Freelancing in Real Life

As a freelancer, you are the boss, laborer, marketing department, bill collector, bill payer, and more. When things are slow, you go into marketing mode. When things are busy, you’re often dealing with double the prospects while juggling double the workload. It can be tricky to get things into that perfect “pocket” of a balanced workload.

For me, the more leads I get on new business, the more time I’m spending on estimates and business requirements. As a result of that, the less time I have available for the projects in-process. Is it smarter to keep the prospects waiting, the existing clients waiting, or the wife and kids waiting?

I want to know what you do to balance your time between new projects and projects in the queue when things are insanely busy, and I want to know how you spend your time when things are slow.

Friends of AnywhereMan.com are doing some exciting things in the next few months and I want to share a couple of them that you need to check out.

Where Do You Work Naked?

First, Lisa Kanarek of WorkingNaked.net (see my interview with Lisa) is doing a month-long contest called “Where do you work naked?” and she wants photos and a quick description of your home office. She’s giving away some excellent home-office related prizes and it’ll be worth your while to go and enter the contest. Be sure to subscribe to her blog, too. She’s always sharing helpful tips for working from home.

Market Your Business On The Web

Next, Aaron Weiche of Five Technology is helping put on half-day Local University seminar in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area that will help you and your small business better understand marketing on the web. Representatives from both Google and Bing will be there to discuss their respective search engines as well.

I will say this about Aaron: The guy knows his stuff. I keep my eye on the way he interacts on the web and he’s getting a huge amount of ROI with minimal effort, right down to the things he shares on Twitter. I know that the ROI of you attending this workshop will be equally impressive.

Oh yeah, you probably want to know about the deal. Aaron is giving AnywhereMan readers $40 off the price of the seminar, cutting the price from $129 down to $89. Visit the Local University Twin Cities page and use code “anywhere2010″ at checkout to receive the discount. I might try to make the 3.5 hour drive down there myself!

Got Good Deals Or Events?

If anybody else has something useful or fun going on that might be of interest to my users, just let me know. Please don’t be offended if your event or promotion doesn’t make the cut, but it never hurts to ask.

Here is part two of my first “Startup Saturday” in which I built and launched a new business/site in a day. That site is TweakMyTheme.com.

Please note that some of the steps in this process are simple enough for anybody who has the ability to place orders online to complete, i.e. ordering a domain, ordering a hosting account, etc. You’ll see me flash a link in the video, but here’s a link to my exact steps for launching a theme-based WordPress website fast.

Amazing enough, I just publicized this launch for the first time yesterday and I’ve already gotten an overwhelmingly positive response and some potential business.

What kind of business are you thinking of launching? Would the ability to get it off the ground on a single Saturday motivate you to pursuit it?

My accounting process is kind of a mess right now. It used to be awesome, not to mention effortless. I was using Quicken Home & Business which worked great for a single-member LLC like mine. Importing data from my bank was seamless. But then the Quicken software started to get super buggy and I couldn’t even open it without it crashing. This may have been a Windows issue or a Quicken issue. Either way, this is not good, especially when tax time rolls around. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’ve decided that I want to look at something else for my 2010 bookkeeping. I’d prefer to stay away from any of the Intuit products including Quicken, QuickBooks, etc. Even Intuit’s TurboTax gave me problems last year as the website crashed the day I had a payment due (though I’ll still probably use it this year and hopefully they can avoid that situation).

My other problem with Quicken is that it sits on one PC. I’d love to find a good web-based system, but at the very least I’d like a Mac-based option. I’ve got that thing with me at all times.

So today I’d like some advice. What would you recommend? How do you keep your books up-to-date? Share your tips with us. I have nothing to offer here, but I need some help!