Maine Creative Services

Congrats and bon voyage to Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey. The Aussie blogger has just quit his “real” job at a help desk and made the leap into full-time self employment, which he writes about here.

Yaro has entered the “free” world.

Of course, if you read his blog (which is well worth your time if you’re entrepreneurially inclined) , you know this young guy already is making a decent living as a blogger. With his Internet savvy and business sense, I have no doubt his plunge into FTSE (full-time self-employment) will bring him great success — and great joy.

Someone once said there are two kinds of people in the world: entrepreneurs — and those who work for one. Yaro is definitely the first type.

Welcome aboard, Yaro!

Freelancing is more than a way to make a living — it’s a way of life.

Working Today surveyed over 2,800 freelancers last spring and discovered that most are creative, independent and fiercely dedicated to their lifestyle. Their free report, The Rise of the Freelance Class, looks at how they (we) are doing. A few key findings:

• Freedom is important to freelancers. Almost all (86%) cited having a “flexible schedule” or some form of freedom (60%)—from office politics, difficult bosses, cubicles and commutes—as the primary benefits of freelancing.
• Freelancers work in the city’s key industries: advertising, publishing, film and television, technology and the arts.
• Freelancers are an emerging constituency. More than half (53%) see themselves as members of a freelancer community. 100% have voted in a national election, 87% in a state election and 83% in a local election.
• Freelancers are falling out of the social safety net. About 28% spent some portion of the last year without health insurance. Less than half (47%) save money for retirement each month.

If you’re self-employed — or considering it — you ought to check it out.

“I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” (Mark Twain)

Twain was right. Spelling’s not important — unless you want people (customers, clients, bosses) to take you seriously. It’s not that spelling is all that important. It’s just that spelling mistakes undermine your credibility.

As a copywriter and marketing consultant, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that typos and misspellings plant little seeds of doubt in the minds of customers. These doubts can torpedo your best efforts at persuading someone to trust you. And who can blame them? If you’re not careful enough to check your spelling, how careful will you be doing your work?

YourDictionary.com has posted a helpful list of the 100 most mispelled, er, missspelled, I mean misspelled words. (Thanks, Lifehack.)

PS: Want a tool like Word’s “AutoCorrect” that works in every application — even email subject lines, etc.? Check out ActiveWords. If you’re a lousy typist like me, you’ll absolutely love it!

(No, I’m not an affiliate — just a satisfied customer. I get nothing for the recommendation.)

Web advertising continues to roar. $3 billion was spent in 2Q alone — a whopping 26% increase. 40% of that was for paid search listings, 20% for banner ads and 8% so so-called “rich” media. More here.

Most marketing makes one major mistake. It focuses too much on YOU, your company, your services, the bells and whistles on your nifty new 2006 model widget. It’s not about YOU — it’s about your customer.

Information marketing takes a more consultative approach. The main focus is on your prospect: their needs and wants, and information about how to satisfy those needs and wants.

What information should you share? Obviously, it depends on the work you do and the audience you serve. But it must have value to your target market. The higher the value of the info you share, the more they’ll value it — and you.

Old news = “So what?”
Common knowledge = “Who cares?”

My suggestion: Give away a few of your best secrets. Juicy insider info fascinates the right people (i.e., the ones who are interested in your services). Sharing valuable info drives up your credibility. It convinces potential clients there must be lots more where that came from.

But wait a minute, you’re thinking. If you give away your secrets, your hard-won knowledge, what will you have left to sell?

Well, you’re not giving away the whole store, of course. You probably couldn’t, even if you wrote an entire book. You’re just giving them a chunk of it. A taste. A free sample, just like the man selling fudge at the carnival.

It’s a fair trade. After all, your “insider information” will attract people who are interested in what you do — perhaps very interested. There’s a name for people like that: prospects!

Read more about information marketing here.

Real estate investors do it with houses. Entrepreneurs do it with businesses. Should you do it with Web sites?

The “it” is buying, fixing up and selling properties — in this case, underperforming Web sites. Yaro Starak of the Entrepreneur’s Journey blog has just published a detailed explanation of how (and why) you might consider it. He covers the advantages of buying an existing site over starting a new one of your own, seven possible acquisition strategies, and what to do once you’ve taken the plunge.

“Making a profit may be as simple as implementing a smart AdSense campaign on a popular site after buying it from an owner wishing to move on to other things. Perhaps an e-commerce site could use some search engine marketing or some tweaking to an AdWords campaign might do the trick, or better still, monetize, optimize, affiliate and upsell for maximum gain – make use of all the marketing tricks at your disposal.” Link

Yaro’s post offers another great example of what I call “information marketing,” a powerful new approach to attracting customers (which is what marketing is all about). Yaro generously shares the information he has worked very hard to acquire, which boosts his credibility tremendously.

You can read more about info-marketing and other aspects of attracting customers on my Web site.

Find a need and fill it. Find an aggravation and fix it. That’s the kind of thinking that drives a small army of independent Firefox developers. These imagineers continue to improve the Web browsing experience with their innovation. They see problems or irritations, then create small, simple, often-elegant solutions (called extensions) that fix or eliminate them. Best of all, almost all of them are free.

Flashblock is especially welcome. At last those obnoxious Flash animations are history. While the technology is terrific, its primary use — as a means of pushing commercials at you — is terribly annoying. Flash ads are the Internet equivalent of a pushy used-car salesman pestering you while you’re trying to browse. (Flash developers, please note.) Personally, I refuse to buy anything that’s sold via spam or Flash animations.

With Flashblock, all that blinking and zooming and, um, flashing is gone. It’s replaced by a calm blank space and a small “f.” If, for some perverse reason, you actually want to view the stupid animation, mouse over the “f” and it changes to a right-facing arrow. Click and watch. Whatever floats your boat.

Flashblock is free, and works hand in hand with another indispensable Firefox freebie: Adblock, which does just what the name implies. Adblock’s big strength is that its use of wildcards, so you can block all or some of the ads from particular servers (or sub-directories).

Other extensions I’ve installed recently that make my heart sing are Gmail Notifier (which gives you a real-time peek at incoming mail to your Google Mail account) and Copy Plain Text, which strips the formatting from web page text. Perfect for writers and researchers like me. (Wish there was one for MS apps.) Update: There is one for MS apps! It’s called PureText, and it’s the equivalent of pasting text into Notepad, then copying and pasting that into the final document. Thanks, Lifehacker for the tip.

So raise a glass to these innovative Firefox developers. You guys and gals absolutely rock!