• You Are Your Own Boss – Being your own boss means that you have to keep track of your hours, motivate yourself, find clients, buy new software, generate sales, market yourself, pay for repairs and all the other things that an employer handles for you.
• Financial Instability – Finances are unpredictable when you don’t have a regular paycheck. You get paid when the client sends you a check. Sometimes that can be 30 days or more after they have been invoiced. Plan accordingly by creating a rainy day fund to cover your expenses in case of an off month or delayed payment.
• Greater Earnings Potential – If you have consistent client work and multiple revenue streams, you should make significantly more than you would being employed. Try writing a book, creating a product, teaching, speaking or selling stock as alternative sources of income.
• Set Your Own Hours – You can work whenever you want, but some people will expect you to be available 24/7. It helps if you set regular hours and boundaries with clients. You can also take a vacation when you feel the need, but you don’t get paid time off.
• Variety of Work – You won’t be stuck working on one project for months at time. Expect to have a couple of big projects and a couple mini projects from a variety of sources.
• Loneliness – You will spend a lot of time alone. Be prepared to cope. I joined soccer, kickball and dart leagues to get some exercise and ensure that I interact with lots of people on a regular basis. You can also schedule regular lunch dates, get a pet, get involved with your professional community or work in an actual office space.
• Responsibility – You are responsible for everything, including your own success or failure. The blame and credit belong to you.
• Lack of Benefits –You have to provide your own insurance and retirement plans.
• Sales and Marketing – You constantly have to look for new business. That means marketing and selling to potential clients. Even if you don’t like it, you need to spend at least 20% of your time on sales and marketing in order to keep business steady.
• Choose Your Projects – You can pick your own projects, turn down those that aren’t a good fit. If you have a enough clients, you can walk away from a bad project.
• Work Anywhere – You have the pleasure of being able to work anywhere. You could work at home, coffee shops, libraries, another country, an office or even the pub. A home office the most popular choice, but it is a double edged katana. Having a 20 ft commute is awesome, but you can’t leave your work at the office.
• No Office Politics – You don’t have co-workers trying to undercut you to gain an advantage. There is no he said she said back and forth.
• No Dress Code – You can wear whatever you want. Casual Friday meet casual Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

THANKS FOR READING
Thank you for reading The Benefits And Drawbacks Of Self Employment. I hope you found it helpful and informative. You can follow me on twitter.com/richardbeu.

• WELCOME
  Introduction – What will be covered and a general timeline.
• Benefits + Drawbacks of Self-Employment – Loneliness, Responsibility, Financial Roller Coaster, Lack of Benefits, Doing Sales and Marketing, Own Boss, Greater Potential Earnings, Variety of Work, Own Hours.
• SETTING UP YOUR BUSINESS
  Legal Structures – Sole Proprietorship, Partnerships, Corporations, S Corporations, Limited Liability Company. Decide on a legal structure after weighing pros and cons of each.
• Business Plans – Do you need a business plan? What goes into a business plan? Determine how detailed a business plan is need. Create business plan template.
• Pricing – How to price your products or services. Determine hourly rate which will be basis for project/product pricing.
• Running a Home Office – Keep your home office your sanctuary, keeping things quiet, basic supplies, tax benefits, be honest about it, get dressed, have a routine, keep regular hours… Set up home office.
• Policies and Processes – Even if you work alone, creating clearly defined policies and processes is very helpful. Write down phone policies, your design process, how you handle initial meetings and so on. It will help ensure a certain level of quality and consistency in your services/products. Write policies and processes out. This will make you think about how your business will run in detail.
• Record Keeping –What to keep track of and how to do it to make sure your business is on track. Create record keeping templates or set up software.
• Professional Services – Guest speakers talk about what you will need them to do. What you can expect from accountants, lawyers, insurance companies and banks. Plan for when you will need these professionals.
• Using Interns – Understanding how to set up a proper owner/intern relationship. Write out intern requirements and circumstances where they would be useful.
• CREATING YOUR BUSINESS
  Brainstorming Business Ideas – Students to come up with an idea for their business.
• Create Business Plans – Create and present business plans.
• Critique Business Ideas for Feasibility – Can they afford the startup costs and initial overhead? Is there a demand for the service/product? Can they acquire any needed skills in a reasonable amount of time?
• Dealing With City Hall – Guest speaker from City Hall to explain the process and requirements of starting a business in New Orleans. Everybody registers a company, gets a business license and an EIN.
• Specializing – How to find your niche. Start out as more of a generalist and figure out what you like then focus on it.
• MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS
  Logo + Stationary +Business Cards – How to find a designer or create them yourself. Guest speaker on what makes good logo and stationary design.
• Printing – Get stationary and business cards printed. Guest speaker from printer to talk about printing process and paper selection.
• Website – Competitive Analysis – Conduct a competitive analysis which analyzes the marketing effectiveness of a company’s online presence and their competition’s. Define parameters for someone being a competitor for the company. State who your competitors are. What customer needs are you competing to meet? Determine who your customers are and what they expect. How do their prices compare to yours? How do you plan to compete?
• Website – Project Planner – Fill out a project planner which asks about features, scope, objectives, audience, competition and branding.
• Website – Project Brief – Create a project brief that provides a project overview, project scope, creative considerations and a timeline for your website.
• Website – Search Engine Optimization – Go over SEO basics.
• Website – Content Creation – Create all text and images for the website.
• Website Creation – How to find a designer/developer or use a wordpress theme or make it yourself. The approach to this would be dependent on student knowledge of website design.

• Marketing Materials – Create a market/press kit to mail to or drop off at potential clients.
• Qualifying Prospects – So you don’t waste time with clients who won’t work out.
• Build your audience – Having an audience who freely listens to you is so much easier and cheaper than you going to them.
• Email Signatures – Include business and website in all email signatures.
• Tell everyone you know – Literally everyone you know.
• Craigslist – Design and place Craigslist Ads.
• Print Advertising – The pros and cons of print advertising. Determine if it is appropriate. If so, design and place ad.
• Online Advertising – Go over pros and cons of online advertising. Determine if it is appropriate. If so, design and place ad.
• Press Releases – Send a press release announcing your business and major milestones to local publications. Only send in things you think other people would find interesting.
• Competitions – Hold some sort of competition your target audience would be interested in. Prize is some free service, consultation or product.
• Working With Others – How to approach other companies, ad agencies and other freelancers for contract work.
• Referrals – How to generate and incentivize referrals.
• SELLING
  Invest in Relationships – The better you are at building relationships and the more people you know, the more you will sell.
• Look for problems you can solve – Prospects want to know what is in it for them. What problem can you solve for her?
• The Sales Meeting – Do your homework and be prepare beforehand. If you are nervous, don’t let it show. Be nice, show competence, know the problem and how to solve it, paint a picture of life after problem is solved, get a concrete next step (another meeting, sign a contract and so on). Conduct practice sales meetings with other students.
• Don’t Pressure People – Don’t be annoying or pushy.
• WORKING WITH CLIENTS
  Minimizing Risk – Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
• Conflicts of Interest – What constitutes one and how to avoid them.
• Coping With Incompetence – How to handle it when things go awry.
• Danger Signs – These situations indicate a project is starting to go bad.
• Clients to Avoid – How to spot problem clients before they become clients.
• Paperwork – Create and go over invoices, receipts, terms & conditions, estimates, proposals, f1099.
• Meetings – How to approach, prepare and execute meetings so they aren’t a giant waste of time.
• GETTING HELP
  Mentors Are Awesome – Discuss the benefits of having help from someone who has been there before.
• Read a Book – Books are really helpful.

THANKS FOR READING
Thank you for reading The Entrepreneurial Artist. I hope you found it helpful and informative. You can follow me on twitter.com/richardbeu.

What makes a company a competitor?
There needs to be established criteria for who is a competitor and who is not. Factors that go into defining a competitor include: size, location, price, market share, and other variables dependant on your industry.

Who are the competitors?
To have a successful competitive analysis, we must find the actual competition, not just the perceived competition. A search is conducted to find the three companies that best meet the criteria to be a competitor.

Who are the customers?
Knowing who the customers are, enables you to see how well targeted their online marketing is. A website whose customers are middle-aged men and a website whose customers are teenage girls should look and function differently. This question can be answered two ways; by defining who the current customers are or by defining who the desired customers are. This is almost always defined by the client.

THINGS TO LOOK AT

Site Architecture
Site Map – Look at their site map, if they have one, to see how they anticipate a user moving through their site. Is information easy to find? Is the setup intuitive? Does it make sense?

Features – What features do your competitor’s offer? Why do they offer them? Are they useful? What features could make your website stand out?

Design
Is it Appropriate? – Is the design appropriate for the customer base? Is the design appropriate for the company?

Traffic
Visits per day – If you don’t track the number of visitors coming to your website, how will you know how effective your internet marketing is? Google Analytics is great program for tracking all types of information about your visitors. I’d recommend using it if you aren’t already.

Demographics – You want the demographics of your website to match your ideal client. If you are attracting the wrong demographic you need to make an adjustment to your internet marketing strategy.

Geography – Where your traffic comes from makes a difference. Say you have a restaurant in New Orleans, Louisiana and have traffic from over 20 different countries. It is pretty cool that there are people in Malaysia that have found your site, but it doesn’t mean anything. Why not? People in Malaysia are not going to come to your restaurant. You want local traffic for most small location based businesses.

Links
Broken Links – Broken links show that the website is poorly maintained and make you look bad. You should have an error page (404) that is helpful in case it does happen. An error page also shows up when someone types web address incorrectly, so it is a good idea to have a useful error page whether or not you properly maintain your website.

Inbound links – Inbound links are important because they help determine how you rank in search engines and drive traffic to your site.

Keywords
Organic search engine keywords – Having a high search engine rank on an important keyword will bring in tons of business. It is marketing that comes without direct cost. You must pay with great relevant content that encourages people to link to you.

Where they rank with the Keywords in their Meta tag – You can find out how much people are spending on advertising online, for what keywords, and what websites they are advertising on.

Paid search engine keywords – If you look at the source code of other people’s websites you can find the meta tags. One of the meta tags has the attribute “keyword”. The keywords in the mata tag are the words that they really want to do well in the search results. How well people are doing on their first three or four meta keywords is an indicator of how well their internet marketing is working.

History
When was the site was created? – All things equal, an older site will rank higher than a younger site.

When was the site last updated? – This gives you an idea of how often they add new content, if it is updated at all.

When was last time the design changed? – This will let you know how often they redesign their site. Are they interested in keeping up with the times or do they still have the same design they’ve had for 10 years.

Traffic Trends – Traffic tends to increase or decrease over time. Are they doing better this year than last year. Do they even get enough traffic to measure whether their traffic is going up or down?

Google
Google PageRank – Google returns search results based on a combination of relevance and PageRank. PageRank is on a 0-10 scale with few sites attaining a score above 5.

“Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.” – Google

Google Indexed Pages – This tells you how many pages are in the Google index. If a page is not in the Google index, it will not come up in search results. You can submit a site map to Google to make sure that it includes all of the pages on your site.

Rankings
Alexa Traffic Rank – Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon that audits the frequency of visits on various websites and makes the results public via a ranking system. The lower the number, the more traffic the website gets.

Technorati Ranking – Technorati.com is a blog search engine that assigns each blog a ranking based on the number of blogs that have linked to it in the last nine months. It is pretty useful to see who links to you and if your links are going up or down.

Code
Does the site validate? – Search engines crawl valid code better than invalid code and it is a good practice to have valid code.

Do images have ALT text? – People will come to your site from search engines based on your alt text for images. Google and other search engines return results for more than just websites. Don’t neglect the image search.

CONCLUSIONS

After the research has been conducted I present my findings. These conclusions detail how your website stacks up against your competition and what can be done to improve your web presence.

THANKS FOR READING
Thank you for reading What Is A Competitive Analysis?. I hope you found it helpful and informative. You can follow me on twitter.com/richardbeu.

Your community is made up of the people who care about what you are doing. They promote you on their own because they like you. Building this group of people happens gradually over time.

Start building your community today because you will need them soon. When you have news, launch a product or host an event you need to have your community in place before hand so word can spread quickly.

Start now by building trust and relationships. Give, share knowledge and help others. It is the right thing to do and people are happy to help out someone who has helped them.

THANKS FOR READING
Thank you for reading Build Your Community. I hope you found it helpful and informative. You can follow me on twitter.com/richardbeu.

MONTHLY TO DO LIST

1. Analyze timesheets for billable efficiency, time spent on marketing and to make sure I am on budget.
2. Look at the analytics of the websites I run to figure out where traffic comes from and how to generate more of it.
3. Invoice clients for completed work.
4. Generate new clients.
5. Scrutinize finances to make sure that I am on track with my projections.
6. Add worthy projects to portfolio.
7. Complete one business, one design and one programming book.
8. Set goals for next month.

WEEKLY TO DO LIST

1. Finish three tutorials – one Photoshop, one Illustrator and one code related.
2. Write and post an article in the Notebook.
3. Back up all systems and files.

DAILY TO DO LIST

I split my daily to-do list into A, B and C priority items. A is the highest priority and C is the lowest priority. If I don’t get to a C item, the next day it becomes a B item. If I don’t get to a B item, it becomes an A item.

I finish all A items before moving on to B items and so on. This is what my daily to-do list looks like today.

• A Items
  1. Client A – Complete ecommerce application
  2. Client A – Make website live in subdirectory for testing
  3. Potential Client B – Call to set up meeting
  4. Client C – Make adjustments to 404 page
• B Items
  1. Finish blog post
  2. Post blog post
  3. Read chapter 16 of Practical Php
  4. Deposit check
• C Items
  1. Back-up files used today
  2. Create Schedule for tomorrow

I’ve already got my A items finished and I’m well on my way to having a nice productive day.

PENCIL AND PAPER

I recommend using pencil and paper for this system. Writing down your list is faster and easier than using an application. You don’t have to open the program and find the folder the file is located in. You don’t have to learn any software.

Using pencil and paper also allows you to take a break from the screen.

Using pencil and paper also allows you to take a break from the screen.

It will give you an excuse to use that pencil sharpener that has been gathering dust.

THANKS FOR READING
Thank you for reading To-Do Lists For More Productivity. I hope you found it helpful and informative. You can follow me on twitter.com/richardbeu.