I stumbled into freelancing pretty much by chance. While I was in college, working on a Computer Science degree, I would get local contract jobs here and there for a variety of clients with no real relation to each other except for one thing: they had all been referred to me by someone they knew. With each successful job I was generating more and more word of mouth about what I could do and it was leading directly to more leads. I never actively advertised any of my services and yet people were managing to find me.

My very first big time project after I graduated was with an area minor league baseball team. I heard they were taking bids on a re-design of their site and its content management system so I wrote a proposal, had a meeting and won the bid. After the new site was completed and launched I began receiving quote requests out of the blue from people who had either seen the site or had been referred to me by the team’s staff. One project eventually snowballed into the majority of my current client base.

I put together this dopey little graphic to help illustrate my point that you can take one successful job and spin into a lot of future work with a little bit of luck and good word of mouth. As a freelancer, you’re more than capable of making a living bidding on job after job but once people start talking about your skills your reliance on job boards will begin to dwindle away.

I have a guest post up on Collin LaHay’s Mixed Market Arts called Four Tips For Hiring Freelance Web Developers that some of you might be interested in reading.
This post is written from the other side of the fence that I usually stand on. The tips can also be useful for any web developers or designers looking to outsource some of their extra work but the main focus is on non-technical folks looking to hire freelancers.

I use Google Apps for all of the email tasks for i am jack’s design. GMail has a simple feature that lets you “Star” a message and have it placed in a special Star-only folder. This turns out to be a very simple way to organize your tasks from clients.

I’ve tried using web apps for task management like Ta-da List and Remember The Milk but in the end I always come back to the simplest solution: GMail. It’s much easier to just star an email containing a client request than it is to open up a separate site/program to write down what you need to get done.

If you’re running GMail and looking for a way to stay organized give the “Star” feature a try.

The 2007 Web Design Survey from the folks at A List Apart has been released. It’s 81 pages of mainly charts and graphs explaining the responses from the nearly 33,000 people who completed the survey. Most of the questions on the survey relate to people working 9 to 5 but there’s a few bits and pieces in there for freelancers as well.

I hope next year’s survey (assuming there will be one) has more questions focusing on the technology web developers are using as opposed to the workplace and income issues that this year’s survey seemed to stress.