I’m pleased as punch with this turn of events, as I have noticed an increasing trend in job posters demanding “High Quality Copywriters”. If you don’t know why by now, here’s why you should…

Why is Google so Important?

Most of us know that SEO is big business, because by climbing the page to the top of the ranks on Google, your business is right there waiting when someone is looking for your type of product or service. This advertising is an amazing profit producer for businesses as those that are searching for a product – for example a new bed – have already made the decision to spend, so little coercion is needed to make that sale.

What about Web Copy?

Many business owners already understand the importance of good copy on their landing pages, as each page should entice the visitor to delve deeper lowering bounce rates and ultimately leading them to the buy or contact button. In a world where our main human interactions are through a monitor we all crave for that personal service from the safety of our own homes. However, many who employ article writers and bloggers do so with one aim in mind – to make their keywords stand out on the web pushing their website to that all important top spot.

Why Do I Need Good Copy?

Some small business owners misunderstood this and think that any effort will help them climb the ranks. However even before Google could spot cheaper efforts, customers were being turned off when they happened to come across poorly worded articles on the internet.

Because all articles with the website’s keywords are available to view, these often show up in the searches too. Poor quality copy makes a business look shabby and unprofessional and leads the buyer to flick to page two of the search. You know how the saying goes, you have to speculate to accumulate!

What Can a Copywriter Do?

Whilst, Google has prompted many to promote their businesses in the best possible light, no matter what the SEO medium, businesses now realise that SEO is not simply a bunch of keywords but quality writing that entertains, entices and informs the reader. A good copywriter will be able to weave keywords into a blog or article without compromising the visitors experience making sure only Google notices the placement and no one else does. To get to grips with the basics of SEO here are some really useful tips from Fellow PPHer Alison Griffths.

Hi all,

We know this should have been communicated this to you a earlier, so we’d like to apologise for the hiccup. This was due to a technical error on our side. On the flip side it reminds us and you that we are just humans so please accept our apology for this.

With this post we’d like to announce to you an important change that affects our fees on the site. As of Thursday 19th April we have applied a small minimum charge to all invoices paid via PPH of £2.

Why have we done this?

We assure you that we are not greedy bastards! In fact processing invoices costs us much more than the £2 if you consider that each one is checked manually for fraud, money laundry etc. We operate a high-touch customer support service that we know you value and love and we just extended that to 24/7 (on email and soon to be extended to phone support too). So in short, the sole reason for the minimum fee is to try and avoid invoices of tiny amounts being processed, which cost us more to process than the fee we charge.

Please note, this is not an additional fee! It is purely a floor, which means that the same service fee applies as before, except in cases where the service fee amount drops below £2 on any invoice.

We hope you find this reasonable and justified.

As always we are open to your feedback.

————————–

The PPH Community Team

Zoe Goodacre is a copywriter with a number of clients on PeoplePerHour. She’s also a performance coach who specialises in helping new start-ups and freelancers focus on personal and business goals. She’s kindly offered to give us the benefit of her expertise and has some tips to help you get your objectives in focus.

Stephen Covey, author of the best-seller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People once said we should all “begin with the end in mind.” Having clear objectives is statistically proven to drive achievement, but in real life we’re often already halfway through one of life’s journeys before we figure out where we’re going, and better still where we want to be!

Working with a coach can be an excellent investment in your personal and business development. With the skilled guidance of a coach, you can more quickly identify personal and business objectives and decide how you will go about achieving them.

If you’re just starting out, you might not have the time or the money to invest in engaging a coach. However, I have a few tips that I can share with you about focusing your mind on your goals and putting your plans into action.

1. Define your Outcome

Recently, I asked a roomful of people the most important thing when setting out on a long journey. Surprisingly few said that you need to know the destination. Your outcome, however, is vital. If you don’t have this clear, how will you know if you’re doing the right things? What does success look like for you? How will it feel when you’re achieving your goal?

Sometimes the end in mind seems further than it really is

2. Assess your Situation

Think about where you are now. What are you spending your time doing? Is it moving you closer to where you want to be? If the answer to the second question is no, the next section is particularly important.3

3. Evaluate your Choices

What options or opportunities are open to you? What are the consequences of each of those choices? What choices are likely to have the best outcome for you or your business.

4. Decide your Actions

This is where you need to get real. Which of your choices are you going to take action on? Where will you start? What obstacles might you face? How willing are you, on a scale of 1-10, to carry out your actions?

5. Review your Results

There is no achievement without recognition of results. How are you going to know when you’ve fulfilled your goals? When will you review your progress? Put some time in your diary to give yourself a performance review and decide where to go next.

With these simple set of steps, it’s much easier to focus on what you want to achieve and get yourself motoring towards success!

It is very important to keep records of all the expenses you had that were a result of your freelance work. You will be able to deduct these expenses from your income and therefore pay lower taxes. To report your freelance income on a tax return, you must fill out Schedules C and SE for Form 1040.

Step 1
Obtain a copy of IRS Schedule C (Form 1040), or Schedule C-EZ, if applicable, Schedule SE and Form 1040.
Step 2
Determine your total freelance income by totaling all income for which you received 1099s. Income from an employer that is below $600 does not need to be reported to you, the freelancer, in the form of a 1099. You must still report it as income, so keep track of that income for your total. Also determine the amount of the expenses that you incurred.
Step 3
Fill out Schedule C per the instructions provided by the IRS. Record your net profit on line 31. Transfer this figure to line 12 on Form 1040.
Step 4
Fill out Schedule SE to determine your self-employment tax. Transfer this figure to line 56 on Form 1040.
Step 5
Complete Form 1040. Attach Schedules C and SE to Form 1040.

Guest Blogger Ben Brown is the Creative Director and founder of Citizen Design. He has worked with the likes of Apple, The BBC and Universal Records; and he has kindly agreed to add us to that list, taking up a regular slot here on the PPH blog.

I’ve only just thought of Freesources, I wish I’d have called part one that, NUTS!

Anyway, last month I gave away part one of my trusted list of free online resources, in a desperate attempt to please everyone, and destroy my own business, and guess what? I’ve decided, it’s not enough, I need your approval so badly, I’ve decided to give you some more of my precious links. So here’s 10 more, (mostly) free online tools that you can use to speed up your workflow, save a bit of time, and present yourself in a more professional manner, oh and make yourself a generally more likable and handsome/beautiful person. (Okay, maybe not that last bit).

1. ManageFlitter

First up is Manage Flitter. Now if you run Twitter campaigns for clients you need to make sure you’re churning the account and keeping it fresh. It’s easy to follow 2k people and get 200 followers back, but once you’ve hit that limit, unfollowing people through the native app is time consuming. ManageFlitter can help you with that, limited to 1000 unfollows every 24 hours, it’s the perfect way to clean your account, and keep it junk free.

FREE – Subscription for upgrades

2. Mailchimp

MailChimp looks beautiful, and under the hood lies a user experience that can be as simple or as involved as you want it to be. You can send 12k emails to 2k subscribers for free every month, and there’s good value pricing plans in place to accommodate more as this grows. Even if you’ve got no interest in using the Chimp, take a look at the Resources section for some great information on email marketing, as well as a colouring book of chimp pictures, amazing, I know what I’m doing for the rest of the day!

FREE – Subscription for upgrades

3. 960 Grid

The 960 Grid is a neat and tidy way to keep your site design in order, this site offers a whole range of templates for a host of applications including, Photoshop, InDesign and Fireworks. Within this package there’s a range of column number options so you can find the perfect fit for the site you’re looking to design, and never have to worry about setting up your guides again. Lazy, yes, timesaving yes, and probably better than you could do it in the first place, of course.

FREE

4. Browser Size Google Labs

This is a great way to show your clients that their current sites aren’t working across all browsers. I do find it strange that so many people look at the internet on such tiny screens, but if you check this out you will see the facts. Remember the percentages shown are the amount of people that CAN see the screen. This is also a great demonstration of the importance of the 960 grid, according to this data you can see that quickly after 960px, the cut off rolls down to around 50%.

FREE

5. ConvertPDFtoWord.net

Often a job will come along that sounds really easy to do, and more often than that, a job will be, ‘Can you convert this PDF into a Word doc so I can edit it?’, and now the answer is yes. This tool means that you can effectively create editable stylised documents for your customers, something that is always difficult. Just don’t let them see how easy it is now.

FREE

6. Prezi

Powerpoint presentations are currently so utterly naff, that they have a kind of retro chic about them, Steve Jobs banned them, and Dave Gorman is touring a show all ‘ironically’ presented in them, so before you launch into your next presentation to a sniggering set of Gorman fans, take a look at Prezi. This easy to use service lets you build online presentations that zoom, and zip around the screen giving potentially dry subject matters a little splash of intrigue.

FREE – Subscription for upgrades

7. Morgue File

Stock photography budget dried up, need some free images? Well take a look at Morgue File, there’s a bunch of stock shots on here covering most subjects, and although the quality isn’t always top notch, with a little bit of Photoshop work, you can get some really cool results. There’s no licenses covering the images for creative or commercial work, but take a look at the terms to make sure you’re not breaking any rules

 FREE

8. Ads of the World 

This is an astonishing resource of inspiration for any creative, showcasing the most interesting advertising work going on around the world and across every industry imaginable. It’s fun reading the comments as well, some people are so utterly opinionated, it’s very humorous watching them get giddy with excitement when they think they’ve found a return of an old idea.

 FREE

9. Dropbox

Remember that man that used to come into you office in stinky leathers, speaking all muffled through a crash helmet? Well, he’s probably out of a job now, because this is how you send large files to customers these days. Dropbox is a great way to make you look organised and responsive to a client. Once you start work with them, set up a Dropbox and invite them in and share the work as you progress, using this to house all the photography and copy, so both parties can always share versions and have an oversight into what’s going on.

 FREE

10. 5 Second test

This site borders on the cruel, but in principal it’s a great proposition. Upload your creative to the site, set your questions and let users give your design the 5 second test. People taking the test will see if they can spot what you’re selling, your key message, or your Call to Action in 5 second window, or you get electrocuted, not really. Personally 5 seconds is a little bit quick for me, but then I’ve aged badly and my reactions are shot. This is a fine way to test a site design, and you can gather effective results to present your case to your client if your project is struggling in the design process.

FREE (Do tests to earn tests) – Subscription for upgrades

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So there we have it, 10 more freesources that help make my life easier, and now help out all of my competition. So what resources do you use? Which sites have speeded up your day, helped you to deliver a slicker service and made you a better freelancer? COME ON SHARE!

Friday 6th April

Monday 9th April

In addition, we are also upgrading our phone system from Tuesday 10th April!  Please use our new contact number 0203 608 1191 to hold of our Customer Support team.