Getting Life Done – Coffee And TV
Being a freelancer is not always easy. The biggest problem you will face as a freelancer is not competition, rude clients nor finding clients, it will be you. You yourself are your worst enemy in freelancing.
Unlike in a 9-5 job, as a freelancer you are your own boss, which usually is great. Though being your own comes with it’s own responsibilities, such as bossing yourself around. In a great article on FreelanceApple.com, the author says about controlling yourself and your drinking habits (about coffee):
Sphere: Related ContentSleep, however, is probably the worst part of drinking caffeine containing beverages. There are 5 stages of sleep and “deep sleep” is in stage 5 where you are getting a real rest. Drinking coffee will rarely allow you to pass stage 4 and you will never enter stage 5 for your real rest. If you drink a cup of coffee, there is still a considerable amount left in your blood stream twelve hours later to disturb your sleep pattern. This just means that when you wake up you will need more coffee and will slowly be edging toward a full addict with only minute differences from a addicted smoker. Read more
The #1 Free WordPress Newsletter Plugin & System
Newsletters are a prime marketing resource and a huge profit center. WordPress blogs offer the first great step in marketing your self, your service and your product, but it is not enough and many people have come to that realization. There are many plugins for newsletters, yet all rely upon WordPress’s built in user system. Is this all that bad? No. But it is extremely limiting and can be dangerous for your business.
The danger comes from within. Most of this is danger that can only be seen once it comes back to bite you, so it’s best to take precautions to avoid any unnecessary problems. One of my biggest problems with using a built-in newsletter system is that it requires the WordPress and mailing list systems to be on the same server. You had very little control over where your data was stored. Also, as good as some of these plugins may be they all have limited functionality. Little scheduling support, no auto-responders, bounced e-mail checking, little to no look customization and worst of all, most of them did not have any support for e-mail throttling.
E-mail throttling is limiting the amount of e-mails that go out at a time. Many hosts limit the amount of e-mails that can be sent out at any given time in-order to prevent spam. If you cannot control how fast your e-mails go out, you may very well be blocked by your host and isp! You website could go down and stay down for hours, days or even weeks!
So what is the best solution? The best FREE, as in beer, solution is to not use a ‘built in’ system at all. So far, the best free newsletter system out on the internet is phplist. And several helpful people have create two extemely useful plugins for WordPress which enable you to use phplist from within your WP blog.
Sphere: Related ContentBetter Business Hygiene: E-mail Addresses
Filed under: Better Business Hygiene, Business, How-to
Looking your best on the internet isn’t as hard as most people make it out to be. Yet for some reason most people fail to grasp even the most fundamental aspects of business hygiene on the internet. Did you know that there still are people out there who use a @aol.com e-mail address on technical job applications? Not that there is anything wrong with an Aol.com address, but it’s like showing up to a Porshe meeting in a beat up Geo Metro; the chances are you won’t even get in.
Whether you are applying for a job, writing articles or just being an employee it is essential for your internet hygiene that you have an appropriate e-mail address. You’re e-mail address is like the suit you wear. Going to a meeting dressed incorrectly is a death sentence. Likewise, a poor choice of e-mail address will hamper your business efforts.
Don’t think an e-mail address is ‘just’ an e-mail address. It says a lot about you. Much like the car you drive, the house you live in and the cloths you wear. Looks are important, no matter what anyone says. We all know “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”, yet we all judge on first impressions (aka, by our looks).
For business this is important as a good address sets the tone for you. If, for example, you are starting a business and want clients to invest with you it would not look good if you sent your mail from ‘fluffykitten123@hotmail.com’. It is very unprofessional for several reasons:
- First and foremost, the username is completely inappropriate. Extremely childish. Very poor taste.
- The username is not professional at all, unless your business’s name was “Fluffy Kitten 123″ LLC.
- Nothing wrong with @hotmail, though it means you cannot be troubled with having your own domain name.
- It’s all to easy to create a cheap @hotmail account to use for spamming and fraud.
Here is a quick list of the best things you can do to make yourself look better on the internet as a business:
- Own your own domain. For example, I have pk@piotrkrzyzek.com
- Use consistence name schemes. In my example, I use the first and last name initials @piotrkrzyzek.com
As a person, here are some things you can do to help yourself look better:
- Use a reputable e-mail service, like gmail. I also have piotr.krzyzek@gmail.com. I use this for all my business correspondences. Other good services can include: Schools (.edu), Government (.gov), Military (.mil), Hotmail, Yahoo. There are of course others, but these are the ones that come first into my mind.
- Use business standards when creating your e-mail address. Use something along the well accepted format of firstname.lastname@service.com. Other good variations include: last.first, initials, firstInitial.lastname. You can also use your self employed business name as the address name. If for example you have Nuclear Fusion Design Studio Blog, you can safely create NuclearFusionDesigns@gmail.com and it will still look good.
- Do not use profanity or ‘adult’ words in the username.
- Do not use silly, funny or cute usernames. Keep it professional.
- Great tip if you have a few extra bucks, get your own domain and use that.
For further reading, you can check out “How What Your E-mail Address Says About You” at Lifehacker.com
This is the first part of a long series I’m calling “Better Business Hygiene“. Better Business Hygiene aims to teach you how to look better on the internet as a person, as a business (even if you don’t have one) and how to position yourself as an expert in your niche.
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