When I got to my third year of design school, I distinctly remember taking on my first ever freelance client. It was my roommate at the time, and she and I traded a logo design for her burgeoning fashion business for a dress she made me for my cousin’s wedding. And pretty much since then, I ran a nice little side hustle as a freelance designer.
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Value is a term that is often tossed around, mostly from people trying to sell you things. For me, value is about what I learn, grow or get enjoyment from – and that is a pretty broad set of standards. In the fast-paced, often vapid-seeming world of social media though, the question we should ALL be asking is “What VALUE does my social media bring to my customers lives?”
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People seem to have come down with a case of the “busy’s”. “How are you?” – “Busy”. “How is business?” – “Busy”. “How’s your Mum?” – “Busy”. See a pattern here?
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Working in agency land and the corporate world was a real eye opener for this multitasking machine who likes to go home at 5:30. I found that many of my colleagues would not be efficient or effective as they could (or should) be during their standard hours, only to work back late and turn up late citing having “worked so hard and so late” and were both celebrated and sympathised for it.
Read MoreI would like to start out here by explaining that this piece of content really isn’t as wanky as it sounds on face value. You know how it is so much easier to give your girlfriend advice about her clothing choices or her career than it is for you to take the same advice and put it into practice? Well, business is much the same. From the outside looking in, it is often incredibly easy to see the changes that someone should make in their business, and the steps that they should take. The question has always been, how do you apply the same clear and logical thinking to your own situation, and essentially learn to take your own advice?
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Social media is a fantastic thing for small businesses, giving you direct marketing access to your customers and allowing your brand to be a part of their every day and every movement. Thinking back 40 years ago, brands had nothing like the access we have to customers today – but that works both ways.
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Saying NO to different opportunities as a small business owner is scary. We want to say YES all the time because we aren’t sure when the next opportunity might come or if by saying NO just that once, all the opportunities will disappear. But it’s not that cut and dried.
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NO is the hardest thing that someone in Small Business can do, but it is something that we all face at one time or another as businesses grow and change, sometimes in completely unexpected ways.
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A blog post is not like a firework, one spark and it’s done. Blog posts can (and should!) attract customers for months after you write them. All it takes is a little planning and motivation to keep them working for you all year round. 1. Comments. You can and should be commenting on other people’s posts all over the Internet. On Facebook, Instagram, other blogs, LinkedIn, whatever platforms your brand operates on, create the conversation that social is supposed to be about. Be more subtle than “hey read my post”, but use it as an opportunity to contribute your own story, your own learnings or perspective. 2. Backlinks within your own posts This is one of my most effective tools as a social media manager. They say it costs 10x as much to attract a new customer as it takes to retain one – so why doesn’t the same rule apply for your blog? If you have an interested reader there, bounce them between posts and keep them on your site. This can be done in a few ways, including widgets that preview content you might be interested based on the tags attached to the post you are currently reading; or literal links in your post when that topic is mentioned. Both work well. 3. Emailing them out to clients when the question arises This is a great one for more corporate companies. How often us your customer service writing the same stupid response to a common question? Write a blog post, and cut your work in half and ensure that consistent quality information is given every time. 4. Flashback Friday, Throwback Thursday etc. This is a very visible Internet trend but is also just good advice. No-one else is going to talk about your older content if you don’t – and you didn’t write it for it to be a one and done deal did you? The idea of social media is also that your follower base is continually growing – so an older post will always have a new audience, and that might be the perfect piece of advice for that audience, who in turn will share and move the content, encouraging new followers who haven’t seen your content… See the cycle yet? So establish a flashback system – whether it’s #flashbackfriday #throwbackthursday or posting content that is exactly one year old; remember to push and hustle your…
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I have designed quite a few websites in my time and some of them I have even built and coded. The biggest trouble with being a designer working on web projects is undoubtedly working with developers. Good ones are hard to come by, and often you are working to completely different schedules – in my experience, they work nights and mornings to have their weekends off, while I need a little more sleep than that. Couple that with a designers need for perfection and a developers need for function and you have the potential for some sleepless nights and heavy frustration. In my experience, as with all things, it really comes down to good, open and honest communication. Similarly to briefing in a client, I’ve got some simple tips for briefing in a project to your dev team: 1. Always start with a face to face meeting. As a small and local business owner myself, I believe it’s incredibly important to support those Aussies who are working on their dream, so I strictly work with Australian developers. I have worked with a number of them over the past few years and the most successful projects have worked out when there was a face to face meeting, earlier in the design phase – once you’ve gotten an overall concept signed off by the client. Sit down, have a coffee and talk about what you expect from them; what you will do, where you go from here. Then take the time to explain how you think it will function, then get their expert input. If you don’t know about CMS’s or development languages because you’re newer to the game, that’s fine – but lean on your developer to make these recommendations so you don’t over promise to the client. 2. Project manage. At the end of the day, this is your client and it’s absolutely your ass if you can’t deliver. So work out a schedule (Gantt Chart for those in marketing), allow a buffer of time and start riding your developer a little. Anyone working on a far off freelance project is going to need a nudge, so drive the beast. 3. Content. Ultimately in website development nothing can be done by your developer without content. Text, images, graphic assets, the whole works. Get it together in web optimised .jpegs, sort it into page folders in your Dropbox, name everything using a…
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